Cyberattacks Rupture Euro Airports & Michelob Ultra is the King of Beer

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0:28Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Toby Howell. And I'm Kyle Haggy. Today, Jimmy Kimmel made his return to late night TV, but not everyone got a chance to tune in. And America has a new number one beer. It's Wednesday, September 24th. Let's ride.

0:47Good morning and happy hump day, everyone. Neil is still out enjoying some time off, but before he left, he was cooking up an idea for the show, I Want to Run By You All. He called it, what are you talking about in your group chat? Kyle, what the heck was Neil talking about? Scientists haven't figured out quite what's going on in Neil's brain, but what we do know, you all have that one group chat. It's a constant thrum in the background of your daily lives. You're discussing sports. You're discussing the market. Obviously, you're talking about the Morning Brew Daily Show. And so we want to know what the recent topic du jour has been in your group chat.

1:19We all know it goes down in the GC. It does go down in the GC. So send us an email or a DM on Instagram or X with some screenshots or a quick explanation of what you all have been talking about. And again, we're looking for the weird and wacky here. For instance, my group chat is talking about how punting is dying in the NFL. Teams are punting just 3.65 times per game this season. That's the fewest in history. So if we get some good ones, kind of like punting, we'll discuss them when Neil gets back. Toby's group chat has statistics. It's incredible. We just stole Neil's idea. I'm actually going to go with this was my idea.

1:52This was my idea all along. It's what he would have wanted. Our email is morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com or shoot us a DM on X or IG at MB Daily Show. Let's see those group chats. And now a word from our sponsor, Remarkable. Toby, we have to talk about your notebook, bud. It's brown. And? It was white when you got it. If you want to look the part, you got to get a Remarkable Paper Pro move. Oh, you mean the portable paper tablet that helps you be more present, fit all your paperwork conveniently into your jacket pocket and digitize and organize anything you don't want to lose. Yeah, and it doesn't smell like stale coffee.

2:30It's even got two weeks of battery life, so you don't spend every few hours having to charge it. You can try Remarkable Paper Pro Move for 100 days for free. If it's not what you're looking for, get your money back. Get your paper tablet at remarkable.com today. That's remarkable.com. Jimmy Kimmel made his return to ABC last night after a four-day suspension, breaking his silence with an emotional monologue. He choked up as he told the audience that it was not his intention to, quote, make light of the murder of a young man, but also he had some words for President Trump, saying that while a show is not important in the grand scheme of things, quote, what is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this.

3:14Kimmel had been off air ever since he made insensitive remarks about Charlie Kirk's murder, which led to Disney pulling a show shortly after FCC chair Brendan Carr threatened to take action against the network. But while millions tuned in to watch Kimmel's return, a good portion of the country had to opt for the YouTube cut instead. Sinclair and Nexstar, two of the biggest broadcasters in the U.S., control more than 25 % of ABC's local affiliates, and both decided to replace Kimmel's show with other news programming last night and going forward. One person who likely was watching, though, was President Trump, who posted on True Social, I can't believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back about an hour before Kimmel's show was set to air.

3:56Kyle, this has quickly become the story for free speech conversations in this country, with people from both sides of the aisle weighing in on the potential suppression of First Amendment rights. I think a lot of people might have stayed up past our bedtimes to catch this episode. Yeah, I had to catch it in the morning because you got to go to bed at like 8 p.m. to get up for this show. I thought the monologue was good. It hit the beats I thought he had to hit. I love when a guy gets a little teary-eyed for the First Amendment as well. That's always a nice touch. I think the one part of this story that we haven't talked about in the intro is the pushback on Disney from creative talent, which might have forced their hand to bring Kimmel back, actually.

4:33At least five Hollywood unions representing 400 ,000 workers publicly condemned the company. The screenwriters union described it as, quote, corporate cowardice. Damon Lindelof, the creator of Lost, said, I might not ever work with Disney again if they don't bring him back. A former chief executive of Disney, Michael Eisner, which is very rare, rebuked the company. And so Disney kind of found itself in a tough spot here. And I think part of their reason to bring him back was like, they have to keep making movies and keep making TV shows. They can't lose the confidence of talent across the globe.

5:04And then the other aspect of this is these owners of the ABC affiliates, Nextstar in Sinclair. They are a lot more powerful than you probably ever realize. These are not names that you think about when you flip on the TV, but their programming reaches about 23 % of all U.S. households. So when they make the decision to preempt the show as they did, some of major markets aren't getting the show anymore. A lot of the markets they serve are major metro areas, Washington, D.C., Seattle. So if you were in one of those, maybe when you flipped on the channel that you expected Jimmy Kimmel to be on, instead you've got local news programming.

5:42So they are continuing to kind of flex their might, maybe align themselves with the FCC because Nextstar is trying to get this merger across the finish line. So there's definitely some business implications underneath the service as to why Jimmy Kimmel didn't appear on their networks last night. And it's not just the merger. They also might need the FCC to change some of its rules because this merger would bring their TV ownership up to more than 39 percent of U.S. households, which is technically prohibited by law. Depending on how you break it down, the FCC would need to grant them basically a rule change.

6:15We saw with Paramount, CBS and the Colbert show getting pulled that there might be some political calculus here. Nextstar is definitely doing that. Sinclair also announced that it wants to do M &A in 2025 and beyond. And so they're probably trying to get in the good graces of the administration as well. And then finally, one aspect of this that is just really ill-timed is Disney actually announced price hikes yesterday for its streaming service, Disney+. So they usually do this around this time, but obviously they couldn't have foreseen this brouhaha coming up. And so it's just really awkward timing right now because they are under massive fire right now.

6:51So we'll see how the consumer response is to the fact that maybe they'll start boycotting Disney Plus going forward, especially when you're getting the price hiked on you at this very sensitive moment. I think we need to see Bob Iger's group chat. That's the group chat I want to see. That is a stressful group chat right now for sure. Moving on, yesterday as President Trump took a smiling photo next to Argentina's president, Javier Mille, at the United Nations Summit in New York, all seemed to be well between the two leaders and allies. But under the surface, things are anything but calm in the wake of Miele's free market overhaul of Argentina's economy.

7:25Critics point out that the Miele economy is contracting, tens of thousands of jobs have been lost, and the financial markets are roiling. Miele said that all that pain was a byproduct of his move to rein in Argentina's runaway inflation. And if you just trust him, a V-like recovery awaits on the other side of the tough austerity measures. But that prosperous and stable economy has remained elusive. Unemployment is up to 7.6 % from 5.7 % when he took office. And Argentina has about 200 ,000 fewer jobs, according to government data. The charm has worn off, a reverend who works in some of Buenos Aires' neighborhoods told the Wall Street Journal.

8:05Still, Mille doesn't have a Trump card in his back pocket. President Trump's support. Treasury Secretary Scott Percent said this week that the U.S. is looking at all options to potentially bail out Argentina and help stabilize its currency. The news sparked a rally amongst investors, lifting Argentine stocks and pushing the peso up 2%. President Trump also offered explicit public support for his friend Millet, saying he's done a fantastic job. We're backing him 100%. Kyle, Mille rose to fame as a chainsaw-wielding right-wing populace, but right now the results haven't quite followed his bravado.

8:42Yeah, I mean, he inherited a very difficult situation to his credit. Inflation was a peak of 289 % in April 2024 in Argentina. It was dropped to 34 % in August. So his move to tame inflation worked in some aspects, but when you try to do that, other things can go awry. But he was kind of this animal spirit even during the Trump campaign. He was looked at as a political leader, much in maybe the likeness of Trump that was going to disrupt the bureaucracy, bring a lot of change. Him and Elon shared a stage at one point, I believe. He was kind of the original Doge father. And we're seeing that while there's some good to that, there's also some things that don't work out quite well.

9:25It's not just economical, though. I think you've brought up kind of this political element. His sister is involved in some corruption scandal, which has maybe some voters a little worried that he's not all he's made up to be. And so the U.S. support will be important. I wonder how much here internally at the U.S. we're willing to support Argentina. Yeah. And Argentina has historically been a little bit of a rough bet for, you know, people trying to bail them out because there is this running joke, essentially, that Argentina is kind of like the worst investment in global economics because they end up defaulting on their debt so frequently.

10:03That is just something that happens as you are trying to, you know, get a country out of trouble when it's just been systemically had issues with inflation and whatnot. So but I do think that you're seeing the U.S. position themselves as an ally to Argentina right now, saying it's a systemically important ally, saying that there are resources there that we want. But maybe it is if you read between the lines, they're just friends and that's why we're going to backstop them. But Miele's overall plan in general was to bring down inflation by kind of devaluing the or revaluing the peso against the U.S.

10:40dollar. Let's make this currency a little bit stronger. And the upside is you have cheaper imported goods, stuff like cars, tires, clothing coming in the country. It's a lot cheaper now because your currency is stronger. But what that does do is suddenly make your exports less competitive as well, which has affected some of those core industries like manufacturing that all political leaders want to be strong in their country. Yeah, you mentioned the investment in Argentina. By some accounts, Argentina accounts for about a third of the IMF's overall lending, which is just a huge number. And the IMF will give out loans to countries that need a little more financial capital to get things in a good spot.

11:16But those come with certain rules. And then basically, if you can't initiate those reforms and get in a good spot, you need more loans to cover the old loans and you get in this really vicious cycle. So Argentina finds itself kind of between a rock and a hard place here. Yeah, it's defaulted on foreign debt nine times in its history, three times since 2000 alone and as recently as 2019. So that is why there is that joke that sometimes lending money to Argentina feels like it's a black hole. Yeah, and a story that's certain to make your company's IT guy say, see, I told you those cybersecurity trainings were important.

11:48Several airports across Europe, including London's Heathrow, suffered delays and disruptions after a cyber attack was launched against automatic check-in systems. The attack started on Friday and its effects were felt over the weekend and into this week. Brussels, for example, asked airlines to cancel half of yesterday's flight departures due to persistent problems. Berlin and Dublin's airports were also affected similarly. The problem originated from Collins Aerospace, a software provider that works with several airlines across the world. and the EU Agency for Cybersecurity said on Monday that Collins had suffered a ransomware attack where hackers attempt to lock up the target's data and systems in attempt for, you guessed it, a ransom.

12:30Now, zooming out, this attack is just one of several cybercrimes that have struck European businesses, hospitals, and charities over the summer and in the past year. Marks & Spencer, one of Britain's largest retailers, was hit in April by a sophisticated cyberattack that cost$405 million in lost profits. And Jaguar Land Rover, Britain's largest carmaker, was hit with a cyber attack in September that disabled many of its systems for weeks. It expects production to remain halted until at least October. Now, Rachel Reeves, a chancellor in the British government, said that officials were working closely with Jaguar Land Rover and, quote, there is a wider issue here of ensuring that foreign states, including Russia, cannot bring down production or flights or public services in Britain.

13:16It is a new and growing threat. Now, it's not conclusive yet who is behind any of these attacks, but obviously a strong statement from Chancellor Reeves. Toby, this story has got me a little nervous of accidentally clicking on a phishing attempt email here, so I'm a little scared. You are not wrong because cyber attacks in the aviation sector are up 600 % this past year. This is a disaster at these European airports because the automatic check-in systems, the thing that we all use when you get to the airport are down right now. So they're asking flight, you know, attendants to not find attendants, but people working the airports to manually check people in, which just sounds absolutely awful.

13:55But I do want to talk about just the size of this Jaguar Land Rover cyber attack, because this is a very critical business in the UK. It's one of the UK's largest employers. They have 32 ,000 direct employees in Britain, but they also have 104 ,000 jobs supported throughout its supply chain. So it's its parts, materials, logistics. And then also those wages that people are garnering from working at Jaguar Land Rover support 62 ,000 more jobs indirectly. So in total, the impact on the UK economy is 200 ,000 jobs, not even talking about the actual impact on the company itself, who is losing millions of dollars every single week as they are not able to pump out these cars.

14:37So just this entire business has been ground to a halt, which is going to have ripple effects throughout the entire economy. And we have to talk about AI in every story. So I think AI represents kind of this unique new vector in cybercrime. One, actors now have tools to, like, make phishing emails a lot better. Like, ChatGPT can cook these up very well. But also, as we're connecting more and more tools together through these kind of nascent technologies, security sometimes doesn't catch up. And so threat actors have found ways into some of these new systems. And I think we're going to see cyber attacks continue to rise.

15:12And you did say that we're not sure who's behind the airport attack. That is still up in the air. But we do have a good sense of who's behind the Jaguar Land Rover attack. And that is there's this telegram channel that has posted screenshots saying, hey, we're in the system. And it's calling itself Scattered Lapsus Hunters, which is actually a loose alliance of three hacker groups that maybe we've talked about on this show before. One, Scattered Spider. They were behind that Marx and Spencer hack from earlier this year. And then Lapsus is a very big group at this point. They have made a name for themselves attacking companies like Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Uber.

15:49Most of these are young English-speaking people too. So it's not necessarily the foreign actors like the Russian that the chancellor was talking about. It is just young Gen Zers who just want to do this for financial gain. So again, not sure about the airport attack, but at least Jaguar Land Rover. This is a group of English speaking, profit minded young people who are going after this major company. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with our next story right after this. One of the hardest parts about B2B marketing is reaching the right audience. I remember when I bought a coffee maker and then months later kept getting served ads for a coffee maker after I'd already cozied up to my new one.

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18:24The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development forecasted in its quarterly report that the U.S. economy will grow 1.8 % this year, up from the 1.6 % previously expected, while the global economy will expand 3.2 % this year, stronger than the 2.9 % projected in June. Now for the bad news. The global economy is expected to take a hit from Trump's trade policies, with growth expected to sink to 2.9 % in 2026 from 3.2 % this year, while U.S. expansion is slowing from its growth rate last year as higher tariffs and uncertainty take hold. So it really depends on how you like your glass, Kyle, half full or half empty.

19:04If you're a half full guy, the OECD did bump up its 2025 forecast, forecast pointing to businesses rushing orders ahead of tariffs strong investment AI in China's fiscal stimulus but if you're a half empty guy then the OECD points out that the full impact from the overall effective tariff rate of 19.5 percent the highest since 1933 has yet to be felt so expect slower growth going forward it's Schrodinger's economy both stronger than expected but weaker than in years past and I'll stop there before I make another metaphor Kyle well show it to my glass half full, guys. That's me. I found there was like three main trends coming out of this report.

19:43The first is that it's the investment in new technologies that's keeping the global economy humming. We talked about NVIDIA and OpenAI,$100 billion deal yesterday. Basically, AI, whether you like it or not, is at least keeping investment flowing. I mean, the global economy basically hangs in like Jensen Wong's hands right now. The second is that there's a drop in net immigration, particularly in the United States, reductions in the federal workforce, that's also going to hurt the labor market and soften economic growth. So that's something to watch out for. And then I think the third thing is we've talked about tariffs all year.

20:18And this report's really saying like the worst is yet to come. And many firms just started stockpiling goods before the tariff took effect. And so we're going to see the effects of the tariffs in 2026, at least according to the OECD. Yeah. As people and businesses burn through those inventories, that is going to start cutting into profit a little bit more. And yeah, the OECD is basically warning that, hey, we haven't seen the worst of it and the economy is actually doing better than we expected at this point, but maybe let's look a little bit down the road, a little into the future. And it does look like maybe AI investment won't be enough to outgrow tariffs or something like that.

20:52Now, there are some critics of this report in general, basically calling it an economic horoscope that is mostly just reactive and too often wrong to actually draw any major conclusions from. But technically, it does give a detailed and transparent look into how they build their model. So don't take it with a grain of salt because obviously no one has a crystal ball and can predict the future. But also, you know, don't completely discard it out of hand because it is something that they do put a lot of, you know, thought and have models that go into creating this. And people use it to, you know, create policy recommendations going forward.

21:29So it is something that is important. Yeah, it's definitely something that's taken very seriously in the U.S. by lawmakers. And the fact that it's a prediction for next year gives you a little more confidence in the prediction. Obviously, the farther you get out, the less confidence you can have in your models. 95 calories, 2.6 grams of carbs, 4.2 % alcohol by volume. Those are the stats of America's new top-selling beer, Michelob Ultra. Now, this is a big win for Anheuser-Busch, who launched Michelob Ultra in 2002 and aimed to target a more health-conscious and active lifestyle consumer, which has become an even more important segment today.

22:07Michelob dethroned Modelo Especial from the number one spot, which it held dating back to 2023. Prior to that, Bud Light was often America's top-selling beer. Now, shout out to all my marketers out there because Michelob Ultra might be the perfect case study of using marketing to elevate a product that is relatively undifferentiated from its competitors. Michelob Ultra's ads went hard into the sports and active lifestyle with ads such as, quote, athletes love water, right? This is basically water. Time for a beer run featuring Usain Bolt. It's original lose the carbs, not the taste slogan. And the most recent one with Willem Dafoe and Catherine O 'Hara playing pickleball.

22:46They also have sponsored an incredible amount of sports competitions, including the upcoming FIFA World Cup. Now, if Americans love two things, they are beer and pretending they're still athletic way past their prime. And Michelob Ultra is a dart right in the middle of that Venn diagram. Toby, you're an athlete. Does Michelob have you convinced? One thing that I do like about Michelob and I think is resonating with people is their form factor, their skinny can. And again, this is something that you probably don't necessarily think about when you're picking a beer. But canned cocktails have become increasingly popular with Gen Z.

23:20I mean, you think about High Noons, Rise recently, all these other kind of skinnier looking. White Clog is another example. That form factor mirrors Michelob Ultra's canned. So it is clearly that's something that's resonating with Gen Z as well. And I think they've just threaded the needle quite well between generations by targeting this more active lifestyle. while something people call out is when they are going into a bar in the morning to watch a Premier League game as it's become more popular. You don't want something heavy. You want something light. So you want something like Michelob Ultra.

23:51So it really has found this resonance with a more health-conscious, athletic group of young people. Yeah, they've also rolled out a zero-alcohol version, and they've said that that has really helped the brand of Michelob too. So I think you're right on the money there of who they're targeting and the segment they're going after. McLobe's gain has been Modelo's losses. So Constellation Brands, which has the U.S. distribution rights for Modelo, have seen its stock fall 39 % year-to-date. You look at AB InBev, on the other hand, it's up about 17 % year-to-date. AB InBev, too, we have to give a shout-out to because they were embroiled in the Bud Light controversy of years gone by, which knocked that off the number one beer in America throne.