Did Moderna Just Cure Cancer? & Freight Trains Have a $200M Theft Problem

0:01Marketers, tell us if this sounds familiar. You invest in something that seems incredible, like millions of views, but then don't see any revenue. Instead, invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a$250 credit. Just go to linkedin.com slash mbd. That's linkedin.com slash mbd. Terms and conditions apply. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Raymond Liu. Today, did Moderna just cure skin cancer? And meal kit company Blue Apron is in absolute chaos. It's Thursday, August 20th.

0:41Let's rod!

0:50Good morning. I've got producer Ray here in the co-host chair today with that epic let's ride. Because apparently the man can do it all. Toby will be back from his mini moon tomorrow, but I think he's got some competition, Ray. Ray, how badly do you want to see Dune Part 3 in 70mm IMAX? because if you showed up at 7 a.m. to snag tickets, you were way too late. This week, tickets became available for Dune Part 3 at the biggest IMAX screen in New York City, AMC Lincoln Square, and fans began lining up at midnight to snag their seat nearly 12 hours before the box office opened. By 11 a.m., Insider reported, the line was wrapped around three city blocks, almost completing a full circle.

1:34Remember, this movie doesn't come out until December, and it's still August. Spice does crazy things to a person. Neil, I missed out on The Odyssey, missed out on Spider-Man, and now I'm going to miss out on Dune. I haven't had to deal with this kind of ticket problem since my days of trying to go to EDC. Obviously, this is a great problem for theater chains because they love this kind of buzz, this excitement, this kind of event type of excitement around watching movies at the theaters again. But they got to do something about people buying up more than two tickets. I saw a Reddit post where two dudes had a long list of multiple tickets, and who knows if they are actually going to give that out.

2:16But funny enough, the CEO of AMC, Adam Aaron, said on X, so they did recognize this problem, he said, Greedy intermediaries gobbling up and then scalping AMC tickets above face price hurts customers. I intend to do something about it, limiting or stopping this on your behalf. So yes, they may have a ticket problem on their hands. And just to be clear, you didn't miss out on the Odyssey and the other stuff because you can still see them in theaters. This is literally the biggest screen that people are waiting in line for 12 hours to see. Like I saw the Odyssey in some premium format. It was an IMAX 70 millimeter.

2:55I thought it was perfectly fine. And now a word from our sponsor, Rubrik. Ray, Rubrik is rewriting the cybersecurity industry's rulebook. But I only just finished learning the old rules. Well, the old model of cybersecurity was built on protection, safety nets, recovery plans, systems designed to withstand the last era and maintain the status quo. It can't hold up in the present day. The AI era demands confidence that you can secure and accelerate your business operations so nothing stops your momentum. Rubrik can give you that confidence. Their platform helps you keep going by securing your data, controlling your AI, and protecting your identity built as one architecture, not stitched together after the fact.

3:34To learn more about how Rubrik rewrote the industry rulebook, head to rubrik.com slash mb. That's r-u-b-r-i-k dot com slash mb. I had to rub my eyes a few times to make sure this was real. It is. Moderna shares rose by 177 % yesterday, nearly tripling after its experimental mRNA-based cancer vaccine absolutely aced a late-stage trial, potentially turning the COVID vaccine maker into an oncology force. It was the biotech stock's best day in history. Moderna, along with its partner Merck, revealed that a personalized vaccine paired with Merck's drug, Keytruda, prevented cancer from coming back in high-risk melanoma patients, as well as stopping the skin cancer spread.

4:19It was the first ever successful late-stage trial for a personalized mRNA cancer therapy and a legitimization of the technology powering many COVID shots. Melanoma is the most vicious form of skin cancer. While it only makes up 1 % of all skin cancers, it accounts for the majority of deaths, thousands of Americans each year. Before this vaccine can help, though, there are several more hurdles it needs to overcome. The next phase of the trial will see whether this helps patients live longer. Then the companies will submit the treatment to the FDA for approval, which they hope to as early as 2027.

4:51Ray, this is being hailed as a huge moment for medicine, a huge moment for mRNA's potential to treat cancer. Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about the science behind it because it's actually pretty cool the way that they did it. So after a piece of the tumor is removed, it's analyzed to identify the unique mutations present. Then AI is used to help scientists figure out which of the hundreds of mutations should be in the vaccine. And this is kind of where Merck's Keytruda drug comes into play, which has its own genetic sequence built from a patient's own tumor. And this is where personalization comes from.

5:28Meanwhile, the patient's cells read the mRNA and builds a protein. And that protein trains the immune system to attack the cancer cells. So it's a classic one-two punch where Keytruda takes away the cloak of the cancer and tags in the mRNA to finish the job. And this is all according to CBS News chief medical correspondent, Dr. John LaPook. Merck and Moderna have poured millions into personalized mRNA cancer vaccine technology since the 2010s. And really, the stakes are just bigger than Melanoa because experts who spoke to The Washington Post say that the trial's success could really pave a new way of treating other types of cancers.

6:09And I think it's really fascinating what you said, that these companies have been working on it since the 2010s. This really is decades in the making. When you think of Moderna, you think of a COVID vaccine, right? We remember talking to people and you say, what did you get, Pfizer or the Moderna? Like that was what the company was known for. But they want you to know they've been working on cancer research for a lot longer than this. And then they pivoted to COVID vaccines because they were already making this mRNA-based vaccine based on a lot of research that they were doing. So you have the president, Stephen Hoge, saying people will experience this as the COVID company now takes on cancer.

6:44But for those of us that live in it, it's like the cancer company that pivoted on a dime to help with COVID has pivoted back and really finally came home. And it's a much-needed pivot. It's a much needed result for Moderna. You saw the relief in investors sending the stock up nearly triple because demand for COVID shots is not there anymore. The stock since the COVID highs has fallen more than 90%. They were burning cash on just$2 billion of revenue last year. But now they are suddenly find themselves in this huge market,$240 billion worth for cancer drugs. Meanwhile, Merck stock didn't, it's a much bigger company.

7:21It's a much more established pharma company rather than the smaller biotech Moderna. Its stock went up 12 % yesterday because Keytruda, it's about to lose its patent for that. So people's other companies will start to develop it and it's going to lose a lot of sales. Right now, it's one of the top selling drugs in the world and they're about to see sales of that crater. So it's absolutely huge for them as well. Yeah. While some are celebrating this as a huge medical milestone, and it is, others are a little bit more concerned about the cost and ability to produce this at scale because that's kind of what you want to think about, is will this become commercially viable?

7:55Analysts spoke to Bloomberg saying that to really make this a substantial sales growth opportunity, the vaccine has to work on other tumors beyond melanoma. And it's a huge market. I mean,$2.3 billion a year for drugs that can treat operable melanoma, according to analyst Max Neeson. Cachuta alone can cost up to$200 ,000 a year for some cancers, and other individualized therapies can exceed up to half a million dollars. So for Moderna, it's really trying to diversify its business beyond COVID-19 vaccines, as you mentioned. It's working on shots that potentially could treat diseases like the norovirus and Lyme disease, but this one right here, it could be a winner for them.

8:37Yeah, if they figure out how to treat other tumors besides melanoma, that's what investors are really betting on is that this can be replicated across other types of cancers. It's also a told-you-so moment for critics of the Trump administration and Health Secretary RFK Jr., who have attacked mRNA technology. They actually revoked$500 million in contracts last year to develop mRNA vaccines. He had a lot of health experts coming on saying, what are we doing here? mRNA has the potential to cure cancer, do all these amazing things for the human body and public health, and they revoked almost half a billion dollars worth from research.

9:14So this was sort of a comeuppance moment for critics of the Trump administration's policy after they revoked funding for mRNA. Another told you so moment for Moderna is that short sellers got burned, which is actually kind of funny if you think about it. Not only did you lose a bunch of money,$5.5 billion on paper, but you're betting against a company who actually just had a successful trial of trying to treat cancer. So it's proving a lot of haters wrongs and doing so. And again, this is a big step for cancer treatment. Let's go ahead and move on. Look up in the sky. It's a bird. It's a plane.

9:46It's Superman. Wait, no, it's just a drone delivering some toilet paper. Amazon just announced it's expanding its drone delivery service to 500 cities and towns across the country by the end of this year. It's a pretty big step from its current drone footprint, which operates from just 11 sites in 10 metropolitan areas within places like Arizona, Florida, Michigan, and Texas. In the near future, though, Amazon wants to launch its prime air fleet into the skies of Chicago, Syracuse, Cleveland, Atlanta, and more. Its drone service has already delivered thousands of packages since it launched in 2022, but even after this expansion, drone delivery service is still a fraction of the millions and millions of packages drivers deliver each year.

10:30So the goal here isn't necessarily about cutting costs by replacing delivery workers, but an add-on to keep customers happy with near instant deliveries, according to the company. Neil, I'm sure Amazon always wanted to dominate the cloud business, but I didn't know it quite meant literally. This is all motivated by people wanting even faster delivery. If you hear execs speak across different companies, they say, customers continue to demand faster delivery times. David Carbon, the VP of Amazon Prime Air, said, bottom line is we have yet to reach diminishing returns when it comes to how fast we deliver to our customers, because apparently same-day delivery is not enough.

11:08Over at Uber, which is investing heavily in drone technology, the CEO, Dara Khazr-Shahi, said the desire for rapid delivery is, quote, insatiable. It doesn't seem like it's ending. And I think it's worth bringing up Uber because Amazon is locked in a pretty big race right now, not just delivering to your door via trucks or whatever else they use these days, but also via air because you have Uber earlier this week announcing a big partnership with Zipline, which is a drone delivery service. They want by 2029 to deliver one million Uber Eats burritos, not burritos, Uber Eats packages a day within five to 10 minutes.

11:47Then earlier this summer in July, DoorDash won a huge certification from the FAA to make commercial deliveries using their own drones. Obviously Walmart is getting into this as well. They have a big partnership with Wing, which is made by Alphabet. So if you go down the line, Uber, DoorDash, Amazon, Walmart, and a bunch of other retailers are getting into the drone delivery business because they think people just want to get stuff to their door 10 minutes or less. I mean, classic Uber, where it doesn't really want to build the physical technology, but let someone else handle that front. And they believe the real value is the app infrastructure that they can obviously provide so that they don't want to deal with the overhead.

12:25But it really is a race to see who will be the big first, who will make the first big leap in drone delivery. Because especially if one is able to break ground or air rather, in a city like New York or San Francisco, where you have tall buildings to navigate, it'd be interesting to see how also the drone delivery service will fare with seasonality. Because when you think about like rainstorms and snowstorms, like will those drone delivery service be able to handle all of those? And you're right. I do think the food delivery business is kind of like the nearest future because, you know, who's ordering more than five pounds of food to their door.

13:01I mean, I don't know, maybe if some people will, it depends on how bigger your burritos are, but anything beyond that, it's kind of like where this weird sticking point is because they have to be small and, you know, they also have to be accurate. There was this video that you sent me where a lady's Amazon, uh, Amazon drone delivery dropped their package into the pool. I mean, that's gotta be a huge issue that they have to deal with. Yeah. It's not the scale of the data center pushback, but you do see local opposition to these drones coming. They seem to be a nuisance around certain neighborhoods because they're just loud.

13:36And apparently sometimes they drop things in your pool. So there's this group called Quiet Skies, Texas, that's mobilizing and pushing their local community leaders to get rid of Amazon drones. They say our skies are not Amazon's warehouse. So companies, as they move into new communities, Amazon wants to move into have 500 new cities. They're also going to have to get people in the local communities on board. Maybe they'll say this is a small local minority of people who are pushing back against drones in their neighborhoods. But that is also something, as we're seeing with AI data centers, that tech companies will have to deal with as they want to move drones into the mainstream.

14:13If you've opened a blue apron box recently, you might have been mega disappointed. On social media, customers are complaining that their meal kits don't contain the key ingredients to make a meal. The baked garlic shrimp and tomatoes recipe didn't come with tomatoes. The pesto gnocchi bake was missing the gnocchi. And the cold sesame noodles didn't come with the noodles, the scallions, or the soy sauce. Kind of important. In one Reddit post, a customer said their box didn't contain multiple proteins, but did include extra ingredients they didn't ask for, like a, quote, giant carrot that looks like it was grown by aliens.

14:48The meal kit industry, in particular Blue Apron, is in absolute shambles right now after the bankruptcy of their supplier earlier this year. That supplier, Fresh Realm, was the main supplier for Blue Apron and Marley Spoon, but filed for Chapter 11 after its largest customer, Walmart, stopped buying its food. And you would probably do the same if your supplier also experienced a series of listeria outbreaks in its factories last year. So, Blue Apron and others have had to completely reconfigure their supply chains, and the transition has been extremely ugly. Ray, this debacle is the last thing Blue Apron or the meal kit industry needs.

15:24They've been down bad in the past few years as the COVID high wore off. Yeah, let's go through some of the ups and downs of Blue Apron because during the pandemic days, the meal kit business was booming. We were all stuck at home. We all wanted to learn a new skill. And many of those were like, hey, I can cook things and want to have the ingredients delivered to me. For Blue Apron, it seemed to shine bright but also burned out pretty quickly. Back in 2015, it did secure$135 million in funding. That's according to the Wall Street Journal, even turned a profit for the first two quarters of 2016, which eventually led to an IPO in 2017.

15:57But that's kind of where things quickly spoiled because it reported a loss of$52 million in its first fiscal quarter that same year. And then you have competitors like HelloFresh and Home Chef and Marley Spoon come on to the scene. And then by the end of 2017, Blue Apron said it had lost 15 % of its customer base year over year, all according to CNBC. Finally, in 2023, Wonder Group, headed by Mark Laurie, acquired Blue Apron to essentially save the business. But, Neil, as you said, this supplier issue is a major step backwards. Yeah, so they went public at a valuation of$1.9 billion, and they got sold for$103 million.

16:36So they were already down bad. And then this supplier goes bankrupt and they need to switch suppliers. This is a delicate supply chain we're talking about with these fresh ingredients. And they had to switch suppliers and they found Misfit Markets, which is a Baltimore headquartered perishable food e-commerce company. They bought parts of Fresh Realms business. And what Misfit Market says is, okay, we had to reconfigure this supply chain for Blue Apron. This would typically take us a year, and we had to do it in 10 weeks because we had to fulfill all of these orders, and it's not going well at all.

17:13Each of these companies has come out and said, yeah, we know this is real bad. We apologize. Marley Spoon on Instagram on Monday said, missing ingredients, incomplete boxes, delivery delays. We're in the middle of an operational transition, and it hasn't gone as smoothly as planned. Blue Apron on Facebook posted, over the past several weeks, we've been transitioning to a new fulfillment partner. And to say that it has not gone smoothly would be an understatement. Yeah, and let's also look at the broader Milka industry as a whole. Because even though HelloFresh has largely remained unscathed in this whole debacle, it still is the market leader.

17:47But its stock is down roughly 52 % for this year. and it recently reported a 7.8 % year-over-year revenue drop after it reported weak Q2 earnings. Analysts from Barclays downgraded the whole meal kit company, citing weakening sales trends, failing marketing efforts, and certainly the company's ability to bring in free cash flow. And from the consumer side, a CNET survey found that 61 % of respondents had actually never tried a meal kit service because one, they think it's too expensive, and two, the subscription requirement, where 46 % of those surveyed said they don't want to be locked into a commitment.

18:25So they're also dealing with like a perception issue because even whether or not meal kit services are actually more affordable than actually going out to grocery shopping because when you're dealing with inflation, they still think it's too expensive and they don't want to be contracted into a subscription service. And why cook your own stuff when you can just get Pad Thai delivered via drone? Yeah. All right, up next, it's Neil's numbers. Every day, shareholders meet to discuss important matters about the companies you invest in. Now you can easily make your voice heard too. Vanguard Investor Choice makes it easy to set your proxy voting preference for your eligible Vanguard index funds.

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19:38With the help of Amazon Ads, I'm reaching relevant audiences and competing with the biggest names in men's grooming. We've scaled to over$500 ,000 in monthly revenue. Watch Crown Skin's story at advertising.amazon.com slash rising-stars. Neil, when you need new running sneakers, is an AI agent placing your order for you? You're the Gen Z one here. Wouldn't you be more likely to do that? Fair point, but it is becoming increasingly common. Agents are comparing products, evaluating inventory, and completing purchases for customers. An IDC study sponsored by WooCommerce found that open source platforms give e-commerce brands more freedom than SaaS to optimize for agentic commerce.

20:18That can mean more sales, whether the buyer is a person or a bot. Check out the study at WooCommerce.com slash trends. That's WooCommerce.com slash trends. Welcome to Neil's Numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will send your IQ soaring like Moderna stock. My first number is$200 million, which is the value of goods stolen from trains last year. Yep, you might think train robberies were consigned to the era of Jesse James and Butch Cassidy, but they've come back in a vengeance since the pandemic, with criminal gangs targeting freight lines like BNSF, CSX, and Union Pacific at surging levels.

20:56Train theft has quadrupled since 2020, with 75 ,000 thefts across U.S. freight rail networks in 2025, an average of 200 per day. What are they targeting? Mostly smaller high dollar items that can easily be resold, according to Bloomberg. That includes unreleased Nike sneakers worth more than$440 ,000 swiped from a BNSF train last year or even tires. CSX says it's had more than$900 ,000 worth of tires stolen since 2023. And it hasn't been all that difficult because trains are often sitting ducks. To cut costs and boost efficiency, some rail operators have just two crew members running a train that extends up to three miles long.

21:35But now the rail lines are fighting back. They've plowed tens of millions of dollars into defense systems like barbed wire, drones, AI-powered cameras, and miles and miles of cement walls to cover their caboose. Yeah, I mean, also, if you're kind of wondering how big is this problem, well, according to the Transportation Intermediaries Association, TIA, Theft on rail lines and train yards accounted for 9 % of the total confirmed cargo thefts in 2024, with 63 % occurring when trains were en route and 37 % at train yards. The Association of American Railroads estimates more than 65 ,000 rail cargo thefts occurred in 2024, a 40 % increase from the previous year.

22:14That translates to roughly 180 cargo thefts per day. So it is a real thorn in the side of the rail industry. I think it'll be interesting to see how these robbers will evolve their tactics to overcome these security systems. Maybe they'll take a page from Walter White and stop a train in the middle of nowhere. That's actually one of the tactics that they do use. They just stop a train in a very remote location and seize all the goods. And another tactic that they've started to adopt is leaping from bridges onto moving trains when they're going slow through certain areas with restricted speeds.

22:46And just taking all the stuff while they're moving from jumping off of bridges. So that's probably a movie I would watch. Yeah. All right. For my next number, a lot of Americans are sour on the economy, but not millennials. In a new survey by Chime, half of millennials said their financial situation has improved over five years ago. That's more than the 43 % of Gen X and 40 % of baby boomers who said the same thing. This is a narrative violation. In the popular stereotype, millennials were handed a historically bad hand when it comes to building wealth. As Bloomberg notes, many graduated college and tried to get jobs just as the Great Recession battered the economy.

23:22Weighed down by student debt, they tried to move into starter homes just as buying one soared out of reach. And in their prime earning years, above average inflation has eaten into their incomes. Nevertheless, we persisted buying avocado toast. Now the picture is brighter, with millennials' net worth spiking 134%, far faster than 40 % for Gen X and 32 % for boomers. The bull run in the stock market has helped with millennials owning nearly$5 trillion worth of stocks as of Q1 2026. So have rising home values with millennials share of real estate wealth jumping to 22 % from 14 % five years ago. Ray, millennials may have started off slow, but turns out we're just late bloomers.

24:02Okay, bloomer. Okay, that was bad. Okay, funny. I didn't get the memo, but all kidding aside, this is what stuck out to me in the article. millennials median household incomes were 20 % higher when Gen Xers were in their mid 30s and early 40s. In the study that was cited in the Bloomberg article, millennials were able to increase their income without increasing the hours worked, meaning millennials will be able to be more productive without working longer hours. And I think this points to obviously the flexibility of remote work or hybrid work or high paying tech jobs where millennials can have a more work-life balance.