First Half of 2025: Biggest Story, Biggest Flop, Best Meme and More

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0:27Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, we reminisce about the first half of the year in business news. And then we speculate irresponsibly about what the second half of the year may bring. It's Thursday, July 3rd. Let's ride.

0:46Good morning and welcome to a special episode of Morning Brew Daily. Hope we're catching you just before you've switched off your brain for July 4th. Today, a look back and a look forward. 2025 just crossed the midway point, so we're handing out halftime game balls. What's been the biggest story of the year so far? What about the biggest flop, the best meme? Then we'll gaze into our crystal balls and offer up some extremely informed predictions about what could happen in the second half of the year. I'll share one right off the bat. The Mets aren't making the playoffs. Toby, I am pumped to go through these with you.

1:20So am I, Neil. I'm also going to be quizzing Neil on some of the events that went down in either 2024 or 2025 to see how closely he and you guys have been paying attention. I hope you all are listening to this in the car on your way to some body of water ahead of the 4th. Or if you live in a place where fireworks are banned, I hope you're legally crossing state lines to make things go boom. Either way, thanks for taking the time to listen. And now a quick word from our sponsor, Taco Bell. Toby, it is hot out here. Yeah, Neil, but I am staying cool with this refresca freeze from Taco Bell. You can't see it, but Toby is wearing sunglasses.

1:56It's like out of office in a cup, even when you got to be in office. Taco Bell has a full line of new refrescas, including the Freeze, along with the Aqua Refresca, a Taco Bell twist on the beloved Mexican beverage mixed with real freeze dried fruit pieces and green tea. There's also the Rockstar Energy Refresca with a delicious boost of energy. Head to TacoBell.com slash morning dash brew to learn more. That's TacoBell.com slash morning dash brew. legal disclaimer at participating taco bell locations for a limited time only while supplies last agua refrescas are made with artificial colors and natural fruit flavoring and contain less than one percent juice rockstar energy refrescas contain 200 milligrams of caffeine and are not recommended for children pregnant or nursing women or persons sensitive to caffeine all right to kick off our h1 superlatives we are starting big with the biggest business news story of the year so far now i should preface this by saying neil and i have not told each other what we are picking.

2:55So if we choose the same awardees, that is purely by coincidence and evidence that we spend way too much time together. I hope we don't, Neil, but kick us off so we can find out. My biggest business story of the year is tariffs. President Trump's on again, off again, tariff threats in order to remake the global economy have upended business plans around the world and sent markets on a wild historic ride. Stocks plummeted more than 12 % when Trump announced Liberation Day tariffs against every other country in the world, including a tiny island that's only home to penguins, their biggest plunge since COVID and the Great Recession.

3:29But when he rolled back those tariffs one week later, the S &P 500 surged 9.5 % in a single day, the best daily performance in 17 years. Despite rollbacks, tariffs are still much higher now than when Trump entered office. The U.S. effective tariff rate is currently 18.8%, the highest in 90 years versus 2.4 % in 2024. Many companies have scrapped their guidance for the year due to all the policy uncertainty and higher inflation looms. So far, tariffs have not been passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices in any significant way. But Fed chair Jerome Powell says he knows of no economist that doesn't expect that to happen later this year.

4:08And that's the main reason he's been holding off on rate cuts. So Toby, for all those reasons, it is clear to me that tariffs are the biggest business story of the year so far? I mean, it is hard to debate that. The main reason being that if you did a word cloud of the first half of the year on this show, we probably have said the word tariffs innumerable amount of times. I mean, in the hundreds, in the thousands amount, because for a while, every single top story that we were talking about had to do with tariffs. We had to try to figure out what's a different angle we could possibly talk about just because it did dominate so much of the headlines.

4:42So, Neil, I had a sneaking suspicion that you were going to pick tariffs. That being said, I did not pick tariffs. What? Mainly for that reason. I think the biggest business news story of the first half of the year is the sell America trade. For the past decades, America has really been the only game in town. Post-pandemic, 41 % of all the money in the world that gets invested across national borders flowed into the United States. The Magnificent Seven alone are bigger than all European stocks combined. But in the first half of the year, that vibe totally shifted. The U.S. dollars at a three-year low compared to the euro.

5:21European stocks have been actually outperforming American stocks until a recent U.S. rally. And demand for U.S. Treasury notes as a global safe haven asset has been shaky at best. So yes, tariffs and trade wars were the big story, probably were the biggest business news story. But downstream of those uncertainty-inducing economic policies, is capital flowing outside the U.S., which has massive long-term implications for the economic world order. Yeah, the dollar had its worst start to a year since 1973. So I appreciate your attempt to be creative, but I would say that sell America trade is part and parcel of the tariffs story overall.

5:57I think we are on the same page here. This was the biggest story, moving markets, moving business decisions for the first half of the year, no question. Okay, let's head to our flop of the year award sponsored by WeWork, where we choose something that wished H1 of 2025 was just a nightmare to wake up from. Toby, who is your flop of the year so far? My flop of the year is Doze. Think about the amount of oxygen and ink and air time that we devoted to Doze's activity in the first few months of the year. Elon was omnipresent in these cabinet meetings. We all learned way too much about his teenage acolytes, including big balls who got access to sensitive government data.

6:36Procures were being cut left and right. People are getting laid off in the emails. The list five things they did in the past week email will go down in infamy. But now that the dust has settled and Elon and Trump are on the outs, what is there to show for it? The most optimistic of trackers coming from Doge itself put the savings at$180 billion. Most news outlets could only verify around$70 billion of that, which seems like a lot of money. But the government spent nearly$600 billion in April alone. And the Congressional Budget Office estimates that Trump's big, beautiful bill alone would add nearly$3.3 trillion in budget deficits over the next 10 years.

7:12So Elon's goal was$1 trillion in cuts. He could barely manage a tenth of that. And, I mean, Tesla's stock price was plummeting as he was doing his business in Washington, D.C. It does give a lot of credence to critics ahead of this initiative, saying many administrations on both sides of the aisle for the past few decades have tried something similar to Doge. The bureaucracy, the red tape, the amount of disorganization or organization in Washington, D.C. is just so complex. It's so impenetrable that we've had initiatives like Doge before. They've failed most for the most part. And it looks like this one is just in a longer, a long list of, you know, failed attempts to streamline the government.

7:54We probably did mention the word dose second most to tariffs in the first half of the year. What's your flop? My flop of the year is Apple. It sure seems like this iconic company has lost its mojo. It's far behind rival tech companies in terms of AI capabilities with the much type Siri update delayed indefinitely. The features that it has rolled out as part of its Apple intelligence suite have been underwhelming. And don't get me started about the disappointing Vision Pro virtual reality headset. Meanwhile, it's losing smartphone market share in China due to local competition. Its app store, Walled Garden, has been broken open by regulators, and it's losing over$1 billion a year on its perplexing investment on Apple TV+.

8:33So it's no surprise that Apple stock is down more than 17 % so far this year. Compare that to Microsoft up 18%, Meta up 22%, and NVIDIA, which replaced Apple as the world's most valuable company, up 17%. It is hard to argue with that. The vibes around Apple are not good right now. I remember early on in the show, I was constantly being accused as being way too pro-Apple, mainly because I was pretty excited for the Vision Pro to come out and the cool technological advancements that it would bring. But it really hasn't lived up to any of the promises of the updated Siri, of the Vision Pro itself.

9:08I am totally on board with you. And I think emblematic of that was at its last worldwide developer conference, which used to be this big thing where a lot of new exciting updates were introduced. All they did was just change their operating system's visual aesthetic look. And everyone's like kind of emblematic of what Apple is right now. They just paper over it with glossy aesthetics, but nothing really of substance underneath. So I think it's absolutely deserving of the flop of the year award. Meanwhile, the chief designer of the iPhone and so many more of its iconic historic products has jumped ship.

9:44He left Apple in 2019, but instead of going back to Apple to design hardware for the company he worked with for decades, he is now linking up with Sam Altman. Joni Ive got paid or his firm got paid$6.5 billion to link up with OpenAI to develop a potential competitor to the iPhone. So things are not looking good for Apple. I don't know if you have an Apple prediction for the second half of the year, but hopefully they can turn this ship around. But the walls are closing in just a bit. OK, it's time for our science category. We're picking one advancement or breakthrough that happened in the first half of 2025 that would absolutely dominate a middle school science fair.

10:22Toby, what blew your mind scientifically so far this year? And you can't say your new lava lamp. my biggest scientific breakthrough is the dude who let himself get bitten by hundreds of venomous snakes to create a sort of universal anti-venom. The guy, Tim Fried, is just a normal fella from Wisconsin who started letting snakes bite him back in 2001 with the aim of building up his own immunity. At first, it was just a hobby because who amongst us hasn't dabbled in some king cobra bites? But as he became more committed, he wanted to help the over 140 ,000 people who die of snake bites every year and the more than 450 ,000 who are injured.

10:58The actual scientific breakthrough here was a paper published back in May where researchers say they were able to create an antivenom that offers unparalleled protection against 13 lethal snakes and partial protection from six others with the help of Freed's blood. So it is the biggest dude's rock story of the year while also potentially saving hundreds of thousand lives in the process. Well, if your guy is a dude's rock story. Mine is maybe the second version of that, a very similar story. Mine is the man with the golden arm. He didn't have to get himself bitten by all these snakes, but he was a hero.

11:33An Australian man named James Harrison died in February after having protected an estimated 2.4 million babies from possible diseases or death. That's because his plasma contained a rare antibody that scientists could use to make a key medication. And Harrison donated blood every two weeks from age 18 to 81 to give them a constant supply. By the time he died at age 88, Harrison was one of the most prolific blood donors in history, having been pricked 1 ,173 times. Too bad these two guys never got to meet each other. That's what I was saying. If you combine their blood, you would have the most powerful blood in history.

12:09I think I'm going to give you, not that this is fully a competition, but I'm going to give the edge to you there. One, because the nickname the golden arm is just so sick. And then two, just the scale that Harrison was able to help, you know, puts it over Freed's less, you know, large scale helping of people who are affected by snake bites, but two dudes rock, two awesome scientific breakthroughs in general. All right, up next, you've heard us talk about a lot of news stories this year, but inevitably some slipped through the cracks, which is why we're giving out the news story you forgot about award to the news story you probably forgot about.

12:43Neil, what did that big brain of yours end up remembering that most people forgot? My news story you forgot about is Red Note. Remember, this was the Chinese app that surged to the top of the app store in January as TikTok users worried about an impending ban known as TikTok refugees came over in droves. What happened next was a remarkable moment of cultural exchange between Americans and Chinese people who don't often interact due to the internet firewall that's been set up by the Chinese government. China-based users offered Americans tutorials for using the app, and they asked for help with their English homework.

13:17However, the camaraderie did not last. TikTok never went away because Trump pushed off the ban. And now Red Note is only talked about in lists of things you forgot about. Neil, I'm not going to lie. Our big brains finally collide on this one. That was also my news story that you probably forgot about because it was just such a flash in the pan. And it did reach number one in the App Store. So it was a big deal for a very short amount of time. It was very funny seeing the interactions as well. But, I mean, the sign-up instructions for this app were in Mandarin. Like, it was never going to be a long-term thing.

13:52But it was funny for just a second to just see these two cultures colliding. So, great. I never would have expected this is the one that we would have had the same one for. Because maybe it was just, yeah, we both forgot about it. We're like, oh, wait a second. So we're too smart. Let's just put it at that. All right, finally, let's give out our Meme of the Year award to the meme we think captured the essence of the first six months of 2025. Who was H1's Hak Tua girl, Neil? My Meme of the Year is Benson Boone doing a flip off a piano at the Grammys. No one can quite get a handle on this mustachioed pop star.

14:28Despite getting ridiculed by critics, he had the most streamed song of all of 2024 with Beautiful Things, and he followed that up with a new album, American Heart, that debuted at number two on the charts. Pitchfork gave that album a 3.6 out of 10, saying that Benson Boone's flair can't make up for the fact that his songs aren't very good and that he lacks a unique point of view. Still, you got to admit, the guy does have flair, and that's made him a perfect vessel for virality in the TikTok age. I mean, I am not a Benson Boone guy. You are more of a Benson Boone guy, but I will say, if I could do a flip, I too would be flipping off every single pano I came across.

15:05So I'm not going to fault the dude for flipping. That is an underrated meme for sure, though, because a lot of people kind of were introduced to him for the first time at the Grammys. Like, who is this dude? Why is he constantly flipping? So pretty astute memery right there. My meme of the year is the 100 men versus one gorilla meme. This meme has floated around the Internet for a while now, but it caught fire again in the first half of this year. One guy on X renewed the debate by setting up the concept of a hypothetical battle between 100 unarmed men versus one silverback gorilla. Mr. Beast joked about asking for 100 male volunteers to make it a reality.

15:43Robert Irwin, Steve Irwin's son, weighed in on it. And Jake Paul boasted a video of himself with a gorilla in the background saying, it's time to end the debate. So for me, definitely meme of the year material because one, it was pretty harmless. Two, it was easy to grasp. And three, everyone had an opinion on it. So, Neil, I won't even ask if you agree or disagree with my choice, but I will ask you to weigh in. Who do you think would win? Well, I'm curious. There were so many threads of zoologists and people who study gorillas weighing in on this. What did they end up saying? Well, a lot of them said that a human's ability to coordinate and cooperate was obviously it's what makes humans, you know, rise to the top of the food chain already.

16:22because we could plan an attack and take turns attacking the gorilla before the gorilla just would run out of energy. But a lot of zoologists did say if humans were to attack one by one, a hundred in a row, we would absolutely get demolished because the gorilla could, you know, swipe you away. And zoologists did say, hey, we probably have overestimated and over-exaggerated gorilla's strength. They are extremely strong, but they're not enough to withstand just like the force of a hundred men. So it was a fun debate because you could get really scientific about it Or you could just imagine someone running at it with a lot of confidence, but not a whole lot of plan.

16:58Okay, we are going to take a quick break and come back with a business in memoriam segment. Does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the void? But with LinkedIn ads, you can know you're reaching the right decision makers, a network of 130 million of them. In fact, you can even target buyers by job title, industry, company, seniority, skills, and did I say job title? See how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started at LinkedIn.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

17:36Tuesday on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozema St. John host the highly anticipated new competition show. I hired 10 creatives from all walks of life. They will be battling it out to see who can impress the world's biggest brands. This is a huge opportunity. This is the battle for the next big idea. This is not play play. We're spending millions of dollars. I'm so excited to embark on this adventure with all of you. Make the best idea win! On Brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere Tuesday on NBC. Cue the melancholy music because it's time for our first half in memoriam. No, we're not talking about the people who died.

18:13just remembering the products, features, and moments that marked the end of an era. I will go first. RIP to Skype, which owner Microsoft sunsetted in May. Founded in Estonia 22 years ago, Skype was one of the first services to offer free long-distance voice and video calls, which allowed you to chat at no cost with your friends who you met on Study Abroad. Alas, Skype failed to seize its golden opportunity when the pandemic sent everyone working from home. And due to falling user numbers, Microsoft decided it wanted everyone to migrate to Teams. Oh, that's right. It also is just so iconic with the sounds and everything.

18:49Like we all kind of have a conception of Skype growing up on the Internet. It was one of the first big Internet success stories. But you have to say they fumbled just a 3-1 lead, whatever sports metaphor you want to lead. Because Skype was the way to connect over video. And what happened during the pandemic, video conferencing became absolutely massive. Zoom capitalized on the way, Google Meets capitalized on the way, but Skype couldn't muster up any momentum. So yeah, it's kind of sad. And I wonder if in generations from now, people even know what Skype was or if it will always be Zoom and Google Meets going forward.

19:23Our next InMemorium is dedicated to free bags on Southwest. As of late May, the iconic Bags Fly Free plan officially died. Southwest began charging you$35 for your first check mag, marking the end of an era. Though Southwest execs had held firm on the iconic perk for years, even trademarking the phrase as recently as 2023, activist investors in a tough airline industry forced the company to adopt some of the nickel and diming methods of its rivals. The company claimed at an investor day in September that if it started charging for bags, it would only make $1.5 billion a year compared with an expected loss of$1.8 billion in market share.

20:02And yet, it did it anyway, Neil. Well, big changes are coming to Southwest. In addition to getting rid of bags fly free, just a couple of weeks ago, the CEO floated the possibility of creating airport lounges and also flying internationally. They just fly to Caribbean and some Mexican destinations now. Now they've actually filed an application to fly to Europe. So this is part of a broader wholesale change that wants to move Southwest from what it had been for so many decades into just broader norms of the airline industry, which is how you make money. And that's what this activist investor wanted these management types to do.

20:43So lame. I just, I just flied Southwest and having to go to the kiosk and seeing that pop up was literally an out-of-body experience because that used to be what Southwest is. So maybe it will make them more money, but you know, I feel like it lost a little bit of its soul. For our next in memoriam, he hasn't left us, thank goodness. But Warren Buffett is leaving his role as Berkshire Hathaway's CEO after one of the most epic runs in business history. At the end of Berkshire's annual shareholder meeting in May, the 94-year-old Buffett stunned the pack crowd in Omaha by revealing he would hand over the role he'd been in for 60 years to his handbaked successor, Greg Abel.

21:18Talk about big shoes to fill. Berkshire stock could fall 99 % and it would still outperform the S &P 500 since Buffett came on board in 1965. That was the best part of admittedly a pretty sad retirement announcement is just going through all the insane stats that Berkshire Hathaway has racked up. I mean, falling 99 % still outperforming the stock market, that is insane to say. Just goes to show the power of compounding. And also, I'm a little bit nervous as to the future of the Berkshire Hathaway annual investor conference because this is like business celebrity heaven for a lot of people who follow the stock market.

21:56I don't know if it's going to carry the same weight without Warren Buffett there kind of, you know, dispensing his words of wisdom. Our final In Memoriam segment is dedicated to Microsoft's blue screen of death. For 40 years, computers running Windows have displayed the same iconic screen when they run into issues that cause a restart. But the company announced last week that the blue screen of death will become the black screen of death by the end of the summer. The image has entered pop culture as the go-to meme for everything that goes sideways. But the reason it's meeting its own demise is to improve readability and align better with Windows 11 design principles.

22:35Again, the end of an era, Neil. At least it went out with a bang. Remember last year's CrowdStrike cybersecurity outage where screens across the world at airports and train stations and computer desktops from Hong Kong to the United States all flashed the blue screen of death. So it went out, you know, with a huge display that everyone in the world saw what it meant by the blue screen of death. It was an introduction to many and it was a farewell for others. All right, let's move on. And now we're going to look ahead to the second half of the and offer up our own predictions for how things are going to shake out.

23:13Neil and I, again, have not told each other these yet, so I'm excited to see how hot your takes can get, Neil. I'm thinking you're more of a Tabasco sauce level guy rather than a Carolina Reaper take artist, but maybe you'll prove me wrong. Give me your first prediction, Neil. This one is going to break the Scoville scale. I predict that a judge will force a breakup of Google. Remember, last year, Google was found to have an illegal monopoly in search, And later this summer, the same judge who made that decision will be announcing Google's punishment. The DOJ, which brought the case, has asked the judge to split Chrome and Android from Google and bar it from receiving$20 billion a year from Apple for Google to be the default search engine on Apple devices.

23:54I think there is a good chance that happens. Wait, this is so perfect, Neil, because my first prediction is Google ends the year as the most valuable company in the world. And let me tell you why. Right now, Google is worth$2.2 trillion. NVIDIA is worth$3.8 trillion. But Google is trading at a PE of only 18. If it were to be valued the same way as Microsoft and Apple right now, it would be a$4 trillion company. And I think it will eventually catch, the market will eventually catch onto that because right now, AI is a money-burning enterprise. A leader in the space, OpenAI, is a private company with access to a lot of money.