Mailbag Episode! Morning Routines, Best Career Advice, and More

0:02Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, you've got questions and we've got answers. A special Q &A edition of the pod where things are gonna get spicy. It's Thursday, January 1st. Let's ride.

0:21Happy New Year and welcome to 2026. Did you know that now we are closer to Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the construction of the Great Pyramids of Giza? It's true, and it has been for 500 years. Either way, we're very excited to begin this new chapter with you all this year. And what better way to kick it off than by getting a little vulnerable? We are in the hot seat today and answering questions that you all submitted to us a few weeks ago. Some of them were too personal, like are we tighty-whiny or briefs, guys? But everything else was on the table. We'll run through some business and market-focused questions you had before diving into some lore about the show and ourselves.

0:59And I tell you what, we got some young Barbara Walters on our hands because you guys asked some great questions and some horrible ones like the Tidy Whitey one. But before we dive in, a word from our sponsor, Rubric. Neil, you know in every spy movie, there's that one rogue agent who goes completely off script. That's what today's AI agents feel like. They automate everything. They move insanely fast. But one wrong move and suddenly they deleted the wrong finals or optimized something straight into the ground. I love me a spy movie. And the scary part, they can do 10 times the damage in a 10th of the time, which is why Rubrik Agent Cloud is basically the studio director for your AI agents.

1:39It's the only platform that lets you monitor, govern, and rewind their actions. It's running in the background like a behind-the-scenes crew, full visibility, and guardrails so your agents don't go rogue, and if something breaks, you just roll it back, like hitting undo on an entire plot twist. And the rewind is fast. It's why hospitals and banks rely on it. If your business relies on AI agents, you need the ability to monitor, govern, and rewind their actions. Right now, our listeners get exclusive early access to Rubrik Agent Cloud. Head to rubrik.com. That's R-U-B-R-I-K.com, rubrik.com. Okay, let's head to our first question.

2:18This one was from GoldenBoyBrawlStars on Instagram. They asked us, what was the most significant moment of 2025? Toby, I'm tossing it to you first. My mind immediately went to Liberation Day when Trump rolled out those tariffs and was holding up the big poster board. It looked like a cheesecake factory menu, but that moment felt like it defined a better part of the year. We said tariffs an ungodly amount of times on the podcast after that day. It definitely spooked the markets. It spooked the markets continually over the next few months as well. And I had my quote unquote normie friends asking me about it, which to me shows that something penetrated the general consciousness saying like, hey, is everything going to get more expensive?

3:03Like what's going on with tariffs? So to me, I think that moment where he's holding the board in the, you know, the Rose Garden that sums up 2025. And everyone's going through looking at each of the names and each of the percentages that are associated with those particular countries. And we also got the story of the herd of McDonald Islands, which are home to no humans at all. But they got a tariff for the penguins and the polar bears that live there. My most significant moment of 2025 came all the way back in February when when the Eagles won the Super Bowl. They crushed the Chiefs. Yeah. So that was a great moment of 2025.

3:36Actually, it's true. It's not my most significant moment. One of those moments was the Pope's election. That was pretty cool when we got the first American pope and there was a lot of hoopla around that particular election and the process behind it. And I thought it was a cool marriage of something ancient, truly, that's been going on for more than a thousand years and something modern, having this dialogue with each other. And it was also another moment we saw we saw the rise of prediction markets, which was a huge narrative and story this year. Yes, they were big during the election back in November 2024.

4:09But also, you know, everyone was kind of clued into the prediction markets. What was Calci and what was Polly Market saying about which pope would would take the lead or get or get elected? So I thought that was was quite an interesting angle to it all. Which, by the way, the prediction markets got it totally wrong. I was all in on pizza balla because, come on, a pope with the last name pizza balla is pretty cool. But first American pope is a pretty good consolation. If we're being honest, though, I think the most significant moment of 2025 in terms of its impact that we'll have 5, 10, 15 years down the road will probably be an advancement in an AI video generator like Nano Banana or Sora or something like that from AI and OpenAI and Google.

4:52because, I don't know, I just think going down the line, those things truly blur the line between reality and fiction. And I think as they keep getting better, and they're already so amazing, I just think the risks, the opportunities, and the risks are endless when it comes to generating video that is fake but looks so real. Neil, you'd have a feeling great if this was an exam question because you just gave three completely different answers. You've got to stick to your guns. I'm Liberation Day all the way. And I'm Eagles. All right, let's move on. This question is from Liz, also on Instagram.

5:23What do you predict the hottest jobs will be in 2035? Okay, I hope we're not. I hope we're graded on a curve here because that is a long time from now and things can change pretty fast. But I guess from an overall trend perspective, with AI coming for white-collar jobs, and I do think that it will be a significant blow to accountants, lawyers, people just doing desk work, I think that the jobs that will rise in status to become, quote unquote, hotter are things you do with your hands, like the trades, electricians and plumbers. We're already seeing that in 2024 and 2025. Those companies, those types of jobs really commanding a premium.

6:00And then in the same vein of people who do stuff with their hands and feet, athletes. I think athletes is going to be an even bigger job because right now we have AI that can code, AI that can write, AI that can search the web for you. But we don't yet have AI that we'd watch play soccer, football on the TV. To that, I say humanoid robots, Neil. I'm saying we don't have them yet. They can barely, you know, fold laundry. They're not going to start kicking field goals. I know. I was actually more thinking about the trades. I feel like eventually we're going to have AI-enabled humanoid robot electricians and plumbers, although maybe that does take a little bit more.

6:372040, not 2035. Yeah, 2040. 2035 is a long way away, which makes my answer feel a little bit more short-term dated. But my answer was cultural strategists or just experiential marketers because it kind of meshes with the same theme that you described where as AI slot becomes more prevalent, IRL is so back. We have said that so many times throughout the year that people are craving in real life connection with each other. And so people who can create those moments, I'm thinking of the Marty Supreme, you know, marketing campaign when there was a blimp and there was just these clothing pop ups. And it felt very energetic in real life.

7:14I think the people who can tap into those feelings and tell those stories for brands are going to become even more important. So I don't know what the actual name of it is. I'm calling it cultural status, but people who have a finger on the pulse are going to become more important. I love that. Okay. Let's move on to Alex who asked curious, what's one thing you now pay much more attention to in business or markets than you did when you first started morning brew and why? All right. This might be a hot take because as I've started to pay attention to more business news as a whole, you realize that there's not as much going on as you think.

7:48And I want you to tell me if you agree with this, but as we are going through the news of the day, There's only a few stories that are really dominating the narratives in the market for that day. Yes, there's a lot of peripheral things going on, but the main core things that are of importance is not that high. You can usually count them on one hand. Our show only has five or six stories a day. So when you are not paying attention to the market, it feels like all this crazy stuff is going on all the time. You don't know what's happening, and you just feel like there's this tsunami of information coming on.

8:20Once you start honing in and focusing, it almost feels like there is less going on than I actually anticipated. Well, the news is a business and they need to generate stories and narratives and things that are supposedly going on because they need people to watch. I mean, CNBC is I don't know if it's a 24 hour network, but they are going for many hours of the day. And there certainly is not enough things to talk about. And same with sports or any other news outlet that has something going 24 hours a day. I mean, if you actually watch that all the way through, there's, you know, 90 % of it, they're talking about absolutely nothing.

8:56So that's why I like what we do is we know that there's a lot going on that may be important, but that also may not be important. Then we just make a 25-minute show about what actually is important. I think that's maybe why people listen to the show. So wait, are you agreeing with me or disagreeing with me that there's not as much going on as you think? I agree. Okay, perfect. Do you have an answer? But I'm saying that that's because of the industry of the news business. Um, my answer is, well, I didn't pay attention to business or markets at all before I started at Morning Brew. I was a history major and I didn't even know why Warren Buffett was famous.

9:32I didn't know what IPO stood for. So it's all new to me. And actually I've been doing this since 2017. So now it's not new. Um, but before then, yeah, I, I did not know anything about business. I was very much a liberal arts person. So before and after Morning Brew is completely, 180 for me. But I also have talked to a lot of other business journalists and people doing business reporting and things like that. They're very similar to me in that they didn't set out. Many of them did not set out to be business reporters. They set out to do something else and then somehow backed in to business and the economy and markets.

10:07And we're like, well, this is just super interesting. I never really thought about this before. But because I'm a curious person, I can get into it. And obviously, it's so important and drives pretty much everything we do. Let's move on to Matt's question. Can I get a prediction on stock of the year, dog of the year for 2026? Let's have a caveat here. Oh yeah. You can do the, I'll do the caveat. This is not financial advice. Do not take anything we say as financial advice. And with that said, Neil, go ahead. Well, I'm going to do maybe broader trends. And so what is going to be the stock of the year for 2026?

10:39I think things kind of even out and even Stevens, where if something's down the year before, maybe it'll go back up the next year. So I think I look at slop bowls like Cava and Chipotle and sweetgreen. They had a really bad year in 2025. People did not go to slop bowl places at all. Maybe that was inflation or maybe that people were turning to sandwiches for more texture. I don't really know what was going on, but those companies had a really bad 2025. So maybe we could see a comeback in 2026. And this is actually backed up by a company called Citrini Research, which releases a bunch of trends that they see going on in the stock market in 2026.

11:15And they say something like this, that back of the house automation would allow these firms to reduce labor costs and boost profit margins. So when you're looking at a X's and O's perspective, not just vibes, which my stock analysis is based completely on vibes as like this company, these companies did bad the year before, and there's going to be some sort of cultural rebound back to slop holes. They're talking about actual profits and the fact that Sweetgreen and Chipotle are doing a lot of automation. We got this AutoCado from Chipotle, which they're going to, you know, cut out some workers and have robots do a lot of the avocado slicing and mashing.

11:51Sweetgreen has been huge into automation. So those are ways to cut costs. And maybe it won't necessarily drive traffic back to these places, but at least they'll be more profitable. I never got off the Slop Bowl train, so I've been a ardent Slop Bowl supporter. What's your dog of the week? My dog of the year. So my dog of the year could be meta. And I don't know whether the stock will go up or down, obviously. But when you look at all these companies that are investing tens of billions of dollars into AI, there seems to be a pretty obvious use case for AI when it comes to Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

12:28But when you look at meta investing$70 billion into AI infrastructure, that's a lot, obviously. like what are they going to use AI for to make ads better on Instagram? Like how are they going to actually make money from AI? And I think you just, I literally just think you answered. Maybe I did, but I do think 2026 is going to be a year of like, show me the money for investors looking to these AI hyperscalers and saying, can you show me a return on your investment? It feels like from Google, Microsoft, Amazon's perspective might be easier to show that progress than Meta. And Meta's most recent earnings report last quarter, or the third quarter of 2025, was really bad.

13:07They said they were going to spend a lot more than they were expected in their stock tank because of it. So I think there are just maybe more questions around Meta's social media use case of it than these other ones that are focused more on enterprise. I'm going in a totally different direction for Stock of the Week than slot bulls. I'm going in metals and uranium. I don't think people realize how much copper wire a data center uses, just a single data center. We're talking like football fields worth of copper wire. And when the same thing goes for uranium, as nuclear comes online and gets more and more support behind it, I'm just pretty bullish on finite resources that are pretty crucial to the infrastructure and energy plays over the next few years.

13:48And then for Dog of the Week, this one is also a little vibe space. I'm going with Ticketmaster because I don't think there's a more hated company out there today in terms of their customer base, but then also in terms of regulators. There's so many lawsuits floating around the ticketing industry in general right now, especially as the World Cup and all these mega events come online, tickets conversation and ticket prices conversations just become back in the zeitgeist. So I'm thinking Ticketmaster is just gonna get a lot of that negative energy and it's not gonna have the best year going forward.

14:19Very vibes-based, very vibes-based. And that's fun. All right, let's go on to some Morning Brew daily questions. This one's from Daniel, and we really could have picked anyone because a lot of people wanted to know about our daily routine. So this is just what Daniel wrote. What do you guys do if you want to go out with friends? That's an assumption, okay? And have some drinks on any given night. Do you ever stroll into the studio at 4 a.m., healthy hungover? What happens if there's some breaking news that you have to incorporate into tomorrow's show while you're out on the town? There was a lot to unpack there.

14:53I think in general, I call it a school night whenever we have a show the next day. So like we're not doing anything. We're not club rats. We're not club rats. The latest we stay up is usually for trivia, like a bar trivia that we're either hosting or attending. So, you know, we're adults. Like we have work in the morning, so we're not going to do anything crazy. So that's first and foremost. If something late in breaking happens, we are in the office at 430 in the morning. And so we usually have a little bit of time before we actually record. We typically sit down and record around 6 a.m. So that hour, hour and a half before we start recording is one last chance to do a headline sweep.

15:32If something big happened overnight, we just quickly prepare for it in the morning. That's kind of the reason why we do it in the morning so we can be as up-to-date as possible. So that's a big reason that, one, we're not out partying at night on the town, and, two, that we're in the office so morning so we can bring in the most up-to-date show as possible. Yeah, usually we just have to decide. We come in Monday morning. We have to decide whether the Sunday night football game is going to be the top story or the second story. But, yeah, there's a lot of talk because we do we do love sports and, you know, other stuff that happens late at night.

16:00But we do usually go to bed before those finish. So there's a lot of talk of like, hey, did you see that this happened? There's a lot of like recapping what happened from the hours of nine to midnight in the world, usually when usually in the sports and entertainment sphere. This question is from Brendan. Which CEO would you want to interview the most and why? Great question. I just heard an interview from this guy, and I thought he was really interesting, and I would love to interview him. It is Blake Scholl, who is the CEO of Boom Supersonic. Boom Supersonic is a company that makes planes, or is trying to make planes, that go supersonic speeds, that go really fast.

16:39So basically another iteration of the Concorde, but trying to rectify the mistakes that made Concorde not a great business proposition. So this guy was pretty thoughtful on things from like just how do we improve airports from when the moment you get out of your car at the gate to boarding the actual plane. So he has a lot of, you know, thoughts of revamping security and the airport experience to when you actually get on a plane and you can travel from New York to London in three hours. He was really happy that this administration removed restrictions on overland supersonic travel. So that was a big regulation that limited supersonic aviation over the United States and that limited this industry was that because of the sonic boom that happens past Mach 1, there were restrictions on how fast you could fly over the United States.

17:30And those restrictions are not there anymore. So maybe we'll see a boom in supersonic travel led by this company called Boom. And it would be really interesting to hear his thoughts. I'm going way more mainstream. Sam Altman. I just want to get a read on the guy. He's going to shape the course of humanity over the next decade or so. So it would just be nice to see how he is. We get to talk to our guests a little bit before we actually go on air with them. And that five-minute period can go a long way to just figuring out, hey, would I want to hang out with this guy or not? So I really, like, I don't know if anyone will afford this to Sam Altman, but he is one of the more influential people in our modern times right now.

18:09So, of course, that's someone who I want to sit down with. And, yeah, quite mysterious. Very mysterious. He doesn't do a lot, and he mostly does interviews, you know, in very controlled environments with, like, people from the industry. So maybe we could bring him to more of the normie masses. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back right after this. Cyber attackers these days don't need exploits. They'll just use your allowed tools against you. That's why ThreatLocker enforces default deny at execution. This security model stops unknown software, scripts, and ransomware the moment it tries to run.

18:43They also help you enforce zero trust by blocking any unauthorized applications or behavior from ever running. From global enterprises to lean IT teams, ThreatLocker delivers a practical, enforceable security layer that stops unknown threats, minimizes attack surface, and helps companies stay ahead of an evolving threat landscape. Learn more at threatlocker.com slash morningbrewdaily. That's threatlocker.com slash morningbrewdaily. Okay, Dobie, this question is from Brendan, who asked our previous question, so he was kind of on fire. What product would you advertise on the show that does not sponsor you, and why, something you use day-to-day or you believe in?

19:22Okay, I am big into fitness tracking right now. So Whoop and Eight Sleep are the big ones, although Whoop actually already sponsored the show. Whoop is just something that you wear on your wrist every day and it tells you how you slept, how is your resting heart rate, how's your heart rate variability. And I've gotten really into the data side of health recently. So any health tracker from Oura Ring to Eight Sleep to Whoop would be something that I personally do use and would like to sponsor on the show. It's just fun, even though you're not a big fan of it because sometimes you have a bad night's sleep and you're like, I don't need the data to tell me already that I had another night's sleep that was poor.

20:03So that's something that I've just started nerding out on. So any fitness tracker is one that I'd love to have. What are the other fitness trackers that are? Well, Aura Ring's actually the only one I haven't tried. It's just like a different form factor. And just any heart rate monitor when you're doing exercise. I just like the data portion of it is something that fascinates me because you see how, you know, if I eat this close to my bedtime, it actually makes me sleep worse. And you can start figuring out how to dial those things. And I don't let it govern my life because, you know, life is for living still.

20:33But it's still it's just fun to say, like, oh, this is how my body reacts to these things. All right. I took this question in a different direction because I don't know. I just thought about what stuff I use. I just reflected on what products I use every single day. number one is this rubber spatula so I hope rubber spatula company I think it's just Amazon basics but it's just this blue rubber spatula and you can use it on literally anything you cook from eggs to soups to literally anything and I just it's something I pretty much use every day or at least five to five days out of the week the other one is the New York Times games app or the New York Times crossword I do that pretty religiously every single day the full crossword not the mini and I've been getting into spelling bee a little bit more so I that is another product that I use quite literally every single day.

21:18The other is the New York City subway. I'm on it every single day. You can sponsor us. Zoran, you are the mayor now. So if you're listening to this, would love to be sponsored by the F train. That is so fun. Neil's mind immediately goes, you can pick any product in the world, rubber spatula, a crossword, and a train. I'm telling you, I'm just saying, this is what I use every day. It was just like a very interesting thought exercise. It might be something for people out there too. And then the other, this is a little more sincere, but like media outlets and newspapers, because that is something we use every single day.

21:49And we definitely could not do our job without it. And they require payments because this is a business after all. So yeah, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Bloomberg, Financial Times, Associated Press, Reuters, Business Insider, NPR, like all of the news websites. Keep going, keep going. More, more, more. No, are we competitors or? I think there's a symbiotic relationship between them and us, and especially with the newsletter. For many years, the newsletter is us too. We are aggregators, the podcast and the newsletter. We take what's out there that other people have published, and we put it into this pint-sized, more fun, lighthearted format for audiences who feel a little overwhelmed with all the news out there, as we discussed earlier.

22:36And at the same time, the newsletter drives a ton of traffic back to these publishers that hopefully gets them more customers and more paying customers that feeds their business. So I've talked to these guys over my eight years at Morning Brew and they love us. We love them. There's a great relationship between us and legacy media. And I know they've gotten a bad rap. Trust in news media is at an all time low right now. But in terms of a product that I use every day and find a lot of value in, it's legacy media, it's newspapers. You absolutely failed. They do great work. Failed the question again.

23:05You're not allowed to have 14 answers to every single one of these, okay? I prepared one answer. You got 17 of them. All right, let's move on to some more questions that are more Toby and Neil focus. I love this one from Morgan on Instagram. If there was a museum dedicated to you, Neil, what would be in the gift shop? International food court. Oh, I'm not into like material things that much. Spatulas, not included. Yeah, just the necessities. And I know my brother's listening to this being like, you buy so many clothes, which is true, but I don't want that in my gift shop. I think that something that most exemplifies me would be an international food court with incredible regional food from all over the world who doesn't like eating after you go to a museum and you get all hungry.

23:49And I know you're saying, oh, maybe there's a restaurant in the museum as well in addition to a food court. But I'm just abolishing the gift shop in general and removing the food court. And we're doing a bazaar of everywhere in the world. And we're getting some really good dishes. I like this question because I love things and trinkets. I love board games particularly. So Mahjong sets galore, Scrabble boards, you know, Dominion card game, lots of sporting goods. There would just be an entire section devoted to like a Dick's Sporting Goods S thing where you'd have a golf simulator where you can hit balls.