Miami is Now Pricier Than NYC & The Massive Train That’s Making Adults Cry

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0:31Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, meet the locomotive so majestic, it's making grown men cry. Ben, Miami is now more expensive than New York City. It's Wednesday, July 22nd. Let's ride.

0:57It's time to settle this debate once and for all. You shouldn't rinse dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. Went down a home appliance rabbit hole yesterday and learned that the expert consensus is that pre-washing your dishes results in a less effective job by the dishwasher. And that's because your dishwasher has sensors that measure how dirty its contents are. And those sensors are easily fooled. If the dishwasher is duped into thinking your dishware is clean from the get-go due to the rinsing, then it will run a shorter, less powerful cycle. so you're just supposed to scrape off large food scraps before loading up the dishwasher and nothing more.

1:32Toby, I feel like so many listeners are about to say, I told you so to the person who always makes them pre-rinse. So I hear you, but I will always be a scrub first guy. I don't trust the black box of the dishwasher. I want visual evidence that's going in relatively clean. To get more scientific with it, your dishwasher detergent has these molecules called surfactants that latch onto food pieces and pull them away towards the water. But guess what? So does your dish soap. So I'm surfactanting away food molecules with my scrubbing just like the dishwasher is. However, I watched that same video you watched.

2:09I learned that dishwashers do not use that much water. They use the equivalent of running your kitchen sink for about two and a half minutes. So I always thought I was being lazy for not hand washing more, but maybe I'm just being environmentally insensitive when I'm hand washing. So long story short, being lazier in the kitchen is actually probably better for both the environment and for the cleanliness of your dishes. And now a word from our sponsor, Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Neil, it's time we handle some hard questions head on. Yeah, like whether you should pour your milk before you pour your syrup.

2:42No, like will AI take my job or how do I even know when to trust it? I don't have an answer for you on that, but you're not alone. those are real questions from real people. Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude, heard them over and over in more than 120 ,000 interviews about people's hopes and fears around AI. Anthropic's not trying to gloss over these tough questions because their goal is to make sure AI actually works out well for people. They publish real research on these kinds of questions, even when it's uncomfortable. So if you've got your own hard questions about AI, and let's be honest, who doesn't, head to claude.ai.mbd to submit it to Anthropic and explore how they are answering them.

3:23That's C-L-A-U-D-E.ai.mbd. For years, moving from the Northeast to Miami meant better weather, excellent Cuban food, the ability to leave one more button open on your shirt, and a more affordable lifestyle. At least one of those things isn't true anymore. Thanks to skyrocketing prices across the board, the Miami metropolitan area is now more expensive than greater New York City. for the first time ever, according to census figures released this month. The only other region that's more expensive than Miami, the Bay Area. Miami's consumer price index, a measure of inflation, has spiked 36 % since 2019 per Bloomberg, which is a bigger jump than any other metro area besides its neighbor to the west, Tampa.

4:05It wasn't supposed to be like this. Florida, famous for having no income tax, has historically presented itself as a cheaper alternative to its colder weather foil, New York City. It's why a flock of billionaires led by Ken Griffin have made moves there since the pandemic, scooping up$100 million mansions in the most pristine beachfront neighborhoods. But middle-class families in Miami are being left in the lurch. The benefit of no income tax is getting erased by the rising cost of living in other areas, whether it's housing, the financial burden of owning cars, and soaring private school tuition, if you wanted to go that route, and salaries are not rising to keep up with the rate of inflation.

4:40Toby, I knew something was wrong when they tried to charge me$100 to get into 11. I think you were getting denied from 11 no matter what. But let's talk about housing because whenever you talk about an area getting more expensive, it usually comes down to home prices. And home prices in the Miami area are up 79 % since COVID. That is absurd. But it's not even just that home prices themselves are getting more expensive. It's everything that comes afterwards. talking about insurance premiums, rising property taxes, there's maintenance costs, there's all these things that go into owning a home that are specifically expensive in Florida because Florida is just more vulnerable to weather.

5:22And we've talked a lot about how as hurricane season gets more active, it does drive up insurance premiums. So not only that first sticker shock of a house price, but everything that comes afterwards makes Miami just untenable for a lot of people these days. Right. So housing prices are up 79%, but let's look at insurance premiums and property taxes. Florida has the highest home insurance premiums in the country, an average of$8 ,292 last year. That is four times what homeowners pay in New York State. And let's talk about property taxes. Miami area's property taxes are up 62 % since 2019, more than twice the national average.

6:01I know a lot of New York homeowners say I pay so much in property taxes and especially in New Jersey, suburbs of New York City, they say my property tax bill is insane. And that's probably true. But when you go down to Miami and looking at the insurance costs and the property tax costs on top of already surging home costs, then that's why we're seeing Miami edge ahead of New York City when it comes to unaffordability. This shocked me. The average spend per diner in 2026 in Miami,$94. In New York, it's$79. So restaurant spending is now higher in Miami than in New York City. What are you eating down there in Miami?

6:40And you did mention that salaries haven't kept up. That is absolutely true. New York wages have gone up pretty steadily. Median household income in Miami sits roughly$1 ,000 below the national medium. So they cannot afford to pay. Normal people cannot afford to live in this city anymore. The people who are still benefiting from Miami and from the fact that Florida has no income tax, they're the billionaires. I mean, we've talked about how Mark Zuckerberg has bought property down there. Both the Google founders have bought property down there. Howard Schultz, Alex Carr, Palantir CEO, has bought property down there.

7:13If you are ultra wealthy, then yes, Miami still works for you because you can dodge a lot of taxes. But even if you're upper middle class, those property taxes are biting into your income. You're not saving as much from taxes as you initially hoped. So the ultra wealthy doing fine. I mean, it's kind of a story no matter where you live, but everyone else is feeling the squeeze. But especially in Florida, which has the most regressive tax system in the entire country, that's according to the Left Leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Regressive tax means that you're harming the poor more than you're harming the rich disproportionately.

7:47So the top 1 % of Floridians pay 2.7 % of their incomes in taxes. The poorest fifth pay 13.2%. Let's look at New York State. The top 1 % pay 13.5 % of their income in taxes compared to Florida's 2.7%, while the poorest fifth pay 11.1 % in state and local taxes. So we got this tax system that's benefiting the rich, not benefiting the middle class or the poor. I love this rivalry between New York City and Miami because they kind of hate each other, but at the same time, they can't live without each other as well. Miami developers, Miami real estate developers, when they pitch their new properties to people, it's usually to New Yorkers.

8:30So they promote the city as, quote, the sixth borough and some particular buildings as, you know, the tallest residential buildings south of New York. So they're really positioning themselves vis-a-vis New York in certain ways, but also as its foil. so very interesting to see this rivalry play out but I guess New York has the upper hand now because it is somehow cheaper to live in than the greater Miami area unless Miami gets LeBron which I've seen some rumors that he's going back home well not home but to his previous home all right let's move on do you hate your phone yes there's lots of parts to love like being able to call your parents and take a picture of your weird cat named goose but just as often it feels like a little attention sucking wormhole that's rotting your brain from the inside out it's against that backdrop that the light flip a new flip phone has entered the market it comes from the startup light whose founder said that they made the flip because gen z customers were begging for an alternative they could use without the sirens call of social media the light flip is just 299 and comes from the same designer who worked on the original motorola razor more than 20 years ago and it's more than serviceable at everything outside of serving up tiktoks you can call and text though your fingers might not quite be as nimble on that keypad.

9:42You can set alarms, use a calculator, jot down notes, listen to music and podcasts, even navigate using map apps. So it's not a total brick, but it's a lot simpler than what's probably in your pocket today. Neil, to zoom out a little, the light flip is another piece of so-called slow tech that is making a comeback. Things like iPod nanos and camcorders are becoming more popular again as people are reacting to the relentless progress of technology by dumbing down their devices. Do you think you could survive in this day and age with just a flip phone? The answer is no. I was thinking about what aspects of a smartphone I really couldn't live without, and I can't live without tap to pay.

10:23Yeah, it's true. I mean, you always leave your wallet at home. I've started leaving my wallet at home as well. When you go on the subway, tap to pay, a lot of the retailers that we frequent have tap to pay. this particular phone has no NFC chip inside, so it doesn't have tap to pay. And I don't know if I can, you know, start bringing my wallet everywhere now. So I think, you know, that's probably a small thing, but maybe it's a big thing. And that's maybe one reason why they're positioning this not necessarily as a replacement for your smartphone, but maybe something that, you know, it pairs with your smartphone.

10:54You take it out of the house with you when you go on particular errands or trips that you don't necessarily need your smartphone for. Also, removing the NFC chip is a response to Lite's previous phone, which is called the Lite Phone 3. That received a lot of negative feedback for A, being super expensive. It came in at$699. And B, just being too much like a smartphone. It had a touchscreen and a lot of certain apps and features that made it close to a smartphone. So it was a dumb phone that was close to a smartphone. People didn't necessarily like that. So then they went the complete other route and made a flip phone.

11:30I find it interesting that it is Gen Z clamoring for something like this because you might have initially thought that it would be a nostalgic play for kids who grew up in like the 90s and wanted that flip phone back because it evoked images of their first phone. But no, it's a lot from young people who just really want to unplug right now, get away from the algorithms that are kind of governing their lights, their lives. I think light is doing something smart too, is that this phone comes out in 2027, by the way. So even though they announced it, and in the meantime, they're telling people to sign up for their newsletter called Flip Your Life, where they're trying to help customers transition into a dumber world away from their smartphone.

12:10So tips for reducing smartphone dependence, community support, because it is a massive shift. I can't imagine just tomorrow waking up and not being able to use Apple Tap to Pay or something like that, or iMessage someone. So I think they're trying to build a movement here around slow tech rather than just throwing people off into the deep end. It's clear there is a movement, maybe it's small, but of breaking down the smartphone into its constituent parts with various devices that also used to exist on resale markets. iPod sales are up 48 % from 2024, 2025 over 2024. So if you want to listen, maybe you'll have an iPod.

12:51And then Canon told NPR that sales of its renowned point and shoot camera, power shot. We're up nearly sevenfold from 2022 to 2025. We just have to bring back the Rand McNally road at list to replace Google maps. And we're really breaking down the smartphone, but you talked about nostalgia as a nineties kid. I want to see how good I am now at T9 word. I was so good. I was T9 word. It's like, Oh, is that just, Oh my God, Toby. Is that the texting? Yeah. It's like the D pad texting where they have the, you know, the numbers and like the four letters associated with each number. I mean, I was a menace in junior year and senior year of high school.

13:29That's all we had. So we were, you learned how to type on the D-pad really, really well using T9 word. And that brings us back. So I might get this phone just to see if I still got it. I would not want to challenge you. I did my first phone, even though I am technically a Gen Z on the borderline was a flip phone. And I thought it was so cool because you could do the thing of saying like, I said good day sir, and slam it shut. That's always going to be the best feature of a flip phone is the fact that you can snap that thing shut. Let's move on. Has your family ever pulled out your old yearbook and teased you for your freshman brace face era?

14:03Well, Novo Nordisk is feeling similarly targeted by Eli Lilly and it's suing it over misleading advertising. In this case, Novo's brace face era is a lower dose version of Wagovi that Eli Lilly is comparing to its fully glowing up ZEP-bound drug. In the ads, Lilly cites a head-to-head trial in which ZEP-bound led to an average weight loss of 50 pounds, while Wagovi patients only lost 33 pounds. Novo Nordisk is saying, hey, that comparison is misleading. You need to check out my new pearly whites. We have an FDA-approved study that shows our new high-dose Wagovi produce 47 pounds of average weight loss.

14:41In other words, if you take more up-to-date versions of both drugs, they perform much more similarly than Lilly's advertising suggests. Of course, Novo Nordis has a bone to pick with Eli Lilly. Despite popularizing the entire GLP-1 weight loss class of drugs with Ozempic and Wigofi, it has since been stuffed into a locker by Eli Lilly's set bound, which leads the category here in the U.S. Now, we have this very high school showdown if the high school was a federal court in New Jersey. It seems like whenever you get two companies competing head to head in the same category. A false advertising lawsuit is never far behind.

15:16And that point has now arrived. Yeah. Pizza Hut, Papa John's, Dyson, Shark Ninja, McDonald's, Burger King. There's a long list of rival companies going after each other over misleading advertising. It does seem like Nova Nordisk has a bit of a point because they sent a cease and desist letter back when this ad came out in April and they said that Eli Lilly just basically didn't reply to them. They also note that this ad has received 700 million impressions since it began airing on TV around the end of April. They say that those are 700 million false impressions of what this new higher dose Wiggovi can do.

15:52They said they want to seek a court order to block ads immediately if Eli Lilly doesn't pull these ads within two days. And so I guess they're on the clock right now for 24 more hours because this lawsuit was filed yesterday. Also, something funny is that Eli Lilly added a disclaimer, probably in response to this cease and desist letter, saying that they acknowledge the existence of that there is a high dose Wiggovi. It's a very small footnote. Novo Nord says this is BES. They're calling it a ambiguous, confusing, virtually illegible and wholly inadequate disclaimer that doesn't explain to the viewer what they're actually saying.

16:27Wow, a disclaimer, a tiny disclaimer at the bottom of a pharma ad. Who would have ever thought? Yeah, Eli Lilly's response to is saying that one, it stands behind its advertising, but they're saying that it's grounded in the best scientific evidence available. Basically, what they're saying is there's no one-to-one head-to-head clinical trial that exists today comparing both of the most updated versions of the drug. So they're saying we're just going off of what we had at the time when we were running the ad. So they're almost using the fact that there is no head-to-head trial to support their argument.

16:59But it is everyone has compared, you know, a good picture of themselves to a bad picture of someone else. Maybe when you were in your brace face era. So it is absolutely that they knew what they were doing here because it sounds much better to say 50 pounds of weight loss versus 33 pounds. They probably will not be able to continue doing it going forward. Meanwhile, Nova Nordisk is on the warpath against Eli Lilly. lost that big lead that it had originally when Ozempic was, you know, the Kleenex of the tissue market. And we just knew all of this class of drugs as Ozempic. But Novo Nordisk is filed to suit over this misleading, allegedly misleading ad.

17:38And one wind behind their back is they have a new weight loss pill that is taken orally. And that is doing really well. They came out with it months before Eli Lilly came out with theirs. And the data is pretty stark that it's crushing Eli Lilly when it comes to the pill. As of July 3rd, the Wagovi pill, Novo Nordis, had generated about 153 ,000 US prescriptions. That's compared to less than 20 ,000 for Fundeo, which is Eli Lilly. So it now owns 89 % share of this market. So there's a lot of tools in its toolbox to come back from the early lead it lost. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with a story about a train right after this.

18:20Hey, Toby, how's your duck impression? It's not all it quacked up to be. I refuse to engage with a joke that hack. Okay, then I'll talk. Aflac pays employees claims fast, accurately and fairly, and their plans come at no direct cost to businesses. Plus, they help save employers and employees tax dollars when payroll deductions are withheld pre-tax. That's why nearly all businesses that offer Aflac say they're likely to continue. To learn more, just head to aflac.com slash morningbrewdaily. That's A-F-L-A-C.com slash morningbrewdaily. When demand slowed for HydroJug, Amazon Ads rising star Hayden Wadsworth pivoted.

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19:36In just a few clicks, you can have a say on important shareholder topics like executive pay and director elections. Visit Vanguard.com slash Investor Choice to learn more. It's your shares. It's your voice. It's easy. Vanguard investors own shares of their index funds, and those funds own shares of the companies they invest in. Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor. All right, we need to talk about this summer's hottest attraction. It's not the Knicks, not Taylor Swift's wedding, not the World Cup, and not the Odyssey, but a really, really humongous train. Big Boy 4014, the world's largest operating steam locomotive, has been traversing the United States to celebrate the country's 250th birthday, drawing huge crowds everywhere it stops.

20:18And it's so massive, so dazzling, weighing 1.2 million pounds, that it's making grown men weep when they see it. One teary-eyed 64-year-old from Wayne, Pennsylvania told the Wall Street Journal, nothing beats feeling the ground vibrate, seeing the charting of the wheels and hearing the whistle. It's such a sensory experience. Another man said, upon seeing Big Boy, I was choked up. In the 1940s, Union Pacific ordered 25 Big Boy locomotives to lug heavy freight across the Wasatch Mountains between Utah and Wyoming. But steam engines gave way to cheaper diesel electric trains, and just one of them, Big Boy 4014, remains in operation after being restored in 2019.

20:55In June and July, Big Boy traveled east of the Mississippi for the first time ever, delighting onlookers in Pennsylvania for Independence Day celebrations. Now it's on its way back to Wyoming with a stop in Kansas City planned for today. If you live in the Midwest, just Google track Big Boy to see where it'll stop near you. Bring tissues. I think the reason Big Boy is so popular is the same reason that IMAX is so popular. People just want a spectacle. They want to feel something right now. and the fact that seeing Big Boy is multisensory is absolutely a spectacle because you smell the grease, you feel the steam, you hear like the exhaust going out.

21:33So it's stimulating all of your senses, which is why you have these people crying. Like they are literally breaking down in tears when they hear and feel Big Boy. The business case is interesting as well because operationally, if you get into brass tacks, Big Boy is not an efficient train. it burns 250 gallons of water in 15 gallons of fuel per mile. Usually you do miles per gallon. The ratio the other way. Gallons per mile. So it is not an efficient way to move things around the country, but it is a great marketing tool for Union Pacific because people are crying and weeping over this train. Yeah, and the subtext is also that Union Pacific is a West Coast rail company.

22:15They want to merge, they've already agreed to merge with the East Coast Base Railroad, Norfolk Southern. This is an$85 billion merger that we talked about last year, except regulators are looking into this big time because this would create the first coast-to-coast transcontinental railroad. And whenever there's rail consolidation, there is concern that's going to drive up prices for passenger, not just freight, the freight going on those rails, but also passengers because in the United States, passenger rail shares the tracks with freight. So yes, they're using this as a marketing tactic for saying Union Pacific, yes, we are the West Coast Railroad.

22:54We want to merge with the Norfolk Southern, which is the East Coast Railroad. And we wouldn't even be able to take big boy east of the Mississippi to delight all of these crowds if it wasn't for our partnership with Norfolk Southern. So they're showing the country what is possible if those two railroads do merge. And gosh dang it, I'm falling for the profit again. As soon as I looked up big boy, my Instagram feed was just filled with everyone watching it. And you know what? I'm watching every video as well. It actually is funny too. One person who saw the train called his investment advisor up and said, I want to buy Union Pacific stock.

23:27And the advisor said, not a good financial investment. And he said, it's not about the money. So people are literally fanboying over this thing to such an extent that they are also supporting it financially. All right, let's bring to the finish with some final headlines. lines, Substack really doesn't want to become linked in. That is full of AI slop. Yesterday, the newsletter platform introduced a tool that will help readers understand whether the posts they are reading were written by AI. The tool, powered by the AI detection company Pangram, will give you an estimate of how much the posts, notes, replies, and comments you're reading were written by AI or assisted with AI.

24:02Chris Best, the CEO of Substack, took pains to say Substack wasn't anti-AI. He just wants more transparency about what people are about to read. He wrote, the core problem is not people using AI or the quality of its output. The problem is when there's a mismatch between a reader's expectation and reality, especially when they unwittingly invest their attention in something with no human thought on the other end. That's clawed fishing. Yeah, it shows that people do not like reading AI content. If people did enjoy reading it and if they did enjoy being clawed fish, then Substack would not be investing in tools that detect or filter it.

24:37So we are seeing kind of what the appetite is for this content out there. It does lead to a lot of other questions, though, because can you use AI to assist in your writing? What is the line between getting assistance and actually replacing your own thinking? So this is going to be a Pandora's box. It's already been opened on a lot of social media platforms. The dead Internet theory is that it's just bots talking to bots out there. Subsec is trying to say, no, we're drawing the line in the sand right now. And I was reading some analysis saying that maybe going forward, this is going to be similar to organic food at a grocery store where there's lots of options available.