No One Wants McDonald's Anymore & US Women's Water Polo Sponsored by Flavor Flav?

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0:29Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, McDonald's gives a heat check on the American consumer. Spoiler alert, we want cheaper food. Then everything you need to know about the controversial Venezuelan election that just took place. It's Tuesday, July 30th. Let's ride.

0:52Well, the Olympics are in full swing and countries have been racking up the medals, which are made from a piece of the Eiffel Tower, by the way. So who's on top of the leaderboard? Well, it depends on where you look. Some counters have the USA at number one since we have the most overall medals with 20, followed by France with 16. But the official Olympics website puts Japan at the top since they've won the most gold so far with six. The US has just three gold medals. Hmm. Hmm. I think both those ways of counting medals are limited, though. I'm a proponent of weighted metal counts where you assign a value to gold, silver, or bronze metals and then use that to determine who's performing the best.

1:36And the New York Times actually has a sliding weight calculator where you can do that yourself. If a gold is worth 20 times the silver and a silver is worth 20 times the bronze, the U.S. is in sixth place, France is in first. But if a gold is worth two times the silver and a silver is worth one and a half times the bronze, the U.S. is in first again. So it really depends on what system you want to use. I mean, 20 times from a gold to a silver to a bronze seems way too much of a multiple. I think it's more along the lines of two, especially in some of these competitions where the difference between gold and silver can just be five one hundredths of a second.

2:12So you just want whatever method puts Team USA on top? Yes. I will go to whatever counter and believe whatever counter that the USA has on top. That is the absolute correct method. I hear an eagle calling in the distance right now. Now a word from our sponsor, Beehive. One thing that I think is very obvious just from our general vibe, Neil, is that we don't know how to code. Yeah. To me, Python is a big snake and C plus is what my high school math teacher would write at the top of my exams. But that's okay because even though we've been called to the liberal arts, Beehive makes it easy for us non-technical folks to spin up both a beautiful looking newsletter and a website.

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4:06A day after the election, both candidates, incumbent President Nicolas Maduro and opposition candidate Edmondo Gonzalez, claimed victory. Exit polls and unofficial quick counts both predicted a sizable opposition win, but eventually the state-controlled election authority declared a, quote, irreversible victory for the president. That led to congratulations from allies Russia, China, and Cuba in question from the U.S. and its allies. It's also left the Venezuelan people staring down six more years under Maduro's autocratic rule. Venezuelans have experienced a decades-long sociopolitical crisis under Maduro, where hyperinflation, falling oil production, and violence has led around 7 million people, a quarter of the population, to emigrate from the country.

4:53Neil, Venezuela commands outsized global influence due to its once plentiful oil production, but this election has poured cold water on change potentially coming to the country. Totally. I mean, this election has global consequences because Venezuela is a major oil producer. It used to be one of the world's largest. It is sitting on the world's largest oil reserves. But there have been heavy sanctions in the past against Venezuela for Maduro's authoritarian turn. The U.S. placed heavy sanctions in 2019, saying it wouldn't import oil from Venezuela. It had been its largest customer for decades.

5:28And then the U.S. said, hey, Maduro, if you want to hold free and fair elections, we're going to ease sanctions. So they did that. And that got the economy going a little more again. And then Maduro started jailing his political opponents, cracked down on the press, did all of these other authoritarian things ahead of this election, which led to the reimposition of sanctions. So now everyone's looking at what's going to happen going forward, whether the U.S. and the international community will place even more economic sanctions on Venezuela. Should Maduro reject the opposition's claims that they have evidence that their candidate won the election?

6:04Right. This has put the current U.S. administration in a bit of a dilemma because they had a twofold objective with this free, supposedly free election. They wanted to stem the flow of Venezuelan refugees that have been coming towards the U.S., but then they also want to introduce Venezuela's oil supply back into the global market, especially after what's happening with Russia and Ukraine. So they had kind of put all their eggs in this basket of inducing Maduro to hold this free and fair election in return for sanctions relief. But now that approach has kind of been ruined a little bit because you still have Maduro in power.

6:38And technically he can say that, look, I did what you said you wanted me to do. Now lift those sanctions. But it seems unlikely that the U.S. will actually do so given all the controversy surrounding this election. And Venezuela in general just shows the pitfalls of being what is known as a petro state, which is a country that relies on oil revenue for its entire economy. And meanwhile, at that angle, you also have weak democratic institutions that you can't leverage to put that money into more productive uses and build your economy more robustly and not rely just on oil. So in 2014, I mean, the price of oil was$100 a barrel and Venezuela was cooking.

7:19And then it plunged to just under$30 a barrel in early 2016. And that, combined with government mismanagement and the turn toward authoritarianism, just sent this economy into a spiral. It was the world's worst peacetime economic crisis. GDP plunged by 70%. Inflation jumped up to 300 ,000%. That has since moderated to about 300%. But, you know, we're all worried when the U.S. has inflation of 9%. So you can see why so many Venezuelans are in poverty right now and are just leaving the country in droves. And then one final thing that political scientists are warning about is that if Maduro manages to weather this political storm and make it into another term, they said it offers sort of a green light to other maybe autocrats around the region.

8:08If you look at Nicaragua, if you look at El Salvador, they will be emboldened after seeing that Maduro can withstand these international sanctions, withstand turmoil in his own country to continue his rule of Venezuela. So there's just lots of different downstream effects from this. It does look like some protests have broken out in the last 24 hours or so. The opposition thinks that they do have more evidence that shows that they did, in fact, win this election. So it's definitely a developing story and one that we'll keep an eye on. McDonald's sales are doing their best McDonald's ice cream machine impression and sputtering.

8:42For the first time since 2020, U.S. same-store sales fell as McDank's grappled with the U.S. consumer reigning in their spending. Things aren't looking much prettier abroad either as conflict in the Middle East and a weak performance in France led to sales decline globally as well. For most of the year, McDonald's was able to keep sales afloat amidst declining foot traffic by supersizing their prices. But eventually their customers, particularly low-wage earners, got fed up with the value that they were getting from the Golden Arches. McDonald's listened, though, and has emphasized its new meal bundles where you can grab a sandwich, small fries, a soft drink, and a four-piece chicken McNugget, all for$5.

9:23The bundle was initially slated for a four-week test earlier this summer, but 93 % of locations voted to keep the deal available, so it's here to stay for longer. Neil, the message from consumers is clear. McDonald's got too expensive, make it cheaper, and we'll eat it more. Yeah, but this value meal, this$5 value meal is pretty much like cleaning up before you host a party by throwing all the crap in your bedroom and then shutting the door so no one can see it. It is a band-aid. It is not a long-term solution. And even the CEO recognizes this. He said that the purchasing power of lower-income consumers was bad in the first half of the year, and those pressures have only deepened and broadened.

10:04And he recognizes that this limited term$5 value meal is just kind of a artificial way to get people back in the door. But what they really have to do, and he recognizes this, is bring back that value consistently across all of the menu items. And they're taking a few steps to do that. He says it's going to be a years-long thing to get people thinking of value and McDonald's and cheap and McDonald's in the same way that they had maybe in the past few years, but not recently as these prices have gone up due to inflation. So what is the long-term fix if you don't want to just throw your stuff behind your bathroom door before the party?

10:37It's chicken, honestly, because we've talked about this over the last year. McDonald's has this new emphasis on chicken. Chicken is now on par with beef sales at its restaurants. They're also testing out a new burger called the Big Arch, which features two patties, cheese, crispy topping, tangy sauce. So they're trying to innovate a little bit around their existing product line. One thing I do think that we have to mention, though, is that whenever you're comparing a quarter to last year's quarter, you have to think back to what was happening last year. And what was happening last year was the grimace shake trend was popping off, which I can't believe it's been a year since that, when all those TikTok videos went viral of people drinking the purple sugary drink and doing a TikTok trend around it.

11:20So that boosted sales around that time. So McDonald's got a 10.3 % sales boost, mostly attributed to that viral trend. So you do have to cut it a little bit of slack. And I think that you see investors were cutting it some slack because the stock actually rose, was up 3 % at one point on Monday. It has fallen 12 % overall this year, missing out on a much juicier market rally. But I think that we have to cut it some slack because it was up against growth. You always cut McDonald's some slack. But the reason McDonald's earnings is so important and why we're talking about it is because it is such a massive company and it provides a bellwether, a symbol of how the American consumer is doing.

11:58And in general, it seems like people are pulling back. Finally, they're balking at high prices. They're telling companies you can't keep raising prices and we'll keep buying. I would say during 2022 and 2023, Americans still shelled out, even though companies raised prices and companies bragged about that. Pepsi was like, we're raising prices on everything and people are still paying. This is amazing. And McDonald's did the same thing. But if you go down the line, earnings season just started. Over the past week, including McDonald's, you've seen CEO after CEO come out and say the American consumer is slowing down a bit.

12:31UPS said people were not shipping as many packages. Its stock had its worst day ever. The world chief executive of Whirlpool said that consumers were weary and demand was softening. So you're starting to see pullback from consumers, and that is definitely something that Fed Chair Jerome Powell is paying attention to as the Fed kicks off its meeting and is wondering whether they'll cut interest rates now or in September. Then again, we just talked about the GDP numbers. American consumers fueled GDP growth in the past quarter. Some companies like Coca-Cola are saying they're not seeing so much weakened demand.

13:05So it is kind of an interesting thing where many companies are saying they're seeing a weakened consumer. Some are saying everyone's just doing just fine. And so in the GDP numbers, bear that out. You're too deep in the economic data. Just bring back the grimace shake. That's all you need. If you've been on Twitter or X recently, you might've seen a campaign video of Vice President Kamala Harris saying things like she is a diversity hire. She doesn't know the first thing about running the country and that President Biden is senile. This video is a deep fake since much of it was created by AI. Harris didn't say any of those things.

13:37Instead, it was an AI program designed to replicate her voice, but it gained a ton of traction after X's owner, Elon Musk, retweeted it Friday night to his 192 million followers, and it's been reposted 242 ,000 times since. Election watchers say this was the exact kind of D-Pig video they've warned could destabilize democracies since generative AI burst onto the scene a few years ago. For Elon Musk, it also raises the question, does this video violate X's policies about AI-altered media? I'll let you decide. The platform's rule states that synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm is not allowed or must be labeled.

14:20Satire is allowed as long as it doesn't, quote, cause significant confusion about the authenticity of the media. Toby, defakes are becoming a prominent feature of elections. They're being promoted by the world's richest person, and there are few guardrails to regulate them. Yeah, if you go down X's policies, it does seem like they apply to everyone except for Elon Musk himself. The original poster of the video did mark it as parody, but he only got 22 ,000 views initially. Elon comes along with his megaphone, posts it without marking it as parody, and now it's been viewed over 128 million times.

14:55It is pretty much everyone's worst nightmare when Elon bought the platform of saying, what if he does try to interfere with elections? What if he does use this giant megaphone he has bought for his own purposes? And this combines so many different – so many of those fears into one particular news item because it also involves AI deepfakes as well. So you can tell why a lot of people are up in arms about this, why a lot of people are talking about it because it does seem like it's the confluence of everyone's worst fears in this election cycle. I mean, when watching the video, you know, the first couple seconds, you're like, what's going on here?

15:27And then you realize that it is an AI deepfake video. Also, at the same time, there are real quotes from her actually saying things. Chose how good this technology is, first of all, because it does sound a lot like her. But you can understand why there may be confusion. And I was just like, oh, this is a deepfake video, but I watched it and was like, I could see how people could be confused, especially without a label. which is why in the absence of federal regulation of deep fakes, you have all these platforms, social media platforms, taking it upon themselves to regulate these types of videos.

16:00Meta, Facebook, Instagram say that manipulated medias must be labeled as such and you have to provide context to your post. And then Google, which owns YouTube, has a policy that requires users posting these kinds of videos to disclose and also provide a label. I mean, and also X has this. It depends on enforcement. So without regulation at the federal level or the government doing anything, it's up to these platforms to police. I think an issue, too, with this video is that if you listen to it, then you can come along to that conclusion. But most people don't view videos with sound on, and it just has the captions there.

16:35So you wouldn't know that it was deep faked at that point. So that's just another layer to this. I also think that we have to remember that this is not the first time that AI altered media has played a role in this election cycle. Remember, we spoke about when someone used AI to mimic President Joe Biden's voice, urging New Hampshire voters to not come out and vote in the primary. So this is just a rabbit hole that we are going to continue to go down. And actually, California Governor Gavin Newsom called Elon Musk posts out and said that he is going to sign a bill in a matter of weeks to make sure that posts like this in it that appear to be an ad should be illegal.

17:11So we're definitely going to see some more mobilizing around some of these efforts to codify the law and figure out what to do with these, especially when the richest man in the world who owns one of the biggest social media sites in the world is posting videos like this. Up next, I think we may have just found your new favorite Olympian. Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from Evglyss. After an initial dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people taking EBCLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintained skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.

17:50EBCLIS, LibriKizumab, LBKZ, a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EPCLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to EPCLIS. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems.

18:17You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EPCLIS. Before starting EPCLIS, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Searching for real relief? Ask your doctor about EPCLIS and visit ePCLIS.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. Tuesday on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozema St. John hosts 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.

18:53I'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. We need to talk about screening for colon cancer. I know, I know, your mind immediately went to a colonoscopy, but News Out Yesterday brings hope there might be a new method that's a lot less, well, gross. In a landmark decision, the FDA approved a blood test by Garden Health that can screen for colon cancer. Called Shield, it's the first blood test approved by regulators that offers a primary screening option for colorectal cancer, the second highest cause of cancer deaths in the U.S.

19:33The bad news about this blood test, it is not a replacement for a colonoscopy. Those are still going to be around. The good news, it could be an accessible first step that spurs more screenings for a type of cancer that is largely preventable if you can find it early enough. But many people don't get screened after they turn 45, which is the recommended age to start colorectal screening. In fact, fewer than 60 % of people who are eligible have had their recommended screening, and a big reason why is that the screening options available feel inconvenient, awkward, and invasive. Public health leaders are hopeful this blood test could boost screening rates at a time when colorectal cancer is rising at an alarming rate among younger people.

20:11Right. It has been increasing by about 2 % per year since the mid-90s. It has moved colorectal cancer up to being the top cause of cancer deaths in men under the age of 50, second leading cause, cancer deaths in women under the age of 50. And I think part of the reason why this is just such an issue for young people is that you don't test for it. Like you don't think about – it doesn't even cross your mind to get a colonoscopy before 50 because it's not when it's recommended to do so. So if you can introduce a blood test that is much less invasive, much less gross as you put it, it might induce these younger people who have been seeing higher rates of this cancer to go in and just get checked.

20:48Because if it can happen, if it's covered by their insurance, if it's covered by Medicare, it might make it just a lot more appealing to people and help get in front of this, the colorectal cancer wave that's been affecting a lot of young people. Yeah. To be clear, the federal health authorities recommend that you should get screened after the age of 45. And that used to be 55. And that is an attribution to this rise that we're seeing since the mid-1990s. And the people getting colon cancer younger than 55 has risen 1 % to 2 % every single year. They're still unsure why this is happening. Genetic mutations, exposure to toxic chemicals, changes in diet, and just the general way we live our lives.

21:33So they're still trying to figure it out. It is getting younger, while people who are getting this cancer over the age of 65 has declined. So we're seeing some very interesting trends here. But this blood test is 83 % effective. So people who went to get a colonoscopy and they were found to have colon cancer, 83 % of those people tested positive with this blood test. And I think since it's not a replacement, the idea is you get the blood test. It's very easy. And then if you get a yes or a positive result, then you get a colonoscopy and you may be more motivated to do so because of that positive test.

22:05But, yeah, we just the options available now are just terrible. I mean, colonoscopy, you have to, you know, flush out your system the day before. Get anesthesia for the day. So if you're working or have a family, it's just like something you don't want to do. And then another method is every three years you have to send a stool sample in. And it's just there's no great options right now. Maybe they'll figure those out. Hopefully this blood test can spur more screenings because this is preventable. 70 % of them can be prevented if you find it early enough. So this is a sign of hope for people to maybe fix this rising issue.

22:40There are so many Olympic storylines to follow every year, from dream teams to pommel horse guys, but one athlete has made a name for herself both on the rough-and-tumble rugby field and on the even rougher streets of social media stardom, Ilona Marr. And it's USA Rugby's newest star that I want to talk about on today's edition of Toby's Trends, where I take a deep dive into the internet and emerge with a trend you should keep your eye on. Marr is an early breakout personality from this year's Olympics. She has more than 1.4 million Instagram followers and 1.6 million on TikTok. Figures that lap bigger names like Katie Ledecky or Noah Lyles.

23:17And she's built that following through a blend of content that started as a behind-the-scenes look at life at the Olympic Village back in Tokyo, but has grown by also sharing important messages about body positivity and just being plain funny. She has filmed Love Island parodies about hot new bombshells entering the villa, and then turned around and explained how BMI doesn't define her or her abilities. It also helps that she absolutely runs through people's faces on the rugby field and has the USA position to medal for the first time ever in rugby. Neil, it's been hard not to see either an on-field highlight or an off-the-field video from Ilona Mar so far this Olympics.

23:57She is a star. She is everywhere, and she understands how to build a brand. I mean, she may not be the most superstar athlete in the world. Women's rugby is certainly not the most popular sport at the Olympics or the popular sport in America. But she knows how to leverage social media to the best of anyone I've seen at the Olympics. She has all these sponsorship deals with Secret L 'Oreal and New Era. She launched a skincare line with a college swimmer. So she just understands innately how social media works. and she's built a massive following that whatever happens with her athletic career, she's going to be doing great after because she has just introduced herself to the world and the world loves her.