The Cybertruck Is Finally Here & The Marketing Genius of Spotify Wrapped

0:26Race the rudders! Good morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. On today's pod, Wall Street bigwigs are lining up behind a presidential candidate not named Biden or Trump. Then the Tesla Cybertruck finally begins deliveries today. But do people even want it anymore? It's Thursday, November 30th. Let's ride.

0:53For the second straight day, a major American figure has died at an extremely old age. Highly controversial former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who defined U.S. foreign policy in the 70s and the Cold War, critics say for the worse, passed away at 100 years old one day after Charlie Munger died at 99. So this is admittedly a little morbid, but there is a website I check periodically called The Death List, which is an annual list of 50 celebrities that are getting up there in age. From the top 10 in this year's list, we have lost four people. Kissinger, who was number two, Bob Barker, Tony Bennett, and Harry Belafonte.

1:31Still kicking at number one, Dick Van Dyke. But from my research, it seems that the once death-defying Kissinger holds the record for most appearances on this list. He has been on it for 11 years. There's a list for everything these days. There's a website for everything. 11 years on the death list. That is a long, long time. So wait, Dick Van Dyke is next. Is number one. Interesting. He's not next up. Yeah, right. Necessarily. He is number one. He's number one. Okay, before we jump into the news, we have one last shout out to the sponsor of today's episode, Brex. I say one last because today is the last day of the month, so we'll have a new sponsor starting next month.

2:06I am going to miss Brex. It's been fun teaching people about the best spend management platform out there. It made me want to start a business just so I could issue corporate cards or manage bill pay with Brex. Neil, it's never too late. You should totally start that plane-watching bar and grill outside of LAX. You've always wanted to. I think it's called In-N-Out. You know what? With Brex on my side, I might just do that. Start a competitor. So we'll miss you, Brex, but it's been a fun ride. One last time, head to brex.com today to find the spend management solution you've been looking for. Tonight on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozema St.

2:41John host a 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 tonight on NBC. All right, Neil, the off-delayed, irregularly shaped, and much maligned Tesla Cybertruck is finally starting deliveries today. And despite the fact that no one really asked for a stainless steel reimagining of the pickup truck, 10 lucky people are reportedly set to receive theirs today.

3:23Remember, this thing has been in the works since 2019, but today is a very different world from 2019. Tesla's profit margins are smaller, interest rates are much higher, and Morning Brew has a podcast now. Back in 2019, there were no electric trucks on the market. Now there are three. Back in 2019, the EV market was growing like a weed. Now it's cooling. and all sorts of design defects, mostly stemming from the fact that stainless steel is an incredibly difficult material to build cars with, has led the Cybertruck debut to be more tiresome than triumphant. Still, Neil, Elon has pulled off his fair share of magic tricks in the past.

4:00Do you see a future where the Cybertruck becomes a viable, widely used electric vehicle? I don't know. I don't know. This is definitely a cursed product. It has been since the beginning. There was a launch event where they threw something at the window to prove that the window would hold up, and it shattered. And I think that's kind of a metaphor for the entire production process here. This is a car that is a statement car from a design perspective and a build perspective. And I thought this was a really interesting insight brought up by one reviewer. It is a car that you want to take a selfie with, but is it a car that you actually want to own, especially at premium prices?

4:34We don't know the price of the Cybertruck because they pulled the prices from the website a couple of years ago because they just couldn't give an estimate. Seems like it's going to be upwards of$50 ,000 up to up to 90 ,000. So I don't know. I mean, I wouldn't buy it. It doesn't seem like, you know, it doesn't seem like this is what the market wants right now. They want an EV that is affordable and practical, especially with cooling demand for one. So I don't know if they're wanting to be driving around with like a Blade Runner type vehicle. Yeah, the consistent messaging I'm seeing out of Elon and out of Tesla is that Tesla's future won't hinge on the Cybertruck because it is one of those vehicles that is not going to be practical for maybe a wide swath of people.

5:15So Musk keeps saying he wants to temper expectations and that the next stage of growth will be kind of propelled by a next-gen vehicle, not the Cybertruck itself. So you never want to see a car release and them say, everyone temper expectations, this is not going to make or break our company. It is more of a novelty item at this point in time. It seems like they went away from what was working with the Model 3 and the Model Y. That was all about streamlined manufacturing, make it easy, pump out a lot. And they are kind of reverting back to what happened with the Model X, which was kind of they threw all the cool technology that they could and did all this complicated stuff.

5:52And Model X sales have been basically nothing relative to Model 3 and Model Y. And so they kind of reverted back to the worst practices rather than the best practices of what was working for them. Yeah, let's get into the production issues because they are plentiful. Stainless steel is brutal to work with. It's heavier than other materials. It doesn't like laying flat. It always tries to kind of curve back up into its more natural shape. In short, it's too tough, too expensive, too heavy compared to what else is out there. Also, Musk demanded that the exterior be bulletproof, which made Tesla make the exterior thicker steel.

6:28And also, this takes very precise manufacturing. And there's a lot of straight edges in this car. So any variations in the material end up, you see them. You see them with a visible to the naked eye. So that's why you keep seeing this infamous quote, we dug our own grave with the Cybertruck that Elon keeps saying because they really did. Let's talk about the competition. You said there were three electric pickup trucks on the market. They are the Ford F-150 Lightning. There's one from Rivian, which is an EV truck startup. And there's also a GMC Hummer EV. And you can see why Tesla wants to get into this market because pickup truck sales, trucks in general, are one of the fastest growing segments of the vehicle market.

7:08In 2022, they accounted for 20.5 % of new vehicle sales, up from around 16 % in 2016. So this is a very lucrative market. You also have very high profit margins within the pickup truck space. So there's only three on the market. So Tesla's not exactly going into a super crowded field, but there will be, I think, 12 relatively soon. So a bunch of automakers from startups to legacy companies are piling into this space because everyone just wants to pick up. Yeah. Here's how I'd sum it up. It's a big day for people who care about the Cybertruck, but I'm just not sure how many of those people are left out there.

7:44That's kind of the vibe I'm getting from that. That's a good sum up. Okay. We are less than a year from the presidential election and one candidate has emerged as the preferred choice for the top cats on Wall Street. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador. At the Dealbook Summit yesterday, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who leans Democratic, said that even liberals should throw their weight behind Haley as a Republican alternative to Trump. Dimon has reportedly had multiple calls with Haley and thinks she understands the business world and can get things done. He usually doesn't voice support for specific candidates this early in the process, so his mention of her is a big deal.

8:21And Dimon isn't alone. Citadel's billionaire CEO Ken Griffin is considering throwing some of his fortune behind Haley. Former Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn held a fundraiser for her. And Haley scored a major win earlier this week when she secured the support of Americans for Prosperity Action, the political action committee led by conservative billionaire Charles Koch. They have raised more than$70 million this year. Bottom line, Wall Street is lining up behind Nikki Haley and there seems to be a wind at her back. Yeah, it comes down to choosing a candidate that for Wall Street provides a little more stability, therefore being a little better for business.

8:57So basically they're saying when you compare Haley to Trump, we want the more stable, the more rational option, if you will. And so that's why we're seeing kind of this flood of these Wall Street mega donors stepping into her camp, whereas before they had kind of no one had really chosen a side as of now. Yeah. So she has laid out her economic policy. It has a lot to do with she wants to do tax cuts and she studied accounting in South Carolina, I think at Clemson. And she's been touting that as sort of a crackdown on this runaway spending that has happened under Biden and Trump. She wants to eliminate the five hundred billion dollars in green energy subsidies.

9:35That has been one of the signature policies of Biden and Bidenomics. So she's all about reigning in spending. I don't know exactly how you balance a budget when you want to cut taxes at the same time because you need revenue from somewhere. But that remains to be seen, obviously. But she but Wall Street likes what what what she's saying. she has moderate positions relative to her Republican peers on abortion so she's just more predictable I think than Trump and you also have a bunch of other Wall Street people like Bill Ackman who also leans Democratic saying you know I don't even want Biden and I think that just reflects the broader American public view which is anybody but they used to yeah this surprised me if she can manage to win the GOP bid over Trump which is a big if recent polling shows Haley beating Joe Biden by a margin twice as large as Ron DeSantis.

10:25But let's dig into that if a little bit. While DeSantis is losing ground, Haley's pulling as second most bomber. But in most head to head matchups, she's 44 points on average behind Trump. So again, even though you see these Wall Street people throwing their hat in the ring and their money, there's still a massive chasm to kind of cross before you can start challenging Trump. This might be lighting money on fire. There's seven weeks till Iowa. Seven weeks till Iowa. Okay. I want to talk about what it was like scrolling Instagram yesterday. Everyone listening at home, let me know if this is what your IG stories looked like.

10:57Spotify rap, Spotify rap, Spotify rap, someone getting engaged. Spotify rap, Spotify rap, someone's cat, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, Spotify rap dropped yesterday and it was everywhere as always. People shared their most listened to artists, songs and podcasts, whoop whoop. But the big surprise for this year's edition of Spotify rap was it assigned you a city based on your listening habits. I got Scottsdale, Arizona of all places, but the big ones I saw on social media were Burlington, Vermont, Bozeman, Montana, and Berkeley, California. The seemingly random methodology behind assigning these pretty rogue cities just fed into the viral hype cycle as people posted and gossip about why the heck their musical taste was giving San Luis Bispo for one reason or another.

11:42But I think this is exactly why Spotify Rap continues to dominate the recap game. Technically, Apple and YouTube have rewinds of their own, but nothing goes viral quite like Spotify each year. And I think it's because they always add that bit of a wrinkle. Neil, this was also an especially fun Spotify wrap season for us because we got to be on the other side of the equation for the first time. Toby, you took the words out of my mouth. I was gonna say that each year, this hype builds every year. And you're like, how do they outdo themselves from last year when I thought everyone was talking about it?

12:12And each year it builds. And I think it's because they don't rest on their laurels and they don't get satisfied and they keep adding these new wrinkles and new features. You talk about the Soundtown thing. No one knows what that means at all. I figured out that it was like a college town situation where everyone got either Boulder or Berkeley, like Fort Collins, all the Burlington. I got Burlington. Everyone I know got Burlington. And they didn't even listen to Noah Kahn, a famous Vermonter. So I don't know where that came from. But the thing is, it doesn't matter because it got us talking. and for at least an hour or two yesterday, everyone here at the office and online was all talking about Spotify Wrapped and they continue to up their game year after year.

12:50It was so funny for me too because the way they reveal it to you, they have this song crescendoing one of your songs and then it shows where my listening habits came from and then the beat dropped and it showed Scottsdale, Arizona and I literally lost it. So you can just multiply that feeling that I had across everyone doing this and you can see why it went viral. I also just want to dig into some of our stats because again, I said it was our first time that we got to be on the other side of a Spotify rap. So just pretty crazy. We were the top 10 podcast for 138 ,000 people. The number one podcast for 21 ,000 people.

13:24And my favorite part of yesterday was just getting tagged in all the tweets and all the Instagram stories yesterday. Also seeing what other people listened to around our podcast was fun. So thank you to everyone who listened. It was pretty cool. Yeah, it's mostly just a big thank you because when we're sitting in here, It's just Neil and I. But when we see stuff like the outpouring of support from Spotify Wrapped Week, it's been very fun. So thank you to everyone who posted and listened. OK, but people want to know what your top song was. Oh, my gosh. Wait, my top song was Natu Natu from the RRR movie, which was this Bollywood movie that kind of took over Netflix.

14:01And I just really liked the vibe of it. And I listened to it 23 times, I think, over the span of two weeks. So that was my top song. I don't even remember seeing your stats I didn't share it you know I'm not like a big poster I keep it close but my top song I looked at it this morning was Alone Again Naturally it's a Gilbert O'Sullivan tune from the 70s and I saw it on TikTok because this guy played it on guitar and he was doing a series on the most interesting chord progressions of songs in the 70s and 80s and I was just mesmerized by this song because it had an amazingly complex and interesting chord progression so I was just super mesmerized by and I played it forever and I guess nothing else came close had some 1975 also on there and I had a Beach Boys phase this summer so that was my number three we all have the Beach Boys phase all right now before we dig into your musical taste too deep let's take a quick break I'm Christian McCaffrey pro running back and Abercrombie is an official fashion partner of the NFL I'm not kidding when I say NFL by Abercrombie broke the internet last year and I think this season's lineup is even cooler.

15:07And so does my wife, who keeps stealing all my hoodies. Stay fit for the season and Abercrombie's newest arrivals. Shop NFL by Abercrombie in the app, online, and in store.

15:26When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, The secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans. Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th. And never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end-to-end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at whatsapp.com. Welcome to Neil's Numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will cause your neurons to light up like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. First number is two stock prices.

16:05One is less than$15 a share, and the other is$157 a share. The first number is Progressive Insurance stock price in 2008, and the second is its stock price now. What was behind the surge? No one can say for sure, but execs say it has a lot to do with Flow, the brand's incredibly popular character who premiered in ads in 2008 and is still going strong. The New York Times profiled the actor behind Flo, Stephanie Courtney, and it is chock full of even more crazy stats I'd love to share. One, Progressive spends more on ads in the U.S. than McDonald's, Toyota, or Coca-Cola. And the total media ad spend for the insurance industry is$11 billion, more than what all the top beer brands spend combined.

16:48So why does the insurance industry spend so much on marketing? Well, nearly half of the active property and casualty insurance premiums in the U.S. and Canada were sold by just 11 companies. So you've got to find a way to stand out of the pack. And the way insurance companies have been doing this, writes the incredible Katie Weaver, is not by building trust between their customers and local agents, but by successfully ascribing positive characteristics to the fictional characters who anthropomorphize the companies and products in ads. I'm so interested in the animal versus human spokesperson debate, because on the animal side of things, they're digital representations.

17:24They never age. They never have scandals. And they never do anything outside of exactly what you need them to do. But then you have the Jake from State Farms. You have the Flo from Progressives who more than hold their own against Lemu the emo or the Gecko from Geico. So the Aflac duck. So it is interesting to see the bifurcation between people who decide to kind of trust their brand to a singular person or singular entity like Flo versus someone who just decides, let's just make a digital animal? Yeah, maybe. I don't think they plan on this. They kind of test the waters because I think the Aflac, no, the gecko was just supposed to be a one run thing and it just caught on with consumers.

18:03So they just kept pushing it out. So maybe it doesn't matter. It's just kind of what resonates. And Flo has resonated. She is, I encourage everyone to read this about Stephanie, a very interesting person. She is a comedic actress in Los Angeles who was just doing this, you know, doing commercials on the side. She's friends with Kristen Wiig in the same improv troupe. And this just caught on like wildfire. And now she's probably richer than her wildest dreams. The article said that people speculate that she's probably being paid at least a million bucks a year to start in these commercials, which feels low to me because she's one of the most recognizable figures in advertising in kind of the business landscape right now.

18:40And a cool fact is that she kind of talked to Jake from State Farm when he was starting out about what to expect. You love the mentorship. OK, my second number is the glow up of mortadella, a meat product from Bologna, Italy, that has transformed from modest deli meat to prize centerpiece on charcuterie boards. Exports of mortadella from Italy to the U.S. have jumped from 786 tons in 2019 to 1 ,200 tons last year, a 52 percent increase. So what even is mortadella? Traditionally, it is an emulsion of fresh pork combined with fat from the back and throat of the pig. Sometimes you'll see olives, pistachios, or truffles sprinkled in for some extra pizzazz.

19:18And unlike salami, prosciutto, or other Italian meats, it is cooked instead of cured, so it's much less salty than those are. In the Renaissance, mortadella reached its peak popularity and was a favorite of families like the Borgias and the Medici's. But as industrialization swept through the food industry, mortadella's status plunged as it was squeezed into a can and shipped around the world like spam. Now, though, chefs are finding creative ways to leverage mortadella, and probably with a little help from TikTok, Americans have developed a taste for it. I always associate mortadella with bologna or spam, which honestly isn't bad in my opinion.

19:51Like, I love bologna, but I think that's where it kind of, yeah, lost some of its status. But I'm all the way back in on the fancy ham game. I'm buying stock in ham next year. I think Iberico ham is going to pop off. Costco sells this$100 plus Serrano ham from Spain that goes viral every couple of years. I do think ham is built for the TikTok culture because charcuterie boards are built for TikTok culture. So sign me up for whatever Mordedella is not. What is your favorite cured meat? I love prosciutto, first of all. That's just the goat to me. But I was over in Spain last year and just ate jamoni queso every single day.

20:27And you just can't beat it. Okay, for my final number, a music record has fallen. Andre 3000's song, I Swear I Really Wanted to Make a Rap Album, but this was literally the way the wind blew me this time. Yep, that's the name of the track. Has appropriately broken the record for the longest running song ever to hit the Billboard Hot 100. It rings in at 12 minutes and 20 seconds, topping Tool's Fear Inoculum for the title. Any idea what number three is? Runaway? Nope. Taylor Swift's All Too Well, Taylor's version. I should have known that. Which is 10 minutes and 13 seconds. A 12-minute song that achieves this level of popularity is unusual.

21:01The average runtime for the top 10 songs on the Hot 100 chart is 3 minutes and 15 seconds. But the renaissance of the really long song might be upon us because the three longest Hot 100 hits by runtime were all released since 2019. I listened to it this morning. I had to do my research, and I genuinely enjoyed it. It's calming, yet beneath this kind of soft flute veneer, it's clearly like searching for something. It's not just elevator music. There's a lot more going on to that. and it almost ventures into sonic dissonance at some time. There's a lot of background sounds that don't seem to add up, but it always comes to kind of a satisfying conclusion.

21:35And that is only something that you can explore over a long song. So I really did enjoy what Andre 3000 was trying to do. I don't know if that's what he was trying to do, but that's what I took away from it. You know who brought back the long song? Who? Justin Timberlake in 2013 with a 2020 experience. Go look at that album, which is an excellent album. Most of the songs are over seven minutes long. And Mirrors, which a lot of people know, is eight minutes and four seconds. And Sud and Tai is over seven minutes, too, I believe. No, it's five minutes and 26 seconds. But all of those songs on 2020 Experience, which are epic in scale, are really long.

22:09And I think he kind of brought back the concept of the long song along with maybe like Sufjan Stevens or some others and making long songs palatable to people again. That's crazy because he also brought Sexy back. File this next story under News You Can Use. Google is set to start purging old Gmail, YouTube, and photo data belonging to inactive Google accounts beginning tomorrow, December 1st. If your account has been inactive for at least two years, your data could be on the chopping block, but here's how to save it if you really want your middle school email address to live on. Just log onto it or watch a YouTube video, use Google search, do pretty much anything in Google's suite of services while logged in, and you're good to go for at least another two years.

22:48The big reason behind this big purge is security. And active accounts are way more likely to lack two-factor authentication and thus become compromised. So Google is trying to tidy up its user base to leave it less open to malicious attacks. But there's been a lot of pushback. Emmett Shear, of all people, who was the ill-fated CO of OpenAI for all of 72 hours, said that deleting old YouTube or blogger content was like, quote, burning the commons. I see it both ways, Neil. Got to clear out the digital trash to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. But some accounts are tied to old photos, old blog content.

23:23This stuff is history. Yeah, it made me think about what my sort of digital organization is like. And it is chaos. You know, I'm sure I have so many email addresses from just signing up for one newsletter, getting that one particular promotion. So I need to do that. It's also a good reminder to probably have a local backup of a lot of the stuff that's on the cloud because you never know what a particular platform like Google could do with it. So if you have a bunch of photos on Google, which I think I do, tied to an account that I definitely use now, but who knows what will happen in the future.

23:54Probably a good idea. There's something called Google Takeout, which allows you to export your photos and other data or download them to a local place. So maybe that's a good idea. It's kind of like a wake-up call where maybe if you don't have a lapsed Google account, you can still kind of take stock and do some winter cleaning of your digital life. But also, inactive accounts are only going to be a more and more pressing issue on social media. A 2019 study by the University of Oxford found that dead accounts could outnumber the living on Facebook by 2070. Again, 2070 is a little ways down the line.

24:26But you start to think when all these inactive profiles start building up, the opportunities for impersonation or sending out mass spam emails, you start to figure out why these inactive accounts are such an issue. So I totally see why Google is doing this so they don't let bad actors take advantage of it. All right, so just make sure you do this if you have a lapsed Google account by Friday and you wanna keep it. Okay, for our final story, I'd like to introduce a new segment called TIL, or Today I Learned. It's Reddit speak for when you learn something truly surprising that you need to share with someone.