The World Cup Has a Ticket Problem & The First Ever Reverse-Aging Drug

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0:32Toby Mervine:Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, why are so many tickets still available to the World Cup?

0:39Neal Freyman:Then the FDA just approved the first new sunscreen ingredient in decades. It's Wednesday, June 10th. Let's ride.

0:55Toby Mervine:Good morning and happy Wednesday. Look, a lot about the World Cup has been controversial and frustrating, as we'll get into later in the show. But the vibes are on the up as Americans have begun to see our country through the eyes of first-time visitors. On social media, Europeans visiting the United States for the Games have been posting their experiences around the American South, expressing wonder at the nature, fast food, and friendliness of the people in small-town USA. One German guy named Freddy in particular has gone viral. He's documented his journey around Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, rafting down the Chattahoochee River, catching the NBA Finals at Chili's, and eating Waffle House at 1 a.m., which he called a 10 out of 10 experience.

1:35Toby Mervine:Toby, sometimes you just need someone else to hold up a mirror to not take things for granted.

1:38Neal Freyman:I know, but this is the internet, and of course everyone is extremely cynical, So questions have been swirling on if this is just an American dude LARPing as a wide-eyed German tourist. But he appears to be legit. He has 22 ,000 posts on X. And if you scroll back through his history, he does appear to be posting from Germany. Plus, I want to believe that this level of genuine excitement he's experiencing while eating Chili's and Waffle House and Bucky's for the first time is real. It's pretty great, too, that when Americans go abroad, they look at the cafes and, you know, the pizza. But when Europeans come here, they get SEC football stadiums and shopping at Walmart.

2:16Neal Freyman:And it makes both sides of the Atlantic just as happy to see each other's culture.

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2:55Toby Mervine:Just head to sage.com slash morningbrew to learn more. That's sage.com slash morningbrew. Speaking of the more bad vibes around the World's Cup, just one day out from the start of the tournament, FIFA paces a potentially very embarrassing situation, empty seats at games. According to a Financial Times analysis, nearly 180 ,000 tickets are still available on official resale platforms, a glut that highlights FIFA's unusual and controversial ticketing process for this year's event, the biggest it's ever put on. It's stinging news for your friend who thought they were being smart by snagging a bunch of tickets early on at face value with the expectation of reselling them later for a tidy profit.

3:33Toby Mervine:The FT found that since ticket prices on the official porter have slid 20 % over the past month when taking the 26 % fee on transactions into account, most resales could now come at a loss. Tickets are still up for grabs for seemingly the most in-demand games. For the U.S.'s opener against Paraguay and Los Angeles Friday night, 4 ,400 tickets were still available for resale at a median price of over$800. Of course, these tickets could still be gobbled up prior to the game's beginning, but the prospect of the TV camera panning to empty rows at World Cup games would indicate that FIFA's big gamble on ticketing was a huge flop.

4:07Toby Mervine:For this World Cup, the soccer nonprofit changed everything about the process, maintaining direct control of ticketing and charging higher prices by far than any other World Cup in history. As the clock ticks down to the opening kickoff, it looks like that could have backfired.

4:20Neal Freyman:I'm so nervous. I do not want there to be empty seats at the World Cup because one thing that you do when you start to treat ticketing as a revenue maximization opportunity is that you start to risk the atmosphere in the stadiums themselves. We saw this at the Club World Cup in this past summer where there were tons of empty seats as demand didn't quite meet where the ticket prices were priced at. And if you price these traditional supporters out, then you start to get an environment that is more akin to the Super Bowl. And famously, the Super Bowl, despite being one of the biggest sporting events in the world, has a horrible vibe inside because Joe Burrow has said the Super Bowl atmosphere has a feeling of a corporate dinner party because it's mostly just very, very rich people and corporations that can actually afford these seats.

5:06Neal Freyman:The fact that the World Cup is moving in that direction makes people nervous for the actual ambiance and vibe inside the stadium themselves.

5:13Toby Mervine:So we've heard a lot, you've heard a lot from me, that this is the most expensive World Cup by far to attend. Let's put some numbers on that. So World Cup tickets across America, Canada, in Mexico this year cost more than twice as much as they did in Qatar in 2022 and about four times as much as they did when the U.S. last hosted the tournament in 1994 adjusted for inflation. And this has been a direct strategy by FIFA. The head of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, has argued that the North American market is, quote, a very special market where no one complains about ticker prices when you go to a concert or an NFL game.

5:50Toby Mervine:He calls this a once in a lifetime experience for North American fans to experience the World Cup and go to games. So that's why they've changed up their whole process. They've introduced things like dynamic pricing, which they haven't before. And we are used to dynamic pricing here with concert tickets. And no one likes it. It's when demand goes up, ticket prices go up. When demand goes down, ticket prices go down. So that is FIFA. This is a very intentional strategy by FIFA to jack up prices for the North American market. And you can see that, yes, United States is, we are more willing, not willing, but we have experience paying more for the biggest games.

6:26Toby Mervine:The Super Bowl, the get-in price this year was$900. The equivalent maybe in Europe was the Champions League, which is the biggest soccer game on that continent. The get-in price there was$200. So there is a big gap. But FIFA's really sticking it to us with these revenue maximization tactics.

6:41Neal Freyman:It did feel like they just overplayed their hand, too, because I remember FIFA reporting that 500 million ticket requests came in when the ticketing platform still first went online. But now we're getting reports that there's still 180 ,000 remaining. So one of them was lying and it looks like they were lying about the initial demand. It just stinks. I hope it's fall. I hope the vibe is good. I hope the people who deserve to go watch their teams play, like the German tourists meandering around the U.S. South right now, gets in and it's not just a very rich and corporate feeling event. We got one day, one more day.

7:19Neal Freyman:So I guess the flip side is if you're looking for a last minute ticket, there are still tickets available and maybe you could get them for a lower price than your forward thinking friends. Moving on, there's a saying that growing old is mandatory, but growing up is optional. But what if they were both optional? That's the vision of Life Biosciences, a company that is trying to reverse aging in humans. The Boston-based longevity startup took an important step towards that goal, announcing yesterday that it had just started the first FDA-approved human clinical trial to turn old cells into less old cells.

7:54Neal Freyman:Another way to think of it, they just injected a patient with anti-aging juice. The goal is to make old cells behave like a younger version of themselves, with this specific trial targeting the eye of a patient suffering from glaucoma. The fancy name for this sort of longevity treatment is cellular reprogramming, which targets the four proteins that can reset an adult cell back into an embryonic-like state. There are risks associated with this approach, namely that the cells become cancerous, but as of right now, it's the most promising anti-aging technology in development. Neil, this life biosciences trial is extremely small, up to just about 18 participants.

8:29Neal Freyman:And for now, it's contained to just one eyeball. But over the next six months, as they monitor the patient for safety issues, if all goes well, it could open the door to applications that make the liver, muscles, brain, and overall body healthier and younger. It's like a chug jug from Fortnite.

8:44Toby Mervine:Which I have never played yet, but that sounds very interesting. A bunch of huge names are attached to longevity science and anti-aging. Elon Musk has called aging a very solvable problem and said that age reversal is coming. Sam Altman, who's the CEO of OpenAI, has backed a number of startups or one startup in the space. Jeff Bezos has backed another. Brian Armstrong, who's the Coinbase CEO, actually co-founded another longevity startup called New Limit. So there's a lot of attention and money being thrown at longevity by these billionaires because it is expensive. but they're saying that this is potentially a new frontier of science with a lot of serious names attached as well.

9:22Neal Freyman:Let's dig into the science a little bit. So the breakthrough is actually not making cells younger because scientists have known how to reset cells for decades now, but you don't actually want to do that because when you reset it to an embryonic-like state, that erases their identity, erases their role in the body. And also if you do that, it increases the risk of cancer because they forget what they are. So Life Biosciences uses three of what are called four Yamanaka factors. It is a partial reprogramming. They intentionally avoid the one that is most associated with cancer. They say there's an off switch in this treatment as well.

10:01Neal Freyman:So it's a fascinating thing that I had no idea that we could turn all our cells into baby cells and that's actually not what you wanna do at all. You just wanna de-age them a little bit.

10:10Toby Mervine:Right, maybe get them to the teen stage without the rebellion. But yeah, there's a couple other names to know. Yamanaka factors you mentioned. This was named after this guy in Japan, a scientist and a surgeon, Shinya Yamanaka, who in 2007 was the first person to first successfully reprogram adult human cells. And he won that Nobel Prize for it. Then the other person to know is David Sinclair. He is the co-founder of Life Biosciences, the company that's doing this particular study. He is probably the most controversial but most accomplished scientist in this particular field. He has talked about – he runs a lab in Harvard, which has spawned a lot of these companies.

10:50Toby Mervine:He has talked about bodies being like computers that can be programmed and reprogrammed and rebooted. So he's been a huge booster of this. At the same time of him being a huge booster, he's also made some pretty, maybe not outlandish claims, but very ambitious claims about longevity science where others in his field have sort of pushed back and said, look, he's had stuff like, yeah, the person who's going to live to 150 years old has already been born. And some of the people who have worked with him in the past have called him a snake oil salesman and talked up his accomplishments a little too much.

11:22Toby Mervine:But at the same time, they concede that whatever LifeBioSciences is doing with this first human trial and the fact that there's so many companies in this space and they're really making advancements could not have happened without him.

11:33Neal Freyman:I hope they figure it out because after my bachelor party, my back is sore, my triceps are hurting. So any little anti-aging injection, I need it already at 29.

11:43Toby Mervine:You know how good it feels to finish up a project that's taken you months? For the Sagrada Familia, it's been 144 years. Today, Pope Leo will be in Barcelona to bless the completion of the world's tallest church, whose torture construction began in 1882. While a moment for celebration, it's also sure to inflame debates about over-tourism in a city that's fed up with out-of-towners. The Sagrada Familia is the masterwork of legendary Spanish architect Antony Gaudi, whose jaw-dropping Dr. Seussian buildings you've no doubt seen if you've been to Barcelona. The church's final tower is going to be inaugurated today on the 100th anniversary of his death, June 10th, 1926, when it was just one quarter completed.

12:22Toby Mervine:When asked when the Sagrada Familia would be fully built, Gaudi replied with his most famous quote, my client is not in a hurry, that client being God. Which is a good thing because this church has been a bear to build primarily due to two factors, money and war. During the Spanish Civil War in the 30s, a decade after his death, Gaudi's blueprints for the church were mostly destroyed, leaving his associates and disciples scrambling to decipher his plans. A lack of money has also been a hurdle, with visitor ticket sales ultimately replacing donations as the main source of funding for construction.

12:53Toby Mervine:And it's those tourists that send Catalans spiraling with rage. In the past few years, as visitors' numbers to Barcelona have surged, locals have rebelled against foreign tourists staging protests and sometimes pelting them with water guns. Pope Leo will probably get a warmer reception though.

13:08Neal Freyman:Before we get into the tourists kind of pushing back on this, let's just marvel at what Gaudi was able to create. So you mentioned that, you know, back in the 30s, a lot of his designs were destroyed. So modern architects who have been completing his project have been kind of forced to rely on some sometimes spotty designs. but they have basically marveled at how thoughtful and how geometrically accurate his designs actually were. And now that they can use modern tools, they were able to verify that he had a plan for this, even though it looks like basically like a drip sandcastle at the beach.

13:44Neal Freyman:It's very nature inspired. That is kind of the core of his work. The impossible geometry seemingly works. So that's just one very cool thing as well. Now the symbol of it being an over tourism, it stinks because there is, potentially more to come because you said that it was finished but the glory facade which is this big entryway still isn't finished yet and that could potentially if it is completed lead to 3 000 people being affected or displaced so it's not the end we're gonna hear of you know locals pushing back against the scrata familia even though it is just this beautiful incredibly

14:20Toby Mervine:imposing building on the barcelona skyline yeah it's there's barcelona skyline there's not many buildings that are high tall at all it's like very one two three stories and then you see the Sagrada Familia which stands 560 feet above it's absolutely amazing and people know it and in Spain is just facing a crush of visitors in April the country received 9.1 million international visitors a new record high for the month which was five percent more than April 2025 and you're starting to see just so many debates play out in Spain and across Europe about people coming and Spain it seems like they hate tourists more than anyone else.

14:56Toby Mervine:There was a YouGov poll Europe-wide published in September 2024. 28 % of Spaniards had a negative view of foreign tourism, which was by far the highest percentage of any country. Their main gripe is housing. Barcelona houses have, or housing prices have been spiking in recent years. And they say that the foreign, the crush of forest visitors have, and proliferation of Airbnbs has contributed to a supply crunch that's driven them from their neighborhoods and turned the city into a kind of Disneyland and stripped it of all of its

15:26Neal Freyman:you know really local flair let's do a tourism swap let's send one spanish tourist to the u.s south and have them eat at bucky's and then send one u.s tourist over and have them check out the scrawda familia i think that will make us all kumbaya and be friends with each other all right we're gonna take a quick break and come back and talk about sunscreen right after this

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