Thousands Stranded in the Desert at 'Burning Man' & Jimmy Buffett's 'Margaritaville' Empire

0:00What should you invest in? And how often? Making investing decisions is easier with Fidelity. With their step-by-step experience, you can find investments based on your goals and comfort level. And if you'd like, you can decide how much and how often to invest with recurring investments that happen automatically. Ready to make your next investing decision? Head to fidelity.com slash trading. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE SIPC. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. On today's pod, we will talk invasive species because a new study shows that those lanternflies you keep seeing everywhere are part of a much bigger problem.

0:41And it's well past five o 'clock in Tokyo, so Toby and I are going to pour a cold land shark and discuss the late Jimmy Buffett's business empire. Then we'll break down the mud and madness of the Burning Man Festival this year before turning to the diamond market where rough cut gems are facing an existential threat from a less pricey competitor. It's Tuesday, September 5th. Let's ride.

1:08Okay, Neil, it's Tuesday. We're coming off a long weekend. Give me one rose and one thorn from it. Okay, so first of all, we haven't discussed this before, so these are completely organic reactions. I don't have any thorns. It was utterly delightful. I'll have two roses real quick. I saw John Legend at Tanglewood. Whoa. Yeah, see? You did not know that. I didn't know that. And Tanglewood's this beautiful music venue in the Berkshires. And he's got a great voice. I wish he had a little bigger band behind him. But he shared his story. He's got a super fascinating story. And the guy's got incredible pipes.

1:43So just a very delightful evening. Lots of cheese. Lots of wine. Another rose. I guess I would say lots of pool time. Oh, like literally lounging? Yeah. But, oh, it's not lounging. Like when I'm at a pool, I realize that five minutes in, like I need to do something competitive. So it's either like, let's see how far I can swim back and forth underwater, or we've got this beach volleyball. Let's see how many times we can keep it up in the air. Like, can we hit 200? I was going to say, you're looking a little sunkissed too. So I'm glad you had some nice lounging. All right, hit me. My rose was, I slept in legitimately till 1230 PM yesterday.

2:17I have an app that calculates my sleep debt, which is how many hours of sleep I owe my body. It was sitting at 20, a 20 hour deficit before this past weekend. So I just caught up on there. and then my thorn is I actually lost my wallet this weekend so it's yeah it's all on your phone now anyway I know I've it's been amazing I've been able to survive without my wallet for like the last three days but eventually so if anyone's got wallet recommendations I'm in the market for it all right all right now let's jump into our top story of the day while you and I were having wholesome weekends like the good podcasters we are there was a whole group of people having a big old party in the desert I'm of course talking about Burning Man the yearly festival that brings together an eccentric crowd from tech moguls to celebrities for a multi-day festival deep in the Nevada desert.

3:04Now the core tenets of Burning Man are self-sufficiency and self-organization and those values were put to the test this year after two to three months of rain fell on the festival in a matter of days leaving 72 ,000 people stranded in mud thicker than a bowl of oatmeal. Social media was awash this weekend and rumors that things were dire and food and water were running low. There were rumors of an Ebola outbreak, which turned out to be completely false. Even the president was briefed about the situation at one point. But yesterday, organizers finally gave the so-called burners the green light to leave as the roads cleared, the mud became passable.

3:41All this to say, Neil, that this is one of the more conspicuous burning mans in recent memory. And it's clear that this once small countercultury gathering is much bigger these days. Definitely much bigger. But if there was anybody that could survive a huge mud mud situation in the desert, it is I think they call themselves burners because one of the one of the 10 principles of Burning Man is radical self-reliance. So there were a lot of interviews with people who were there and they're like, yeah, this is no big deal. Like, so what if the toilets are overflowing? Like, I've got enough alcohol.

4:15I've got enough food to keep me through a few days. Like this is exactly what we were prepared for. I think the you know, you've seen a transformation in Burning Man over the past few years from a countercultural festival for hippies that started in San Francisco in the 80s to a more seen or be seen event with techs, with tech moguls, celebrities become super popular in Silicon Valley. So maybe these people who came in on their air conditioned RVs or private jets were a little more taken aback and were not prepared. And one of the most famous stories from this past weekend was Diplo and Chris Rock were at Burning Man.

4:50And Diplo had it had a DJ set in Washington, D.C. later that night and they closed off all of the roads. And so Chris Rock and Diplo walked six miles allegedly in the desert, hitchhiked and Diplo eventually made his set. But they posted about it on Instagram. So that kind of shows you the transformation of Burning Man into a more fuzzy situation. Yeah, I mean, Mark Zuckerberg's been, Elon Musk goes almost every single year. He did not go this past year, though. Yeah, tickets are$575. But the interesting thing about Burning Man is that there's no real money that is passed back and forth. It's more of a gift and bartering system.

5:30So it's actually a very interesting social experiment for researchers. Some researchers go there to study how human social networks work and how they form because it's just such an atypical system in the capitalist world that we live in. How does a bartering system work? So that's always an interesting thing is to see how the gift economy is working. And then also, I just think it's interesting, too, that nothing about this is optimized for efficiency. It's all about just serendipity and these transcendental experiences. So, Neil, I just have to know, though, too, would you would you go? No, this doesn't interest me.

6:07I mean, I would go as, you know, like this sociological experiment. Like so MIT Media Lab sent a, you know, sent a team last year. And I feel like I would be one of those more. I always love just being, you know, a fly on the wall in these situations. So I don't know if I would have this like transcendental experience myself, but I would love to go watch other people do it and kind of study the informal economy and the ways people interact there. That more interests me than, you know, doing the whole, you know, no shower thing. Sex, drug, and rock and roll thing, yeah. All right. There's no good way to transition from a story on Burning Man to a story about invasive species, but I'm just going to let it rip.

6:43More than 3 ,500 harmful invasive species are having a profound impact on the Earth's ecosystems and the global economy, responsible for 60 % of all extinctions and costing society$423 billion a year. That is according to a major UN-backed study out yesterday, which warns humans that we need to take this invasive species problem extremely seriously because without exaggeration, they pose a threat to human civilization. Let's first talk about the economic costs, which the study says are quadrupling every decade. The main damage is done through wrecking the food supply. These invaders spread disease, deplete fish reserves, and destroy crops while crushing the biodiversity of an area.

7:25and the problem is getting worse with more than 200 invasive species. I'm going to be saying invasive species a lot, this story, so just get used to it. With more than 200 invasive species getting introduced every year, the reason for this is that humans have made traveling across continents so fast, so seamless that invasive species can easily hitchhike on a cargo ship or commercial plane to a place they're not native to with disastrous effects. Through modern transportation networks, we've supercharged not only the movement of people and goods, but also animals and plants. So yeah, apparently we should be really worried about invasive species.

7:59I was just shocked at all the examples that were provided in this report and just how many ways invasive species can impact the economy. I mean, you have fishing grounds that are just choked by this type of water lily, which is apparently the most invasive species in the world. Power plant pipes that are clogged by zebra mussels. Everyone knows zebra mussels. We all been talking about zebra mussels for a long time. And then like electrical lines downed by brown tree snakes, just all these different examples that you wouldn't expect and how they can impact everything from the food supply to infrastructure.

8:31And another thing that I thought was interesting too is that how some species are very native in quotations, very native, meaning that they just truly can't adapt to these invasive species coming in. And one example is birds in New Zealand make their nests at ground level and they were completely unprepared to fight against the presence of rats, which came in via the shipping industry. And so it's like this very hard thing sometimes where some species are so native that they can't even adapt to handle these new invasive species. So what do you do about it? The report had a few different solutions.

9:07The first one they said is prevention. Like we need to step up checks at ports of call and things like that to prevent rats from coming. Black rat is the number one animal invasive species, if you didn't know, coming into the places to begin with. And islands are especially susceptible, like we saw with Maui, with these invasive vegetation that came in that helped spur the wildfire. And then if you can't prevent, if you can't do prevention, which is the number one thing, then you go, you go to eradication and you just got to kill them all. And there's new technologies that are ways to sort of stop an invasive species in its tracks.

9:40Well, one of the ways that eradication can take is that you introduce another species to target the invasive species. That's a very fine line, though, because sometimes when you do that, if you release a predator into an ecosystem, you're introducing another variable element. And it's backfired before is when like the harlequin ladybird, which is an Asian native, brought to the U.S. in the earliest 20th century in order to control insect pests. But then it turns out that bird proliferated and became an invasive species itself. So it really is this fine line between, okay, you can introduce a predator to tamp down this invasive species, but then that predator might do too well and become invasive itself.

10:20All this to say, if you see a lantern fly anywhere in the East Coast, you are supposed to crush it. That comes from Mount High. That's not our thing. You definitely have to crush it because it's bad not only for us, but for it's destroying the wine industry on Long Island and the Finger Lakes. 10 states in seven years now. So, yeah. I haven't seen a lanternfly this year, but apparently they're so bad. They're all over. I just live in the studio. All right, moving on to our next story. The singer and business mogul Jimmy Buffett died at 76 over the weekend from Merkel cell cancer. It was sad news for as many fans known as Parrot Heads, but as Buffett said himself, if there's a heaven for me, I'm sure it has a beach attached.

10:59And that was Buffett's whole appeal, using his style of Caribbean-infused country rock music to whisk you away from your 95 to a white sand beach in the imagined paradise of Margaritaville, which was more a state of mind than a real place. But while he preached a beach bum lifestyle, Buffett himself was not wasting away at Margaritaville, more like grinding away. Buffett turned the concept of Margaritaville into a licensing business empire, attaching his brand to things like pickleball paddles, luxury resorts, retirement villages, cannabis goods, RV camps, salad dressings. You could go on. Forbes recently calculated he was a billionaire from his sprawling ventures.

11:37And honestly, I think Buffett's Margaritaville brand will end up being more of his legacy than his music, which I went through his whole discography yesterday. It was okay. Well, it's a good vibe. We were playing it too. It's perfect background music, especially when the sun's shining. But yeah, I mean, his business empire was expansive and sprawling. Of the$1 billion, just 5 % came from his actual music catalog. So it really does go to show how big he became and how big this lifestyle became. I just want to go through some of the other things. You hit some. You got the Margaritaville-themed condominiums, resorts, retirement communities, which I love too because it's advertised for the 55 and better crowd.

12:18It's just a classic thing. Margaritaville restaurant chains in airports, which I have been to, and then cruises as well that go from Palm Beach to the Bahamas. So he truly was all over the place and very sprawling. And then this is my favorite Jimmy Buffett story is that obviously he's got the same last name as Warren Buffett. And so the two actually took a DNA test in 2018 to see if they were related because Jimmy Buffett's like, I got such good business acumen. So do you. Turns out they weren't related. But then Warren Buffett jokingly said that asked Jimmy to keep me in his will. So it's kind of like this full circle moment where, yeah.

12:55That's very fun. Another thing that I found was he was a big writer. He was a big writer. He was a novelist and a nonfiction writer. And he's only one of six writers with like John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway to appear on both the New York Times' fiction and nonfiction bestseller list. The dude could do it all. It's just kind of like a little hypocritical. I got to say, he's telling everyone through his music to like take it easy, take it chill, don't worry about work. Meanwhile, he's literally a workaholic and he's doing all these business deals. He's writing books. He's being a super successful author.

13:29So he's a billionaire. I mean, I don't know. It's a little interesting to hear what he's saying, what he's saying in his music. But Margaritaville Times Square, we have to talk about that because I've been three times. It is a$370 million operation up there. And it opened in 2021. It was by far his biggest business venture at that price tag. And it recently filed for bankruptcy, actually. because I don't know why they opened in 2021 when Times Square was still getting back. And they think it's going to be okay. But I've been there a few times. It's actually, I say I went ironically. And then when I'm there, I'm like, hey, this is actually pretty.

14:06I really want to go as well. And I think it was because one of Jimmy Buffett's friends said, until you take New York, like you haven't done anything yet. So I think it was kind of his white whale. He definitely wanted to have a presence there because if you make it in New York, you can make it anywhere, baby. All right, Neil, before we jump into the next story, we're going to take a quick break. Tonight on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozema St. John host 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.

14:40This 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.

14:59When 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. Okay, Neil, we're coming off a long weekend, which means it's time for our Winners of the Weekend segment, where we peruse the weekend's news and pick out two stories from people that had an especially good Labor Day break.

15:39Neil, you won the pre-show foot race, so you're up first. Who is your winner? My winner is the head coach of the University of Colorado's football team, Deion Sanders. So many of you might know Dion as an incredible athlete. He's the only person ever to play in both a Super Bowl and a World Series, but he's making a name for himself as a football coach. Coach Prime, as he calls himself, was hired by Colorado last year to an astronomical five-year contract worth$29.5 million, and he's already turned college football upside down. After winning just one game last year, Colorado brought in nearly 90 new players during the offseason, and in their first game this year on Saturday, stunned powerhouse TCU in Texas.

16:21The hype is only building in Boulder. Football season tickets sold out for the first time since 1996, and ticket prices for Colorado's home opener versus Nebraska next week have spiked more than 1 ,500 % than last year. The guy also puts on a show wherever he goes, so it's no surprise that Amazon is following Coach Prime in his first season as Colorado coach for an upcoming docuseries. Toby, this is definitely one of the most fun sports stories right now. He's electric. Every time he's on the mic, too, it's just a new soundbite. My favorite part of this story, though, is that he signed this big coaching contract, five-year deal,$29.5 million.

17:00The Colorado athletic director says, we don't have the money yet at the time that they signed the deal, but I know we'll have it, so I'm not worried about that piece. And everyone was just quote-tweeting and saying, this is a Ponzi scheme. That's exactly what Bernie Madoff would say. Oh, we don't have the money yet, but we'll have it. But sure enough, the money is pouring in. They already had a record year of donations. They raised$28 million, which is up$8 million from the year prior. So when you make a bet on this huge public figure like Deion Sanders, you want to see more money coming in, want to see more hype around the program.

17:32And they're clearly getting back. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Right, exactly. Yeah, so, I mean, Colorado's a great football school. They love football up there. And they've been just dormant for so long. So it's exciting to see them back. Okay, one final thing on how he's running the program too. They don't have captains, which is like a typical thing you have on a sports team. They have L's and D's, which stand for leaders and dogs. So they literally come up to like the pre-show, pre-game coin toss, not with a C on their jerseys, but with an L or a D on there. What is a dog? A dog.

18:04You're like a D-O-W-G, like you're just a dog. Is it less than a leader? No, it's just like someone who grinds it out, someone who's like very nitty-gritty. It's a little different from a leader, but it's adjacent. Again, just like a totally funny. What's the optimal L to D ratio on a team? I think you want a few L's and then like a lot of D's, mostly D's. Okay, so like 1090? Leader or dog. All right. I'm just taking coaching tips from Coach Prime. Yeah, there you go. Okay, Neil, my winner of the weekend is the legend herself, Mariah Carey. You know how we ask each other every Friday, is it a fast week or a slow week?

18:38Well, Neil, I have a fast year moment for you. Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is You pulled in 316 ,000 streams on Saturday, which is a 75 % increase over the same day in 2022. And turns out the Queen of Christmas owes it all to the Philippines. Spotify charts show the song was streamed 112 ,000 times on September 1st within the country because apparently the majority of the majority Catholic Philippines starts celebrating Christmas absurdly early. There really isn't a great reason for it either. Filipinos just love Christmas, so they start celebrating as soon as the burr months, September, October, November, December, begin.

19:18Neil, one, who knew the Philippines went this hard for Christmas? And two, talking about Christmas already just feels so wrong to me. Yeah, it's so hot in here right now. It's so hot, yeah. Well, look, good for them. I would say I would hold off as long as possible for Christmas music. You know, I don't like to preempt myself. I feel like I'd get sick of it by November if I start listening to it now, and I don't want to ever get sick of it. So good for them. It's not my cup of tea, but good for Mariah Carey. That's very funny that people are starting to crank Christmas music right now on September 1st.

19:48So a few years ago, The Economist did a study around how much money this song brings in for Mariah Carey. And from 1994 to 2016, they said she made$60 million just off this song, which is around$2.6 million every single year. So I mean, I don't want to be a hater, but it's not even close to the best Christmas song. It's not just like it's become like a meme and a tradition at this point that, you know, you just wait for it. But I don't think anyone actually kind of listens to on there. I like it. It gives me like that tinkly feeling. That's what you want. All right, Neil, for our next story, I want to tell you about the diamond market.

20:22We know that lab grown diamonds have become increasingly popular over the years, but they're now becoming so popular. It's sending the price of real diamonds into a tailspin. Rough diamonds, which are diamonds that haven't been cut yet, are in a pricing free fall. In June 2022, diamond seller De Beers was charging around$1 ,400 per carat for select makeable diamonds, which are the type that make it into wedding rings. But by July this year, that had dropped to just$850 a carat. Now, De Beers is denying that lab-grown diamonds are the problem, saying that while there has been a little bit of cannibalization, they see the real issue as a macroeconomic issue.

21:01But still, the pricing collapse is pretty dizzying and has the industry finally coming to terms with the existential threat of lab-grown diamonds. So, Neil, which side do you kind of land on here? Is it just that people are spending less money on luxury goods or is there a wider trend that people are leaning towards lab-grown over roughly? Probably both because lab-grown diamonds have grown so much in popularity since 2018. They were just 2 % of the market and now they're 10 % of the market. But it does seem like there is a broader shift or maybe not a shift, but a blip because of COVID of a lot fewer people getting engaged in buying engagement rings.

21:36Like the price of lab grown diamonds has fallen even more than regular diamonds. And Signet Jewelers, which I didn't know, they own like literally every jeweler like Kay and a bunch of the other ones that you Zales, Jared, Diamonds Direct. They own Signet Jewelers owns all of them. And they're saying that like we have seen engagement ring sales plummet from in like 2022, 2023, because no one got engaged because no one became couples in 2020. And the average time that it takes from a couple formation to an engagement is about three point five years. So we're going to be in a slump from 2023 to 2024 because of those that period during covid.

22:18So it does seem like there is a little bit of a secular decline in this overall engagement ring industry. David's bridle just went bankrupt last year. So I'm just curious about this lab grown diamond thing. Like, well, because prices basically you can mass produce this in a lab. They are identical to regular diamonds. But will they get too cheap to the point where it's like, OK, well, I'm not really spending much on a diamond, you know, an engagement ring. But the whole point is like a signaling factor that like I can spend much. I can spend this amount. So I don't know where this all shakes out.

22:50De Beers thinks that there's going to be a high-end market for actual diamonds, and then kind of the low-end market for lab-grown diamonds, and they're just going to be completely different. I haven't let you talk at all. No, they are behind that. De Beers is this big marketing. They've created the rough-cut diamond industry, and they started selling its own lab-grown diamonds in 2018, and they intentionally sold it at a steep discount price in order to create that kind of juxtaposition. because yes, they want the rough cut diamond to be like this thing that signifies your forever love. Put it in a different category than the lab growing diamonds because it helps them because they control the rough cut diamond market.

23:30So I think you're totally right on that psychological difference that they want to hammer home. But there might just be too much of a stigma with regular diamonds going forward because of all of the ethical baggage and slave labor that goes into actually getting those. It's a rough time for the rough cut diamond market. Well done. All right. Let's go finally to our week ahead segment. We usually do that on Monday, but it's still the first day of the week. So let's do a little preview of what to expect this week. There's a lot going on, but first I got to start with da-da-da-da-da-da. Da-da-da-da-da-da.