US Scraps Offshore Wind Projects & A Pirate Music Group Scraped Spotify

0:28The best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong people.

0:36Good morning, Bird Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, why renting out your clothes is the hottest new side hustle. Then some internet pirates scraped all of Spotify and published it on the internet for free. It's Tuesday, December 23rd. Let's ride.

0:56Good morning. We are taping this Monday afternoon, actually, to give our team a head start on the holiday break, which is what I want to discuss with you right off the top, logistics. I genuinely love talking logistics. Starting tomorrow, Morning Brew Daily will hit your podcast feed every weekday morning through the end of the year, but the episodes will be pre-taped specials to match the relaxed vibes of the holiday season. We have recorded all of them so far, and let me tell you, they're all as varied and fun as Trail Mix heavily indexed on M &Ms. We have a variable buffet of delicious content coming your way.

1:32Some fun interviews, one with the guy who coined the term inshittification, which explains why everything on the internet suddenly feels worse. Also a great discussion about how to wrangle your dream job and career. Then some shows looking back on Neil's numbers and Toby's trends. And also our producers jump behind the mic to give a behind-the-scenes look into what goes into the show and roast us a little. I think my favorite holiday episode, though, is the game show we recorded that you all can play on Christmas Day. So make sure to tune into that for some Yule Time competition. Like I said, it's a content charcuterie board, so eat it up.

2:10But first, a word from our sponsor, Public. Toby, you were a bit late to the recording. What's going on? Whoa, whoa, Neil. I just got distracted checking my portfolio on public. Why? Well, they have this cool new feature, Generated Assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. You can type in anything like AI-powered supply chain companies with positive free cash flow or defense tech companies growing revenue 25 % year over year. Oh, yes. I remember you were talking about that. You can invest in just a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's.

2:51I will definitely get to the show a little earlier next time, but get started at public.com slash morningbrew and earn an uncapped 1 % bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash morningbrew, paid for by public investing, full disclosures, and podcast description. The offshore wind industry is facing financial disaster after the Trump administration said it would pause leases for five wind farms off of the East Coast, imperiling billions of dollars in investments. The projects include coastal Virginia offshore wind, the largest project of its kind in the country, as well as wind farms in development in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York.

3:28Collectively, these are expected to power more than 2.5 million homes and businesses when completed. To justify pausing the offshore wind projects, the Interior Department cited national security risks coming from the Pentagon and Energy Department, but provided few details on those threats. President Trump has railed against offshore wind for at least 14 years when he tried to stop an offshore wind farm from getting built in view of his golf course in Scotland. Since day one of his second term, he's tried to dismantle the sector in favor of fossil fuels, his preferred energy source. Wind leaders blasted the move as restricting power generation at precisely the time the U.S.

4:05needs more of it. and fast. AI data centers are ravenous for electricity and prices have been rising for households as outdated grids become strained. Toby, it seems that the Trump administration will not rest until the wind industry bleeds money. The administration kind of had a nebulous reason for killing these projects. The Interior Department said that the government has found that these turbine blades actually create some sort of radar interference that they are calling clutter. And they say that could be a national security risk because they could obscure some actual objects that are moving targets towards, you know, the coast of the United States.

4:43So that is the unclassified explanation for this that a lot of people found unsatisfying because of course the national security of America was a factor when you were approved as a project to begin with. And a lot of former Defense Department officials said we were definitely included in this process as these wind projects were being approved. So why now does it suddenly have this national security justification, which is why a lot of people are saying this is just a rug pull out from underneath the industry. And they are about to lose money when these projects don't get developed and there's no construction on them.

5:16And you just have to look at this one project, Empire Wind in New York, to see just how financially, potentially catastrophic this could be for these wind companies. So this was a$5 billion project that in April, the Interior Department ordered construction be stopped at. And when work on Empire Wind was initially paused back in April, Equinor, which is the company that was developing Empire Wind, said it was losing$50 million a week. Another project that was delayed Revolution Wind was losing$15 million per week. And because of that, the Orsted, which is another company that was developing it, said it would cut about 2 ,000 jobs back in October, around 25 % of its workforce.

5:55So you look across the board yesterday at wind stocks. They were all down because this is truly a financially devastating for these companies. And I want to clarify, they're not necessarily killing these projects. The Interior Department said it was pausing them until it could work through these national security concerns with these companies. But each day that construction doesn't go through is more strain on the grid, according to these executives, and a lot of money off these companies' balance sheets. The wind has been swirling around at these projects, though, because if you go back to January, a judge actually struck down Trump's January wind leasing halt.

6:28They called it arbitrary and capricious and a violation of federal law. So there is some judicial pushback to this, as well as these companies obviously doing everything they can to figure out if this stop work order is going to hold up in court or hold up in general. So just brutal, though, because these products are extremely capital intensive. I mean,$50 million a week is some serious burn here. And especially if you've already laid the foundations out there, halting work just doesn't make sense financially for them at all. So you are right. It is an absolute blow to them when it comes to just the money that goes into them.

7:03They're facing a ton of macroeconomic headwinds as well. Yeah, sorry. But in terms of higher material costs, higher interest rates, this industry was already struggling before the Trump administration came in and used the full might of the government against this particular sector. So what will happen for this particular order, this pause order by the Interior Department, is we're going to court again. And, you know, there's been a ton of wind court cases that have been going on since the Trump administration came into office in January. Toby, I got a new investment thesis. It's called the periodic table.

7:41Metals continued their historic run this year with gold, silver, and copper popping to new record highs yesterday. Not to be outdone, platinum rose for an eighth straight session, reaching its highest level in 17 years, while palladium notched a three-year high. Commodities have been anything but boron this year. Gold has popped nearly 70 % for its best year since the Iranian revolution of 1979 jolted energy markets around the globe. Silver's gone even more parabolic, popping over 130%. That's great for investors and those assets. It's not great for everyone else because when metals are going up, it means things overall are going down.

8:19Gold, which has been around for millennia, is seen as a hedge against instability, whether it's geopolitical tensions, rising fiscal deficits, or political uncertainty. Another reason these metals are rising has to do with the Fed. The central bank is projected to cut rates even more next year, which makes holding bonds, which won't yield that much interest, less attractive to owning metals, which don't yield anything. Toby, we are in a golden age of gold. The catalyst for why metals did so well is a little confusing because, as you said, gold has always been seen as a safe haven asset. And then you look at what actually happened in the market this year, the market did very well.

8:56I mean, the AI trade was extremely hot. The S &P 500 finished the year up 16%. I really hope I didn't just jinx it right there. But it's had a very solid year, notching hopefully another double-digit gain. And yet here you have all these economic headwinds also existing alongside it. I do think the Federal Reserve kind of coming under attack from the Trump administration spooked a lot of people. Then also you have to go back to what central banks have been doing across the world. I think you have to look back to when Russia invaded Ukraine as well. because once Russia saw and other countries saw that their central bank assets were frozen by the U.S., they said, wait a second, it's very vulnerable to have foreign currency reserves, especially when it comes to sanctions.

9:41What is not easy to sanction, and that is gold. So we have seen the People's Bank of China add gold for 13 consecutive months in a row saying, hey, this is our hedge against geopolitical instability as well. So it's a safe haven asset for central banks as well. And speaking of geopolitical instability, the recent catalyst for why gold was spiking on Monday and these other metals seems to be concerns about potential war or conflict breaking out between the United States and Venezuela. Remember, the United States has taken a very aggressive posture against Venezuela's oil industry, seizing tankers, creating essentially an oil blockade against Venezuela that is escalating.

10:19And as soon as traders saw Trump use the word war last week in a post to social media post about Venezuela. That is a basically a sirens call to start buying gold and other metals. I also want to talk about these other metals, though, because it's not just gold rising. It's copper. It's silver. It's palladium. It's platinum. A lot of these metals don't aren't just hedges against instability. They actually have uses for industry and things like AI. And you love talking about copper, how much copper goes into a data center. So you have on the one hand, these metals are rising across the board, but for kind of different reasons.

10:55Some are geopolitical hedges and some are just because you can use them in stuff that's becoming super hot right now. Yeah, they're not just shiny. They're not just a pretty face. They are very applicable for EVs, for the energy sector as well. So you are right that silver in particular has double use cases, both as a store of value, but also as something that is very useful in industrial applications. You can't help but compare physical gold to digital gold this year too. Gold up 70%, Bitcoin down 4%. Big flipping in right there. Let's move on. The largest music streaming platform in the world just got its milkshake drunk by an activist hacker group.

11:33Anna's archive claims it scraped nearly the entirety of Spotify's database, not just one artist catalog or even a specific year of music. We're talking the audio files for 86 million songs, which represent 99.6 % of Spotify listens, now open sourced on the internet for anyone to torrent. If you had a SanDisk that could hold 300 terabytes of data, you too could have access to nearly all of the popular music ever recorded. Spotify is investigating the incident, saying that the hackers used illicit tactics to access some of the platform's audio files, but Anna's archive frames their actions as a preservation effort.

12:11Their claim is that music history is fragile and too centralized. it's better to have a decentralized repository that leads to more open distribution. The group has applied similar logic to books and other copyrighted materials they've published on their site. This has obviously set off a firestorm of controversy over what the fallout will be. Some have said it could free up some artists from being trapped in Spotify's walled garden, giving other platforms a chance to rise up to provide more discoverability and better revenue sharing. Others caution that it could be a free-for-all for AI companies who now have lots of juicy metadata to train their models on.

12:47Neil, no word on whether podcast episodes were included in the leak. And it is a goldmine for statisticians and music lovers as well, because how often do you get 296 million rows of music data to learn and understand the music world according to Spotify? So a lot of people have been diving into this particular data, whether it was illegally pirated or not, and trying to understand what the music world is as Spotify sees it. And one crazy stat that I saw was how top-heavy music in general is on Spotify. Anna's Archive estimates that Spotify's top three songs have more combined streams than the bottom 20 to 100 million tracks put together.

13:34And those top three songs are Die With a Smile, Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, Billie Eilish's Bird of a Feather, and Bad Bunny's DTMF. So Spotify Music World in general has a longer bottom of the order than the Phillies had this past season. It's not the point of this story per se, but you are right. The data aspect of this was just so good for data nerds. 0.1 tracks accounted for the most popular music of all time. 70 % of songs on Spotify receive literally no listens at all, barely any attention. 120 beats per minute is the most common tempo across the catalog. I know because there's a lot of EDM music on the platform.

14:10And then the most used key is C. And the least used one, do you want to take a guess on the least used one? Use your music brain right here. B major. D sharp, actually. There's barely any songs in D sharp. So if you're looking for a different wedge to break in, have a new sound, maybe try out D sharp. But yeah, let's go back to kind of the implications of this massive hack. Spotify is a discoverability platform for a lot of these artists. You know, you have the chance to get discovered when you're put on playlists, when you are, you know, up next in a queue, when people are just listening on a shuffle.

14:41So for small artists, it actually could be a good thing because more services might pop up that give them an avenue for discoverability that you don't necessarily have to use Spotify to find these people anymore. Big artists will do fine because they're massive. It's a very top-heavy industry. They have touring. You can listen to them on Apple Music. You can find them other places where people are saying who might get hollowed out. It's kind of the middle ground of artists, the messy middle, who have to rely on streaming revenue for most of their income. They have to rely on Spotify, hopefully putting them on a playlist.

15:11They're in a little bit of an uncertain spot now that you could go listen to their music for free. But usually the top and bottom might come out of this in a better spot. Again, it's all hypothetical, while the middle might have a tough time. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's Trends. This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card. I'm a person who really appreciates simplicity. And when it comes to credit card rewards, the simpler, the better. That's one of the many reasons I have an Apple Card. The rewards are super straightforward. I earn up to 3 % daily cash back on my everyday purchases.

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17:07If you're looking for some extra dollars and you have some extra collars lying around, consider renting out your closet for cash. Today's Toby's Trend is all about people monetizing their wardrobes. Take Emily Nassau, a 30-year-old who lives in Manhattan. She makes up to$2 ,000 per month on the platform Pickle, which allows you to list your clothes for rent. Her most popular items are a Chanel mini wallet, and in general, the items that do well for her are luxury pieces that most people otherwise couldn't afford. Pickle's rise sits at the nexus of a lot of intersecting trends. People love a side hustle, with a bank rate survey showing that over 25 % of American adults have side jobs.

17:48Gen Z have also normalized the sharing economy, according to Tamai Sideri, a marketing professor at NYU, who says cash-strapped young people are way more open to renting stuff in general compared to other generations. Finally, the youth like it because there's a sustainability aspect. Instead of buying a new dress for your cousin's friend's sister-in-law's wedding that you'll only wear once, you can hop on Pickle and rent it for a fraction of the cost without relying on fast fashion or additional consumption. Neil, it's appropriate that this is our final trend of the year because it hits on so many of the beats that have been a through line in 2025, sharing, caring, and wearing.

18:26Let's talk about the money first. So how much money can you make renting out your clothes on Pickle, where it says its top 10 lenders earn$3 ,200 a month in 2024, and then the company makes money. It takes a 20 % cut of transactions in the app and then 35 % of transactions from their in-person store, and they have a store as of 2023. It was founded by two Blackstone employees back in 2022. Am I allowed to render judgment on Toby's trends? I think this is great. Yeah, I think this is very cool. Like, I use Airbnb. I use Turo, which is a peer-to-peer car sharing app. I'm sure a lot of people listening to this use other peer-to-peer companies or networks in order to rent stuff.

19:09And I think this makes a lot of sense for clothes, especially for those one-time events where it's not like you don't want to buy something just for that one time. We've all been there where you have to get that one particular specific outfit for a social event you have to go to. That's usually very expensive and way fancier than anything you would wear otherwise. So why not just get it from somebody else and use these apps? So I think it's pretty cool. If you're listening to this and thinking, I feel like I've heard this idea before. Rent the Runway was kind of the OG pioneer in this space where it did exactly what you said.

19:41the difference is that that was a centralized entity that you had to rent from rent the runway and then return it that way. This is peer to peer. As you mentioned, it is a lot more flexible. There's usually same day or last minute rentals. And so you can get your hands on something very quickly. Also, it's just kind of, there's like a voyeuristic aspect to it. Like what are other people have in their closets? My fiance does this a lot from, you know, our apartment And it almost feels like a business because she's always texting me like, hey, we have a courier coming by to pick this up. Can you have this ready for them?

20:14And you do it in exchange. It's facilitated actually by mostly Uber couriers, but other freelancers fill in from time to time. So it is a very kind of feels, I don't know, personal and not as professional right now. It really does feel like you're borrowing something from someone else and you get it back. They have an insurance angle as well, which I'm sure a lot of people listening are saying, how do I know it won't just come back ripped? that's where Pickle steps in and adds an insurance layer to it. So it is fascinating that people are turning it into real businesses. I do wonder how big it could scale.

20:44I mean, when talking about the circular business model more generally, there are very bullish estimates out there. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, circular business models, which I guess this is a part of, could be worth about$700 billion by the end of the decade. And the big angle there is, you know, carbon footprint. It's reducing waste. And this has been a huge problem for the fashion industry for decades, why people have been shunning fast fashion a little bit. So circular business models are expected to reduce the fashion industry's carbon footprint by 16 percent by just reusing stuff instead of throwing it out and getting a new one.

21:20The one aspect that we have to highlight, though, is that this works in dense population centers. You know, it's a lot harder if you live in a more sparsely populated area because there's just not as many people whose closets you can go to. it just doesn't make sense for the couriers to go there. So obviously New York City is a nexus for this, but they're slowly trying to expand to other cities. But certainly you need a lot of closets. You need a lot of fashion-minded people who are willing to give their stuff up. So it's not just something that's gonna suddenly spread across the entire country.

21:50Right, it reminds me of Turo versus Enterprise in terms of renting a car. And if you don't know what Turo is, it's basically you have a car that's just sitting on the street. You can rent it out to me who doesn't have a car and I will go use your car for a weekend getaway. Meanwhile, Enterprise is more of that rent-the-runway centralized service and Enterprise is still way bigger than Turo was. So ultimately, rent-the-runway may still be much bigger than this particular peer-to-peer clothing industry. I'm looking at your fit right now, Neil. Anything you think you could put up on Pickle? You got a nice LLC?

22:19I got nothing. You got nothing. I don't think I have anything that anybody wants. Let's just say that. All right, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. CBS's 60 Minutes is facing an escalating crisis after new editor-in-chief Barry Weiss delayed a story set to air Sunday night at the last minute, raising concerns of editorial independence. The story, which featured interviews with Venezuelan men deported to a prison in El Salvador, the show described as, quote, brutal, was screened five times and was approved by the network's lawyers as good to go, according to 60 Minutes correspondent Sharon Alfonsi.

22:52It was also heavily promoted by CBS ahead of its expected airing Sunday night. However, when Weiss saw it, she deemed it not ready. In a call Monday morning, Weiss reportedly said, while the story presented powerful testimony of torture at Seacott, the prison in question, it did not advance the ball. The Times and other outlets have previously done similar work. The public knows that Venezuelans have been subjected to horrific treatment at this prison. To run a story on this subject two months later, we need to do more, and this is 60 Minutes. We need to be able to get the principals on the record and on camera.

23:24Alfonso, the correspondent, said her team had reached out to the Trump administration for comment, but they refused to participate. She said, quote, in my view, pulling it now after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision. It is a political one. Yeah, Alfonso went on to warn that if the government's refusal to participate in a story is enough to kill the story, then effectively they have control over what CBS is putting out. This was the number one fear when Barry Weiss came into the CBS newsroom. Would she have undue influence from the Trump administration after her arc kind of bent more towards the right-wing politics when she came into CBS?