Would You Only Eat “Made in USA” Beef? & Being a Bridesmaid is Becoming Too Costly

0:28This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Olivia Lake. Today, do you care whether your beef is made in the USA? And has being a bridesmaid become too expensive? It's Friday, September 18th. Let's ride.

0:47Well, this is exciting. Subbing in for Toby today is Olivia Lake, our associate producer. You hear in the credits every day making her MBD hosting debut. I couldn't be more excited. Liv, one question. How do you feel about cats? If I wasn't so deathly allergic, I think I would love them more, but I do think that they're very cute. Okay, well, what if I told you that a new cat just dropped? For the first time in more than a century, a new species of cat has been identified that was previously unknown to science. It's called the Tilkayo tiger cat, and it's a little spotted guy who lives in the Bolivian cloud forest.

1:23Scientists found it when a local man brought one to his home thinking it was a domestic a cat until he realized, no, this thing was wild and turned it over to a wildlife sanctuary. Liv, how are you feeling about this new feline? You guys all need to look up the picture because this thing is so cute. It's got cute little ears that I've never seen on a cat before. And then it has little leopard spots. Yeah, if I wasn't so allergic, I'd go straight for this species, but it might not like me back. And now a word from our sponsor, Hotels.com. Neil, did you know they have hotels that are just for dogs?

1:58Yeah. Well, I didn't, and I stayed at one for a work trip. It was rough. Good one. Sounds like you could use business preferences from Hotels.com. It helps travelers find the right hotel faster by remembering their go-to work trip requirements. Travelers set their preferences once, including fully refundable stays, Wi-Fi, breakfast, gym access, and more. Then future business trip searches automatically surface matching hotels. That way, you can book work trips faster. Just set your preferences once and get results tailored to your business travel needs. Plus, get up to 20 % off select hotels instantly with member discounts and earn rewards for future travel.

2:33Sign up for their free rewards program and start earning on every work stay at hotels.com slash morningbrew. That's hotels.com slash morningbrew. Loyalty members 18 plus. It's National Cheeseburger Day, and no doubt you're planning to celebrate by making your signature patty stunning guests with its juiciness. But as you pick up ground beef from the grocery store, you'll find that unlike other common food items, you won't be able to see which country that beef is from. The question of beef's country of origin is front and center after the Trump administration allowed 300 ,000 metric tons of beef trimmings to be imported from abroad at a reduced tariff rate to cool skyrocketing prices, a move that's outraged cattle ranchers here in the U .S.

3:15for meddling in the market and hurting their business. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the administration is exploring a middle way that aims to appease ranchers, but also help out consumers. Require a label on beef that will display its country of origin. The idea is that if you know that beef is made in the USA, you'll pay a premium for it. While if it's not, you can scoop it up at a lower price. It's not definitely going to happen. officials are going to review regulations, provide an economic analysis of what could happen should the labeling be enacted, and decide whether to move forward with the issue within 90 days.

3:49If it does, it'd mark the next drastic move the White House has taken to make beef less expensive, but ranchers remain wary. Liv, I had no idea some foods require an origin country label, while others did not. Yeah, this is crazy. I had no idea about this. According to the New York Times, beef actually did require origin labeling at one point. The 2002 farm bill required retailers to put origin labels on fresh beef and a number of other meats and fruits and veggies, and then an expansion passed in 2008 that added chicken to that list. But then Canada and Mexico complained to the World Trade Organization, and they argued that the requirements violated their trade agreements and it caused them millions of dollars that they had to spend to comply.

4:30And the WTO agreed with them and allowed Canada and Mexico to impose$1 billion in retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. So then to avoid those tariffs, Congress repealed the labeling rules for beef and pork in 2015, but left them in place for other products like chicken and produce. So that's why if you're in the grocery store, you see made or source in the USA stickers on avocados or apples, but then ground beef in the aisle right next to it doesn't have anything on it. It's not clear that this does anything economically or for USA ranchers. I mean, there's been a couple of economic analyses. We know the government's about to do another one.

5:07But back in 2015, the Agriculture Department's chief economist found that the economic benefits of putting these country of origin labels on beef would be, quote, insufficient to offset the cost of the requirements. And those are hefty costs. Putting a label on everything as this, obviously, the cattle doesn't go straight from the ranch to your refrigerator. There's many steps along the way and these labels add up another estimate put it at eight billion dollars in costs over a decade to the beef and cattle industry and then when you talk to consumers they're like we don't actually care where the beef is from maybe they say they do but actually when they go purchase one it it doesn't really affect them on a list of things that do matter to them place of origin regularly finished finishes second to last only ahead of environmental impact and what people care about when they buy beef, it's much more important to them, whether it's high quality, safe, things like that, rather than whatever country it came from.

6:04And we were talking before the show, it's also the beef, the ground beef that you buy, it doesn't come from a single place because I know I noted that the Trump administration is bringing in 300 ,000 metric tons of lean beef trimmings. You can't eat that on your own. Basically, you combine that with the fatty trimmings from I know you're you're right now. a lot of people are grimacing. This is how ground beef is made. You combine lean beef trimmings with more fatty beef trimmings from, it could be like a cow from a completely other country. And that together creates ground beef. Yeah. I mean, I didn't, this was the, the innocence in my mind.

6:41Not only did I think it all came from the same place. I thought that when you're buying ground beef, it's just all one cow. Like I thought each package was one thing. I didn't really think that it was this cow cocktail that it really is. but good to know, I guess. Yeah, but this is a big deal. We can move off how ground beef is made into the broader problem here, which is that the number of cattle and calves in the United States is at a 75-year low, just 86.2 million currently in the US. There's been a lot of drought that's devastated cattle herds. That's driven up prices for consumers. A lot of the actions that the Trump administration has taken, like importing foreign beef trimmings, has upset a lot of ranchers.

7:24This labeling requirement seeks to appease them somehow, but more of the little guys, the independent ranchers, say this is gonna be too costly for us. Actually, it's the big guys who don't like this. The retailers, meat packers, feedlot owners, they say this is gonna be way too costly for us. We cited that estimate of$8 billion in added costs over a decade. The little guys say, okay, maybe this will help us out because people will go to the grocery store, see made in the USA from a smaller rancher, and will say, yeah, like let's buy that. I'll pay a little bit more. But what they're saying overall is that these are all band-aids to the bigger problem.

7:58We need to incentivize production of cattle to get these cattle herds back up. And only then can they address the problem. That is the long-term solution. Moving on, welcome to Stock of the Week, Dog of the Week, the segment where Liv and I pick one stock that remembered to pack their lunch and another that's settling for a$20 bull slop. You won the pre-show knitting contest, Liv, so you get to go first. Shout out to my knitting. My dog of the week is transportation companies because diesel prices are hitting them like a freight truck. According to AAA, diesel just hit an all-time high of$6.40 a gallon, up more than 70 % from a year ago, and the culprit is a genuine supply crisis.

8:36At an energy conference, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said that the strategic buffers that had cushioned prices for months, reserves, stockpiles, alternate pipelines, have largely now played out. after attacks last week knocked out a major Saudi pipeline that had been routing around the blocked straighter for moves. The pain is already showing up in the market. J.B. Hunt's stock dropped more than 13 percent on Wednesday, one of its worst days since going public in 1983, after the trucking company warned earnings could fall 5 to 10 percent quarter over quarter. It's not isolated either. The Dow Jones transportation average fell nearly 3 percent the same day.

9:11And there's no clear relief coming. GasBuddy's head of petroleum analysis said the national average could top 650 within days. Some Midwest states may hit$7 and diesel in California has already crossed$8 a gallon. With harvest season ramping up demand for diesel powered farm equipment and no resolution to the war in sight. One energy analyst put it bluntly. Diesel has no easy solution. Yesterday, this is all of my Twitter feed could talk about JP Morgan's commodities team, which are the people who are probably most plugged into oil prices, oil flows, a lot of billions of dollars are at stake for them.

9:45They wrote this note and they said, for the first time since the start of the Iran conflict, we don't have a baseline view. We simply don't know how to model the end game. They're completely throwing up their hands and saying, we have no idea what's going on here. And then I'll continue. At the onset, we thought we did. We assumed there were economic red lines. The US administration would be unwilling to cross$100 oil, gasoline near$5 a gallon, et cetera. Six months later, many of those lines have been crossed, yet the exit strategy is less clear, not more. Then they close with, the assumption that the disruption is temporary is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

10:19So what happens if it doesn't? I guess we're finding that out right now. Yeah, and when and where will consumers feel this themselves? One analyst at Mellius Research noted that fuel-related cost increases typically, they get absorbed first by farmers, transporters, and retailers before showing up in consumer prices. So it's kind of like that thing we saw with tariffs where we're not really going to feel it immediately, but it is going to happen, you know, a few weeks or months behind. And some of the industries that are getting hit the hardest by this are food and beverage. Food and beverage companies, they get hit hardest by diesel increases because they not only have to pay for the transportation, the fuel to transport their goods, but they have to have continuous refrigeration on those trucks or trains.

11:04So they have to pay for fuel to regulate those temperatures as well. So they're kind of working on a double dependency. And that's where we could see price hikes show up more. And if you are flying later this year, you already maybe booked a flight or didn't book a flight yet in November and December. You could see that flight just kind of wiped off the calendar. number of airlines this week came out. United American Southwest said that, look, we probably with the fuel spike recently, remember they did this back in the spring as well. We might have to eliminate cheaper, less profitable flights from our schedule in December should jet fuel prices keep spiking like this.

11:42So if you're going from, I don't know, Ithaca, New York to Topeka, Kansas, like on a United flight like that, probably. Yeah, I hope not. But because I don't know what you're doing there, but that might be removed from the schedule, those lower profitable routes, because these airlines, just like J.B. Hunt, the trucking company, are saying fuel is just too expensive there, expensive now. And I would just say the bottom line here is that we've been warned for months by the oil and gas companies, by the transportation companies, that there's this brewing fuel crisis. We're running out of fuel. We're exhausting all of our levers to get more fuel.

12:20It looks like that crisis has actually arrived now. Yeah. And then there's the China of it all. For months, China, they're the world's largest oil importer, and they were burning through their own stockpiles instead of buying more on the international market. The International Energy Agency estimated that China drew about 41 million barrels from inventories in June alone. So China was effectively absorbing a big chunk of the supply shock itself, and that was freeing up the oil for everyone else. And that's kind of what kept the lid on global oil prices. But now China's running low. And so they're dipping back into that global supply.

12:55And that's kind of raising the prices all around for everybody. Yeah, it's not just raising the prices. It's literally we're running out of diesel. If you go to various gas stations, I've seen pictures of this in North Texas, in California, and some in Florida, like diesel, usually you see the price, but they're just they just write out like or zero, zero, zero, because there just is no diesel. We are in an absolutely huge fuel crunch right now. All right, my stock of the week is cybersecurity, a sector that is one of the few beneficiaries of AI potentially wiping out humanity. This week, cybersecurity stocks boomed after AI leaders pledged to slow down development of cutting edge models, setting the risk that the technology could become smarter than humans and bring down civilization.

13:38CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks, the two leaders in the field, have gained 17 % and 10 % respectively, while other players in the space like Okta, Zscaler, and SentinelOne also saw double-digit gains. The bullish case is that facing unprecedented cyber threats, companies are now going to spend more to protect themselves, boosting the fortunes of the security firms. These stocks have been doing well for a while. Both Palo Alto and CrowdStrike have doubled so far this year. But Anthropics CEO Dario Amade's blog post over the weekend warning that AI agents could take over the internet in as little as six months poured fuel on the fire.

14:12Palo Alto CEO Nikesh Arora told the Goldman Sachs conference, I spent eight years trying to convince people cybersecurity is important. Dario did it in one week. Better than me, clearly. We have pretty wild to work in a field where robot apocalypse is your best marketing. Yeah, I think cybersecurity companies are probably the only ones kind of welcoming this news. But people think that these attacks are something that we're preparing for, but they're already here. Boston Consulting Group surveyed 300 CISOs in 2026 and found 89 % of companies reported AI-enabled attacks in the past year. And 35 % say that those attacks caused them significant financial or operational impact.

14:52So this is already a problem that companies are facing, and they're having to spend a lot of money to try to combat it. In that same survey, they found that cyber spending rose 12 % in 2025. So AI is expanding the cybersecurity challenge faster than budgets and security teams can keep up with it. And what's great for CrowdStrike and Palo Alto is they're not just being called in when there is an attack at the moment. They're being called in at the inception of these models. So Anthropic and OpenAI, they call in cybersecurity firms at the very beginning as they're making these models to do some checks on them and see how they're...

15:33Obviously, maybe it doesn't work so well, but what they're saying now is we are going to call in more third parties to look at our models as they are being created so we don't make any mistakes when we release them to the wild. That is only increasing the business fortunes of these cybersecurity companies. So, yeah, when you see the headlines like robotic apocalypse coming, it's less that more than just like a regular AI cyber attack that could wipe out a lot of computers and make life difficult for everybody working around the world. CrowdStrike, if you remember that name, a few years ago, there was that blue screen of death all over the world because they had a bug.

16:09And so you see what happens when CrowdStrike goes down. It's more of that operational security risk rather than ending of humanity kind of threat. But either way, these companies are absolutely ripping right now. And along with the rest of the market, we should say the stock market had a really great day overall yesterday. We're going to take a quick break. But up next, why women are increasingly turning down bridesmaids proposals. Toby, what do you do with a great product, but your brand can't seem to connect with customers? Uh, beg? No, don't beg, but do check out Rising Stars. It's a docuseries that follows small business owners as they create their businesses, face real challenges, and scale their brands with the help of Amazon ads.

16:49Like Crown Skin, they couldn't connect with customers in men's grooming until sponsored products on Amazon ads helped them reach the right audiences. Now they're doing over$500 ,000 in monthly revenue. Watch now at advertising.amazon.com slash rising dash stars. That's advertising.amazon.com slash rising dash stars. A very guten Morgen to do, Neil. Very good, Toby. But why are we speaking German? Because I just snagged breakfast at Berlin Currywurst. And thanks to Square, they were uber fast. Square is the easy way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, manage staff, and keep everything running in one place.

17:28Plus, built-in tools like loyalty and marketing to help reward customers and keep them coming back. Get up to$200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com slash go slash morningbrewdaily. That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash go slash morningbrewdaily. September is World Alzheimer's Month, but most people never check their brain health until something's feeling off or wrong. That's why we joined Function to check our numbers before brain fog became normal. Your focus and mental stamina leave a data trail in your blood and Function tracks it, like how high homocysteine can be linked to brain fog and cognitive decline risk.

18:05Or how magnesium supports nerve signaling and focus under stress. Plus, Function members can add on a brain-related add-on test like Alzheimer's detection test. Check your brain and health like us. Function provides over 160 lab tests for$1 a day and member pricing on advanced imaging. Join at functionhealth.com slash brew and use code brew25 for a$25 credit. That's functionhealth.com slash brew code brew25. Neil, peak wedding season is here and lucky for your wallet, you will never be a bridesmaid. Being asked to be a bridesmaid is quite the honor, but it's also become a financial negotiation.

18:43A BF polling survey found nearly one in four women who've been a bridesmaid have considered turning the roll down purely over cost. And among women 25 to 34, that jumps to more than one in three. It's not hard to see why. The cost of being a bridesmaid has roughly tripled in the last two decades from around$900 in 2014 to about$3 ,000 today, according to professional bridesmaid for hire Jen Glantz. That number adds up fast between the dress, alterations, a bachelorette trip, a bridal shower, plus day of costs like travel, lodging, hair, makeup, and a gift. Beyond inflation, experts point to social media pressure turning weddings into multi-day, Instagram-worthy productions, bachelorette trips to Nashville or Napa instead of a single night out, with one wedding planner warning, the pressure to keep up with the Joneses is crazy.

19:30Some women are pushing back through practical means, too. Resale platform Vinted says searches for secondhand bridesmaid dresses are up 17 % year over year. Neil, always a bridesmaid, never the bride, has taken on a whole new meeting. It now means you're also broke. Bridesmaids for Hire. We should revisit that later. This extravagance starts as early as the bridesmaids proposal where brides-to-be are spending ungodly amounts on just asking their friends to be in the wedding party. There's this viral video from earlier this summer where one 25-year-old influencer, bride-to-be, is creating all these presents, wrapping these presents for asking these bridesmaids to be in her wedding party and their Lola travel blankets, roller rabbit, pink monkey pajamas, personalized stony clover pouches.

20:22I've never heard of these brands before, but apparently they are expensive because the entire comment section was saying, this is insane. Do you know how much money this is? They estimated it cost$1 ,700 per bundle or over$10 ,000 for six bridesmaids. So you're spending over$10 ,000 total just to ask people to be your bridesmaids. What expectation does that put on the people who are actually being a bridesmaid? You also have to go out above and beyond on the bachelorette party, the shower, everything else that comes with it. And that's just driving insane inflation across this wedding party business.

20:57Yeah, I have not had the privilege or burden of being asked to be a bridesmaid, but I have been a guest at weddings and guests in general are complaining that it's just becoming too expensive to even go attend a wedding. Gregory Gerla, a 36-year-old New York entrepreneur, said that he spent$10 ,000 attending 13 weddings in one year. And Emily Schatz, a 26-year-old in San Francisco, she spent even more on less weddings. She spent$15 ,000 on seven weddings and three bachelorette parties in the same period. So wedding spending rose 8.5 % in the first half of 2026 compared to the same period only last year, according to Bank of America Institute.

21:39And guest fatigue is measurable too. 57 % of respondents say that they would decline a wedding invitation from a close friend or relative purely for budget reasons. And that's up three points from last year. So. Wow. I think one of the issues here is that weddings have just gotten longer. According to the Knotts study this year, more than two thirds of weddings now last two to three days. I'm not trying to pick on Toby, but he just had his wedding. It was extensive and I had a great time, but it was Thursday night rehearsal dinner. Friday night welcome party. Yeah, we can talk about it. It's not here.

22:17Saturday night, the wedding. It is just a long, it's not just one day. It is a complete weekend thing, which drives up the cost for everyone. I was happy to pay. It was so much fun. Yeah, it was awesome. We talk about, okay, Jen Glantz is a bridesmaid for hire. She's been having this business since 2014 and she gets hired to be a professional bridesmaid. Basically, she's a stranger, but she makes up a backstory. She goes into the wedding party and she basically arranges things and gets all the gossip from other people. So what an interesting profession. She also said that the way things are going with this over-the-topness, she thinks that bridesmaids are going to be extinct within 10 years because it's just not sustainable what's happening.

23:04Let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. 198-year-old Merriam-Webster is doing its best, how-do-you-do fellow kids impression by adding 1 ,400 new words to its dictionary, including many internet-native phrases like looks-maxing, rickroll, and apropos to this time of the year, cuffing season. It also added a bunch of words that have become part of the modern lexicon, like chili crisp, shapewear, and yacht rock, though that did peak in the 80s. In an email to the New York Times, Merriam-Webster president Gregory Barlow said of the new words, There wasn't a theme, but we can see that online culture and social media increasingly generate new language.

23:38Conversation on social platforms creates fertile soil in which new words crop up and spread. Plus, the dictionary is no longer bound by literal physical binding, opening up infinite territory. Barlow said the online dictionary has limitless space to add all the words that merit inclusion, even if some words turn out to be relatively ephemeral, which is a word I think I need to look up. Yeah, I mean, I think Merriam-Webster should stick to words like ephemeral. I think that they can kind of keep the real word thing. And then this is why we have Urban Dictionary is for the online slang. But I also think internet slang is fun because it's kind of like if you know, you know.

24:15And if you have to go on Merriam-Webster to figure it out, it's like maybe you shouldn't know. Right. Like if I see something and I'm like, oh, looks maxing, what does that mean? And instead of asking you, who are like very internet native, I go to Merriam-Webster. You know, it's a bit odd, but I understand why they're doing it. They want to codify these things and give a resource. All right. Up next, a historic district in Seoul, South Korea, known for its late night food stalls, indie businesses, and traditional architecture, has been named the coolest neighborhood in the world by Time Out magazine.

24:46Jong No Sam Ga topped the annual list of 40 cool neighborhoods compiled by Time Out, whose editors rank neighborhoods based on criteria like food, drink, nightlife, unique local businesses, livability, and community. Rounding out the top five, La Ocean District, a seaside neighborhood in Rabat, Morocco, Neos, Cosmos in Athens, Chinatown in Los Angeles, and Govan Hill in Glasgow, Scotland. Other American spots that made the top 40 are Westtown in Chicago, the financial district in New York, and the distillery district in Lexington, Kentucky. Yeah. As a native New Yorker, I don't know if I can trust this list because of the Fidei shout out.

25:23I mean, the historical nerd in me loves Fidei, but I don't know if it screams cool. I think what they're trying to do is name neighborhoods that you wouldn't necessarily think of or do something intentionally controversial. So we talk about it, but But yeah, I would agree that FIDI is not cool, but maybe what they're going after is like change, right? Like FIDI is, we just marked the 25 years after 9-11. People never thought that the downtown Manhattan would come back. And Financial District has really been booming by replacing a lot of these office buildings with apartments. Didn't know we were going to go on a crazy FIDI tangent.