America Unleashes “Economic D-Day” on Iran & US Open Faces Backlash Over Ticket Prices

marketers tell us if this sounds familiar you invest in something that seems incredible like millions of views but then don't see any revenue instead invest in what looks good to your cfo linkedin ads generates the highest row ads of all major ad networks spend 250 on your first campaign on linkedin ads and get a 250 credit just go to linkedin.com slash mbd that's linkedin.com slash mbd terms and conditions apply good morning brew daily show i'm neil fryman and i'm toby howell today the u.s open faces backlash over soaring ticket prices then blank street is taking their vc backed coffee business out to la it's tuesday august 25th let's ride imagine you're at home just trying to go about your life but you're not sure what to do you're not sure what to do you're not sure what to do imagine you're at home just trying to go about your life but you're not sure what to do imagine you're at home just trying to go about your life to supercharge its growth. I wonder if Blank Street can keep the appeal while scaling from hundreds to thousands of locations. I think that's appropriate comparison because they actually share an investor, Tiger Global, which is a huge investment firm, has invested in both Pop-Up Bagels and Blank Street. General Catalyst is the other big backer of Blank Street. And if I told you, okay, here's a company that General Catalyst and Tiger Global are backing, you'd probably say, okay, so it's a tech company from Silicon Valley. I mean, these companies invest in Airbnb, Stripe, Anthropic, OpenAI, companies like that. But here they go into a coffee company. And I think it speaks to what Blank Street is trying to be, which is a little bit more than a coffee company. It's this, yeah, what do they call it? Like a daily luxury brand where you come in, everything is so automatable and there's not a lot of human interaction. You go in and you get your matcha or ice cream and you leave. And it's just this very efficient, efficient process that no doubt was started by, or no coincidence was started by a bunch of tech entrepreneurs. There is some secret sauce to Blank Street's model. One, as you mentioned, they have invested a lot in technology. They have automatic espresso machines that can produce eight espresso shots at once in as many as 700 shots per hour. It's just faster than most other coffee shop chains. A lot of these LAites that were being interviewed by the LA Times were like, yeah, I love my specialty. Coffee shop, but it takes so long to get a cup of coffee there these days. Go to Blank Street. It arrives much quicker. And the other thing that they've done very well is kind of put themselves into culture. The company describes its design philosophy as tofu in cigarettes, where tofu is like the simple, sleek, clean and restrained. Cigarettes are energetic, fun, and a little bit weird. I was just educated. That is also a Gwyneth Paltrow phrase right there. And they're just really good at doing fashion stuff as well. They invented a tiny, puffer jacket for an ice drink. They debuted what they called the sleeve globally during London Fashion Week. So they just kind of understand how to navigate the culture of today in addition to getting you your coffee in a reasonable amount of time. And they've also become a verb or an adjective in a negative sense because I hear people talk about the blank streetification of certain neighborhoods where it's super bland. It has that Silicon Valley tech aesthetic where there's not much going on. There's not a lot of, a lot of personality to these particular locations. And when a blank street moves into your neighborhood, you know, it's a little bit cooked. So blank street, you know, obviously a ton of people want in. They're expanding like crazy, but also there is some backlash to what it does to the character of local neighborhoods when it comes in. All right, moving on. Tennis fans have found an even more sinister enemy than pickleball, their own US Open. As fan week kicks off in the sports final major, tennis lovers are sounding off against soaring ticket prices that are putting this once affordable New York pastime out of reach. Weekday grounds passes are $65, but those face value tickets were scooped up long ago when they were first released in May. Now on the secondary market, the average get in price is about $311 compared to 262 a year ago. If you want to be guaranteed a seat in one of the stadiums, just a place to park your butt, that'll run you even more. And good luck scoring a ticket to the championship match. Center court tickets for the men's final have risen above $21,000 on secondary websites. The growing backlash has put the USTA, the organization running the tournament, on the back foot. It's a nonprofit whose mission is to increase accessibility to tennis and grow the game across the country. And for decades, the US Open lived up to that promise, giving fans the opportunity to get up close and personal with the best players at a reasonable price point. But as you no doubt have noticed, in the past few years, the US Open has become a cultural juggernaut drawing celebrities and influencers, while at the same time, demand for live experiences has skyrocketed. Many say that's leaving, the regular middle-class tennis fan on the outside looking in. I mean, it is a brutal display of supply and demand. One buyer who was just trying to get a little ticket to a general admission posted a screenshot showing 430,000 people were ahead of them in the virtual queue for men's singles final tickets. So just the sheer amount of people who want access to this event cannot keep up with, you know, the prices that are being offered right now. So when you have a resale market that allows, unrestricted markups, you're going to see these prices start to balloon. And it's a story we've been talking about all summer, really. Think about how much World Cup tickets we're going for. It's just the demand is there. So prices are going to meet that demand rise and meet that demand. So you can complain about it unless you start passing down laws and rules around resale market. It's going to keep exploding because so many people want these tickets. So here's the USTA response. They say that accessibility is at the core of the beginning, of our strategy. Our vision is to be the most inspirational and captivating sports entertainment event in the world. They also point to Fan Week, which is happening this week, which most of the tickets or access there is completely free. You can see the qualifying tournament, mixed doubles, exhibition nights. A spokesperson said, you can see Djokovic on Arthur Ashe playing a practice match against another top 10 player for free in the first row. That's like no other sport that I can think of. And I do think they have a point because think about going to a live, a live event these days, whether it's a concert or an NBA game that runs you 200, 300, 400, $500. And when you go to the US Open, it begins at 11 a.m. and runs potentially in the first week. It could go late into the night. So if you're spending $300 in terms of a cost per hour basis, a ticket is actually a bargain. But for me and a bunch of other tennis fans who remember the golden days of 10, 15 years ago, where you could get in for 50, 60, 70, $80. It just represents what maybe what the US Open has become, which is like a bastardization of this once affordable egalitarian tennis tournament. Especially too, the USTA has approved credentials for close to 100 content creators to attend. That says everything right there. It does. I mean, you talked about like how it's become this Instagrammable event and the fact that they are dedicating a lot of their time and energy to catering to creators and influencers rather than the normal person. That also has rubbing people, it's rubbing people the wrong way. But also I did notice the USTA has started credentialing podcasts as well. So maybe, just maybe we'll be part of the problem. I don't know if they'll have us after this particular segment. Good point, good point. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's trends right after this. Meet Amazon Ads rising star, Daryl Spencer, who set out to redefine men's self-care with his brand, Crown Skin. Amazon Ads helped him grow. I walked away from big tech to build a luxury brand in a category that no one was paying attention to. With the help of Amazon Ads, I'm reaching the top. I'm reaching relevant audiences and competing with the biggest names in men's grooming. We've scaled to over $500,000 in monthly revenue. Watch Crown Skin's story at advertising.amazon.com slash rising dash stars. Cybersecurity as we know it is dead. It's a figure of speech, but the truth is the old model was built on protection, safety nets, recovery plans, systems designed to withstand the last era and maintain the status quo. The AI era demands confidence that you can secure and accelerate your business operations so nothing stops your momentum. Rubrik can give you that confidence. Their singular platform is designed to secure your data, control your AI, and protect your identity built as one architecture, not stitched together after the fact. To learn more, head to rubrik.com slash mb. That's R-U-B-R-I-K dot com slash mb. Neil, you know how parents always get loads of unsolicited advice about kids? I believe it, but I can't say I've experienced it. Wait, are you expecting, uh. No, for clothes you can actually count on, there's Little Sleepies. Real moms created Little Sleepies with clothing designed for the realities of daily life with babies and kids, plus super soft, super stretchy fabrics and no scratchy tags. Snag some for the kids in your life at littlesleepies.com. That's littlesleepies.com. Neil, I'm looking at my phone right now. I have. 515 unread text messages. It is overwhelming being this popular, but it's also got me thinking about using one of those slow messaging apps that have taken the internet by storm, a trend I want to talk about on today's edition of Toby's Trends. Take Carrier Pidge, for example. It's an app that lets users send messages via digital pigeons that fly at the actual speed of pigeons. You can track your little bird as it makes its way across the physical distance that separates you from your loved ones. It separates you and your recipient, bringing my good morning text to Neil from Chelsea to Williamsburg. Developed by 29-year-old software engineer Noah Irabino, the funniest part is your pigeon can get lost or die along the way, adding an air of unpredictability to your communications and a revenue stream for Irabino since a replacement bird costs 99 cents. Roost is another similar app that expands the idea from just pigeons to include 1,000 animal messengers, including a white Italian snail that goes at just over one mile an hour. The thesis of these slow communication apps is that life has gotten too frictionless and fast for our own good. By making a message take a day to reach your friend instead of a millisecond, you might spend a little more time crafting what it has to say and a little more time digesting it as the recipient. Clearly, the idea is resonating. Roost hit 650,000 downloads last month, while Carrier Pidge went from a couple hundred users to over 75,000 after a viral page. post on X. Neil, would getting a breakup text delivered via bar owl make it better or worse it would be a hoot for sure i mean is this the first moment in history where we've tried to slow down human communication for humans for thousands of years we tried to talk to each other faster we had the pony express we had the telegraph we had the telephone we had railroads we wanted to talk to each other faster now that we can do that instantaneously a lot of people in the slow tech movement are saying actually maybe that has had negative societal consequences and we need to slow things down and talk to each other more intentionally and these guys came in with pigeon apps and said maybe this is the way to do it whether you think it's a gimmick or something that can last long term uh remains to be seen but i do kind of find it funny that there's these two apps happened around the same time they say it's two guys from new york who both worked in tech and they developed concurrently these pigeon uh sending apps and they both say yeah we thought we launched it independently we had no knowledge of the of each other so maybe it's one of those quirks of history where two but people had the same inspiration for some reason at the same time i mean the basic concept isn't new either you go back to the mid 2010s slowly is a pen pal app that does geographically delayed messaging so this idea has been in the ether for a while now uh the other thing too is that there's clearly demand for it right now 80 of gen z adults are worried their generation relies too heavily on tech knowledge it's not like they don't have technology cal newport talks a lot about adding friction into your life he is an author he says uh the human brain cannot function well in a friction free world when your information is constantly arriving and instantly it overwhelms your ability to switch attention so people have been adopting these apps and started writing very funny to their friends because it's not just a you don't send kk as a text message people have said that they started writing in like bridgerton language where they say dearest neil it has been a long time since i've last seen you because this is arriving via bird and just like the fact that the bird could not make it just add some fun to it as well some uh relationships who live in manhattan together they're like yeah that's how i text my boyfriend now it just makes it more fun so i can clearly see how it's both fun and needed in today's information environment yeah i think olivia mcdonald who was quoted in the new york times summed it up a little bit best she said some things are better when they're worse however i want to point out sending things to a pigeon is not necessarily worse there's this famous story back in 2009 of a south african financial services company named unlimited it and they were fed up with the internet speed in south africa at the time it was super slow so they put this test out they sent a homing pigeon about 50 miles away with a memory card attached to its leg and then they also sent the same data via internet so the homing pigeon which was named winston got there in an hour and a half hour and eight minutes and then it took another hour to upload all the data okay so it took about two hours and eight minutes by that time the internet had only transmitted four percent of the exact same file so just because it's a bird doesn't mean it can always uh lose to the internet these days a joy of learning about these apps was we learned how carrier pigeons work as well carrier pigeons are actually not carrier pigeons they're more homing pigeons because they are raised in a particular location which is essentially they are inbonded and they're you then physically transport those pigeons somewhere else and then a person possessing your pigeon can attach a message and that's why they're called homing pigeons it will fly back to where it was raised you cannot just have pigeons flying from one location to a location of your desire they can really only go in one direction which is back home which i did not know i actually never knew how carrier and homing pigeons worked so some people were you know had a bone to pick with these apps because they're like you can't be sending them willy-nilly they they all have to be raised in their respective areas and they're not going to be raised in their respective areas and inboxes so just another useless fact that maybe will come in handy one day all right let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines president trump up the ante in his trade war with canada saying the u.s will impose 50 tariffs on canadian autos and parts come january 1st 2027 the threat came two days after canada's prime minister mark carney announced dollar for dollar retaliatory tariffs on the u.s which slapped tariffs on 20 billion dollars worth of canadian goods on saturday currently the u.s has 25 tariffs on canadian vehicles rebates for u.s made content that goes into those cars doubling that to 50 could put auto plants north of the border out of business the canadians though seem prepared to sacrifice for the larger cause of defying trump yesterday ontario premier doug ford said of the president he underestimates canada we're all in up here we're at a fever pitch everyone's in for an economic war this war of the words has also been escalating just as quickly as the trade war has uh ford referred to himself as a big dude instead of trump i have a lot of real estate on my butt so he has a lot of room to kiss my butt i'm putting but in uh in the replace of another word and then trump fired back with someone should get these clowns to fall in line or the consequences for canada will be far worse feels like ford won that round right there ford has also invoked uh ronald reagan saying that he would be throwing up over trump's tariff policies right now so this is going back and forth and again these actual tariffs are going back and forth and again these actual tariffs are going back and again these actual tariffs are going back and forth and again these actual tariffs at the u.s uh put in place go into effect in january so there's going to be a lot more squabbling a lot more talking before any meaningful economic impacts happens but in the meantime we've got a good show on our hands we need to square off in the hockey rink again yes absolutely elbows up moving on remember bitcoin it's okay if you don't it's been performing worse than that time i had phlegm in my throat for over a month but in a blink and you missed it rally the world's biggest since 2023 after languishing through the summer near the sixty thousand dollar range it is closing in on eighty thousand dollars after a twenty percent jump some tailwinds have come courtesy of the bond action we've been talking about as treasury purchases ramped up and yields fell a little investors suddenly remembered bitcoin exists bitcoin ets attracted 1.9 billion dollars in inflows over the last week their biggest haul since october neil it's probably been almost a year since we've mentioned bitcoin outside of the stock market and it's been a long time since we've mentioned bitcoin outside of the stock market and it's been a long time since we've mentioned bitcoin outside the odd trump administration policy but it is storming back it's never wise to write off bitcoin and we're seeing a revival of what's called the debasement trade which is the investor investor community worrying that large government deficits and aggressive spending by governments will weaken fiat currencies like the u.s dollar and give a boost to alternative currencies like bitcoin so we're seeing that after besant's move last week to prop up the bond market there's also another reason seems like there's a shortfall in the bond market and it's a shortfall in the bond market and it's a shortfall in the bond market and it's a shortfall in the bond market and it's a shortfall in the bond market and it's a short squeeze going on which leaves some investors and analysts questioning whether this rally does have legs but for bitcoin people i mean it was down about 40 to 50 percent below its record highs from october 25 2025 for the last six seven eight nine months so the fact that we're just talking about it again as usually good news for bitcoin because it typically goes up when you just talk about it all right finally the nfl season doesn't start for a few weeks but the san francisco 49ers have already recorded a loss of the bond market that's because the team owner jed york whose family is worth 8.5 billion dollars was arrested on sunday in an ohio trailer park for allegedly trying to pay 140 for sex according to the california post he was taken into custody on sunday after being nabbed in a sting operation run by the mahoning valley human trafficking task force york cut a plea deal with prosecutors pleading no contest to lesser charges of disorderly conduct and possessing criminal tools the tool being the cell phone used to reply to a prostitution advertisement york joins a long list of ultra wealthy sports owners who've been caught up in the law some for more high level white collar misdeeds but others for more prosaic crimes obviously york and the nfl are trying to clear this up since it's big reputational risks for both of them but so is the trailer park where he was arrested which according to fox claims it is a victim of circumstances its facebook account posted that it was not being used in the sting operation but rather that's where cops happened to catch up to york it is never the case for a good sign when a trailer park is trying to distance itself from you as a billionaire nfl owner and meanwhile the residents where this happened was east palestine ohio and if you remember that name it's the same really small town in ohio where there was that train derailment a few years ago that spilled toxic chemicals and they had to evacuate and there was a huge controversy over that train derailment so the people there are like oh my god we're in the national news all the time can we just get some peace and quiet over here now we have the billionaire owner of the san francisco 49ers being arrested for uh a prostitute or ledge prostitution uh here in our town so hopefully they they're just like can we just be out of the headlines for a minute all right that is all the time we have thanks for starting your morning with us have a wonderful tuesday if you're free tonight there are still a few discounted tickets available for a comedy show toby and i are participating in with our much more hilarious co-workers head to the link in the show notes for 20 off and we'll see you at the bell house in brooklyn later tonight to show you your thoughts on the episode or anything else send an email to morning brew daily at morning brew.com or dm us on instagram at mb daily show let's roll the credits emily milliron is our supervising producer raymond luke is our senior producer our producer is olivia graham and our associate producer is olivia lake technical direction by nina miller hair and makeup must be traveling to work via carrier pigeon because it's taking a long time devin emery is our president and our show is a production of morning brew great show today neil let's run it back tomorrow Thank you. the following is a paid advertisement toby do you have a personal philosophy yes everyone should have more money new york life's protection powered growth philosophy might align with yours then it explores how protection can serve as a strategic foundation for long-term financial success that enables future opportunities their approach brings protection and growth together helping clients build confidence through every stage of life to learn more head to newyorklife.com slash protection dash powered dash growth that's newyorklife.com slash protection dash powered dash growth