(upbeat music) - Good morning, Brujalee Show. I'm Neil Freeman. - And I'm Toby Howell. - Today, meet the busiest Uber Eats restaurant in the world. - Then Meta is releasing smart glasses without the creepy cameras. It's Thursday, September 24th. Let's ride. (upbeat music) - In not too long, you'll be able to take off in New York City and land in Sydney, Australia. That is, if you're willing to spend 18 hours on a plane, this week, Quantus announced the first ever non-stop service between Sydney and New York set to begin in the middle of 2028. It's the second leg of the airline's project Sunrise, which aims to connect the far away continent to major Western capitals. The first coming next year is a flight between Sydney and London, which will take longer than the New York one at 22 hours. To make these grueling journeys possible, Quantus has acquired a dozen special air buses equipped with an extra fuel tank holding nearly 50, 300 gallons. There will also be a well-being zone where you can stretch out, grab a snack, or even watch a guided exercise video. Toby, need your 18 hour breakdown. How much sleeping, how much reading, how many movies? - Well, first of all, you can listen to about 36 episodes of Morning Brew Daily. In case you've fallen about a month behind on your schedule, you could also run six marathons if you go sub three. You might annoy some of your passengers, but in reality, you're probably gonna watch some movies. So why not watch all of the Godfather trilogy? All the way through twice. You could also do what our producer Emily did who actually did just fly 19 hours to Singapore. She watched all three of the Shrek movies, so if that's more your speed. And now a word from our sponsor, Roku Ads Manager, Neil. A $5,000 reward sounds pretty nice, wouldn't she say? - I think it depends on what it's a reward for. If $5,000 is my reward for eating some weird bug, Amen. But if it's for getting a misspelled tattoo, that probably pass. - Well, the $5,000 I'm talking about is for advertisers. Right now they can get a $5,000 match on their first spend on Roku Ads Manager. - Roku is the top smart TV operating system in the US with 100 ad-supported streaming channels. So I'd say that $5,000 is a worthwhile reward. - To cash in on the offer, use code
[email protected]/mbd. That's
[email protected]/mbd. Medicare into yesterday's connect conference was something it hasn't had in the AI race for a while now, momentum. It's a new personal (audio cuts out) while AI agent Muse has a rocket into number one on the app store with its shares falling suit, ripping more than 20% since Muse launched for their best month in more than a decade. Zuck started things off by debuting smart glasses that are a little less creepy. After years of privacy concerns around people unknowingly being recorded, Meta unveiled a $349 rate ban audio glasses that ditched the camera entirely. You still get music calls and Muse AI just without everyone wondering if they're being surveilled. Then Zuck went after Apple. Meta unveiled new VR glasses that weighed just 100 grams and cost $1,300, roughly 1/6th the weight in 60% cheaper than Apple's $3,500 Vision Pro. The capability still go toe-to-toe with Apple though, including hand in eye tracking and a 5K display. Mark Goerman, a Bloomberg reporter who primarily covers Apple, summed it up on X saying they are incredible. And finally, Zuck pulled a page from Steve Jobs's playbook with a one more thing moment at the end where he unveiled the Muse Charm, a sort of physical pendant representation of your AI agent that gives Tomagotchi vibes. The tiny keychain device gives you a dedicated way to talk to Muse throughout the day as Meta tries to give you multiple ways to interact with your agent, not just on your phone. Neil, Meta spent years burning tens of billions of dollars trying to convince everyone that the Metaverse was the future, but it seems like it wasn't all for not. It stumbled into taking the lead and building hardware for the AI agent instead. - Reviews of this were ecstatic. Tech Journalists were comparing this to the Apple hardware rollouts of old vision, creativity, experimental, whimsical. It's certainly way more compelling at what Apple rolled out earlier this month. That is absolutely music to Zuck's ears. Apple has been the thorn in a side for decades. He has hated that you have to go to the iPhone to access Instagram, to access WhatsApp, to access Facebook. And now he's trying to create a new computing platform, whether it's glasses or this Tomagotchi style thing in your pocket where you can access this for now ultra-popular AI. So Zuck has had a great night last night. A lot of people thought that this Meta hardware rollout was really visionary. - It all goes back to Mews too. Whether they knew it's gonna be as big of a hit as it has become, Mews is just everywhere throughout this ecosystem at this point where one of the things that they highlighted was the new Rayban Meta Oakley glasses that runners like you can knock out your to-do list while on a run by saying, "Hey, book me a massage after this. What time is the kid's soccer practice? You have this way to interact with it everywhere now instead of just on your phone. That's why you saw this pendant being rolled out. It's not necessarily gonna be the new form factor that's gonna take over from the smartphone, but it's maybe a way for kids to have a cute little emoji icon thing on their back back and talk to it. You never know what's gonna happen as long as you give people different ways to interact with something that previously was gate kept by their phone. So now it's on your face. It's on your key chain, it's on your phone. It's everywhere and that's exactly how Zuck wants it. - Maybe we're seeing a split screen reaction though because in Silicon Valley, everyone is applauding Meta for this visionary hardware and Mews and is using Mews for literally everything to book their appointments, book reservations. Out in the rest of the country, there is widespread antagonism toward Meta and backlash to especially their glasses that have these cameras attached. They've even earned the moniker pervert glasses because there've been many instances of men going up to women and filming them without their consent. A bunch of bars, restaurants, hospitality venues, all around the world have banned these glasses. Meta is loaded with privacy concerns in a recent survey by Oppenheimer. Just 8% of US consumers would trust Meta with their passwords. So it's very interesting to see this play out where Silicon Valley is all rallying around Meta's new hardware division while maybe the broader population is still very skeptical that they would wanna give Meta a lot of their data even though they probably already have and use these glasses that have cameras, which is why one reason why Meta rolled out these new glasses that don't have cameras. - I think it's fascinating to the business plan behind Mews because right now it's very expensive to run. People are querying it for their restaurant reservations, whatever they're doing and Meta's basically giving you that for free right now. So what is the money-making idea? Zucker on stage and said, "We believe Mews will make you money. "We're standing behind this by making it free "for a huge number of tokens. "Over time, we will profit by taking a small fee "from transactions." One of the key use cases so far has been go through my email history, cancel all subscriptions that are redundant or that I'm not using. People have been posting, I've saved thousands of dollars on this. They think that might be the business model. The fact that Mews can save you money or help make you money potentially by selling off some of your stuff on marketplace, whatever it is, they think they're gonna take a little slice of that and everybody wins. We'll see if that vision comes to fruition, but it's a very interesting approach to making money with Mews. - The bottom line from Connect, I think Meta has definitely stolen the hardware spotlight from Apple at least for now. Diesel prices have gotten so out of hand that President Trump thinks we need to keep it all for ourselves. Politico reported yesterday that his administration is preparing to ban diesel exports abroad for 90 days, a controversial high-wire act that many in his own cabinets say would backfire spectacularly and outrage the U.S. energy companies who've backed him. The White House called the report fake news and Fox heard that the administration was backing away from the idea. Still, with the midterms just weeks away, what Trump desperately wants is line go down on the diesel price chart. As a result of the energy crunch in the Middle East in Russia, storing diesel costs are squeezing the wallets of American consumers and businesses, particularly farmers who use diesel to power every part of their operations. On Wednesday, the average price for diesel was a record 652 a gallon, up 91 cents from a month ago, and up from 238 a year ago. Most agree that American diesel prices would fall initially should Trump announce a ban on exports. All the diesel that was supposed to head to foreign markets would get pumped back into the U.S. boosting supply and dampening the price. That's what happens after that, where you see economists, the oil industry and members of Trump's inner circle all get worried about the unintended consequences of an export ban, which they say will over the long run send fuel prices ratcheting back up. Just last week, Interior Secretary Doug Bergham said, quote, "We would consider an export ban if we thought that actually might lower prices, but that's not the case." Toby tons of opposition to this, but Trump feels like he needs to do something when it comes to diesel. No one really denies the fact that diesel prices would initially go down, especially in certain regions of America, especially in the Gulf region where a glut would hit the market. But where it gets complicated is the fact that refineries, they don't just make diesel. It's not just, hey, here's our diesel plant. They actually turn crude into a lot of different products. It's gasoline. It's jet fuel in addition to diesel. If refineries suddenly can't sell as much of that diesel as they are used to, the economics of running a refinery completely changed. And actually, what you might incentivize
them to do is produce less diesel and produce less gasoline and produce less jet fuel, which is not good because we need more of it right now. So that's the second order effect. Yes, initially a glut would come onto the market in the United States lower prices, but going forward, it would really warp things economically speaking. Yeah. So on Tuesday, Trump endorsed the idea of a ban on diesel exports, but then the oil industry has mounted a furious campaign behind closed doors and actually in public to get this not to happen because they absolutely hate this idea. When refiners cut back, that means they're buying less crude oil from these companies. So you have all these industry trade groups, plus the Chamber of Commerce writing a very angry, not angry letter, but a very, you know, sternly worded letter to the Trump administration saying, please do not do this. This would be catastrophic. Quote, we urge you to reject calls to ban or otherwise limit the exports of diesel and other products. Export bans would lead to less fuel production, tighter supplies and rising costs for American families, farmers and truckers. But the other side of this is Trump is getting a lot of pressure specifically from Republican senators and governors in farm states who say, we need, you need to address diesel because this is getting out of hand. Chuck Grassley really lit the match. He is the, he is a senator from Iowa saying that, you know, diesel prices is killing farmers income and I wanted to bring an example of what that actually means. So I saw this TV segment on a farmer in Iowa. He has almost 10,000 acres of feedlot with 12,000 head of cattle. He uses 800 gallons of diesel a day. So rising prices are costing this guy $75,000 more in just diesel prices every month. Multiply that. But like for all of the farmers that are across the United States and you can see why Trump feels the pressure to do something. It's brutal and it could have knock on effects for decades to come because, again, the administration wants more US refining capacity in general. But refineries are very big investments. They literally take tens of 20s of years to come online. If you are an investor, you're look at what Washington is doing right now. Maybe preventing you from selling your products on the global market. Do you really want to go down that path? Do you really want to invest in making a big refinery come online? So that is the question here. Even if you shake confidence just a little bit, you might be hurting your production decades on in the future. One final unintended consequence that we need to talk about is this would create a two tiered market between the US and every other country. And so Europe would get absolutely slammed by, obviously, you know, you think of an export ban not going to foreign markets. It would be bad for them. It would absolutely be bad for them would create a ton of geopolitical tensions between the US and our allies in Europe and other parts of the globe because their prices would spike. We already saw that yesterday on this report of the ban potentially coming into place, diesel prices in Europe jumped as much as 7% Europe in anticipation of this happening. We'll see whether it comes to pass. Let's move on. It's been a rough year for McDonald's. So it's thrown in a half billion dollars at the problem. Yesterday, Mick Danks laid out a plan called next to return some luster to the golden arches. Next goes after every part of the restaurant experience. Once you modernize stores for the delivery aids by putting in designated mobile order pick-up spots, playplaces and dining rooms will also get a facelift too. And the food department McDonald's is tripling down on chicken, hoping a new hand-bredded option will help offset higher beef prices. It will also introduce more specialty drinks and breakfast options too. But you can't spend eight and a half billion without looping in some AI. So get ready to meet Archie, a Google-powered AI drive-through ordering assistant. The back of the house is also getting AI injected as well with a system called Arch IQ expected to bring efficiency gains. Well, it's a nice plan. The burden of execution will fall on franchise owners at an expected cost of $800,000 a restaurant. That's the stick. The carrot is that the upgrades are expected to add roughly $100,000 in annual cash flow for the average U.S. restaurant according to the company's CFO. You know, I've seen a lot of people comparing Nike and McDonald's these days to iconic brands who just can't quite seem to find their stride. The company stock is down 21% this year is coming off its slowest quarterly growth since last year and fell in additional 4% yesterday is next enough to write McDonald's a ship. I would be a little hesitant to compare McDonald's to Nike. In some sense, like Nike has certainly not, you can't eat Nike, has certainly not executed well. I think the general consensus that they've stumbled have a lot of errors. McDonald's on the other hand, you can look at their execution and said, honestly, this is pretty good stuff. You are just in a very tough market right now with inflation and just people cutting back GLP1s changing diner habits. So this is just a broader problem. But where I would say Nike and McDonald's have similarities is that they're both operating an environment where their broader industry is just not seeing a lot of growth. It's pretty stagnant. So McDonald's grew 0.8% sales in the first quarter, right? It's just basically flat and all the other fast food restaurants say, yeah, we're basically seeing flat or declining foot traffic. So what McDonald's needs to do and the CEO completely recognizes this is in a flat market, you need to steal market share from your competitors. That's the only way you can grow. So they're leaning into chicken to go after Chick-fil-A. They're leaning to beverages. They're the second biggest coffee purveyor in the world. They want to become number one. So they're treading into Starbucks and Dunkins and seven brews turf. So this is the way they think they need to grow is by stealing market share from competitors. I will push back a little bit on the execution side of things because one thing that the executives said about like the previous couple of quarters says that they may be leaned too heavily on promotions. Remember, this was a money maker, like the Travis Scott meal, the every insert celebrity here meal. There was tons of those. And McDonald's for a while loved that because it wrote it to growth. But now they're saying that it's leading to inadequate customer service because there's just too many promotions. It takes too long to cobble together these specialty meals all the time. So they're saying, we're going to simplify things a little bit. And you are right. They are very conscious of the fact that GLP ones are going to affect their business. And so our leaning heavily into an menu that they think GLP one users would like. Crispy chicken bowl, grilled chicken snack wrap. One of the biggest requests that they got is for grilled chicken to come back. There's also a burger bowl and egg bites for breakfast. These are intriguing ideas. We'll see which ones actually manifest on their menu. But they know that 84% of ULS households with a GLP one user visiting McDonald's, they better have meals for them to enjoy. One lever they can pull that I think will make them a lot of money is advertising. So a bunch of retail outlets have started to do this. Walmart, Amazon, Uber, they've all lean into advertising. They say that every company becomes an ad company down the line. Looks like McDonald's is also doing that. They have piloted a program at 450 company on restaurants that began last month where they're putting ads for separate businesses on their drive through chains. So that think about how much money that can make. They say 85% of the U.S. population visits to McDonald's once a year. They have 14,000 locations across the U.S. and if they plaster ads on the drive through as you're going on, I mean, they could easily turn out that switch and make a lot of money. If I'm Burger King, I'm buying up all the advertising space. Am I wrong there? And also, I'm just closing the circle here. When's Nike going to start putting ads on their shoes? At some point, every industry becomes an ad industry. All right. We're going to take a quick break and come back with Niels numbers right after this. Every day, shareholders meet to discuss important matters about the companies you invest in. Now, you can easily make your voice heard too. Vanguard investor choice makes it easy to set your proxy voting preference for your eligible Vanguard index funds. In just a few clicks, you can have a say on important shareholder topics like executive pay and director elections. Visit Vanguard.com/investorchoice to learn more. It's your shares. It's your voice. It's easy. Vanguard investors own shares of their index funds and those funds own shares of the companies they invest in. Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor. Deal. You ever stay in one of those hotels where you sleep in a human size birdcage? No. Well, it's real sad. Sounds like you can use business preferences from Hotels.com. It helps travelers find the right hotel faster by remembering their go-to work trip requirements. 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Welcome to Neal's Numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will melt your brain like a Derek Trucks guitar solo. For my first number, I want to take you on a trip to the restaurant that does more delivery orders on Uber Eats than any other one on the globe, making it possibly the world's busiest restaurant. Any thoughts on what kind of place it would be or where? In fact, It is a family run Indian Pakistanis.
joint named "Augas" located in a strip mall in the suburbs of Houston, inside a reported. This place is an absolute machine, they serve more than 4,000 diners a day in their physical restaurant and whip up about 1,600 takeout and delivery orders additionally equivalent to half a million per year according to the New York Times. To accommodate the crush, Augas has converted a storage room into a call center where a chunk of its 200-person workforce are constantly on the phone taking orders. It's gone to the point where drivers from 3rd party delivery apps almost exclusively deliver 4 Augas, one told the Times that 99% of his deliveries come from Augas earning $50,000 just from this restaurant over the past two years. So what's the secret sauce? Why is Augas such a juggernaut? For one, the prices are affordable, serving the mass market. To the market is big, with 655,000 South Asian residents living in the Houston area and 3 is customer loyalty, Augas has invested in becoming a linchpin of the community, a real local spot that people want to order from 1, 2, 3, 4 times a week. To be I think one of the owners, Shaukot and Meridia said it best, it's not a restaurant, it is a food factory, the amount of food we put out every day is absolutely mind boggling. And my favorite part is that they are so big that they have negotiated with the delivery apps to get better, sweetheart deals, Shaukot and Meridia said that they have persuaded DoorDash, Ubers and GrowHub to reduce their commissions and return for keeping the enormous volume that they bring to the platforms. He said we get deals that no one else in the entire world gets, we got to go visit. Absolutely. The one thing that they said though is they keep it very authentic in that- It's a little spicy, so I'm a little nervous, but we got to go. Yeah, I don't even know if they have a mild spicy option for you, but I was looking at the menu this morning. Most stuff is under $20, except for the goat entree, so we got one go and then we'll just go ham on the rest. Looks delicious. My second number is on the complete opposite side of the food spectrum, a bakery that just opened in New York City sells one thing, a loaf of sourdough rye that costs $60, $60 for one loaf of bread. This store, appropriately called rye, is the brainchild of Martin Hour, who's built up a minor baking empire in his native Austria and wanted to make a big splash state side. He made a splash, all right, with the city buzzing over whether any loaf of bread, no matter how tasty, was worthy of $60 of your hard-earned money. Reviews have been split, grub streets, Charlotte Druckmann said, "I have tried it, and I can report it is actually worth the price." Feel examined of Bloomberg was more cynical, writing that New Yorkers could probably find better bread for a fraction of the price while conceding the $60 loaf is better than supermarket bread. But maybe the quality of the bread made from a 57-year-old sourdough starter isn't really the point. It is the price. Sam had described the loaf not as a good but as a service catering to the wealthy leisure class who viewed the rye more as a status symbol on your counter or in an Instagram reel than nourishment. And unlike August, they don't deliver. I think that it is about the experience because if you go into rye, it's more of a show bakery. You go in for the experience of actually seeing how the bread is made. But honestly, the bread isn't even the most egregious price point within rye. If you want a baseball hat from there, $80, if you want a bread knife, $230, and then if you want a container to store your $60 loaf in, $480, clearly he's figured out that price is a lever that he can pull and people will buy it, but I'm not paying nearly $500 for a bread basket. From my final number, let's get off of food and talk about toys, which aren't really for kids anymore. Remarkably, toy sales among adult-only households are now outpacing toy sales among households with children, up 16% through June and accounting for 55% of the broader industry, according to Sir Cana. Catering to grown-ups has been great for business with toy sales for the first half of 2026, coming in the strongest in the past six years. This has been so good that Jeffrey the Giraffe has awakened from his coma nearly a decade after it filed for bankruptcy. Toys are us recently said it was going to open 120 standalone locations ahead of the holiday season, where you'll find 40-year-olds grappling with second graders for the last Lego build remaining on the shelf. So we've been tracking this trend of kittles for a while now, pretty striking. They've overtaken actual kids in buying toys. I mean, look at what Sir Cana says is the top toy brands that are selling Pokemon NFL FIFA HEMOB products, Marvel, Star Wars, and Lego. Those are all extremely adult-coded when it comes to collectors, so it's not surprising that a lot of people are buying baseball cards and Pokemon cards these days, but I do think it's got to be two-fold-one kids. They got iPads. We didn't have iPads growing up. Would you rather have one Barbie or would you rather have the entirety of the world's computing power at your fingertips? I think that kids are playing less with toys and those are playing more with toys because they are returning to analog. It's a two-sided sandwich that is causing more adults to shop at toys or else. By the way, we'd love to see a toys or else come back to talk about nostalgia there. They peaked out 1,000 locations, but even if we get 100 open up, I feel like it's going to start to become the spirit Halloween of the holiday season. We're like, "Oh, hey, a toy's our us, so it's good to see Jeffrey the draft back." All right, let's print to the finish with some final headlines. CNN, MSNOW, and Politico, take off your sweats and get off the bench, you're back in the game. Early this morning, a federal judge appointed by Trump ordered his administration to quote "immediately return reinstate and restore press credentials of the three outlets." Calling their band by the White House last week, likely unconstitutional since they weren't given advance notice and didn't have time to respond. The reprieve is temporary 14 days for now, but is a big win for news organizations who banded together to impose a semi-blackout on President Trump's activities in protest of his attacks on the free press. Earlier in this week, the White House signals it would appeal any ruling from the judge that wasn't in their favor. One immediate effect of this is that the outlets can come back in time to cover a very important visit to the White House that's happening today, which is when Trump will host Chinese leaders Xi Jinping, so we will not have a blackout White House when it comes to one of the more consequential meetings for the entire globe. Finally, price hikes are becoming an annual occurrence at Disney these days. The mouse is raising streaming prices for a fourth straight year. Add free Disney+ and Hulu are both jumping 13% to 21.49 a month, while their individual add supported plans rise 50 cents to 12.49. The strategy here looks like your mom's advice as we enter chili or fall, bundle up. Disney+ and Hulu together with ads is staying at 12.99, just 50 cents more than either service alone. If you want the add free bundle, it costs 21.99 versus nearly 43 if you subscribe separately. These price hikes have taken the streaming division at Disney from a money pit into a profit center, but I looked back just for good old times at the add free tier of Disney and what that used to cost 6.99 in 2019. Yeah. We had no idea how good we had it back then, because I think Apple even came out with Apple TV as 5.99 or something like that. I mean, death taxes and streamflation, three things you can be certain about. From 2021 to 2025, the average add free streaming service price jumped 54%, that is compared to broader inflation of 16%. And now you just have to what is the end point of all this, how expensive is too expensive? The US household spends $69 per month on streaming plans, not nice according to Deloitte's 2026 digital media trends. You know, have you started cutting back on streaming services because they've gone too expensive? I have. I was just looking at a recent survey by SoFi and basically about people's financial habits. And a vast majority of people admitted to only subscribing to streaming services for certain shows and then canceling. I think that is going to become just the new norm is like, Oh, I really want to watch widow's Bay. I'm going to subscribe to Apple for a month, watch it and then unsubscribe. That is happening at a more frequent rate. So there's going to be an equilibrium here as prices get higher, but people start churning more. Maybe we'll settle at a little bit lower than we are right now. The problem is I just have no idea which ones I'm actually signed into and what is already just on my TV and somebody else is signed into. So definitely using your brother's ESP in somewhere. You definitely are. I mean, I think the only one that I actually know that I pay for is HBO. But if I fire up Netflix or Paramount Plus, like I would not be surprised if I just got hit with a you don't pay for this, you are signed in. So, you know, I'm sure a lot of other people are in the same boat. And then if we are hit with that blocker saying, you're not subscribed to this, I don't think I'm going to pay whatever it is for Netflix anymore. That's the one. I'm not an Netflix guy. I will probably talk about Netflix coming up maybe a week, okay? That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Thursday to share your thoughts on the episode or anything else. Send an email to
[email protected] or DM us on Instagram @NBDailyShow. Let's roll the credits. Himalayan is our supervising producer Raymond Lue is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer is Olivia Lake, technical direction by Nina Miller. Heron Makeup is out for delivery. Devon Emory is our president and our show is a production of MorningBrew. Great show Daniel. Let's run it back tomorrow. What do water bottles and a skincare brand have in common? Before you say more hydrated skin, they're both featured in Rising Stars by Amazon ads.
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