Good morning, Drew Daley show. I'm Neil Fryman and I'm Toby Howell. Today, the best college in the United States is no longer Princeton. Then, Peloton is out on cycling and all in on running. It's Wednesday, September 23rd. Let's ride! This is what happens when you hand your kid a Rubik's Cube instead of an iPad. A six-year-old girl in China just set the new women's world record for solving a Rubik's Cube averaging under 4.5 seconds over five solves. It's not just talent, but a lot of hard work. Gigi, as she's nicknamed, practices every day for two to three hours and has mastered over 1300 Rubik's Cube solving algorithms. Congrats to Gigi, but I am worried about her likelihood of developing carpal tunnel. I obviously went through a Rubik's Cube phase growing up. My fastest was sub one minute, which I was very proud of, but clearly not on Gigi's level. This also set up a debate amongst your friends about what age you peak at certain disciplines in life. There's not a lot that you can reach this summit at age six, but chess is up there, e-sports are up there. I guess speed-cubing as well. It also got us thinking about what you peak at later in life because we're past six years old. Experience definitely helps in things like law and medicine. I toss crosswords out there too, just an accumulation of knowledge. So your best days are still ahead of you, Neil. Thanks, Toby. And now we're from our sponsor, Roku Ads Manager. You know how adding salt to caramel makes a good thing even better? I'm more of a toffee guy, but yeah. Well, Roku Ads Manager is doing something similar. They already reach 100 million streaming households, see an average of 4.3 streaming hours per day, an account for 47% of U.S. TV streaming time. But to make their platform even better for advertisers, they have a special offer for morning brew daily listeners. When you spend $5,000, you'll get a $5,000 match on your first spend with Roku Ads Manager. That's the kind of pitch that sells itself to your marketing team. Launch your next campaign on Roku. Head to advertising dot roku dot com slash mbd and use code brule5k to access the match. That's advertising dot roku dot com slash mbd. Artificial intelligence is getting a rebrand, not from a hoard of McKinsey consultants, but straight from the mouth of the president. Trump told the United Nations General Assembly in New York yesterday that the U.S. government will start calling AI super intelligence AKA S.I. Arguing the artificial branding makes the technology sound fake. He also posted polls on social media asking if people preferred the term superior intelligence. They did not. He followed that up by dismissing the AI Doomsday warning saying America won't stifle something quote bigger than the industrial revolution. That came an hour after UN Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez kicked off the day by painting an ominous picture of what could go wrong with AI, saying life and death decisions must never be surrendered to machines. Killer robots must have no place in our future. The class over AI was just one part of a combative 37-minute speech for Trump that also went on a meandering geopolitical tour. Trump called for the complete economic isolation of Iran and threatened to quote annihilate the country if it doesn't reach a deal. Though he predicted one would come soon. And all eyes are looking ahead to tomorrow when Chinese president Xi Jinping visits the White House. On the menu are tariffs rare earths Iran Taiwan and of course AI sorry S.I. Neil Alaco and on but let's start back at super intelligence. It's a little unclear what Trump's motivations are here. Why do you think he's pushing for this rebrand? Because he is an AI bull as we say and the brand of artificial intelligence is so bad we're seeing pushback against data centers all over the country. We're seeing pushback now against the AI safety implications. He understands that this is that AI has a marketing problem and so at Trump always changes the name of things and hopefully you know he thinks he thinks he'll he will get his way. He said in this particular speech I'm not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the industrial revolution we will only encourage super intelligence. We're going to encourage it not reignited. The issue with calling it super intelligence is that already has a very specific meaning within the broader AI community. It's very closely associated with this philosopher Nick Boscham. He described super intelligence as an intellect that exceeds human performance across all cognitive domains. Super intelligence is the apex of this field. It's not just another name for artificial intelligence. So that is why a lot of people within AI are saying that Trump is trying to borrow the prestige of a term that already carries a lot of weight within the AI community and that's why he's going about it. Probably not going to catch on though because it is already something that carries another meaning that isn't just basic artificial intelligence. You know who does hope it catches on is the country of Slovenia and here's why so you know how anguilla is a small island in the Caribbean. They've made tons of money about half of their total budget from the dot AI extension any time any website registers with a dot AI at the end they have to pay anguilla and now it's basically giving this country so many riches 50% of their national budget. The extension Si refers to Slovenia. So if companies and people registering domains now start having the extension Si I want to end their website with Si then they'll have to pay Slovenia. So Slovenia is looking there probably in the in the building itself listening to Trump saying let's rebrand it to Si and hoping please please please do that because then they'll break in a lot of money. And then just a quick rundown of other things that Trump talked about in a speech yesterday. Thomting when it comes to Iran that has been floated is a diesel export ban from the US and Trump had initially been against it but yesterday he actually said he supports restricting US diesel exports which is a big shift for the administration. The idea behind a export ban is that the US currently sells some of their diesel fuel abroad. If you restrict those exports then more diesel states inside the US potentially increasing domestic supply and bringing prices down in the short term now a lot of people push back against that because when you restrict it from the global market that actually ends up sending price hikes throughout the entire globe which will eventually make their way back to the United States but it it just shows how tight international supply is right now that an export ban could be floated as something that is popular now that wasn't popular even just a few days and weeks ago. Because prices are at a record high and then finally we have a den you want to the Greenland saga that has captured the better part of this year. Remember President Trump wanted to take over Greenland which is a territory of Denmark but yesterday Trump Greenland and Denmark came to the table in very United Nations fashion signed a deal that said that the US will not actually take over Greenland but the deal does pave the way for a larger US military presence on the big island. So we do have a wrap up to the Greenland drama. It looks like everyone is pretty happy. Denmark keeps Greenland but the US has a greater military presence on will have a greater military presence on Greenland which it thinks is very important given all of the strategic ambitions on the Arctic from people like China and Russia. Call it revenge of the nerds Princeton has been to throne as the number one college in the United States. According to the annual US news and world report ranking MIT has taken over the top spot from Princeton after 15 years of the Tigers leading the list but the changing of the guard may have to do more with a tweak in methodology than anything else. US news introduced a new metric evaluating graduates earnings by majors that MIT particularly excels at. It's part of an ongoing shift by the magazine to better account for how students do after graduating from a certain institution than their high school resume heading in. Reflecting greater hesitation about the return on investment of going to college in the first place. Coming in third after MIT in Princeton is Harvard then Yale that stinks then Caltech and Stanford tied for fifth. The highest ranking public school was a tie between UCLA and UC Berkeley at 20 while Williams College retained its title as the best national liberal arts college. Whether or not this matters at all has come under scrutiny in recent years with a growing course of critics bashing the rankings as a popularity contest and a cash grab by US news. Princeton's own president about five years ago called the college rankings a game and a quote slightly daft obsession that does harm when college's parents or students take it to seriously. I don't think he's changed his mind after this latest report. The issue is unfortunately US news has a big audience a lot of people pay attention to their rankings. Their website attracts over 100 million users annually and if you go back a survey from 2024 found 58% of college bound high school seniors considered rankings to some degree so that's over half of people coming into college saying yeah I do look at these rankings and yeah US news has come under fire because an investigation by the New York Times last year found that University of Maine at Augusta paid $15,000 to market three US news badges on its website and this was not top college in the world it's number 61 online bachelor's program for veterans like very specific badges that you can just toss on your website so you have that validation so anytime these rankings come out and especially if there's a shift at the top it renews the debate around US news it doesn't look like it's going anywhere anytime soon but especially because I'm throwing these rankings out University.
of Maryland drops seven spots to 49th place. So yeah, these are definitely not real, but it does come at a time when there's a broader reckoning around the value of going to college and whether you should go in the first place, whether you're paying up to $100,000 per year on these things. But yesterday, a VC firm, one of the biggest, introduced an alternative to college. We're seeing more and more of these. Andrewson Horowitz invested $35 million dollars in a San Francisco based two year alternative to traditional college. They want to recruit kids aged 16 to 22 to what they're calling the Horowitz and recent Academy. I guess they switched up the names as some sort of agreement. They're, they're working with a bunch of corporate partners in the tech world like Anthropic Meta Google and Nvidia. And they're saying, look at the CEOs of the biggest AI companies. They all dropped out of college. They didn't find that college was valuable to them. AI is changing everything about education. We want to give you an AI native education, where AI starts from the ground up. It infuses everything that you do. So it's very interesting, alternative to the traditional four year college that we're seeing. Yeah, they're giving students $5,000 for travel and research and then $50,000 in compute credits per student. So absolutely. You used to get dining credits. Right. Exactly. That's exactly what I was thinking about. And some of the example courses that they floated are AI inference engineering brand and visual identity development and the geometry of luck. So it's very much in that Silicon Valley alternative college route. Housing is not provided or pay for too, which is interesting. So maybe there's some side hustles involved here. But the reason why A16Z wants to do this is because they venture capital is an access game. You want access to the best founders. And if they feel like they can cultivate it through this university, then obviously they're going to have a leg up on the competition. So they'll invest in some of the people coming out of this college. But it did have some people saying, where does it end? You need some sort of credentials in today's day and age. Taylor Lorenz, a internet writer said, I'm a huge proponent of homeschooling and using tech for education. But at some point, a child has to receive some accreditation, right? Or are we just funneling kids straight from AI school into A16Z lectures to YC to etc. So she was basically saying, this is the tech line that you can go about. But what about just normal people? Do you need to have a resume that shows you into college still? Is that still a part of the work culture here in America? So it opens up a Pandora's box of what does college mean right now? Do you actually need to go to University of Maryland or can you go to a two-year thing where you get $50,000 AI credits and employers look at that the same way? Or do you not even care about employers because you're going to go start a company? All right, moving on. Peloton made its name in cycling, but it's chasing after runners now. Yesterday, the struggling at-home fitness company released its cheapest ever treadmill as it tries to ride the running wave to revive its anemic sales. The new tread flex will cost $2,195, about a thousand bucks cheaper than its current treadmill lineup. Saving customers money but also space thanks to its ability to fold upright when not in use. What is not shrinking is the at-home running market with Peloton CEO Peter Stern sees as a big opportunity for the company, set to grow 40% to 5.6 billion by 2030. Peloton is known for its at-home bikes, but after peaking a few years ago, stationary bikes and spin classes have been stuck in neutral. It's all about running now as major marathons and run clubs see record participation. The issue with this new strategy is the fact that running is pretty much free. You can always lace them up and just go outside instead of spending over two grand on a budget treadmill option, but Peloton is hoping that packing their treadmill with features like gate analysis that measures your vertical oscillation and stride length to help increase efficiency will convince people to shell out. Peloton needed a growth story, has it found it in running? Well, it does make sense to do this, being an exercise company without leaning into running is like being a fast food company, not investing in fries. Like treadmills remain the most popular piece of exercise equipment. And Peloton thinks this is its next growth act. If you haven't been paying attention to Peloton stock recently, it is down 97% from its peak 40% since this new CEO came on in January 2025. So, it's a lot smaller. However, it is far more financially healthy than it used to be. It's been repairing its balance sheet. It's been cutting costs. It's now back to profitability. So, it is smaller, a healthier company. However, it wants to grow again and it's looking to various avenues to do that. It wants to get into the B2B business, sell to hotels and gym chains. And then it also thinks that running has this cultural moment that it really wants to tap into. I think the only way that this really succeeds is if they are really packed with technology. Because again, running is the most fundamentally simple thing you can do in the world. You do not need equipment. You need a pair of shoes. Some people don't even wear shoes. Just go outside and run. So, I think that this gate analysis thing where some people are going to get really into the data of can I gain efficiency by being better with my stride length? There's going to be data nerds who want that. There's also this feature called reruns, which takes your outdoor runs that you log in the Peloton app and syncs their inclines to the treadmill. That's a very cool feature in my opinion where if you want to train for the first half of the New York City marathon, see what the elevation gains are going to be like. You can log that into your treadmill and it will just elevation based on what it's going on outside. That kind of stuff will attract a very hardcore audience. And then I actually think that they're capitalizing on another trend here, which is high rocks, which we've spoken about. Their most expensive treadmill has a sled mode, which you can turn on basically 300 pounds of resistance and push, I mean, it sounds miserable, but pretend like you're pushing a sled, moving the slats very slowly, they think that the high rock stride is going to be into that. So I think that they are positioning themselves well for the hardcore runners, not necessarily even people like you and me who don't have space, but I see the vision here. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with a debate about ice coffee right after this. Toby, what do you do with a great product, but your brand can't seem to connect with customers? Bag? No, don't bag, but do check out Rising Stars. It's a docky series that follows small business owners as they create their businesses, face real challenges and scale their brands with the help of Amazon ads. Like crowned 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 dot amazon dot com slash rising dash stars. That's advertising dot amazon dot com slash rising dash stars. Neil, you ever stay in one of those hotels where you sleep in a human-sized birdcage? No. Well, it's real sad. Sounds like you can use business preferences from hotels dot com. It helps travelers find the right hotel faster, but remembering they're go-to work trip requirements. Travelers set their preferences once, including fully refundable stays, wifi, breakfast, gym access, and more. Then future business trip searches automatically surface matching hotels. Sign up for their free rewards program and start earning on every workstay at hotels dot com slash morning brew. That's hotels dot com slash morning brew loyalty members 18 plus. Neil, what's your plan for managing your money? Good one Toby, tell me another. Listeners, please don't take after my co-host. North, Western, Mutuals comprehensive planning approach can give you peace of mind in an uncertain world. Whether you're just getting started or wondering if you're on the right track, they'll match you with a financial professional who will meet you where you are and ask better questions to uncover blind spots and find new opportunities. Get started at nm dot com plus to better understand your finances, tune in to the award-winning podcast, a better way to money. That's nm dot com. The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A debate is raging online about iced coffee, but not the appropriate time to switch over to hot. The controversy concerns whether it's acceptable to bring iced coffee into a job interview. And it's got Gen Z fighting Gen X with us millennials unsure who to side with. It all started last week when a recruiter named Caitlin Posted a TikTok video mentioning she sees Gen Z candidates pulling up to job interviews with an iced coffee. As someone with 16 years of experience, mostly placing applicants in super buttoned up Fortune 500 companies, she explained it comes across as unprofessional. When you show up with an iced coffee or an iced latte, it says that the interview is just a stop on your list of errands for the day, she says. It looks like you went to target. You went to Starbucks. Now you're stopping by for your interview and then you're on to the next thing. It looks a little too casual to me. This was the match that started a fire with everyone weighing in on the seemingly trivial issue. Some on the hiring and supporter take arguing it reflects an un-serious attitude. Others took a different tack wondering why anyone would want to bring an iced coffee to an interview in the first place with a potential for condensation dripping down wet hands and spillage. And yet others, mostly young people, turn the table saying they never want to work for a company so square they judge you for having an iced coffee during an interview. Toby, what in the Dunkin Donuts is going on here? I have no idea where I fall on this debate because it would be so annoying to have someone squirreling a beverage with ice in it and the condensation piece actually is the thing that really screams unprofessionalism. If you're going to go shake someone's hand and your hand is wet, it's just a bad way to start. But then I
I absolutely see that young people are saying, this is just another arbitrary kind of standard of professionalism that is being applied to us that doesn't matter at all. What does drinking an iced coffee have to do with my ability to complete the job that you're hiring for? So I absolutely see it both ways. It's also funny too that there is a generational divide between iced coffee and hot coffee. It's distinctly a Gen Z thing to like iced coffee. Only 43% of Gen Z prefers hot coffee. That's compared with 89% of adults over 60. So there's a sub-generational divide going on within the larger debate around if it's professional to show up with iced coffee. - Here's my question. Is iced coffee the ex-factor here? Like if you bring in a hot coffee or something that's not going to drip on a wooden table or something that doesn't make your hand cold or there's more of a lid on it, is like iced coffee the reason that everyone got so upset and hot and bothered about this particular thing because this was the choice of beverage. But if someone brings in another type of beverage, like yeah, a hot drink or tea or something, does that just kind of negate the whole premise because of the less opportunity for spillage condensation wet hands, all of those logistical concerns? - Absolutely. I think if you show up with a hot coffee, like this guy's got it going on. And again, it speaks that generational divide that more older people prefer hot coffee there. Zooming out here though, it actually goes back to the story we were speaking about previously about college and what is going on with how it's preparing students for today. Cornell actually released his big report yesterday about how they don't think that they're preparing students very well for the workforce. They said that employers question students' abilities who handle workplace demands, solve problems where there's no clearly defined answer, recover from setbacks. There's probably a wider debate here going on about Gen Z just being prepared in general for life after school. The iced coffee component is just the jumping off point to a much bigger conversation here. So I don't think that you can look as much into it or as least into it as you want, but there is something to be said about Gen Z, not necessarily knowing the norms of workplace culture and that causing friction against their older bosses. - And they don't care about it. They're saying, "You don't let me have a nice coffee in my interview. "Don't let me bring a drink until wherever I'm going." Like what am I doing here? This is, I don't want to work for you. You're so squarely. So that is their perspective. I think where I come down on this because I'm sure everyone wants to know is I think if I was hiring, if I was doing an in-person interview and someone came in with an iced coffee, like I would probably think a little. They would be ding down the rankings just a little bit. - What if I brought you on though? - Then you go up. - Well, that'd be nice. I'd be caffeinated and very energetic. - Exactly. - For the particular interview, the final twist in all of this is, I haven't conducted, and probably a lot of you, haven't conducted an in-person interview in since COVID began. So that's another variable here, whether it's remote, can you have an iced coffee when you are doing an interview over Zoom? We'll never know. - We'll never know. - Everyone actually-- - But the big rage is this. - Yeah. All right, let's bring to the finish with some final headlines. Kousey is asking federal regulators for permission to offer leverage on prediction markets, potentially bringing one of Wall Street's favorite tools to the event contract business. Right now, if you want to make a $1,000 bet on the Odyssey to win Best Picture, you need $1,000. But with margin, traders can put down a fraction of that and borrow the rest, allowing them to make much bigger bets with less capital. Kousey says that it could be useful for long-term markets where traders otherwise have money tied up for months or years. Critics say, do not let people borrow money to bet on the average temperature in Paris for November. To be fair, this is very much directed at Wall Street. Margin would initially be limited to certain well-capitalized accounts with sports, culture, and mentioned markets excluded. But Neil, sounds like a bit of a dangerous idea. - Yeah, I'm gonna get all levered up to bet on who's gonna get eliminated in the first episode of Survivor. No, this is a lot more buttoned up than just letting you or me bet on culture and sports on Kousey. Kousey wants to be a real Wall Street company. Just raised money at a $22 billion valuation last month, which was double what it raised, the valuation or last raised. In December, wants to draw in a lot of professionals, investors, like brokerages and hedge funds to invest on its platform, to use particularly as a hedge against particular outcomes like they would on the traditional derivative markets. And it thinks that by offering Margin, it's a crazy headline to say, oh, get Margin, get leveraged to wager on prediction markets, little more narrow than that. It really wants to become the next Wall Street. And this is the next step to do that. This was the year we all chose Texas. Ella Langley's heartbreak, country tune, shoes in Texas just became the longest running number one hit of all time reaching 23 consecutive weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. With her feet Langley beat out the queen of Christmas, Mariah Carey, whose Bob, all I want for Christmas is you, held the previous record at 22 weeks. Then comes a bar song in Old Town Road at 19 weeks and a bunch at 16, including Despacito and last night. It's a remarkable rise for Langley, who made her grand old opera debut in 2023. With fewer than one million monthly listeners on Spotify, now she has more than 32 million and the longest running number one track in recorded music history. - And here's the thing. I don't see anything coming for the crown, either. There's no obvious contender to knock it off from number one. We might have to wait until Christmas time for Mariah Carey to come back, because that's the only song that I see actually making a run for choosing Texas. It has been a country decade though, because if you go back to these long number one hits, you have Susan Texas, you have Shabuzie's a bar song, you have Morgan Wallins last night, and then you have Lil Nas X's Old Town Road, which probably set off this entire kind of like country fusion mix that's going on. But wow, it is amazing to see the rise of country in this country. - I don't think you can go home tonight. It's going to be a huge protest, because you said you don't see any song coming. - Yeah, what's coming? - In the future to de-thrown Ella Langley. I saw an announcement from a pretty famous pop star yesterday. Taylor Swift said she is releasing a new single patient zero out September 25th. That's on Friday, so let's see. - Well, here's the thing, I'm still choosing Texas. Let's see if it can knock it off right there. I'm going to lever up on prediction markets and say that. I'm just joking. - All right, well, good call. Good luck. - Better to choose Texas than be a patient zero. - Yes. - All right, we close out every Wednesday show with suggestion box where Toby and I each share a recommendation to get you over the hump of the week. I guess I'll go first. For my recommendation, you know when your friend whips out an intimidating board game starts to explain it and you think, oh no, I don't think I have the brain power for this. Those worries I'll go away when it comes to splendor, which I played for the first time this weekend. It's a real bonafide strategy game but was super easy to learn and get a handle on the gameplay. Check all the boxes. Quick on ramp works out the brain enough but not too much and doesn't take that long at all for a game to wrap up. Hopefully with you as the winner, splendor is a great four person game but if you want to find yourself in a bigger group and want some guaranteed fun, check out the game's sushi go or the mind. - I mean, I co-sign all of those. Your brother, I've played probably 30 games as a splendor against your brother. - But how did I never play him? - There's no idea 'cause I've played that so much with your brother. - I literally played it for the first time this weekend with neither of you guys, so. - It is easy to pick up and you can, there's multiple like different strategic vectors that you can go about too. So absolutely co-sign splendor. It is very fun. My recommendation is to poke around the website squares in squares. What is it you ask? It shows the optimal way to pack a certain number of identical cubes inside a larger square. For instance, nine cubes easy. It's just a three by three grid. But 17 squares, it is cursed. The mathematically optimal way looks completely random and leaves tons of awkward space. Things get really wonky to higher up. You go 238. I just, you gotta go check it out. It's a personal favorite of mine. This has been a question for mathematicians for a while now. There's this guy, David Ellsworth, who compiled all of the different configurations based on findings from Eric Friedman. Scroll through that and just have a laugh because how can the universe have made this the optimal way to pack some of these squares? It's a great way to kill 20 or 30 minutes. I stopped listening to you and you said the URL and I just went on it and now I'm scrolling. Wait, what did you say 238? 238 is just-- Oh, that's good. Yeah, it's a good one. But 239 is very similar to 238. It is bizarre though. It's awesome. 11 and 17 are just disgusting at how they're actually organized. But that is the mathematically optimal way to pack something. I don't know when this is going to come in handy in life, but at least you'll be able to say that you know how to pack 17 cubes in a larger square. All right, that is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Wednesday. To share your thoughts on the episode or anything else, send an email to
[email protected] or DM us on Instagram @MBDailyShow. Let's roll the credits. Emily Mill iron is our supervising producer. Raymond Lu is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham. And our associate producer is Olivia Lake Technical Direction by Nina Miller. Hera make up brought a juice box into their interview, which was endearing so we hired them. Devon Emory is our president and our show is a production of MorningBrew. Great show day, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. If your pack could use a change of pace, get to one of Great Wolf lodges, 22 locations. Splash away in the indoor water park, words.
always 84 degrees. There's a massive wave pool, a lazy river, and tons of water slides. There's also a bunch of great dining options and complimentary daily events like nightly dance parties, all under one roof. Book your stay at GreatWolf.com. That's GreatWolf.com.
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