Rent Control Fever Catches Boston & Tide Unveils Most Unappetizing Detergent

Good morning, Virgilis Show. I'm Neil Friman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, rent control fever sweeps the country. Then, Ty just released the successor to the TidePod and you better not eat this one. It's Wednesday, February 18th. Let's ride. Remember, Game of Thrones? Yeah, me neither. But it might be time to head back to West Rose. HBO has released a new series set in the Game of Thrones universe a night of the seven kingdoms. And it's actually good, like historically good. The most recent episode landed a 9.8 star rating on IMDB, which makes it one of the highest rated TV episodes ever. Fun fact, the only TV episode to achieve a 10 out of 10 rating is Osamandius on the final season of Breaking Bad. So I was scrolling through some of the top 10 episodes of all time. A lot of anime, including Vinland Saga, heated rivalry, snuck in there as well. But I'm sort of an IMBD hater because numbers two through 18 are all tied at the same rating, 9.9. So any ranking system that does that probably isn't precise enough, I need to know if people think an episode of Bluey is actually better than Game of Thrones's battle of the Basterd. Give me some nuance IMDB. That being said, it is good to see Thrones kind of get its groove back because people forget-- actually people don't forget this. This finale was rated 4.0 on IMDB. You don't need a lot of nuance to realize that that episode kind of stunk. And now a word from our sponsor, Flav city, Neil? Smell my breath. No. Never again, not after the blue cheese incident of 2022. This time is different because I just had Flav city's new pepperminty Shamrock all in one protein smoothie. I want you to really smell the peppermint. 25 grams of protein, 10 grams of collagen, and functional mushrooms. Still going to pass, but these protein smoothies do provide quick delicious nutrition on the go just at milk or water, shake for 20 seconds, and you're all set. No blender required. The limited edition Shamrock flavor is fantastic, but they've also got banana bread, brownie batter, vanilla, and more. Seriously, they taste as good as any milkshake. Head to go.shopflav city.com/nbds to try any of their delicious flavors. That's go.shopflav city.com/nbds. I am not saying we're going to get it departed too, but things are getting a little rowdy in Massachusetts. New England's most popular state is gearing up for a fight over rent control, which is likely to end up on the ballot in November. The proposal is pitting landlords against labor advocates economists against policymakers, Democrats against Democrats, patriots against loyalists, and the entire country is watching. One of the reasons this rivalry is so heated is that the proposal would be the strictest rent control anywhere in the United States. It would prevent Massachusetts landlords from raising annual rents by more than the rate of inflation or 5%, whichever is lower. In other areas like California, Oregon, and Maryland, ReCtrl is limited to the rate of inflation plus a little sugar on top. It's a drastic plan that even split the state's two most powerful politicians, Governor Mara Healy and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. Healy is against the rent control initiative, but Wu came out for it last week, saying I'm not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. What no one disagrees about is Massachusetts and the Boston area in particular are facing a housing affordability crisis. Rent prices are among the most expensive in the country. Statewide, a two bedroom apartment goes for about 2560 a month, 74% above the national average. In Boston, that spikes to nearly $3,400. So speaking as a Massachusetts native, can we just all come together and remember the real enemies here, Arjenke's fans? We will actually talk about New York and just a sec, but you said it's dividing lots of people within the Massachusetts. It's even dividing Michelle Wu herself, because earlier in the year she would criticize this very same initiative. She called it quite restrictions. She said it could potentially discourage construction. And that really does drill into the economic argument against rent control is that people say Boston rents are high because demand for housing exceeds construction. That is a simple micro economic, fundamental supply, demand issues right there. And so the solution is to increase supply. The solution is to make it easier to build rather than putting caps on rents, trying to constrain pricing artificially. That is always kind of the general thrust of people's critiques of rent control initiatives. Yeah, that's what Mara Healey, the governor, has been saying she said, if you look at the studies, you effectively halt production. And that's because if landlords don't raise rents, then they can't collect enough money. And then they won't put more money into building housing or maintaining certain properties. So she points to this example in the Twin Cities, which you got over the past few years in the Twin Cities is kind of this nice natural experiment of what different policies can do to housing. I'm talking about Minneapolis. They did not have rent control. They saw a rise in permits in St. Paul right next door did have rent control. And they just-- and they saw permits for multi-family construction just tumble precipitously. And now they are rolling that back. So if you look at different places around the United States that have implemented this, including Massachusetts back in the '70s and '90s, which you could talk about, then they say this is just a policy that while it has great intentions to keep prices manageable for rents, it just simply doesn't work on the ground. Yeah, it is very funny. There literally is historical precedent in Massachusetts, as you mentioned, from 1970 to 1994. So initially it is popular because who doesn't want lower rents, especially when you're trying to get elected as a politician. But then some of the observed outcomes from that period in Massachusetts, available units, declined. Housing quality kind of fell. And by the mid 1980s, 11,000 rentals were vacant in Boston, which is just exactly what you don't want in a city with a constrained housing supply. So there are plenty of examples of people trying this. But it just happens because people are feeling extremely crunched right now in New York City in Boston and a lot of these places that these ballot initiatives are going to gain a lot of support. Yeah, we should just say it's not just Boston or Massachusetts that is entertaining the idea of rent control in Los Angeles. They just recently tightened rent control for the first time in to four decades. Zoran Mamdani, the new mayor of New York City, has this big campaign plan to freeze rents for stabilized units. It looks like we'll see what happens in Massachusetts. But it does seem like there's a lot of popular support. There was a survey of 500 registered voters. Nearly 63% would support the rent control ballot measure should it come in November. And also, this is not the only governor mayor spat that's happening right now. Yesterday, Zoran Mamdani of New York City proposed a 9.5% property tax hike, which goes against what New York governor Kathy Hocal wanted because he wants to tax the wealthy and corporations. And he said that Hocal's not letting him do that. So this was a last-ditch attempt to fill a $5 billion to your budget hole. So that's a nearly 10% property tax hike for the New York City, which would be the first property tax hike in more than two decades. That got a lot of people talking. Can't we all just get along and build more housing in the process? All right, moving on. If your version of commuting to your job involves rolling out of bed and changing into your business sweatpants, then I have some advice as to which companies to work for. Newer companies are significantly more likely to allow work from home, according to a new national bureau of economic research paper. Employees at companies founded after 2015 are about twice as likely to work from home compared to firms founded before 1990. Well, WC, Boomers and Gen X are famously office-built, and the data backs that up too. CEO Age has just as much to do with work policies as company age. CEOs under 30 offer on average 1.4 work from home days a week, while CEOs over 60 offer just 1.1. Still, when a company was founded matters the most of all. Unsurprisingly, if you were bringing a company into the world in 2020, you were remote first by necessity. And to this day, companies founded during that year lead Alcoharts with 1.74 work from home days per week. How does this affect you? Well, even as companies like Amazon and JP Morgan are waging a return to office battle, their older leaders will eventually retire bringing millennials and Gen Cs into CEO roles, who will potentially bring more flexible work preferences with them. So, Neil, if you want that short commute like bed to desk length, then youths in the boardroom could be an important aspect to target. This is really big implications, because over the past couple of years from 2023 to 2025, these same researchers that did this study have been tracking remote work, and they found that work from home rates have been declining over that time period. But this study suggests that maybe in five to 10 years, so you're talking about as more Gen Z comes into the boardroom and they implement these remote first policies that total remote work rates across the United States will start to rise again. So, really, this generational shift has huge implications for remote work, commercial real estate, everything that goes into that. Huge societal shifts. So, it's very interesting to see this study out. - There is an ironic kind of undercurrent to this though, because there's a big narrative violation that we have to point out here. Gallup did a poll last year that found amongst baby boomers, Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z. Gen Z is actually the least likely to favor exclusively remote work. Only 23% of Gen Z employees say they prefer fully remote work compared to 35% of employees from each other generation. So, even though this study is saying like, "Hey, yeah, work from home might come back into popularity again." Maybe young people don't even want that. They love going to the office because who doesn't love going to the office? You get to hang out with your best buddies. - So, a lot of people do not like to go to the office. That is certainly clear, but it seems like these companies that were built from 2020 on were just remote native from the first place, and that's why we're seeing such drastic discrepancies between companies that were created after 2020, in the world. before 1990 because if you started a company in 2020 or 2021 or 2022, you have Slack built-in. You have Zoom built-in and probably now you have AI tools built-in that all leads to maybe more asynchronous workplace. So even if these Gen Z bosses stare down, these Gen Z workers who want to go back to the office seems like the Genie is out of the bottle and there will be at least a certain amount of days that will be remote work for the foreseeable future. And there's absolutely an argument to that new technologies with AI technologies maybe work from home becomes even more easier to pull off like asynchronous workflows are just becoming in the norm. So there is just a real technological argument to this as well that maybe in 10-20 years, it will be much easier to work from home than it even is today. TidePod meet the Tide Trisket. Yesterday, Tide announced its latest attempt to change the way you do laundry revealing that it's new tile-like detergent brand will roll out nationwide in April. It's Tide's biggest laundry innovation since the TidePod in 2012, which has grown to a $2 billion a year business for parent company Proctor and Gamble. Called TideEvo, these tiles really do resemble a Trisket though you shouldn't snack on them. Each one is made up of more than 15 miles of super thin fibers stacked in six different layers of cleaning ingredients. The tile gradually dissolves when the water hits and is specifically designed to be washed cold. And the process of inventing it, talk about the laundry equivalent of the Manhattan project. 15-phd level of chemists and engineers spent over a decade in the lab perfecting this tile, all in the hopes that Christopher Nolan will one day make a movie about them. More pressing for PNG is the question of whether the tile will make a dent in the $9.3 billion market for laundry detergent in the US, 70% of which is dominated by liquids. Execs are bullish telling Axios that TideEvo will be quote "big" if not bigger than Tide pods. But of course they're going to say that Toby, I'm more interested in your opinion. I think it is so funny how they are persisting at this product because they in their marketing materials are they're saying that it triggers four out of five sentences. They say "Site, it has this lovely diamond shape touch. It's a dense sponge fuzzy feel. The smell you can just smell the cleanness and even the sound it makes a little pop when you open the box. The fifth sense though, they're saying deliberately avoided in that sense is taste obviously because Tide pods have this story history. They look like candy. People on social media did the Tide pod challenge. They started eating the Tide pods, which was a PR nightmare for PNG because unfortunately they made a delicious looking laundry pod. So this one, they're getting out in front of it and saying "Trisket is almost like a good way of thinking about it because this is dry and fibrous. You don't want to eat it." They're saying there's no way any of you out there could possibly find this appetizing. So I love how they're trying to get in front of people trying to put it in their mouths. What's interesting to me about this particular product is how they're trying to establish these green sustainability bonafides. They're positioning as a way to eliminate the need for plastic bottles and another thing is about the particular packaging, specifically very lightweight slim packaging. It's very much not to sustainability but also the fact that most people order this online. So they're saying this is going to be a much cheaper way to get this from our fulfillment center to your door and it's going to reduce shipping costs because of how we package this and such a lightweight way. Yeah, because think about the current container you have for either your pods or for detergent. It's very heavy plastic. Now it is just a light box. But I do love that Tide put so much effort into this. I mean 10 years. It really is a Manhattan project of laundry, which is crazy. Tide is, they go so hard on laundry. They identified 55 separate steps when it comes to doing your laundry. I couldn't name more than five. That include wearing the clothes in the first place. I'm really wondering where that because that is a literal fact that they cite in their marketing materials. It's 55 steps and I was like, what am I doing something wrong here? Like yes, I separate the lights from the colors, but that's one step. The next step is put it in. Maybe it's like bending from your waist is a step. I don't know. I got to get into that. But they do have to care about it because US laundry market is $25 billion market. Any slight shift in form factor has massive repercussions. I mean, Tide pods is a $2 billion annualized business for them. So they run the risk of cannibalizing some of that. Is this a successor is going to take market share from them. But Tide execs are like, honestly, we've invented a lot of different ways to do laundry. We've gone from powder to liquid to pods now to tiles. And people still use all of those. It really is kind of whatever you like to use to clean your clothes. So total new form factor excited to put it in my mouth. I'm just kidding. I would never do that. But I'm excited to try it because I like trying new laundry detergents as well. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back and talk about Norway after this. Neil, tax season is fast approaching and it's got me thinking about my finances. Yeah. Is this finally the year you're going to work with a financial professional? That is a way better idea than what I was thinking, especially since North Western Mutual can match you with a financial professional who will work with you to build a plan based on what's important to you and help grow your wealth and protect what you've worked so hard for. That's right. So find a better way to money at nm.com. That's nm.com. The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Company. I'm being more intentional with my everyday movement. Oh, yeah. Did that indoor putting green order drive yet? Not yet. But besides that, when I trained for the marathon last year, I realized it's less about metrics and more about what works for my body. And that's where it woops wearable tech can help. Woop isn't about chasing numbers. It's about building awareness, spotting patterns and knowing when to push and when to pull back so you can show up with more energy, presence, and intention. Turn insight into everyday action. Try it out at join.woop.com/brewdaily. That's join.woop.com/brewdaily. Alright, quick personal update. I've been on the league and things are happening. I've been talking to some genuinely impressive women and yes, some have responded. I actually have a date lined up. For me, that's momentum. What I like, it's not an endless scroll. It's curated. Every day I get a select batch of smart, interesting people who are actually serious about dating. It feels intentional, efficient. Like someone filtered out the noise. So if you're looking for someone on your level, someone serious about getting serious, check out the league. Download the app and apply today. With the Winter Olympics well into their second week, if you check the Metal Leader Board right now, you'll encounter a familiar site. Norway, a nation with the population, the size of Minnesota, leads in total medals and golds just as they did last winter Olympics and the one before that and the one before that. Right now they have more than double the US's gold medals with 2% of the population. The question is how and a good answer would be do everything the exact opposite of the United States. While the US has a win at all cost mentality, Norway prioritizes fun to such an extent that no official scorekeeping is allowed in organized sports until age 13. While the US charges hefty fees to participate in sports, Norway keeps them affordable. Imagine a Norwegian's horror if they knew the extent of private equity has crept into US sports. Norway's official sports model is joy for all. Meanwhile, US private equity giants carve up youth sports into a $40 billion dollar by the way. Meanwhile, US private equity giants carve up youth sports into a $40 billion business. So, Neil, as you watch Johannes Hofslot Klabo, win one gold medal after another and Norway's medal count continued to dwarf America's. Realize it's not an accident but a lot of little decisions that add up to create a winter powerhouse. That in the fact that they have a lot of mountains and a lot of snow probably helped too. Certainly helps but this is a deliberate strategy. Back in 1984, Norway's team went to Sarajevo and they only just got three golds. Four years later, they came home with no golds and they're like, we have to do something about this. And so, they created a project called the Olympia Toppen, which is an organization whose only responsibility is to recruit and train Norwegian athletes to be absolutely dirty in the winter Olympics. And that has absolutely paid off starting in 1994. They had the winter Olympics at Lillehammer in Norway and they started their run basically in 1994 by pioneering this big umbrella method for youth sports and it's just kind of crazy for the American mind cannot comprehend. The fact that they don't keep score until age 13. And a lot of people are probably rolling their eyes and saying like, of course, Norway does well because they're literal, it's a mountainous country. It's one of the most mountainous countries. People get around by skiing all the time and yes, that is true. But also, they do really well in the summer Olympics too and warm weather sports. I mean, there's Carson Warholm who's a 400 meter hurdle champion Christian Blumenfeld. He has the Ironman Trap on World Record also recently just recorded the highest VO 2 max ever. There's Gustav Eden, capsule root. He's a tennis player, Victor, hoblin, a golfer, early hauling like the Norway punches will far above its weight in terms of the size of its country. And a lot of it does have to do with just like their approach to sports as a whole back to the Olympics. So one thing that they do is bring all their Olympic athletes together in sort of a mini training camp a year before the Olympics where you're having, you know, the skeletoners sitting next to the cross-country skiers sitting next to the bath leads and all just feeling like an actual team and that does pay dividends. Again, some of it seems like wishy washy but you look at the results and you say there is something here that is happening. It is a lot of small decisions that ladder up into a bigger result. And one of those small decisions that I thought was very interesting is that they have a huge used equipment market. Now skiing these winter sports are very expensive specifically the equipment and a lot of American families might be like, well, I want to have my kid do skiing or snowboarding but when I look at the prices, for lift tickets or any of this equipment that they're getting, it's just way too expensive. But Norway has this very robust secondary market for winter sports equipment that allows families to get them at lower prices and then when it comes to signing them up for leaks, it's also not expensive. So you can see that this is a deliberate strategy and it's absolutely paying off. And then another thing that's interesting to me is we're talking about winter sports and Norway being so good, they are not so good at hockey, which is shocking because the two other Scandinavian countries that very much resemble Norway, Sweden and Finland are amazing at hockey. There are 95 Swedes in the NHL this season. There are 46 Finns, but there are only three Norwegian players in the NHL and this has to do, there's, you can go down a big rabbit hole and I highly recommend it because it's very interesting. But here's just a reflection of that. There's just no hockey rinks in Norway. It has 54 indoor rinks in total. There are more rinks in 60 miles of Stockholm, Sweden than that. So go down the rabbit hole, figure out why Norway is not good at hockey even though they just kind of dominate every single other winter sport. - Should I do my Nordic Fun Fact on the scoreboard? I'll do my Nordic Fun Fact. When Sweden and Denmark play each other in a team sport, the scoreboard bug on screen reads sweet SWE versus Den, which spells Sweden. And then the remaining letters left over from that are Den and Mark, it is very stupid, but if they ever play each other in hockey or soccer, you can bring that fun back up. - Okay, let's bring to the finish with some final headlines. Stephen Colbert just dropped the gloves in a spat with his employer, CBS and FCC chair, Brendan Carr, accusing them of censoring an interview on his late night show. For Monday night's episode, Colbert was set to talk with James Talleriko, a Democrat running in a primary for the Texas Senate seat. But Colbert said that CBS lawyers told him, "In no uncertain terms, that the network could not air the interview because of increased FCC scrutiny of a rule that requires equal air time for political candidates on local broadcast networks." In a six minute diatribe, Colbert called out Carr and CBS, which he said and instructed him not to talk about the political pressure to scrap the interview. Colbert began, "Because my network clearly doesn't want us to talk about this, let's talk about this." CBS disputed the version of events saying it hadn't banned the interview from airing, but warned that the equal time rule would be triggered if it did air. CBS said it offered the show different options for keeping in line with the rule. What ended up happening is, Colbert put the interview with Talleriko on YouTube, where it's wrecked off far more views than it would have gotten otherwise. - Yeah, viewers do have a choice in today's day and age. If they don't want to watch it or can't watch it on broadcast airways, they can go to YouTube and it has done extremely well. It's totally a stricened effect situation where more people and more attention have been drawn to this interview now than maybe if it had just originally aired. It has more than 1.7 million views on YouTube as of early yesterday afternoon. That is a lot, especially when you compare it to an interview from the same show with Jennifer Gardner that has just under 100,000 views. So no shade to Jennifer Gardner, but you see how much more significant the intention on this political interview was because of this spat. Moving on, Palantir wants a Palantin tan. The company is moving its HQ to Miami, Florida. As it to us been caught up in the Florida heat waves sweeping across corporate America, Palantir started life in Palo Alto, California, but outspoken CEO Alex Carp has railed against the culture of Silicon Valley, saying back in 2020, "We seem to share fewer and fewer of the technology sectors, values, and commitments." That proceeded a move to Denver for a while before yesterday's announcement signaled it would follow the likes of Citadel down South. Neil, we've spoken about billionaires looking for some sand between their toes with Mark Zuckerberg recently purchasing a house in Miami. A migration accelerated by proposed Wealth Tax in California, but companies have been a little slower on the uptake. Maybe Palantir will kick off a new wave. - Yes, Citadel came in 2022, then yet Apple and Amazon expanding their offices. Service now is opening an office in West Palm Beach. So we did have this discussion last week about whether this was just billionaires going to Miami to escape higher tax rates or whether we would see actually more companies move there and opening up headquarters. It still remains to be seen whether Palantir is just establishing a token headquarters in Miami. Are they gonna actually move their entire office down there and we still don't know that particular detail? But it is significant because just as recently as a few years ago, Alex Carp the CEO said, Colorado is a very sane and pleasant place. He'll probably still have a house there because I think he loves to cross country ski, but he did, it is a significant move to down South. - I was at dinner with some people from the tech world yesterday and that was the main topic of conversation is what Alex Carp is a huge cross country skier. Like that is a massive part of his identity and yet here you are going to Florida. It just doesn't seem right. So maybe he'll get the ones with little wheels on it and just do it on the Miami highways. - All right, finally, America's long running debate over chicken wings is finally being put to rest. Boneless wings can in fact be called wings. Yesterday a district court judge dismissed a complaint from a man who sued Buffalo Wild Wings over deceptive marketing. Back in 2023, this guy ordered boneless wings from a Buffalo Wild Wings and said he was shocked to find out they were not chicken wings that had been deboned, but instead just white meat nuggets cooked in the style of a chicken wing. Buffalo Wild Wings said, get over yourself by using context clues. You can figure out pretty easily that our boneless wings are not deboned wing meat, much in the same way that everyone understands cauliflower wings are not made out of wing meat. Despite the case's gravely serious nature, the judge had a lot of fun with this ruling saying the complaint has quote, "nope meat on its bones" and the accuser did not drum up enough factual allegations to state a claim. Okay, I generally side with this judge, especially the cauliflower argument, but there have been inconsistent rulings on this back in the summer of 2024, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that a man who ordered boneless wings should have expected the possibility of bones and they actually denied him a jury trial after he swallowed a bone fragment and medically hurt himself. So those are two opposite rulings from two different states. So it is time to send this wing debate to the Supreme Court and think should be juicy. That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Wednesday. If you wanna get in touch, send an email to morningbrudely at morningbrud.com or DM us on Instagram at MBDallyShow. Let's roll the credits, Emily Million is our executive producer. Raymond Lut is our producer, our associate producers, our Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Her makeup is training in Norway, Devon Emory is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great, sure Daniel, let's run it back tomorrow. (upbeat music)