(upbeat music) - Good morning, Brutali Show, I'm Neil Fryman. - And I'm Olivia Lake. - Today, do you care whether your beef is made in the USA? - And has being a bridesmaid become too expensive? It's Friday, September 18th, let's ride. (upbeat music) - Well, this is exciting. Subbing in for Toby today is Olivia Lake, our associate producer here in the credits every day, making her MBD hosting debut. I couldn't be more excited. Liv, one question. How do you feel about cats? - If I wasn't so deathly allergic, I think I would love them more, but I do think that they're very cute. - Okay, well, what if I told you that a new cat just dropped for the first time in more than a century, a new species of cat has been identified that was previously unknown to science. It's called the Tilkayo Tiger Cat, and it's a little spotted guy who lives in the Bolivian Cloud Forest. Scientists found it when a local man brought one to his home, thinking it was a domestic cat, until he realized, no, this thing was wild, and turned it over to a wildlife sanctuary. Liv, how you feeling about this new feline? - You guys all need to look up the picture because this thing is so cute. It's got cute little ears that I've never seen on a cat before, and then it has little leopard spots. I, yeah, if I wasn't so allergic, I'd go straight for this species, but it might not like me back. And now a word from our sponsor Hotels.com. Neil, did you know they have hotels that are just for dogs? - Yeah. - Well, I didn't, and I stayed at one for a work trip, it was rough. - Good one. Sounds like you could use business preferences from Hotels.com. It ups travelers find the right hotel faster by remembering their go-to work trip requirements. - Travelers set their preferences once, including fully-refundable stays, Wi-Fi, breakfast, gym access, and more, then future business trip searches automatically surface matching hotels. That way you can book work trips faster. Just set your preferences once and get results tailored to your business travel needs, plus get up to 20% off select hotels instantly with member discounts and earn rewards for future travel. - Sign up for their free rewards program and start earning on every
[email protected]/morningbrew. That's hotels.com/morningbrew. Loyalty members 18 plus. - It's National Cheeseburger Day, and no doubt you're planning to celebrate by making your signature patty stunning guests with its juiciness. But as you pick up ground beef from the grocery store, you'll find that unlike other common food items, you won't be able to see which country that beef is from. The question of beef's country of origin is front and center after the Trump administration allowed 300,000 metric tons of beef trimmings to be imported from abroad at a reduced terra fray to cool skyrocketing prices, a move that's outraged cattle ranchers here in the US for meddling in the market and hurting their business. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the administration is exploring a middle way that aims to appease ranchers, but also help out consumers. Require a label on beef that will display its country of origin. The idea is that if you know that beef is made in the USA, you'll pay a premium for it. While if it's not, you can scoop it up at a lower price. It's not definitely gonna happen. Officials are going to review regulations, provide an economic analysis of what could happen. Should the labeling be enacted and decide whether to move forward with the issue within 90 days. If it does, it'd mark the next drastic move. The White House has taken to make beef less expensive, but ranchers remain wary. Live, I had no idea some foods require an origin country label while others did not. - Yeah, this is crazy. I had no idea about this. According to the New York Times, beef actually did require origin labeling at one point. The 2002 Farm Bill required retailers to put origin labels on fresh beef and a number of other meats and fruits and veggies and then an expansion passed in 2008 that added chicken to that list. But then, Canada and Mexico complained to the World Trade Organization and they argued that the requirements violated their trade agreements and it caused them millions of dollars that they had to spend to comply. And the WTO agreed with them and allowed Canada and Mexico to impose $1 billion in retaliatory tariffs on the US. So then, to avoid those tariffs, Congress repealed the labeling rules for beef and pork in 2015 but left them in place for other products like chicken and produce. So that's why, if you're in the grocery store, you see made or sourced in the USA stickers on avocados or apples, but then ground beef and the aisle right next to it doesn't have anything on it. - It's not clear that this does anything economically or for USA ranchers. I mean, there's been a couple of economic analyses. We know the government's about to do another one. But back in 2015, the Agriculture Department's Chief Economist found that the economic benefits of putting these country of origin labels on beef would be, quote, insufficient to offset the cost of the requirements. And those are hefty costs putting a label on everything as this, obviously the cattle doesn't go straight from the ranch to your refrigerator. There's many steps along the way and these labels add up. Another estimate put it at $8 billion in costs over a decade to the beef and cattle industry. And then when you talk to consumers, they're like, we don't actually care where the beef is from, maybe they say they do, but actually when they go purchase one, it doesn't really affect them. On a list of things that do matter to them, place of origin regularly finishes second to last, only ahead of environmental impact and what people care about when they buy beef. It's much more important to them, whether it's high quality, safe, things like that rather than whatever country it came from. And we were talking before the show. It's also the ground beef that you buy. It doesn't come from a single place because I noted that the Trump administration is bringing in 300,000 metric chunks of lean beef trimmings. You can't eat that on your own. Basically, you combine that with the fatty trimmings from, I know, your signature right now, a lot of you are grimacing. This is how ground beef is made. You combine lean beef, beef trimmings with more fatty beef trimmings from, it could be like a cow from a completely other country and that together creates ground beef. - Yeah, I mean, I didn't, this was the innocence in my mind. Not only did I think it all came from the same place, I thought that when you're buying ground beef, it's just all one cow. Like I thought each package was one thing. I didn't really think that it was this cow cocktail that it really is, but good to know, I guess. - Yeah, but this is a big deal. We're gonna move off the how ground beef is made into the broader problem here, which is that the number of cattle and calves in the United States is at a 75 year low, just 86.2 million currently in the US. There's been a lot of drought that's devastated. Cattle herds, that's driven up prices for consumers. A lot of the actions that the Trump administration has taken like importing foreign beef trimmings has upset a lot of ranchers. This labeling requirement seeks to appease them somehow, but more of the little guys, the independent ranchers say this is gonna be too costly for us. Actually, it's the big guys who don't like this. The retailers, meat packers, feedlot owners, they say this is gonna be way too costly for us. We cited that estimate of $8 billion in added costs over a decade. The little guys say, okay, maybe this will help us out because people will go to the grocery store, see made in the USA from a smaller rancher, and we'll say, yeah, let's buy that. I'll pay a little bit more. But what they're saying overall is that these are all band-aids to the bigger problem. We need to incentivize production of cattle to get these cattle herds back up. And only then can they address the problem. That is the long-term solution. Moving on, welcome to Stock of the Week. Dog of the Week, the segment where live and I pick one stock that remember to pack their lunch and another that's settling for a $20 bullslop. You won the pre-show knitting contest live, so you get to go first. Shout out to my knitting. My dog of the week is transportation companies because diesel prices are hitting them like a freight truck. According to AAA, diesel just hit an all-time high of $6.40 a gallon, up more than 70% from a year ago, and the culprit is a genuine supply crisis. At an energy conference, Chevron CEO Mike Worth said that the strategic buffers that had cushioned prices for months, reserves, stockpiles, alternate pipelines, have largely now played out. After a tax last week, knocked out a major Saudi pipeline that had been routing around the blocked, greater form moves. The pain is already showing up in the market. J.B. Hunt's stock dropped more than 13% on Wednesday. One of its worst days since going public in 1983, after the trucking company warned earnings could fall five to 10% quarter over quarter. It's not isolated either. The Dow Jones transportation average fell nearly 3% the same day, and there's no clear relief coming. Gas buddies head of petroleum analysis said the national average could top 650 within days. Some Midwest states may hit $7, and diesel in California has already crossed $8 a gallon. With harvest season ramping up demand for diesel-powered farm equipment and no resolution to the Warren site, one energy analyst put it bluntly, diesel has no easy solution. - Yesterday, this is all of my Twitter if you could talk about J.P. Morgan's commodities team, which people who are probably most plugged into oil prices, oil flows, a lot of billions of dollars are at stake for them. They wrote this note, and they said, "For the first time since the start of the Iran conflict, "we don't have a baseline view. "We simply don't know how to model the endgame." They're completely throwing up their hands and saying, "We have no idea what's going on here." And then I'll continue. At the onset, we thought we did. We assumed there were economic red lines. The US administration would be unwilling to cross $100 oil, gasoline, your $5 a gallon, et cetera. Six months later, many of those lines have been crossed yet the exit strategy is less clear, not more. Then they close with the assumption that the disruption is temporary is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. So what happens if it doesn't? I guess we're finding that out right now. - Yeah, and when and where will that be?
consumers feel this themselves. One analyst at Melius Research noted that fuel-related costs increases. Typically, they get absorbed first by farmers, transporters, and retailers before showing up in the consumer prices. So it's kind of like that thing we saw with tariffs where we're not really going to feel it immediately, but it is going to happen, you know, a few weeks or months behind. And some of the industries that are getting hit the hardest by this are food and beverage. Food and beverage companies, they get hit hardest by diesel increases because they not only have to pay for the transportation, the fuel to transport their goods. But they have to have continuous refrigeration on those trucks or trains. So they have to pay for fuel to regulate those temperatures as well. So they're kind of working on a double dependency and that's where we could see price hikes show up more. And if you are flying later this year, you already maybe booked a flight or didn't book a flight yet in November and December, you could see that flight just kind of wiped off the calendar number of airlines. This week came out, United American Southwest said that look, we probably with the fuel spike recently. Remember, they did this back in the spring as well. We might have to eliminate cheaper, less profitable flights from our schedule in December should jet fuel prices keep spiking like this. So if you're going from, I don't know, if it got New York to Topeka, Kansas, like on a United flight. I hope not. Yeah, I hope not, but because I don't know what you're doing there. But that might be removed from the schedule, those lower profitable routes because these airlines, just like JB Hunt, the trucking company are saying fuel is just too expensive there, expensive now. And I would just say the bottom line here is that we've been warned for months by the oil and gas companies, by the transportation companies that there is this brewing, brewing fuel crisis. We're running out of fuel, we're exhausting all of our levers to get more fuel. It looks like that crisis has actually arrived now. Yeah. And then there's the China of it all. For months, China, they're the world's largest oil importer and they were burning through their own stockpiles instead of buying more on the international market. The International Energy Agency estimated that China drew about 41 million barrels from inventories in June alone. So China was effectively absorbing a big chunk of the supply shock itself. And that was freeing up the oil for everyone else. And that's kind of what kept the lid on global oil prices, but now China is running low. And so they're dipping back into that global supply and that's kind of raising the prices all around for everybody. Yeah. It's not just raising the prices. Literally, we're running out of diesel. If you go to various gas stations, I've seen pictures of this in North Texas, in California and some in Florida, like diesel, usually you see the price, but they're just, they just write out like, or zero, zero, zero, because there just is no diesel. We are an absolutely huge fuel crunch right now. All right, my stock of the week is cyber security, a sector that is one of the few beneficiaries of AI potentially wiping out humanity. This week, cyber security stocks boomed after AI leaders pledged a slowdown development of cutting-edge models, setting the risk that the technology could become smarter than humans and bring down civilization. Crowdstrike and Palo Alto Networks, the two leaders in the field, have gained 17% and 10% respectively, while other players in the space, like Octa, Zscaler, and Sentinel One, also saw double-digit gains. The bullish case is that facing unprecedented cyber threats, companies are now going to spend more to protect themselves, boosting the fortunes of the security firms. These stocks have been doing well for a while, both Palo Alto and Crowdstrike have doubled so far this year, but anthropic CEO Dario Amade's blog post over the weekend warning that AI agents could take over the internet in as little as six months, poured fuel on the fire. Palo Alto CEO Nikesh Aurora told a Goldman Sachs conference, "I spent eight years trying to convince people cyber security is important. Dario did it in one week, better than me, clearly. We live pretty wild to work in a field where robot apocalypse is your best marketing." Yeah, I think cyber security companies are probably the only ones kind of welcoming this news. But people think that these attacks are something that we're preparing for, but they're already here. Boston Consulting Group surveyed 300 CISOs in 2026 and found 89% of companies reported AI enabled attacks in the past year, and 35% say that those attacks caused them significant financial or operational impact. So, this is already a problem that companies are facing and they're having to spend a lot of money to try to combat it in that same survey. They found that cyber spending rose 12% in 2025. So, AI is expanding the cyber security challenge faster than budgets and security teams can keep up with it. And what's great for CrowdStrike and Palo Alto is they're not just being called in when there is an attack at the moment, they're being called in at the inception of these models. So, anthropic and open AI, they call cyber security firms at the very beginning as they're making these models to do some checks on them and see how they're, obviously, maybe it doesn't work so well, but what they're saying now is we are going to call in more third parties to look at our models as they are being created so we don't make any mistakes when we release them to the wild. That is only increasing the business fortunes of these cyber security companies. So, yeah, when you see the headlines, like Robotic Hockelips coming, it's less than that more than just like a regular AI cyber attack that could wipe out a lot of computers and make life difficult for everybody. Starting around the world, CrowdStrike, if you remember that name a few years ago, there's that blue screen of death all over the world because they had a bug and so you see what happens when CrowdStrike goes down, it's more of that operational security risk rather than ending of humanity kind of threat, but either way, these companies are absolutely ripping right now and along with the rest of the market, we should say the stock market had a really great day overall yesterday. We're going to take a quick break, but up next, why women are increasingly turning down up bridesmaids proposals. Toby, what do you do with a great product, but your brand can't seem to connect with customers? Uh, beg? No, don't beg, but do check out Rising Stars. It's a 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.amazon.com/rising-stars. That's advertising.amazon.com/rising-stars. A very good and Morgan to do it, Neil. Very good, Toby. But why are we speaking German? Because I just snag breakfast at Berlin Currywurst, and thanks to Square, they were uberfast. Square is the easy way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, manage staff, and keep everything running in one place. Plus, built-in tools like loyalty and marketing to help reward customers and keep them coming back. Get up to $200 off Square Hardware when you sign up at square.com/go/morningbrut daily. That's squ-ar-e.com/go/morningbrut daily. September is world Alzheimer's month, but most people never check their brain health until something's feeling off or wrong. That's why we joined Function. The checker numbers before brain fog became normal. Your focus and mental stamina leave a data trail in your blood and function tracks it. Like how high homocysteine can be linked to brain fog and cognitive decline risk. Or how magnesium supports nerve signaling and focus under stress. Plus, function members can add on a brain-related add-on test like Alzheimer's detection test. Check your brain and health like us. Function provides over 160 lab tests for one dollar a day and member pricing on advanced imaging. Sign up at FunctionHealth.com/brue and use code Brue25 for a $25 credit. That's FunctionHealth.com/brue code Brue25. Neil, peak wedding season is here and lucky for your wallet, you will never be a bridesmaid. Being asked to be a bridesmaid is quite the honor, but it's also become a financial negotiation. A BF polling survey found nearly one in four women who've been a bridesmaid have considered turning the roll down purely over cost and among women 25-34, that jumps to more than one in three. It's not hard to see why. The cost of being a bridesmaid has roughly tripled in the last two decades from around $900 in 2014 to about $3,000 today according to professional bridesmaid for higher gen glands. That number adds up fast between the dress, alterations, a bachelorette trip, a bridal shower, plus day of costs like travel, lodging, hair, makeup, and a gift. Beyond inflation, experts point to social media pressure turning weddings into multi-day Instagram-worthy productions, bachelorette trips to Nashville or Napa instead of a single night out with one wedding plan or warning, the pressure to keep up with the Joneses is crazy. Some women are pushing back through practical means too. Resil platform Vintage says searches for secondhand bridesmaid dresses are up 17% year over year. Neil, always a bridesmaid never the bride has taken on a whole new meeting, it now means you're also broke. Bridesmaids for higher, we should revisit that later. This extravagan starts as early as the bridesmaids proposal where brides to be are spending ungodly amounts on just asking their friends to be in the wedding party. There's this viral video from earlier this summer where one 25 year old influencer bride to be is creating all these presence, wrapping these presence for asking these bridesmaids to be in her wedding party, and their Lola travel blankets roll the rabbit pink monkey pyjamas personalized stony clover pouches I've never heard of these brands before, but apparently they are expensive because of this.
because the entire comment section was saying, this is insane. Do you know how much money this is? They estimated it cost $1,700 per bundle or over $10,000 for six bridesmaids. So that you're spending over $10,000 total just to ask people to be your bridesmaids. What does, what expectation does that put on the people who are actually being a bridesmaids? You also have to go out above and beyond on the bachelor at party, the shower, everything else that comes with it. And that's just driving insane inflation across this wedding party business. Yeah. I have not had the privilege or burden of being asked to be a bridesmaid, but I have been a guest at weddings and guests in general are complaining that it's just becoming too expensive to even go attend a wedding. Gregory Gorla, a 36 year old New York entrepreneur, said that he spent $10,000 attending 13 weddings in one year and Emily Schatz, a 26 year old in San Francisco. She spent even more on less weddings. She spent $15,000 on seven weddings and three bachelor at parties in the same period. So wedding spending rose 8.5% in the first half of 2026 compared to the same period only last year, according to Bank of America Institute. And guest fatigue is measurable to 57% of respondents say that they would decline a wedding imitation from a close friend or relative purely for budget reasons. And that's up three points from last year. So wow, I think one of the issues here is that weddings have just gotten longer. According to the not study this year, more than two thirds of weddings now last two to three days. I'm not trying to pick on Toby, but you just that is wedding. That was yeah, that was extensive and I had a great time, but it was Thursday night rehearsal dinner. We can talk about it because it's not a welcome party. Yeah, we can talk about it this time here Saturday night, the wedding. It is just a long, it's, it's not just one day. It is a complete weekend thing, which drives up the cost for everyone. I was happy to pay. It was so much fun. Yeah, that's awesome. We talk about, okay, Jen Glantz is a bridesmaid, bridesmaid for a hire. She's been having this business since 2014 and she gets hired for to be a professional bridesmaid. Basically, she's a stranger, but she makes up a backstory. She goes into the wedding party and she basically arranges things and gets all the gossip from from other people. So what an interesting, what an interesting profession. She also said that the way things are going with this over the top news, she thinks that bridesmaids are going to be extinct within 10 years because it's just not sustainable. What's happening? Let's bring to the finish with some final headlines. 198 year old Merriam Webster is doing its best. How do you do fellow kids impression by adding 1400 new words to its dictionary, including many internet-native phrases like "looks-maxing," "rich-roll" and "appropriose" to this time of the year, "cuffing season." It also added a bunch of words that had become part of the modern lexicon like "chilli-crisp," "shapeware," and "yot-rock," though that did peak in the 80s. And an email to the New York Times, Merriam Webster president Gregory Barlow said of the new words. There wasn't a theme, but we can see that online culture and social media increasingly generate new language. Conversation on social platforms creates fertile soil in which new words crop up and spread. Plus, the dictionary is no longer bound by literal physical binding, opening up infinite territory. Barlow said the online dictionary has limitless space to add all the words that merit inclusion. Even if some words turn out to be relatively "affemoral," which is a word I think I need to look up. Yeah, I mean, I think Merriam Webster should stick to words like "affemoral." I think that they can kind of keep the real word thing, and then this is why we have urban dictionary is for the online slang. But I also think internet slang is fun because it's kind of like, "If you know, you know." And if you have to go on Merriam Webster to figure it out, it's like, "Maybe you shouldn't know." Right. If I see something and I'm like, "Oh, looks, Maxing. What does that mean?" And instead of asking you who are like very internet native, "I go to Merriam Webster," it's a bit odd, but I understand why they're doing it. They want to codify these things and give a resource. All right. Up next, a historic district in Seoul, South Korea known for its late-night food stalls in D-businesses and traditional architecture has been named the Coolest Neighborhood in the world by Timeout Magazine. Jong-no-sam-gah topped the annual list of 40 Cool Neighborhoods compiled by Timeout, whose editors rank neighborhoods based on criteria like food, drink, nightlife, unique local businesses, livability, and community. Rounding out the top five, the Ocean District, a seaside neighborhood in Rabat, Morocco, Neos, Cosmos, and Athens, Chinatown in Los Angeles, and Govin Hill in Glasgow, Scotland, other American spots that made the top 40 are Westtown in Chicago, the Financial District in New York, and the Distillery District in Lexington, Kentucky. Yeah. As a native New Yorker, I don't know if I can trust this list because of the fight I shout out. I mean, the historical nerd in me loves fight, but I don't know if it screams cool. I think what they're trying to do is name neighborhoods that you wouldn't necessarily think of or do something intentionally controversial. So we talk about it, but yeah, I would agree that fight I is not cool, but maybe what they're going after is like change, right? Like fight I is, we just marked the 25, 25 years after 9/11, people never thought that the downtown Manhattan would come back in Financial District has really been booming by replacing a lot of these office buildings with apartments and know we were going to go on a crazy fight eye tangent. But I think that's what they're necessarily going for is the, like last year, I think they did Ridgewood queen. So it's the neighborhoods that are maybe moving up and making a name for themselves, whereas once we would, they would be overlooked. How many, how many neighborhoods on this list did you have you been to? I've only been to three and one is five. I, but the other one was in Athens and the other one was in Lisbon. Were they cool? They were really cool. And I like that this list focuses a lot on restaurants because I personally travel just to eat, so I, that is something I would trust the list on is just tell me where to go to get good food. Moving on, October Fest kicks off Saturday and runs through October 4th with 6.7 million people expected to pour into Munich and pump an estimated $1.8 billion into the local economy. A couple of fun facts. It actually started as a wedding celebration back in 1810 for a Bavarian prince. Probably wasn't a three day thing like Toby's. And the Munich mayors still has to publicly tap the first keg to officially open the festival. The number of hammer strikes it takes has actually become its own tradition with the record being just two strikes, but there's drama brewing amongst the brewers. Only six approved Munich brewers have been allowed to pour beer at the festival for generations. Organizers say it's to reserve purity, but critics call it a straight up cartel. According to the Wall Street Journal, one upstart brewer has spent nearly two decades and over 12 million euros just to try to meet the entry requirements. Apparently getting into Munich, October Fest is tough, whether you're a partygoer or a pint. Some traditions at October Fest are super old, like the beer and some are new. Dirtles and later hosen only became the dress code in the 90s. So the outfits that you see that everyone wear at October Fest, that is just like 30 years old. I don't know what people wore in the 80s to this. People, which is the dress of that area, that has five consonants in a row, R and D L S. So I hope I pronounced that correctly. I've never seen a word with five consonants in a row. Is it just me or is October Fest not a huge thing anymore for people to go to? I feel like maybe five to ten years. At this time, I would see all my friends going to October Fest, but now it doesn't, like, on the list of things that people travel to go to, I feel like it's lower down in the power rankings. I agree. I think it's also because people kind of just go to their local beer garden and celebrate it there. They're, like, I don't really need to go all the way, but it's definitely on my bucket list. Yeah. You want to go? After thinking about it now, I would love to go to it, maybe, yeah. It's like the globalization of the October Fest culture has come to every city in America or other places where you can go and kind of get, I probably not the same experience. There's 7 million people going, but some similar vibe to it, but I will see you at October Fest next year. Yeah, let's head there. I think we're a little late next year. All right. That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful Friday and an even better weekend. Share your thoughts on the episode or anything else. Send an email to
[email protected] or DM us on Instagram at MBDailyShow. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our supervising producer. Raymond Lue is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer and co-host is Olivia Lake. Several directions by Nina Miller, hair and makeup never turns down a wedding invitation. Devon Emory is our president and our show's production of MorningBrew. Great show day, Neil. Have a great weekend. 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/protection-powered-growth. That's NewYorkLife.com/protection-powered-growth.
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