Chapter 1: What questions are being answered in this special episode?
Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell.
Today, you've got questions and we've got answers. A special Q&A edition of the pod where things are gonna get spicy. It's Thursday, January 1st. Let's ride. Let's ride.
Happy New Year and welcome to 2026. Did you know that now we are closer to Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the construction of the Great Pyramids of Giza? It's true, and it has been for 500 years. Either way, we're very excited to begin this new chapter with you all this year. And what better way to kick it off than by getting a little vulnerable?
We are in the hot seats today and answering questions that you all submitted to us a few weeks ago. Some of them were too personal, like are we tighty-whitey or briefs guys, but everything else was on the table. We'll run through some business and market-focused questions you had before diving into some lore about the show and ourselves.
And I tell you what, we got some young Barbara Walters on our hands because you guys asked some great questions and some horrible ones like the tighty-whitey one. But before we dive in, a word from our sponsor, Rubrik. Neil, you know, in every spy movie, there's that one rogue agent who goes completely off script. That's what today's AI agents feel like. They automate everything.
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Chapter 2: What interesting fact about history is shared at the beginning?
They move insanely fast, but one wrong move and suddenly they deleted the wrong finals or optimize something straight into the ground.
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They asked us, what was the most significant moment of 2025? Toby, I'm tossing it to you first.
My mind immediately went to Liberation Day when Trump... Trump rolled out those tariffs and was holding up the big poster board. It looked like a cheesecake factory menu, but that moment felt like it defined a better part of the year. We said tariffs an ungodly amount of times on the podcast after that day.
It definitely spooked the markets and spooked the markets continually over the next few months as well. And I had my quote unquote normie friends asking me about it, which to me shows that something penetrated the general consciousness saying like, hey, is everything going to get more expensive?
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Chapter 3: What personal questions did listeners submit to the hosts?
Like what's going on with tariffs? So to me, I think that moment where he's holding the board in the, you know, the Rose Garden, that sums up 2025 for me.
And everyone's going through looking at each of the names and each of the percentages that are associated with those particular countries. And we also got the story of the herd of McDonald Islands, which are home to no humans at all, but they got a tariff for the penguins and the polar bears that live there.
My most significant moment of 2025 came all the way back in February when the Eagles won the Super Bowl. They crushed the Chiefs. Yeah, so that was a great moment of 2025. Actually, it's true. It's not my most significant moment. One of those moments was the Pope's election. That was pretty cool when we got the first American Pope.
And there was a lot of hoopla around that particular election and the process behind it. And I thought it was a cool marriage of something interesting.
ancient truly that's been going on for more than a thousand years and something modern having this dialogue with each other and it was also another moment we saw we saw the rise of prediction markets which was a huge narrative and story this year yes they were big during the election back in november 2024 but also you know everyone was kind of clued into the prediction markets what what was kaoshi and what was polymarket
saying about which Pope would take the lead or get elected. So I thought that was quite an interesting angle to it all.
Which, by the way, the prediction markets got it totally wrong. I was all in on Pizza Bala because, come on, a Pope with the last name Pizza Bala is pretty cool, but first American Pope is a pretty good consolation prize.
If we're being honest, though, I think the most significant moment of 2025... In terms of its impact that we'll have 5, 10, 15 years down the road, will probably be an advancement in an AI video generator like Nano Banana or Sora or something like that from AI and OpenAI and Google.
Because, I don't know, I just think going down the line, those things truly blur the line between reality and fiction. And I think as they keep getting better and they're already so amazing. I just think the, you know, the risk, the opportunities and the risks are endless when it comes to those, when it comes to generating video that is fake but looks so real.
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Chapter 4: What was the most significant moment of 2025 according to the hosts?
Let's have a caveat here. Oh, yeah. I'll do the caveat. This is not financial advice. Do not take anything we say as financial advice. And with that said, Neil, go ahead.
Well, I'm going to do maybe broader trends. And so what is going to be the stock of the year for 2026? I think things kind of even out and even Stevens, where if something's down the year before, maybe it'll go back up the next year. So I think I look at slop bowls like Kava and Chipotle and Sweetgreen. They had a really bad year in 2025. People did not go to sloppable places at all.
Maybe that was inflation or maybe that people were turning to sandwiches for more texture. I don't really know what was going on, but those companies had a really bad 2025. So maybe we could see a comeback in 2026. And this is actually backed up by a company called Citrini Research, which releases a bunch of trends that they see going on in the stock market in 2026.
And they say something like this, that Back-of-the-house automation would allow these firms to reduce labor costs and boost profit margins. So when you're looking at an X's and O's perspective, not just Vibes, which my stock analysis is based completely on Vibes, as like these companies did bad the year before, and there's going to be some sort of cultural rebound back to Slopples.
They're talking about actual profits and the fact that Sweetgreen and Chipotle are doing a lot of automation. We got this Auto Cotto from Chipotle, which they're going to
you know cut out some workers and have robots do a lot of the avocado slicing and mashing sweetgreen has been huge into automation so those are ways to cut costs and maybe it won't necessarily drive traffic back to these places but at least they'll be more profitable
I never got off the Slot Bowl train, so I've been an ardent Slot Bowl supporter. What's your dog of the week?
Or dog of the year, sorry. My dog of the year could be Meta. And I don't know whether the stock will go up or down, obviously, but when you look at all these companies that are investing tens of billions of dollars into AI, there seems to be a pretty obvious use case for AI in when it comes to Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
But when you look at Meta investing $70 billion into AI infrastructure, that's a lot, obviously. What are they going to use AI for? To make ads better on Instagram? How are they going to actually make money from AI?
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Chapter 5: What predictions do the hosts have for the hottest jobs in 2035?
All right, let's move on to some more questions that are more Toby and Neil focused. I love this one from Morgan on Instagram. If there was a museum dedicated to you, Neil, what would be in the gift shop?
International food court. Oh, I'm not into like material things that much.
Spatulas, not included.
Yeah, just the necessities. And I know my brother's listening to this being like, you buy so many clothes, which is true, but I don't want that in my gift shop. I think that something that would something that most exemplifies me would be an international food court with incredible regional food from all over the world. Who doesn't like eating after you go to a museum and you get all hungry? And
I know you're saying, oh, maybe there's a restaurant in the museum as well in addition to a food court, but I'm just abolishing the gift shop in general and we're moving the food court and we're doing a bazaar of everywhere in the world and we're getting some really good dishes.
I like this question because I love things and trinkets. I love board games particularly, so Mahjong sets galore, Scrabble boards, the Minion card game, lots of sporting goods. There would just be an entire section devoted to a Dick's Sporting Goods-esque thing where you'd have a golf simulator where you could
hit balls you there's a soccer goal you know try out some pickleballs some tennis rackets and then just some cool posters you know i'm a big poster guy when i go to museums i just went to denmark went to a museum the louisiana museum over there they have so many posters and i love just flipping through all of them that admittedly is an art museum so it's not a museum about me but you can't go wrong with just some good old-fashioned posters i love
People to weigh in.
Well, you didn't even answer the question again. You can't just say I'm not putting a gift shop in. I'm putting a food court in. Like, obviously. There's no rules. Fine. I won't put a gift shop in either. I'm going to put an entire soccer stadium and let's go do a soccer match. See? I love that.
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