Good morning, brew daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, what you need to know about the MAGA vs Doge Civil War over H1B tech visas. Then get ready to feel old. The start of 2025 also marks the dawn of generation beta. It's Thursday, January 2nd. Let's ride.
Good morning. We are so back. Hope you all had a relaxing holiday break and are ready to hit the ground running in 2025. The U.S. enters the new year on edge after at least 15 people were killed in New Orleans early yesterday morning when a man
drove a white pickup through a crowd on Bourbon Street in the heart of the French Quarter. The suspect was killed by police and we know he's a US-born citizen from Texas who flew an ISIS flag on the back of his truck. Authorities are calling this a terrorist attack and believe he's not the only person responsible
The FBI said it's investigating all leads that will allow them to find his associates. New Orleans was full of people, not only for New Year's, but because college football's sugar bowl was in town. That game between Georgia and Notre Dame was supposed to take place yesterday evening, but has been rescheduled for two day out of security concerns.
Separately, a few hours later, a Tesla cyber truck filled with fuel canisters and firework mortars exploded while parked outside of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, killing its driver and injuring seven others. As of right now, authorities are treating the two as isolated incidents, but President Joe Biden said in a statement that law enforcement is investigating whether there's any possible connection with the attack in New Orleans.
One thread that does connect the two is that both drivers rented their vehicles off the car rental app, Turo, sort of like this Airbnb platform for sharing cars, though officials called it a quote coincidence. The investigation into both these incidents is ongoing and will keep you updated as more information rolls in.
Now onto the business news. 2025 isn't just the year where you're finally going to lock in. It also marks the dawn of humanity's newest generation, Gen Beta. While you're out there contending with lower back pain and the eggnog burps, babies born to your peers in the New Year in Onwards to 2039 are kicking off a brand new generational cohort.
Gen Beta will be the second generation after Alpha to have never written a one or a nine in the date section of a test since they're born entirely within the 21st century and many of the US born within the 14 year timeframe will live to see the 22nd century. Now obviously it's hard to predict what's in store for this generation. One thing is for certain and that is generation Beta will be big.
Mark McCrindle, the demographer who coined the name Generation Alpha, predicts that Gen Beta will make up 16% of the global population by 2035 to reach 2.1 billion members. Gen Beta also enters a world of a rapid technological change. If Gen Alpha has been dubbed iPad Kids who grew up in front of screens, Gen Beta is likely to be similarly influenced by the rise of AI in virtual worlds. Neil, it is 2025, the dawn of a new generation. What is in store for Beta?
Well, one thing is they may think of Googling as something that we think of as using a rotary phone just completely ancient thanks to the rise of generative AI and all of those search capabilities that they're allowing. They probably won't have to learn how to drive because of autonomous vehicles. Waymo has been expanding into multiple cities now.
You know, maybe a lot will have to learn how to drive, but 16 years down the road, we might have enough autonomous vehicles where they can just call an Uber, a self-driving Uber, and they'll never have to learn how to drive. They probably won't remember the first Mars landing. That is slated for something like 2030 and 2031. And then when we talk about the pandemic, like me and you, they'll just say, let's get the eating bed grandpa. That'll just be something they read about in the history books.
And they could also potentially live in a post social media world. It's wild to think about now, but think about all of the pressure that legislators have been applying to these social media companies. TikTok could be banned in the US in less than a month in Australia. They're rolling out the first social media ban for kids under the age of 16. That could be replaced by these virtual worlds that we've talked about before. The roadblocks is the Minecrafts where kids hang out.
today, and then obviously there is this rise of AI friends and AI boyfriends and girlfriends that could replace normal social interaction. Again, this is speculation. We're speculating right now, but all these forces are coming to the fore as generation beta, you know, opens their eyes for the first time in this new world. So there is a lot of things that
kind of demographers look back and say the only way you can really delineate between generations is through technological change and it becomes more clear as you kind of progress through time. So we'll see what actually marks the difference between generation beta and generation alpha and Gen Z, but there's clearly a lot of forces kind of being applied to this generation.
Meanwhile, there's just been a surge in what's known as generational research and trying to figure out what millennials, how millennials are different than Gen Z, who are different than Gen Alpha and how their consumption patterns change and marketers and companies are all over this. I was watching football yesterday and I saw a prudential ad that
It asked parents to put it to open a savings account for generation beta. They explicitly used generation beta. They said you can apply now and we'll get $150 for your generation beta kid. So there is a, you know, a lot of attention paid to these generational differences. There's also a lot of criticism toward people who use these generational differences because they, you are basically saying that people were born in a certain age group in a certain 15 year span. That's how long these generations are.
are all the same because there's these certain external factors that weigh on them and influence them in certain ways. There's been a lot of pushback to that, a lot of criticism that generational research is kind of a sham and it's just basically a marketing ploy. But brands are absolutely so keen on these differences whether they exist or not.
And looking ahead a little bit, McCrindle, who is the man behind naming generation alpha and generation beta, he says that he's going to continue using Greek letters every 15 years to mark these new generations. So all those cool generations from the past think names like the silent generation, Gen X, baby boomers, we're not going to have cool names like that. We're just going down the group. And the beta is the worst. I know. Yeah, not the best. I'd rather be an alpha.
A holiday dust-up over immigration has put President-elect Donald Trump in a delicate position as he tries to navigate two powerful factions within his base. The spat is centered on H-1B visas, which allow U.S. companies to hire skilled foreign workers in specific industries, particularly for tech jobs. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramashwami hold the stance that H-1B visas are necessary to attract top engineering talent to the U.S.
given what is in their estimation a pretty paltry domestic supply. However, that pro-immigration beat clashes with members of Trump's traditional base who criticized the H-1B program for displacing American workers with cheap foreign talent and favoring corporations over American labor.
To the surprise of some, Trump ended up siding with Elon in the tech faction, coming out in support of the H-1B visa program. So, Neil, you have these two sides of the MAGA movement fighting a sort of civil war over the legal immigration of highly skilled workers with some very influential and important industries at the center of it all.
Yeah, and the industry at the center of it all is big tech. They love H1B visas because they can bring in really smart people. They say that there's not enough American-born programmers, software developers to fill their open spots. The company that was the largest sponsor of H1B visas in 2024 was Amazon with 9,200. And Google, Meta, Apple, IBM all are in the top 10.
Elon Musk said that he himself was on an H1B visa at one point and Tesla also approved or got approved 742 H1B petitions last year. Other big companies that use it are these IT providers like Cognizant Technology Solutions, Tata Consultancy Services in HCL America. They're all in the top 10 as well. So big tech for
Years now, ever since H1B visas became a thing in the 90s, have been pushing on the government to expand the cap. The cap right now is 85,000. They think that's not nearly enough. They want more people to be able to come into the United States, mostly from India.
the 72% of last year's visa, H1B visas came from India. There was a lot of racial, racist things going on as relates to Indian people because they account for the majority of H1B visas. But the tech industry for a long time has been pushing for an expansion of H1Bs. So we'll see what happens.
Yeah, proponents of the system say that this is not meant to replace the American worker. It is just to be a stopgap. It plugs those gaps that the US workforce cannot satisfy in these very specialized field. One thing that is true too is that Elon Musk feels extremely passionately about this, especially I called it like the tech faction of the MAGA movement. They feel very strongly about it because they think that in order to make America
competitive on a global scale, you need to hire the best global talent as well. So they're not saying this is not about replacing American workers. It's about elevating America as a whole. Because if you're going to recruit the best people, you need to recruit from the world, not just America itself. Elon Musk tweeted, I will go to war on this issue, the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend. So he clearly feels very strongly about this as do others in his his camp.
All I gotta say now is get ready for the Popeye slasher flicks. That's because as of yesterday, the one-eyed spinach-fueled sailor became one of thousands of copyrighted works to enter the US public domain, which allows a new generation of artists to adapt, share, and rediscover old characters, books, and music. It's an annual tradition. Every January 1st, the copyrights for works introduced 95 years ago expire according to the terms of US intellectual property law.
So yesterday, art from 1929 came up for grabs. The first edition of Popeye entered the public domain along with Tintin, legendary books The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, and a bunch more.
The idea of the public domain is to unleash creativity by releasing locked up stories, and we saw this firsthand in 2024. The box office smash hit Wicked is a prequel to L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz books, and one of the most celebrated novels of the year, James by Percival Everett, is a retelling of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Toby, happy belated public domain day. It's a great day to be someone who's itching to write a Popeye musical.
Yeah, or Popeye Slasher film, as you said, at the stop. It is interesting, too, because when these works hit the public domain, sometimes it's not the work that you're imagining in your head. We made a big deal last year of Mickey Mouse, or hitting the public domain.
But it was actually steamboat Willie who appeared in those animated shorteries, whistling at the helm of a steamboat, not the white-gloved Mickey that you and I are probably, or you're probably thinking about at home. Same thing with Popeye, the failure. Is it the Popeye that we know with the, you know, the gravely voice and eating spinach? And that is a little bit up for debate because
Technically, this is the 1929 version of Popeye, and it's not the one where he was eating spinach before he started eating spinach. This is a funny one. He got his superhuman strength from a weird source, the whiffle hen named Bernice. So he survived like bullet wounds by petting Bernice, this magical hen. It was only until later that the spinach actually got involved. So maybe it's not the Popeye that you're thinking of, but it is still the sailor with the bulging bice.
I'm not sure how often I think of Popeye, but I definitely do conflate him with spinach. So you mentioned the spinach doesn't come in until 1931 in that comic, but some sleuths at Duke University went looking for the copyright for the spinach version of Popeye and they found that it was not renewed. So actually, Popeye spinach is in the public domain now. So if you are considering writing a Popeye musical or a Popeye fan fiction or anything like that,
you can legally, you know, have him getting, getting buff from spinach. And you mentioned that kind of jokingly that someone might make a Popeye slasher film film. That has become a very normal thing as these beloved children kind of classics hit the public domain. People immediately jump on and make a horror movie out of it.
In 2023, we saw Winnie the Pooh Blood in Honey, which was this really horrible B-grade horror movie. We saw the Mouse Trap, which was a horror flick based off of Mickey Mouse, and then Popeye the Slayer Man will be released in 2025. There's already a trailer out for that on YouTube.
Yeah, so we're making jokes about this, but this is actually a huge deal. As I mentioned, some of the most blockbuster works of this year are adaptations of old works. And there are a lot of people who criticize US copyright law saying, 95 years, that is intense, right? Like copyright law is meant to protect artists and incentivize creativity because you don't want to spend years working on something only for somebody to rip it off.
after, but 95 years is much after. And it comes as part of a law that has Disney's fingerprints written all over it. Disney really wants to protect its characters, particularly Mickey Mouse. So it created along with US government this, this copyright law that extends protections for 95 years. But you can see how much creativity is unleashed when these works enter the public domain. I just want to get you a little excited.
about who's entering the public domain in the coming years. So we get Goofy in 2028. Mary Poppins and Donald Duck in 2030. Superman in 2034. These are not in the coming years. These are way down the line. Batman, but still you can get excited. Batman in 2035. Tom and Jerry and Bugs Bunny in 2036. That is going to be a big year. If we're still podcasting in 2036, that's going to be a big deal. Wonder Woman 2037. Jan Bader is going to have a field date with those.
Up next are winners of the long weekend. As per tradition, we typically do winners of the weekend on a Monday, but this Thursday is basically a Monday in disguise. So Toby and I decided to pick two things whose holiday break scored a 100% on the tomato meter. I won the pre-show mini golf round with a score of 30 under par. So I get to go first. My winner is the victims of Bernie Madoff.
because somehow they've been made nearly whole. The tenth and final round of payments to people scammed by the notorious Ponzi schemer was sent out on Monday, bringing the total recovered to 94% of estimated total losses. Officials called it an un-presented conclusion to a compensation process
that will have repaid $4.3 billion to over 48,000 people in almost 130 countries. This final batch paid out about $131 million. So where'd the Fed scrounge up the money from? Most, about $2.2 billion came from a settlement with the estate of Madoff investor Jeffrey Pickower, while $1.7 billion was recovered from JP Morgan, which is the bank Madoff used to orchestrate his fraud.
As for Madoff, he died in prison in 2021 while serving a 150-year sentence for conducting the world's largest Ponzi scheme, cheating investors, most of them regular people out of $20 billion. Yeah, I think that's the big takeaway here is that the Madoff Victim Fund says that a lot of people incorrectly assume that the victims were these big institutions, these big pensions or these high-worth
high net worth individuals, which there were a lot of them that invested with Madoff. But a lot of the M.V.F. victims were also these small investors, relatively small investors. And by M.V.F. you mean Madoff Victim Fund, which is like the fund that they created to pay out. Correct.
loss is averaged right around $250,000. So again, to some people that is not a small victim, but again, in the grand scheme of this kind of world of high finance, that is a smaller investor. And it did wreck a lot of havoc on people's lives. And even though that these, some of these big pensions were so-called big investors, they are including charities, including schools.
Obviously, I mean, you don't need me to rehash how disrupting the made off, you know, Ponzi scheme was, but just remember that some of these victims were relatively small level in investors. And it's pretty remarkable. 94% is crazy that they're able to scrounge up the funds to pay these people back and reminded me of a recent fraud, FTX, where they, the prosecutors and the people cleaning up this mess were able to do something similar.
And we were talking before the show, what did they were able to repay FTX, like 98%. So these victims are made whole eventually by through all these asset seizures and settlement agreements. It took 16 years in the Madoff case, but a small bit of good news for this Madoff situation.
My winner of the very long weekend is the entire stock market because its 2024 was stronger than your last drink on New Year's Eve. Despite a bit of a wobbly December that saw the S&P close down 2.5%, the Dow Slide 5%, it was a dang good year for stocks. The S&P 500 finished up 23%, a strong showing right on the heels of rising 24% in 2023.
Those back-to-back gains of over 20% was the best performance for the index since the year I was born, which was Neil. 1990. 1997, good job. You know me so well. A combination of awaiting inflation, interest rate cuts, and the promise of AI sent stocks flying. However, if you missed out on a few key companies, you whiffed out on a lot of these gains. The Magnificent Seven accounted for over 50%.
of the S&P 500's total gains this year with Nvidia coming in as the top performer in the S&P 500 once again with a nice 179% gain. Neil, if your portfolio ended up in the red this year, feels like you got no one to blame but yourself.
That's harsh but also true.
and 50%. This is the AI company that has AI data analytics company that has a lot of clients in the US government and the Pentagon, but it's expanding to have more private clients. So Palantir was a huge winner. Some other smaller companies that did really well and sort of
exemplify what's going on in the economy. New scale power, which is a nuclear power company focused on small modular reactors rose 450 percent. And we saw a lot of big tech companies invest in those small modular reactors in order to power their data centers. Another company that did super well.
love in, which is a mobile app development marketing company. Shares were up more than 700% on the year. So those were a few of the outliers of overall a great market. Let's go to the losers here. I mean, I can think of three blue chip stocks that did really poorly and have engaged these big turnaround efforts to turn around their businesses.
three are Boeing Intel and Walgreens. Intel and Walgreens both shares were both down over 60% Boeing told so many crises over the over 2024 was down 30%. So those big Dow stocks did not do well last year.
And if you're wondering why we're celebrating when really the last week of the year was so bad. Was it really red? A lot of kind of analysts are looking out of this and saying, all right, where do we see this next jump coming from? Can't really see it right now. Maybe take some chips off the board, maybe take little profits before the year end, which was a bummer because there's this thing called the Santa rally, which is like post Christmas. There is usually a little bit of bump to end the year. Instead, we got the reverse Santa rally, a little bit of red, but 2025,
three years in a row of twenty plus gains it has happened before stock market history but it is before you were born before i well before i was born well before generation beta was even conceived of uh... so
I won't speculate as to what happened, but it is exceedingly rare to see three plus years of 20% percent. Well, there are people whose jobs it is to speculate. Those are Wall Street analysts. They say on average that the S&P will rise about 10% next year. You have a lot of competing things going on. You have Trump's deregulatory agenda, but you also at the same time have his tariffs and perhaps another bout of inflation and what
really killed the stock market rally post election was Jerome Powell getting up there and saying that instead of four expected rate cuts in 2025, we're only going to have two. So interest rate cuts in the path of the Fed are really going to drive a lot of the stock market this year.
Typically, following the weekend, we give you a preview of the week ahead with this show coming after the longest weekend of all. Let's supersize this segment to give you a heads up about the major events of the year ahead. And we'll start right here in January with Dry January, the annual event when people challenge themselves to lay off the booze during the first month of the new year. Started by a UK charity in 2013, Dry January is more popular than ever with web searches for the term in the first week of 2024.
Doubling from 2023 to reach an all-time high, but for many of you taking on the alcohol detects, dry January may not be too difficult to pull off at all because you're drinking less as it is per capita pure alcohol consumption in the U.S. has dropped to its lowest level since 2002. Toby, are you doing dry January? I am doing dry January. Part of it is also I have another marathon on the dog head.
Those two don't really go hand in hand, but you're right. A lot of this drop is led by the youth, the younger people, the share of 18 to 34 year olds who say they've never, they, they ever drink has fallen by 10 percentage points in the last two decades according to Pew research. So this is clearly something driven from the youth from the people who used to be, you know, kind of driving alcohol consumption. That has kind of started to change a little bit.
Some of the beneficiaries from this has been the cannabis industry as people indulge in Gigi January, cannabis shop operators anecdotally say they usually come in looking for a boost in edibles or those drinkable cannabis products as well. So it definitely is a vibe shift. So obviously 2024 was one of the biggest dry Januarys on record. Let's see if 2025 exhibits a similar growth trajectory.
You only have to look a few weeks out for two other major events on January 19th. TikTok will be banned in the US if it isn't saved by the Supreme Court, which will hear arguments on the case about a week before. Then the next day, January 20th is inauguration day. Donald Trump will be sworn in as the next president of the United States. Overbreak, he urged the Supreme Court to hold off on a ban so he could have time to strike a deal that allows it to survive in the country.
It's been an interesting meal though. I have seen some internet culture writers, Jules Turpak being one of them, that are saying a lot of TikTok users would actually be bummed out if it wasn't banned in the country. They're saying that deep down people want it washed from their culture. They're tired of doing like their brains literally rotting away. We spoke about brain rot in our gear and recap. People are just tired of that feeling. So there is this weird undercurrent of people saying, you know what? Just get it off my phone. Give me my screen time back a little bit.
I don't know how big of a faction that is or if it is more just an online thing, but it is interesting to see that ground wealth support for the band or as we kind of come up against that deadline. Skipping ahead to the fall, which is when the biggest entertainment event of the year is slated to take place. Can you guess what it is?
If you said Grand Theft Auto 6, you are correct. The video game a decade in the making will almost certainly be the biggest entertainment launch of 2025 with projections that it'll bring in $3 billion in its first year and $1 billion in pre-orders before it even comes out. Toby, this property has broken more records than Mando Duplantis. The previous edition, which came out in 2013, is the best-selling entertainment product of all time.
And the trailer for GTA 6 is the most viewed video game reveal ever, with more than 225 million views on YouTube since it was released December 2023. There's this joke that we got X before we got GTA 6 playing on the fact that it's been 12 years between releases. Now you will not be able to make that joke anymore, so you got to find
a new stick. I do think this is going to be gigantic. I mean, all the way back in 2013, Grand Theft Auto 5 did 800 million in global sales on Thursday. I think it's going to be even bigger now because of just all that hype that we spoke about. The biggest film release of the year won't happen until December when the third installment of James Cameron's Avatar saga hits theaters
It won't be GTA 6 big, but it'll still be pretty massive. The first and second Avatar films both grossed over $2 billion globally, putting them among the top five highest grossing movies of all time. And the wild part is there are two more avatars after this next one.
That is hard to wrap my mind around. You know what? I'm just going to say it though. I'm tired of people saying that Avatar is this empty franchise with no cultural impact. I mean, I enjoyed the last film. Way of Water was great. The first Avatar is great as well. I think this next one is great. I'm tired pretending that I don't like Avatar. I think it's a great series.
Okay, let's wrap it up there. Thanks so much for spending your morning with us and have a wonderful Thursday. Wow, tomorrow is Friday. We really earned this weekend coming up. For any questions, comments, or feedback, send an email to morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com. If you're in New Year's resolution, just have smarter conversations with the people around you. Well, I can think of nothing better than to share Morning Brew Daily with your friends and family. So when you talk to them, they'll be just as up to date as you are on current events.
If you don't like that idea, here's Toby with another sharing idea. It's a pretty similar idea. I just want you to share the podcast with someone who's looking for a new news podcast to start the year, new year, new podcast. Seems easy enough. Let's make 2025 the MBDS year ever.
The gang is all back, so let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raven Lou is our producer. Olivia Graham is our associate producer. Yuchena Waugu is our technical director. Billy Menino is on audio. Hair makeup is in the public domain, so feel free to adapt and reuse this joke to your liking. Devin Emery is our chief content officer in our shows of production of Morning Brew. Great show, Danielle. Let's run it back tomorrow.
