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Morning Brew Daily

Special MBD Trivia Show w/ Morning Brew Crew

38 min episode · 2 min read
·
Jack Stebbins,Annie Bennett,Macy Gilliam

Episode

38 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Health & Wellness, Relationships, Marketing

AI-Generated Summary

Key Takeaways

  • News retention testing: Trivia format reveals how poorly even media professionals retain specific details like Pope Leo's birth name (Robert Prevost), 2025's Chinese zodiac year (snake), and Trump's tariff targets (Heard and McDonald Islands), despite covering these stories.
  • Social media engagement metrics: Taylor Swift's engagement post received 37 million Instagram likes, significantly below Messi's World Cup record of 90 million, showing even mega-celebrities have engagement ceilings. Trump posted 158 times on Truth Social in one 24-hour period on December 1, 2025.
  • Box office performance data: Minecraft movie topped 2025 US box office, followed by Lilo and Stitch live-action and Superman. The top 30 grossing films included unexpected entries like Dogman (19th place), a family film about a half-man, half-dog character.
  • Trend forecasting exercise: Contestants predicted 2026 trends including celebrities dating former heads of state (Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau pattern), company towns modeled after SpaceX's Starbase, and necessity-driven crafting as economic pressures increase consumer DIY behavior.

What It Covers

Morning Brew Daily hosts a year-end trivia game show with three Morning Brew colleagues competing for $100, testing knowledge of 2025 news events, celebrity quotes, box office numbers, and cultural trends through five rounds.

Key Questions Answered

  • News retention testing: Trivia format reveals how poorly even media professionals retain specific details like Pope Leo's birth name (Robert Prevost), 2025's Chinese zodiac year (snake), and Trump's tariff targets (Heard and McDonald Islands), despite covering these stories.
  • Social media engagement metrics: Taylor Swift's engagement post received 37 million Instagram likes, significantly below Messi's World Cup record of 90 million, showing even mega-celebrities have engagement ceilings. Trump posted 158 times on Truth Social in one 24-hour period on December 1, 2025.
  • Box office performance data: Minecraft movie topped 2025 US box office, followed by Lilo and Stitch live-action and Superman. The top 30 grossing films included unexpected entries like Dogman (19th place), a family film about a half-man, half-dog character.
  • Trend forecasting exercise: Contestants predicted 2026 trends including celebrities dating former heads of state (Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau pattern), company towns modeled after SpaceX's Starbase, and necessity-driven crafting as economic pressures increase consumer DIY behavior.

Notable Moment

One contestant correctly identified that 250 billion pennies remain in US circulation despite the penny's demise, a number 400 times higher than initial guesses, revealing how dramatically people underestimate physical currency volume still circulating in the economy.

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Episode Transcript

What should you invest in and how often? Making investing decisions is easier with Fidelity. With their step by step experience, you can find investments based on your goals and comfort level. And if you'd like, you can decide how much and how often to invest with recurring investments that happen automatically. Ready to make your next investing decision? Head to fidelity.com/trading. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC, member NYSE SIPC. I'm so excited. I know. We never we never hang out. We never gotta create content together. We never hang out like this. Just the five of us. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Can you turn them off or Yeah. Do we have to listen? I don't know if they're listening to us. Can you hear us? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, they have the in ear headphones. They can't hear us. Yeah. We can. Yeah. We can. We can talk shit about them. They can't hear me. Wow. I look so Wait. Nailed the list. Talk shit about Toby. Good morning brew daily show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, a morning brew daily game show. We'll quiz some coworkers and you on the year that was. It's Thursday, December 25. Merry Christmas, and let's ride. Merry Christmas to everyone celebrating. Hope Santa got you the five piece La Creuset set you were looking for. Today's episode is so different and so fun. It's a game show. We asked three of our very funny friends from around the Morning Brew office to come on the podcast and answer questions about the news of 2025. We laughed, we reminisced, and we learned no one knows the pope's actual name. Also, this is the type of game you can play with your friends and family. So if you want, round up some eggnog filled loved ones, disconnect your headphones, and play alongside our contestants. Whoever wins doesn't have to clean up the wrapping paper, so lock in. But first, a quick word from our sponsor, Public. Neil, hit me with your New Year's resolutions. Well, I wanna get better at golf, maybe pick up knitting, and definitely wanna try to cook more. And? And invest more. Yes. That's why you should check out Public. You can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, and crypto, and now they have generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. Yeah. You can literally type in any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks and then builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S and P 500. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. 2026, here we come. Get started at public.com/morningbrew and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com/morningbrew, paid for by Public investing, full disclosures in podcast description. Now get …

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