Episode 547: Neal and Toby chat about the Napster revival and why it’s being brought into the Metaverse. Then, everyday Canadians are getting fed up with the trade war that they’re deciding to spend their travel money elsewhere. Also, a Trump-backed crypto venture just launched a stablecoin, plunging deeper into crypto. Meanwhile, a group of civil engineers just gave America a report card for its infrastructure…and we’re a C average student. Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Learn more at sophos.com Get your MBD mug here: https://shop.morningbrew.com/products/morning-brew-daily-mug Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow 00:00 - Most important business story in the 21st century? 3:00 - Napster back? 7:30 - Canadians snub US travel 11:00 - Trump launches a stablecoin 16:30 - US infrastructure barely passes 21:00 - Headlines Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the most important business story of the 21st century?
Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, where are all the Canadian tourists? Why our neighbors up north are snubbing Miami for Mallorca.
Then Napster, yes, that Napster, is back after being acquired for a sum of money that is much bigger than you'd think. It's Wednesday, March 26th. Let's...
If your bracket is toast in the real March madness, here's an opportunity to start fresh. The Brews social media team, led by Toby right here, has rolled out a bracket challenge that attempts to answer the question everyone is asking in 2025. What was the most important business story of the first quarter of the 21st century? We're not deciding. You are.
You can head to the Brews social media pages on X and Instagram to vote on juicy first round matchups like when Apple put U2 on all our phones versus the release of Vine or FTX collapses versus Fyre Festival. Toby, the first round of voting happened yesterday. Were there any upsets?
We've already had two upsets in the first round, so we're beating real March Madness in terms of excitement. Both came from the 2000 to 2005 region in a 5 versus 12 matchup, putting the iPods launch versus LinkedIn's launch. The lower-seeded iPod wiped the floor with everyone's least favorite social media platform.
Then in an 8 versus 9 matchup, the launch of Gmail barely eked out a win over the AOL-Time Warner merger. My favorite matchup, though, was Martha Stewart's insider trading case versus Enron's collapse. That almost saw Martha pull off the upset, but... Alas, Enron came out unscathed.
As for the next two regions of the bracket that are dropping today, I'm looking at number 13, Pokemon Go craze versus the number four, Cambridge Analytica scandal. I think Pokemon can upset that one there. And then in the 2019 to 2025 region, number nine, the Aris Tour versus number eight, Nvidia becomes the most valuable company Brutal first round matchup.
I think both of those could have made a run. But yes, as Neil said, voting is going to run through this whole week on Morning Brews X and Instagram accounts if you want to participate. And we'll see you there. Now a word from our sponsor, Sophos. Neil, remember Fluffy, the three-headed dog from Harry Potter? Scared me to death growing up.
Do you remember what Fluffy's one job was? Protecting the Sorcerer's Stone, obviously. Don't test me.
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Chapter 2: Why is Napster being revived in the Metaverse?
That very same Napster just sold for $207 million to a company called Infinite Reality, which says it's going to transform the brand into a quote, social music platform, according to a press release, where music lovers can hang out in virtual 3D spaces to watch concerts, join listening parties, and participate in merch drops.
Yeah, somehow Napster is being resurrected as a metaverse company in 2025. Now, to be clear, Napster hasn't been the Napster you remember in a long time. It went bankrupt in 2002 after a barrage of lawsuits. And ever since then, it's been passed around like an illegally downloaded MP3 file.
Best Buy owned it at one point, so did a company called Rhapsody, and most recently, it was in the hands of a consortium of crypto companies. But Napster still holds the licenses to stream millions of tracks, which made it an attractive acquisition target.
So once more, Infinite Reality is trying to reinvent it, this time with a focus on building this sort of immersive, music-driven 3D social space. Its new CEO, formerly the head of music at Roblox, says artists will be able to create virtual environments that match their vibe, unbound by the constraints of reality.
If you remember Travis Scott's concert in Fortnite back in the pandemic, that's the vibe they're going for here. Neil Napster back in the year 2025, who would have thought?
Well, I wasn't sure what is more surprising about this news that Napster still existed or that it was sold for more than $200 million. That is a very large number. acquisition. And I think you're right that the value in Napster is not necessarily from the brand, but from this library of tracks that it has the license for. It has 110 million tracks.
It's paid over a billion dollars to artists and labels over the past few decades in order to acquire that library. And that made it an attractive target for this quite large company, Infinite Reality, which
Just recently raised three billion dollars at a thirteen billion dollar valuation So this company is quite large even though most of us had never heard about it I guess they're a big player in the metaverse 3d Space and we'll see what they do with Napster. I
I saw a lot of eye rolling from a lot of publications because creating a metaversal company out of a company that went bankrupt back in 2000 feels just so out of date on so many levels. But they are pretty bullish on this idea of these 3D spaces where you can listen to music in a different way because the vision as a the CEO of Napster described it, is Clubhouse times a trillion.
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Chapter 3: Why are Canadians skipping travel to the U.S.?
Yes. Stablecoins have a very explicit promise, and that's you get none of the volatility associated with crypto because they're designed to maintain a constant value of $1. But you get all of the benefits, which is making cross-border payments faster, cheaper, and more transparent. So they're hyping up the lack of volatility and the
ability to promote the US US dollar and US dollar Gemini all over the world through these cross-border pavements so that is the promise of the stable coin and you know emphasis on stable because we've seen a bunch of other cryptos be volatile it's the opposite of a mean coin especially because it's backed by US debt and US currency so that is the promise of a stable coin and
It hasn't always worked out in the past. I mean, remember crypto winter in 2022? That was caused by another type of stablecoin, an algorithmic stablecoin, TerraUSD, collapsed, and it brought down the crypto market entirely because $40 billion was wiped out. So there are a variety of types of stablecoin here.
The one that World Life Financial is hyping intends to be one of the more stable of the stable.
Well done. I am glad you brought up cross-border payments there because one of World Liberty's founders said, we're offering a digital dollar stablecoin that sovereign investors and major institutions can confidently integrate into their strategies for secure cross-border transactions.
That emphasis on international payments actually raised somewhat warning flags because then you can think about, you just go down this thought slope and foreign governments could use the coin to potentially finance curry favor with the current administration, stuff like that. And another concern is a conflict of interest as well.
There's a lot of stablecoin legislation that is making its way towards the president's desk, going through Congress that looks like it should pass before August, which technically benefits the company that just launched a stablecoin. So those are two kind of conflict of interest people have brought up. One, that foreign nationals could intermean with our with our government.
And then two, that legislation that is being passed that supports World Liberty Financial's mission right now. Up next, let's talk about a report card for our infrastructure.
Neil, what's one way you rely on tech in your everyday life? I got a lot of health tracking apps running constantly to let me know how the body's holding up.
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Chapter 4: What is Trump's latest venture into cryptocurrency?
It may not be a report card your mom would hang on the fridge, but it is a slight improvement from the last review in 2021 when the U.S. earned a C-. The American Society of Civil Engineers said that the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed during Joe Biden's presidency, which authorized $1.2 trillion in funding for projects,
was key to improving the country's GPA, as were funds doled out by the Inflation Reduction Act. As anyone who's tried to use Amtrak WiFi knows, there is still a lot of room for improvement.
The Society of Civil Engineers used this report card to call on the government to continue funding infrastructure projects, especially at a time when the Trump administration has put on hold some of the infrastructure bill's funds. The group claims that better infrastructure is an efficient investment of taxpayer dollars that results in a stronger economy and prioritizes American jobs.
Tobias, someone who's familiar with getting Cs, what do you think the U.S. can learn from this report card?
I think that we're trending in the right direction, but you've got to keep this momentum going. Right now, an estimated $9.1 trillion would be needed to ensure that all 18 categories within this report would reach a, quote, state of good repair, as they call it.
Right now, in 2024, the AASC estimated that only, and I stress only there, $5.4 trillion of investments will be made through the year 2033. There is that $3.7 trillion gap between what they think we need versus what we're outlaying there. How do you sell that, though, to American people? They said that it is efficient use of tax dollars.
They think that poor infrastructure costs American households around $2,700 a year. And if you kind of improve on some of those specific categories, it could save Americans money as well. So maybe if your roads are more efficient, if your drinking water is more efficient, if your dams are more efficient.
I love efficient drinking.
I love efficient A. I mean, you take it for granted, but it is a big part of infrastructure in America. So they're trying to spin it as saying that these are dollars well spent and we need to keep spending them.
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Chapter 5: How is the U.S. infrastructure performing according to recent reports?
economic data itself, the hard data, which Jerome, what that Jerome Powell calls it, is looking pretty much fine. Strong labor market spending is OK. So we'll see whether those two converge in the months ahead.
President Trump said he would launch an investigation of Tuesday's shocking revelation that the Atlantic's editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was somehow added to a signal group chat in which top officials discussed a plan to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen.
But the message from the Trump administration yesterday was mostly, this is not a big deal, nothing to see here, as Democrats and other national security experts warned it was a massive and extremely embarrassing breach of tightly guarded information. A legal battle kicked off after five members of Trump's cabinet were sued for violating U.S.
laws meant to safeguard government records by using Signal, a commercial app for official communications.
Signal is kind of having a moment amongst the federal bureaucrats in Washington right now. It was mostly known amongst Silicon Valley and honestly, like global nonconformists for leaving few digital traces. But now there are a lot of people within Washington are embracing it as a tactic to protect their own communications. The app has been downloaded more than
2.7 million times in the United States so far this year. That's up 36% over the same period compared to last year. So I do think we are seeing this shift towards Signal, and we're going to see it start to pop up more and more because obfuscating official communications is definitely something that doesn't go hand in hand with a clear and democratic government.
So I think you're going to see Signal as a name to watch this year, especially as it's being more downloaded in amongst the highest levels of our government. Up next, it looks like the main component of 23andMe's DNA is failure at this point.
After the genetic testing company filed for bankruptcy on Monday, yesterday was another house of horrors as a massive influx of customers rushing to delete their genetic data caused the site to continually malfunction.
Long wait times and error messages greeted customers who were trying to safeguard their sensitive information, especially those who were trying to deal with the data of a deceased family member with a lost password.
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