Google Losing Grip on Search? & US Economy Keeps Chugging Along
31:06 Share

This episode is brought to you by Jira. Jira is the only project management tool you need to plan and track work across any team. So if you're a team of developers, Jira better connects you with teams like marketing and design so you have all the information you need in one place. Plus, their AI helps you knock out the small stuff so you can focus on delivering your best work. Get started on your next big idea today in Jira.

NEIL FREIMAN: Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. TOBY HOWELL: And I'm Toby Howell. NEIL FREIMAN: Today, Google's new AI podcast feature has me and Toby considering a career pivot. TOBY HOWELL: That the US might have reached a public health milestone decades in the making. It's Monday, October 7. Let's ride.

If you have been a fan of Morning Brew Daily for a while, you probably have a fair share of fun facts or numbers from Neil bouncing around in your head. So we were thinking, wouldn't it be fun to have a chance to put that knowledge to the test on, say, a trivia night?

You're burying the lead here. Toby and I are hosting the first ever MBD Trivia Night this month. It'll be Tuesday, October 29th at Morning Brews HQ in New York City alongside our partners Bonobos. We have been looking forward to this for a long time now. Neil and I obviously love trivia, and we also can't wait to have a night with you all in person.

So if you want to come hang with the MBD crew and bonobos, head to morningbrew.com slash events to reserve your spot. Space is limited, so we give you permission to pause the podcast now, pull up your browser, and type in morningbrew.com slash events to make sure you snag a spot for what's going to be an awesome evening. One more time, that's morningbrew.com slash events. Come show us how smart you are and start thinking of creative team names right now.

Now, a quick word from our sponsor, Wise Business, the app for doing things in other currencies. Neil, Morning Brew Daily listeners missed you last week. Well, that's nice, but I was just back home in Massachusetts. Oh, see, I was telling everyone you were off on an international adventure exploring new countries. Nope, just some quality time with family, but...

Now you're giving me some ideas. If you ever do decide to jet off or if our podcast goes global, Wise Business has our backs. And Wise has your back too. It can handle multiple currencies without a hitch, pay suppliers or get paid by clients overseas with no hidden fees or inflated exchange rates. It's as easy as booking a flight. I can tell you haven't flown internationally recently because Wise is easy.

easier. You can make international payments in seconds any time of day. Okay, next trip, we're going beyond Longmeadow. I guess you're inviting yourself to my family get-togethers now? Obviously, I'm invited. For anyone who's looking to simplify your international finances, visit wise.com slash business. That's wise.com slash business.

Before the weekend, we previewed the jobs report for you all, and it looks like you brought the right vibes to that Friday podcast because, oh boy, was it a blowout. The U.S. posted its biggest jobs increase in six months, adding 254,000 jobs in September, beating expectations by nearly 100,000, and the unemployment rate ticked lower to reach 4.1%.

It was just what the doctor ordered for the economy. The report was hot enough to reassure investors that the sky is not falling and the economy is still humming along, but not so hot that the Fed gets a sunburn and decides to rein in its rate-cutting plans.

Plus, the port strike ended on Friday, giving a laxative to what was getting close to a dangerously backed up economy. All in all, it was a pretty good last couple of days, though danger signs are looking that could shake things up, namely geopolitical tension in the upcoming election. But for right now, things are looking pretty good on the economic front, Neil.

They're looking really good. And the question now is, is this a really good economy or is this maybe one of the best economies we've ever had? The economy has had positive job growth for 45 months now, which is the fourth longest streak on record. The U.S. has added an average of 199,000 jobs per month, which is below what we added on

last year, but it still outpaces pre-pandemic gains from 2019. So economists are looking at the economy and the labor market right now, 4.1% unemployment, job growth that is through the roof. And we had revisions to the upside in both July and August. So the question now is, is this a really good economy or is this the best U.S. economy we've ever seen?

So let's immediately turn to what could go wrong. The most obvious things that could go wrong is on the geopolitical front. Obviously, tensions in the Middle East show no real sign of resolving anytime soon and could erupt. Any strike on maybe an Iran oil facility or some of the vital shipping lanes that go through the region could lead to this huge spike in oil or oil.

on a less exciting front, regular old inflation could creep back up again. The inflation report, the CPI report is coming on October 10th. And the job market, again, it's not overcooked. It's not getting to the point where the Fed thinks that it's going to lead to a spike in inflation again. But you never know. There is still a chance that prices could start to rise at a quicker rate than they have been before. There is good news, though. I

Then prices, average wages in September were up 4% from a year ago. That is probably going to more than likely outpace inflation that we see on that October 10th reading. So you are right, a lot of good things, but also a couple of warning signs that you could point to ahead and say maybe it's not going to be smooth sailing for the rest of the year. Yeah, speaking of oil prices, they will definitely be in focus this week because they gained 8% last week, which was the biggest weekly increase since

in nearly two years. But on the stocks front, everything is still humming along. The Dow had a record close. The S&P has closed at a record high 43 times this year, and it's up 21% year to date. So stocks are doing well. And of course, we have earnings season coming up starting this Friday. So that could add jet fuel to the stock rally that we've had or put the brakes on a little bit. But that is also coming on the horizon. And then finally, the

the last thing you should be looking for on the horizon is the election is coming up at the beginning of November. It takes place just days before the feds November meeting where they will announce their next kind of, uh, rate cut. Um, it doesn't look like we're going to get that jumbo 50 point basis point cut that we got in the previous fed meeting, but 25, uh, basis points still seems to be pretty locked in there. Again, you can never say, uh,

something is 100% locked in. But so a lot of big economic reports coming, inflation coming October 10th, and then the Fed is meeting at the beginning of November as well. So still a lot to look forward to. We'll have plenty to talk about in the coming months. Well, Toby, the day is finally here. Robots are coming for our job.

Google released a tool that turns text into a conversational podcast hosted by two AI bots, and it's been going viral because of how scarily good and human-sounding these podcast hosts are. Some tech leaders are even calling it the second chat GPT moment since it could forever revolutionize how we consume complacency.

complex information. The tool itself isn't exactly new. Google released an AI research assistant called Notebook LM last year that allows you to upload content like Wikipedia articles or research papers, and it'll spit out AI-generated text summaries with the main takeaways.

Then last month, Google thought, why limit this to text? Let's put Toby and Neil on notice. And they released an audio overview feature that turns those text summaries into podcast style explainers hosted by these two chatty bots, a male voice and a female voice. People have found these podcasts so realistic and helpful that they've been creating them on a variety of topics and posting them on their social media feeds.

It's pretty goofy, but at the same time, it also feels like a huge breakthrough. After playing around with Notebook LM for a while, Wall Street Journal columnist Ben Cohen said it was one of the most compelling and completely flabbergasting demonstrations of AI's potential yet.

So Neil, first thing I did was of course sneak into your prep doc and feed your intro into Notebook LM just to see who did better. And you know what? Let's just listen to it right here. - What makes Notebook LM really fascinating is this new feature they've added called audio overview. It basically converts those text summaries into like mini podcasts complete with AI generated voices to guide you through it all. - See, this is what's got me all spun up. AI voice is so real, so realistic.

they can basically host your podcast. Oh, God. We are so done for. That baritone. Neither of us have that rich baritone right there. But yes, truly just amazing. It's one of the craziest things I've heard is just how the rhythm is good, how it has filler words. We just heard in that example right there, she tosses in a like to make it sound more human-like. So that is part of the reason why it's going so viral is that it just mimics human conversation so well. And it does have us...

feeling like we got a target on our backs here. We are sweating in the studio. Yeah, it's definitely notable that it was made by Google as well. Google's AI rollout has certainly been bumpy, to say the least. Its AI overview for search was widely panned. It told you, you know, you can eat rocks and weird things like that. So the fact that they have this viral and very successful product where people are just using it to do so many different things is a huge boost to their AI

vision and they're probably just watching how people use this and they're going to make tweaks and customizations to make it even better. They're going to allow you to do more voices, allow you to change the length, and they're going to do so many things with it just because they had this unexpected viral hit on their hands, which they didn't even know about. I mean, they released this tool last year and then they released the podcast thing in September, but only now people are discovering it. So Toby, I mean, look,

You have this tool. What would you use it for? What do you see as the possible use cases for this? A lot of the use cases that people wrote about was that feeding more boring source material into it and having it spice it up. I mean, feeding Wikipedia pages about history into it and then maybe going on a long car ride and just listening to it break down this source material. I fed it one of my old college essays and just –

Listen to them vamp about it. And one thing I've also seen people doing is feed your resume or maybe your personal website into it. And then all of a sudden you feel like on top of the world because you have these people breaking down your life story and they usually are gassing you up as well. That is the real breakthrough here. It doesn't merely summarize the source material. It goes beyond. It adds commentary. It...

focuses on specifically the most interesting and surprising part. So of course this is the internet. So someone just fed it a document of a thousand reputations of the word poop and fart, and just to see what would happen. And they actually dug into like, what does this all mean? Is this some deeper meaning here? Why are we, why are we talking about this? Someone also said, Hey, pretend you're doing a podcast where you just figured out that you two are AI bots

and you're not real people. And they said, I just called my wife and I wasn't even sure if it was my wife. Like it got really existential. So that is why people are kind of focusing on this because it goes beyond that rote repetition or rote regurgitation of the source material and actually trying

adds a little bit of context and color to it. I do wonder if you listen to so many of these, it'll start to make mistakes and it'll start to seem a little bit like video game sports announcements where they repeat the same phrases over and over again. So there's time where this kind of tech...

really wows us and takes us to another place. But at the end of the day, we always come back to humans because they have lived experiences that these AI podcast hosts can't, don't have, and we actually do. So, I mean, I'm sweating a little bit. I still think this technology is in its infancy, but it is pretty remarkable to hear them talk about a particular topic, and you do feel like you're listening to humans.

In the past 10 years, if you're an advertiser looking to target people searching for things online, there's really been only one item on the menu, Google. But these days, the search business is looking a little bit more like an all-you-can-eat buffet. With so many options now, Google's share of the search ad market is expected to drop below 50% next year for the first time in over a decade, according to eMarketer.com.

Despite frequent antitrust scrutiny, a whole host of competitors have begun to claw away at Google's dominance in recent years. People are increasingly turning to TikTok for their search needs, so the platform has started allowing brands to serve personalized ads based on user search queries, just like Google does. Perplexity, the AI-infused search engine startup, is also lurking in the weeds with plans to introduce ads later this month.

Perhaps the biggest reason Google is hearing some Halloween Michael Myers music and looking back over their shoulders is that Amazon is breathing down its neck. Amazon's ad product is growing at 17.6% year over year compared to Google's 7.6% growth to reach 3%.

22% share of the market. But Neil, in 10 years, are we not even going to say Google it anymore? Is Google falling to the wayside? It's possible. I think there's definitely change in the atmosphere now with AI and social video like TikTok.

doing things maybe better than Google can. And obviously, Google is going to respond to this. We just talked about how they're releasing AI podcast tools, and they also are revamping their search engine for the AI age. But I mean, things always change, and people go on TikTok and search for things now. They say that 23% of all users go on TikTok and do a search within 30 seconds of going in. And so I think it is...

Certainly not an inevitability that Google will have its dominance extended for the years to come, especially with all this antitrust action happening against it as well. Yeah, and perplexity is definitely angling for a piece of this same market. It's just now rolling out its ad product to advertisers right now. And remember, perplexity behaves a lot like a chatbot that you've probably interacted with. When you Google something, when you search perplexity for something, a lot of people end up asking follow-up questions, and that's where...

they think they have this unique ad product that they won't serve you an ad on your first query, but if you do...

ask a follow-up question, then it gives you an opportunity to interact with a branded search. They think that people might actually go off on a tangent and start interacting with the search result and talking to someone about like a Tide pen or something like that and going deeper into that and interacting with advertisers in that way. I'm a little dubious of that mainly. I don't think I'm going to take many side quests where I start talking to a brand. But

it is a compelling ad product. They're rolling it out with a very specific suite of advertisers here in the coming months, but that's just another person or another kind of competitor that is potentially going to steal away some of that market share that Google has just enjoyed for such a long time. Meanwhile, Google still is

Absolutely dominant. I mean, especially compared to an upstart like Perplexity. Perplexity said it processed 340 million queries in September. And then by comparison, Google has said it handles 2 trillion searches a year. So what Perplexity does right now is essentially a rounding error to Google. But if it gets more revenue through these new ad products, it could put up a little challenge. Up next, you got our winners of the weekend coming your way.

Brought to you by Indeed. Job hunting is tough. Yeah, to put it lightly. It may not seem like it, but employers are looking, especially with seasonal needs arising around this time. It just takes some polishing up of your skills and resume to stand out to them. If you're a professional looking for your next opportunity in the finance or accounting world, Indeed's got the tools and resources to help you find your next job.

Start with their free resume reviews, which are only available for a limited time. Just upload your current resume and in just a few days, you'll receive a recorded video review with personalized feedback from a professional resume editor with expertise in your field. According to Indeed US and Canada Data, job seekers who use resume services on Indeed are on average 80% more likely to hear back from employers. Yep, it is that effective.

Get started at Indeed.com slash Morning Brew. That's Indeed.com slash Morning Brew. Limit one resume review, recorded plus notes per account. An Indeed account is required to redeem. Offer available while supplies last. Expires December 31st, 2024.

Calling all my B2B marketers out there, if your message isn't targeted to the right audience, you're going to get some not-so-pretty results. Yeah, honestly, it'll just disappear into the noise. So true. Fortunately, though, that's not the case with LinkedIn ads. You can now precisely reach the people out there who are going to find your ad relevant.

Yep, with LinkedIn's targeting capabilities, you can reach professionals by job title, industry, and company, all while building the right relationships, driving big-time results, and reaching your customers. Yeah, it's a game changer. In fact, 79% of B2B content marketers said LinkedIn produces the best results for paid media. Shoot, even we here at The Brew use LinkedIn ads.

Yep, it gives you direct access to a billion members, 130 million decision makers, and 10 million C-level executives. Huge audience spread there. Big time. If you want to start converting your B2B audience into high-quality leads, head over to linkedin.com slash MBD. Plus, sign up right now and they'll give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Go claim it at linkedin.com slash MBD.

Welcome to Winners of the Weekend, the segment where Toby and I pick two things that had a better weekend than Vanderbilt fans after their historic upset of Alabama. I won the pre-show fitted sheet folding competition, so I get to go first. And my winner of the weekend is U.S. Public Health because a milestone sought for decades has finally been reached.

America may have hit peak obesity. According to new data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the U.S. adult obesity rate dropped by roughly two percentage points between 2020 and 2023. It's a watershed moment for a country where two in five adults and nearly 15 million children and teens are obese, with rates rising more than 11 percent from the late 90s through 2020. But then came Ozempic.

While there's no smoking gun linking the fall in obesity rates to the explosion of weight loss drugs such as Wegovy, Zepbound, and others, the Financial Times says it's highly likely they played a major role, and that's due to overwhelming circumstantial evidence. First is the sheer number of Americans taking these drugs. One in eight American adults have used them, while 15 million are using a prescription.

Second, college graduates are seeing the steepest decline in obesity rates, and they're more likely to take the weight loss drugs. Finally, the timing. Usage of these medications took off in 2021, right in the period when the drop was reported. Toby, if the fall in obesity rates is sustained, it would be a public health victory on par with the decline in cigarette smoking. So let's compare and contrast those two public health victories. The decline in smoking was achieved through this big top-down effort, along with public health warnings.

tax incentives outright bans. Meanwhile, the way we have reached potentially peak obesity is due to a single pharmaceutical innovation. It has managed to do in a span of a few years what traditional methods have failed to do over a span of a few decades. Truly a remarkable feat made all the more remarkable by the fact that

that there's this huge contrast in the mechanisms we use to achieve it. - Right, and you have some pushback to the current class of weight loss drugs, actually from a rival, gave an interview with the Financial Times yesterday, the co-founder of Regeneron, he actually warned that

Blockbuster weight loss drugs could cause more harm than good because they cause rapid muscle loss. And then two in five patients discontinue the treatments within a year. So they're rebounding to their original weight, but they just have less muscle and higher body fat percentage. So Regeneron and Eli Lilly, all of these other companies that are working on weight loss drugs, are trying to add a component that

That reduces the amount of muscle loss as you're getting your weight loss with these particular drugs. So he's warning that it actually might be a net negative for society. I'm sure there would be a lot of pushback to that because there are so many health benefits

that come from a decline in obesity, but they still clearly have not perfected these drugs. There are serious side effects, but certainly a public health win for the U.S. that kind of no one saw coming, and then it just kind of happened in 2020, and here we are.

My winner of the weekend is the Savannah Bananas. No, it's not a southern fruit company who weathered the porch strike well. The Savannah Bananas are an exhibition baseball team who are selling more tickets than some real baseball teams these days. Getting a seat to see the team play and dance and entertain the masses has gotten more and more difficult in recent years due to their surging popularity. So the team just announced a stadium tour that would make Taylor Swift proud.

The Bananas will be heading to Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park, and even a couple of NFL stadiums in 2025. These guys are essentially the Harlem Globetrotters for baseball with a lot more twerking and TikTok dances. You are just as likely to see an outfielder do a backflip while catching a ball as you are to see a 6-4-3 double play. But fans eat it up, and now they are embarking on a nationwide tour. They expect to drive over two million

million in ticket sales. I mean, what a rocket ship. They've done such a good job of just capturing what people want to see, a combination between sports and entertainment. They drew more than 1 million fans on their tour this year to 29 cities. That's more than the home attendance.

of the Oakland Athletics, which is, I mean, maybe a milestone if you want to say. Oakland A's did not get a lot of people. But yeah, next year, 18 MLB stadiums, two NFL stadiums that fit 70,000 people. They're expecting overall attendance there.

to double. So they have just worked out this formula, an amazing, amazing product that has grown from just, they were a regular collegiate competitive team in 2016. They switched over to this banana playing style in 2022 with, you know, these different rules that engage fans, especially younger fans,

in a way that maybe traditional baseball or traditional sports can't. Yeah, let's dig into those banana ball rules. Games have a strict two-hour time limit, which is huge because a lot of people criticize that games stretch on too long. They have rules that engage the fans too. If a fan catches a

ball in the stands it counts as an out so everyone brings their glove to the stadium there's no walks instead of a walk there are sprints where after ball for a batter sprints around as fast as possible before all the defensive players can touch the ball there's you can steal first base there's no bunting allowed so they essentially sat down and said how can we engineer this to be the most entertaining product as possible and people are clearly resonating with it i mean the

going to an NFL stadium for a baseball team is... NFL stadiums can fit up to 70,000 people. This isn't even a professional baseball team. This is literally an exhibition team, but the demand is just absolutely voracious right now. They have plans to create the Banana Ball Championship League in 2026 where they actually want to...

make a league with a real championship on the line. I do think they are threading the line between they want it to be entertaining, but it is still high-level baseball. These still are incredible players. You can't do a backflip and catch a ball in the outfield unless you are an incredible athlete. So I think they have found this winning success, and it's only going to get bigger and bigger. Have you seen me in right field? I can do that. No. Oh, good Lord. I've seen you attempt a backflip before. It ain't pretty.

All right, it's Monday. So here is your preview of the events to know about in the week ahead. Memorial events and demonstrations are taking place across the globe today to mark one year since October 7th, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, sparking a devastating war that has no end in sight.

One year in, it is the longest war between Israelis and Arabs since the end of the conflict that set the original boundaries of Israel in 1949, and it's been by far the deadliest. Though international governments have tried to prevent a wider regional war from breaking out, the conflict has spiraled to multiple fronts.

Israel is currently fighting Hezbollah to its north in Lebanon and has traded direct attacks with its most powerful foe in the region, Iran. So certainly an emotional day for a lot of people. Florida is once again on hurricane watch just over a week since Hurricane Helene drenched parts of the southeast with deadly flooding. Another hurricane is on its way. In a matter of days, Milton strengthened into a Category 1 storm in the Gulf of Mexico yesterday.

and is expected to make landfall as a Category 3 hurricane on Florida's battered west coast by midweek. It's not projected to be as powerful as Helene, but it's forecast to rapidly intensify in the next few days, and the National Hurricane Center warned that the risk of life-threatening effects is increasing. Right, it could bring double the storm surge to the west coast of Florida, which are some of the most popular areas of Florida as well. The forecast could always shift, but a...

Potential worst case scenario is that this very high storm surge flooded very highly populated areas of Florida right as they are still recovering from Helene. So not a good combo right there. Helene went more towards Big Bend, the armpit of Florida near the Panhandle. But this could have a trajectory that's closer to major population centers like Tampa Bay, St. Pete.

You're going to see Kamala Harris everywhere this week because she is flooding the zone with major media interviews. Yesterday, the podcast Call Her Daddy released an interview with Harris that covered the topic of reproductive rights and other issues important to young women. Harris will also appear on a 60 Minutes special episode tonight. Then on Tuesday, she'll spend the day in New York visiting The View, The Howard Stern Show, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

bear. Disappointed that talk to a podcast didn't make the cut, but I understand. Tesla will finally reveal its robo-taxi on Thursday after so many delays. The event hopes to be a turning point for the automaker, which has been weighed down by an aging fleet, heightened competition, and it's just looking for its next big thing to excite investors. The

The Supreme Court justices returned from their PTO today for a brand new term, and the work has piled up. A case challenging the regulation of ghost guns will be heard tomorrow, and then two other big cases, one involving a ban on sex transition treatments for minors, and another that requires age verification for porn sites are on the horizon, but have yet to be scheduled.

You might not be ready to start holiday shopping, but the websites are ready for you. Amazon Prime Big Deal Days, the e-commerce giant's annual early holiday sale, starts tomorrow and runs through Wednesday. This might be the year I actually buy something. I do need help, though, because I need a new bed.

And I also need new running socks. So you have a recommendation for either one of those. Please send them my way because I am struggling. He is struggling. Okay, a new earnings season is upon us, as we mentioned earlier. JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, and BlackRock are getting the party started on Friday.

Friday, the MLB playoffs continue with the AL and NL division series. And it has been an amazing postseason so far. I'm not a big baseball fan, but I've been glued to my screen. I'm more of a Savannah bananas guy. Yeah, you are. I think you're adopting the Mets. Is that true? I'm adopting the Mets. All right. Well, I'm a Phillies fan. So we are going head to head in what has been just amazing game so far.

An Adam McKay produced HBO documentary on the origin of Bitcoin premieres on Tuesday. The director set out to unmask the identity of anonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. And of course, people have been trying to do this for over a decade now and they haven't come close. Will he be the first person to finally reveal the identity of Satoshi?

Only one person will know, Satoshi. I don't know, but Tuesday watching could be a nice little Tuesday night in right there. Absolutely. And then finally, on Thursday, McDonald's is releasing a limited edition chicken Big Mac at all of its U.S. locations. Previously, this sandwich was only available overseas or for a short time in Miami.

All hail the Chicken Mac. I will be tasting it. Absolutely. It sounds great. We know fast food chains have been investing all in on chicken, so it was only a matter of time before the Chicken Mac finally made it to the big time. Okay, let's wrap it up there. Thanks so much for starting your day with us and have a wonderful start to this crisp and beautiful October week. For any feedback, questions, or comments on the show, send an email to morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com.

And please share the podcast with your friends, family, and coworkers. If you need some ideas on who to share it with, Toby has some inspo. - I want you to share the pod with someone who will still listen to Morning Brew Daily, even when the robots come for our job. Someone who will be loyal to the human cause. Someone who will be loyal to Toby and Neil. - Absolutely. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Liu is our producer. Olivia Graham is our associate producer. Lonnie Fiscus is our technical director.

Billy Menino is on audio. Heron Magum, don't even think about ditching us for the AI podcast. Devin Emery is our chief content officer, and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.