Morning Brew Daily - Google's AI Leapfrogs its Rivals & Trump-Mamdani Tackle Affordability?

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

Episode 720: Neal and Toby talk about Google’s string of recent wins that resulted in its market value surpassing Microsoft. Then, America’s affordability crisis seemed to be the one thing in common between the Trump and Mamdani meeting. Then, Eli Lilly hits $1 trillion in market value, first for a health care company. Meanwhile, “Wicked: For Good” smashes its target at the box office. Finally, a preview of what’s coming in the week ahead.  Learn more at usbank.com/splitcard  Get your MBD live show tickets here! https://www.tinyurl.com/MBD-HOLIDAY  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. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Consider this comparison. PWC data found the percentage of CEOs who report revenue gains or cost reductions from AI is almost equal to the percentage who say they're still stuck. What separates these two groups? PWC points to a clarity issue. Even for CEOs, it's hard to tell what's AI hype, what's reality, and where this tech can make a tangible difference. Learn where AI can actually make an impact and what successful adoption looks like at

pwc.wc.com slash U.S. slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brew AI. Good morning brew daily show. I'm Yel Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, how a weight loss drug helped Eli Lilly make history. Then how Google went from afterthought to Alpha in the AI race. It's Monday, November 24th. Let's ride. Good morning and welcome back to the week, a short week for Thanksgiving. Random acts of kindness, holding the door for someone, leaving a kind note on a stranger's car, they give you this warm, fuzzy feeling. But what drives people to do them? According to new research, Batman. Psychologists in Milan ran an experiment on the city's subway

systems to study pro-social behavior or the act of helping others. In one scenario, they had a woman appearing pregnant, enter a subway car alongside an observer, and counted how many people gave up their train seat for this woman. In the second scenario, they added a dark night twist. As the woman came on board the train, a man dressed as Batman entered from another door. The difference was Stark. In the presence of Batman, 67% of passengers offered up their seats, but only 38% did in the control experiment. Toby, what is going on here? It makes me think Batman needs to be in our podcast studio and just looming over us, prompting us to act and behave better. It's tempting to think that people were afraid that Batman will beat them up in the, in pursue justice if they

didn't give up their seats, but in reality just shows the power of introducing something weird into people's daily lives. If you jolt people from their routines, they will engage in more pro-social behavior where you're more likely to help those around you due to the presence of an unexpected event. Case in point, 44% of people who offered their seats didn't even notice Batman was there, showing it can often just be a subconscious thing. However, I do want to give Batman some credit. People associate superheroes with things like gender roles, and chivalrous help, so got to give some credit to the dark night where credit is due. And now a word from our sponsor, U.S. Bank.

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And for a limited time, students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need, to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.m.m.S. College PC. For years, the narrative surrounding Google was that it was a slow-moving incumbent, blindsided by Open AI, a classic tale of a big tech giant,

getting outmaneuvered by a brilliant and nimble startup. Well, how the turntables have turned. With the release of Gemini 3 last week, America hasn't been this excited by a next top model since Tyra Banks was telling girls to remember to smize. The new Gemini jumped past OpenAI's chat chitb-5 to become the consensus best-performing chatbot on the market. Then on Thursday, it launched an updated version of its image-generation tool,

nanobanana, which the VP of Google Labs told CNBC is incredible at infographics. It still lags open AI in terms of usage. Gemini has 650 million monthly users compared to chat CBT's 800 million weekly users, but it's making up ground quickly. Google is on a role outside of AI too. It's self-driving subsidiary, Waymo continues to expand its territory and recently started driving on highways for the first time. And YouTube just flexed its muscles in a carriage dispute with Disney, showing the integral role it plays as a powerful new content distributor. Investors have certainly taken notice. Shares of Alphabet are up more than 77% since the summer, pushing its market cap to $3.6 trillion, surpassing Microsoft for the first time in seven years.

Neil, if you go back to just a few years ago, Google seemed lost, uninspired, and caught flat-footed. Now it's got its swagger back. Yeah, Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, knows a thing. or two about software, tweeted about Gemini 3. Holy bleep. I've used chat cheap ET every day for three years. Just spent two hours on Gemini 3. I'm not going back. The leap is insane. Reasoning speed images video. Everything is sharper and faster. It feels like the world just changed again. How is it all playing at OpenAI? Not too well. Open AI CEO Sam Altman told coworkers, we know we have some work to do, but we're catching up fast. I expect the vibes out there to be rough for a bit and that Google's leapfrogging of them in terms of chatbot capabilities could, quote,

create some temporary economic headwinds for our company. So the narrative has completely shifted here. You're right over the past few years because Google is just releasing, Google just released the best chatbot out there, period. I would be nervous if I was Open AI too because not only are you being outperformed, you're also just behind the eight ball when it comes to economics. Open AI projects to burn $100 billion as it pushes towards superintelligence. right now it's on track to make $13 billion in revenue this year. So even right there, the math ain't mathing. Then you look at Google. Google has generated free cash flow of $70 billion over the past four quarters. And part of that revenue is derived from providing cloud services to

competitors like Open AI. So not only does it make more money, it's making money off of Open AI's push for Super Nintelligence as well. So if you just wanted to compare those two companies, now Google is ahead of it on performance and the economics has always been in its favor. Yeah, Google reported record revenue last quarter of $102 billion. That means Google makes in one quarter eight times what OpenAI will make this year. So it has a lot of money to spend on resources. You might be wondering, we're saying, oh, this is the best chatbot. It beat all of these benchmarks.

It crushed rivals. How do they test chatbots? Well, one of these tests, I think, is very fascinating. It's called the Vending Bench and it asks a model to simulate how to operate a vending machine. You've got to track inventory, place orders, set prices. You have to make money in this simulation of running a vending machine. And apparently Gemini 3 is just a vending machine beast and can make so much money operating vending machines. They're very impressed with how Gemini 3 can do this.

That's just one of the possible benchmarks where they say, okay, chat, CBT, run a vending machine, Gemini 3, run a vending machine, and apparently it crushes it. You need both the anecdotes and the testing data as well because there is, obviously, there's this thing called LM Arena, where you pit all these models against each other. And you can make your models do really well on the test that all these benchmarks use. So that's why Mark Benioff's quote is important too, because it's clear that Google made something that is good for people to actually use, not just something that does super well on the testing in the arena benchmark.

So that qualitative as well as quantitative approach shows that Gemini 3 is in a really good spot. And you're right. Google is exceeding outside of the AI race to Waymo. Just got a license to operate across. a vast swath of California. Previously, it's just been in the cities. Now it's got the entire Bay Area, Sacramento,

almost all of Southern California, up to the Mexico border. It's not currently operating there, but if it wants to, it could drive you from North Los Angeles in the valley down all the way to Tijuana and the Mexican border. So the red-eye Waymo drives

are about to come. I did see people tweeting out. So Waymo tweeted out their new expanded territory and they did it. It's colored like an empire, basically. And so people were putting it next to the Roman Empire and saying, like, hey, this is how it starts, but this is where it's going to get. It is expanding it rapidly. And then the final note I'll make on Google is we haven't even talked about YouTube that much. YouTube is absolutely killing it.

According to a new report from Pew Research Center on America's social media usage last year, YouTube is the most widely used online platform for both U.S. adults and the teens. 84% of U.S. adults say they've used YouTube. That's compared to Facebook in second at just 71%. So it is the de facto. I mean, I don't even know if you call it social media at this point, but just it is TV, it is entertainment, it is everything. People are spending more and more of their time on YouTube. All right, everything's coming up, Google. Moving on, Kvetching about high prices can bring anyone together.

Just as President Trump and the next mayor of New York, Zoran Mamdani, who held a surprisingly chummy meeting on Friday as they touted plans to address the affordability crisis. A beaming Trump, who's called Mamdani a communist, said he would be cheering, on as he takes charge of the largest American city, while Mamdani, who considers Trump a fascist, said their chat was productive. In his come-from-nowhere campaign for mayor, Mamdani was like a thorough bread with blinders on as he focused relentlessly on New Yorker's high cost of living. He returned to the topic again and again during his meeting with Trump, saying, we're in the wealthiest city in the history of the world, and yet one in five can't afford $2.90 for a metro card. Trump and other policymakers have seized on the popularity of this message and turned their attention.

to bringing down costs for Americans. Because right now, Americans do believe that life's necessities are getting out of REIT, stretching their budgets for things like groceries, healthcare, childcare, energy, and housing. Recent surveys show the extent of the pain. Consumer sentiment fell to nearly a record low in November, tumbling to a score of 51 out of 100 from 71.8 a year ago. A new Fox News poll found that 76% of respondents held a negative view of the state of the

economy down 9% since just July. Toby, affordability is making a late surge for word of the year. It is. And it's not a very easily to define a thing because if you actually zoom out to the macro data landscape right now, real personal income is up 2.3% year over year. Real hourly wages are up nearly a percent year over year. Right now, people are making more money, but they still feel this affordability crunch because affordability is just an amalgamation of a lot of. lot of very small micro instances when you go to the grocery store, do eggs cost more than they did a year ago? Does your electricity bill go up a few dollars from a year ago? These are things all combined together to say, all right, we are in affordability crisis right now. And that is why

there is such political heft to targeting affordability, because something is always going up in prices. And you can always say, hey, I will come in and make things cheaper, which is why we're just a flurry of attention on it because one, it's harder to find. Two, it is a crisis. Like, things are always going up in price. And the three, you're always going to score political points when you are talking about it. Let's talk about the affordability crisis as it pertains to these various buckets that I mentioned, like the things people spend their money on to just live their lives on a daily basis. First thing is housing. Homebuyer today needs to earn $121,000 a year to afford a typical home. And the average American,

earns about $84,000 a year. So right there, you see a 25% increase in housing prices since 2019 levels. When you ask the average person, what's become affordable? The first thing they'll say is housing. Then you move to child's care in 2024, according to child care aware America. The average annual cost of care for one child around the U.S. topped $13,000, which is up 30% from 2020. So child care is extremely expensive. Health care is also getting even more expensive. There are 165 million people who want their employers' health insurance plans that are expected to see their premiums spike by up to 7% next year come January 1st. That's going to be the largest jump in health costs in 15 years. Finally, let's round it out

with electricity costs. This has become a very salient political issue with data centers going around and gobbling up a lot of energy usage. Americans pay $265 per month in utility cost currently. That is a rise of 12% since last year alone, and overall, 124 million Americans are expected to see some sort of rate increase in their energy bill, according to a new report from PowerLines. So you just go across the board. What do I, where do my monthly bills, child care, health care, food, groceries, electricity, everything's going up. And that is feeding this sense that, you know, I'm just an average American. I can't really afford life. That's the issue, though, is how do you lower prices?

and it almost never actually happens outside periods of recession or depression. So that is the issue. And again, why I say that it will always be a talking point because if you want prices to actually fall, not just moderate in how much they are rising, which is what most people talk about when they say about, you know, taming inflation. Inflation still means prices are going up. If you want prices to actually fall, the only times it normally happens is during periods of economic turmoil.

So it's kind of a catch-22. If you want price to go down, you're going to have a lot of economic pain that comes along with it. Welcome to Winners of the weekend, the segment where Toby and I pick two things that have a lot to be thankful for. I won the pre-show Wordle race, so I get to go first.

And my winner is Eli Lilly, because on Friday, it became the first healthcare company in the world to reach a market cap of $1 trillion. Lilly's stock has been a rocket ship in the past few years because it makes the best-selling drug in the world, an injectable known as Zepbound or Manjaro that helps

people lose loads of weight. For a while, it was in a tight battle for GLP1 supremacy with Danish rival Novo Nordisk, the maker of OZembeck and Wagovi, but recently it's left Novo in the dust thanks to more effective treatments and a savier sales strategy. Lilly was not an overnight success. In fact, it was all the way back in 1876 when Civil War veteran Eli Lilly himself opened a drugstore in Indianapolis that would later become a globe-spanning pharma giant with 50,000 employees worldwide.

Lily has hit pay dirt with blockbuster drugs in the past, including the earliest polio vaccine, insulin and Prozac, but growth has gone into overdrive as it's dominated the weight loss revolution. A lot of credit has to go to CEO Dave Ricks, who President Trump called one of the hottest people in the world of business, not about his looks, but about his ability to create shareholder value. When Ricks joined in 2017, the company's market cap was $81 billion. It's surged by more than $900 billion in value since then. Toby, Lillie might be the most successful Hoosier since Larry Bird. Dave Ricks is crushing it. And also, Eli Lips is crushing it. And also, Eli is kind of becoming a cultural touch point as well.

I mean, they sponsor the Indiana Fever. They have this huge president in Indianapolis, so it makes sense. So they're on Caitlin Clark's jersey. He was recently spoofed on SNL, which is kind of a cultural marker. He's been on a podcast tour. So all of a sudden, this very non-sexy industry of pharma is going to the White House, like in getting meetings with President Trump, like, you know, tech CEOs too. They are a trillion dollar company after starting south of.

$100 billion when he first took over. So pretty remarkable rise. One of the interesting things about ELA's journey to a trillion dollars is that they didn't do COVID vaccines either. During the pandemic, Lilly kind of missed the boat when it came to it. Companies like Pfizer's, Pfizer and Madonna doubled down on it and absolutely ripped during the pandemic. They have been mired in a post-COVID slump ever since then. Eli Lilly mined the fertile waters of the GLP1 craze. And they have done much better long term. So what looked like a misstep at the time has turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Well, it was interesting also about Eli Lilly's. If you thought of them in the past decade or so, the thing that came to mind was insulin prices because over two decades,

Lily raised the sticker price of Humelag, which is its popular insulin by more than 1,000 percent. And this drew a ton of backlash. In 2023, after this huge public outcry, they cut their sticker price of Humelag, but it was this whole drama that this was what Eli Lilly was known for was, you know, gouging people with their insulin. And now it's become something different. It's helping people lose a lot of weight because they just happened upon this. I mean, of course, it was years in development, but they happened upon tears of peptide with Mangaro and Zepbound. And Zepbound. So, you know, they're absolutely crushing. And their pipeline is full to the brim as well. I'm not actually going to try to pronounce their two next drugs, but they have a daily pill

that's coming down the pipeline. Slightly less powerful, but a lot easier to take than injections. Let me try. Or for glopron. Yeah, there you go. I think you nailed it. Someone will correct us in the comments. And then also they have another GLP1 injectable that is coming.

That is apparently the most effective yet, which again, I'll toss it over to you. I can see you trying to rehearse it right now. I am rehearsing in my mind. Retra Trutide. I think you nailed it. Reda Trutide. Both of those. So the pipeline is full, which is always big for pharma companies as well.

All right, we're going to take a quick break and come. back with my winner of the weekend. Today we helped a latte for Sam. Coffee shop, get an insurance quote simply and easily. And made sure a floral delivery van was able to make someone's day.

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won't stand a chance. Find Ollie's sleep solutions for the whole family at ollie.com. That's OLLL-Y.com. My winner of the weekend is Wicked for Good because it did good at the box office. Remember the lofty projections we mentioned on Friday that if Met would have made Wicked the biggest movie of the year. Well, it came within a witch's broomstick of doing just that, bringing in

$150 million at the domestic box office, just 13 million shy of what a Minecraft movie managed. IMAX came in clunch once more, with 30% of domestic screenings happening in large screen format theaters, up from 18% from the first movie, as people wanted to see Galinda's evolution from Ozian mouthbees to government repel in extra large detail. Wicked's performance combined with a projected strong opening for Zootopia 2, has box office watchers feeling upbeat again after a dismal October. Last year, the first Wicked Gladiator 2 and Moana 2 combined to bring in the most money ever for the Thanksgiving period.

But should Wicked keep up the pace, there's hope that this year could sneakily surpass last year's record hall. Neil, all this talk about movies led by movie stars flopping at the box office. Turns out all you need is some Ariane Grande and Cynthia Arevo harmonies to make some mullah. Thank goodness. Yeah, the box office is feast or famine right now. If you talk to industry, people, they say, what really gets people out to the movies is by creating a cultural event around it, by creating some sort of movement. We saw this with Barbie and Oppenheimer. We saw this with a Minecraft movie where people went for the memes, essentially, and now, you know, Wicked created

something special here. And they didn't create it just once. They created it twice. And there was this very ambitious strategy to break up this, you know, one show into two different movies. They spent $300 million on it, not including marketing.

And every last November, it worked. And this November, it worked even better. This is out earning the original by 35%. Although by all accounts, it's worse. Wicked Part 3 coming soon. They're going to somehow continue the story. No, I think one of the reasons it's also doing well is the fact that it's just a PG-rated movie. PG-rated movies have started

to crush it at the box office. Last year, PG-movies accounted for 36% of box office receipts. That didn't always used to be the case. PG-13 was seen as the messy middle. It was too risque for families to bring their kids to. That was for G-rated movies. And then PG-13 was for all the cool kids and our rated movies for all the cool kids. But now PG movies are performing very well. you just go down the list most of the movies we've already mentioned a Minecraft movie that's pg then you go to lilo and stits how to train your dragon those are two live action pgg remakes and then you go back to last year as well moana to sonic the etchog three just pickle me for god that's a lot of sequels right there those are all pg rated movies so the sweet spot for the box

office right now is what gets the families to come out what gets the youths to come out which is you know pg rated two sub winners from this wicked umbrella winner number one subwinner is Wizard of Oz. This IP is absolutely crushing it right now. You said, what's going to come next with Wicked 3? Well, Wicked 2 goes for good, goes into the Wizard of Oz, the movie. It's like the natural lead in. And that movie is crushing it right now. It's at the sphere. It's by some estimates, it's making around $2 million a day. It's this AI reimagined, you know, larger than life screen adaptation of the original Wizard of Oz from back in 1939. People love being in Oz. And then my second sub-winner is Ariana.

Grande for becoming an established blockbuster actor from being a pop star. Many have tried to do this. Harry Styles, Beyonce, Taylor, Swift, Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears. They have all failed to do it. So she might be the first pop star to make that leap from the stage to the big screen in a big way. I guess the only other person who might be in that consideration there is Gaga. But Ariana Grande has proven herself to be an actor who can get people out and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on her movies.

I don't know. I liked Taylor Swift and Katz. I thought she was really, really excellent in that. All right, it's Monday, so here are the events you need to know about in the week ahead. One of the busiest travel seasons of the year has kicked off ahead of Thanksgiving on Thursday. According to AAA, almost 82 million Americans will travel at least 50 miles this holiday, making it a bigger holiday for travel than even Memorial Day or July 4th. If your flight is messed up, you probably can't blame the government shutdown.

Airport operations have basically returned to normal now that air traffic controllers and TSA agents are getting paid again. Still, they're bracing for what's expected to break a record for the number of Thanksgiving flyers. I was looking at the weather forecast, Neil. It looks like we're getting some rain on Monday through Wednesday from Texas up towards Minnesota and moving east. But come Black Friday, things should warm up a bit just in time for you to buy a lot of stuff you probably don't need. But be wary of your flight back. A storm system is expected to develop over the weekend affecting some central and eastern parts of the U.S.

Now back to you in the studio, Neil. Thank you. Thanks for that weather report. All right, speaking of Black Friday, you know, it's a day of deep, deep discounts, but it's also a huge deal for the economy. And that's because, given all the missed data reports on the shutdown, it's going to be closely watched as an indicator of consumer health, something that's been a bit shaky recently.

The National Retail Federation expects holiday shopping to top $1 trillion for the first time this year. However, growth is expected to slow from 2024. I'm the worst Black Friday shopper of all time. Every year it comes around and goes, all right, I'm going to, you know, save some money here, buy stuff I need, and then I can't think of a single thing I need. So if you guys have some good Black Friday discounts, the air fryer, the socks, you know, something cool, please send it my way, because I'm always drawn a blank. It wouldn't be a Thanksgiving without an over-the-top parade and football. Macy's will be holding its 99 Thanksgiving Day parade on Thursday. Buzz Lightyear and

Pac-Man are among the new balloons, while new floats include Stranger Things and, of course, Laboooooo Boo Boo-Boo. As for football, you'll be treated to three Thanksgiving Day games, Packers, Lions, Chiefs Cowboys, and Bagels Ravens, then on Black Friday, because the NFL owns every holiday now, the Bears are going to face the Eagles on Amazon. I hate the new inclusions. They always start off strong, then collapse and deflate halfway through as soon as the pressure hits.

No one wants to see the Eagles play. Am I right, Neil? Okay, finally, the NFL may dominate Thanksgiving, but Netflix also wants a slice of the pumpkin pie. The final season of Stranger Things hits the streaming service on Wednesday, nine years after it debuted and what Netflix hopes will become one of the biggest pop culture moments of the year.

The first four episodes will be released Thanksgiving Eve. Then the remaining four episodes will be released on Christmas Day and New Year's Eve, including a finale shown in movie theaters. Neil, nine years ago, I was in middle school. So were those kids who were acting on the show. I wasn't actually, but it sounded right, which shows how long this has been in the works.

I don't know about the holiday release schedule either. Is that really something? Do you want Demogorgian? involved in your Christmas year. I also am not even sure if Demogorgans are part of the show at this point. I stopped watching around season two,

but it doesn't feel very Christmassy, but maybe they'll prove me wrong. As long as people are at home seat on the couch, then that's when they're going to release their most popular TV show, which Stranger Things has become the biggest franchise that Netflix has homegrown in its HQ ever.

All right, that is all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful start to the week. Holy cow, our live show is next week. week on Thursday, December 4th, we're putting on the holiday party to end holiday parties, and you're going to want to be there. Just head to the show description on our Instagram for the link to tickets, and you won't regret it.

If you want to get in touch about this episode, send a note to Morning Brew Daily at morning brew.com or DM us on Instagram at MB Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Loo is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Heron makeup got a head start on Thanksgiving, travel, very jealous. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew.

Great, Saturday, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavatheater.com. Only a Yamava resort and casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You win?

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