Morning Brew Daily - Sellers Are Ripping Homes Off the Market & AI Slop is Taking Over Thanksgiving

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

Episode 722: Neal and Toby discuss the delisting phenomenon plaguing the housing market as sellers would rather take them off than lowering the price. Also, Google seems to have put a crack in Nvidia���s armor as its AI chips are gaining some attention. Meanwhile, September’s retail data reveals shoppers are pulling back their spending, all the while retailers are showing off impressive earnings. How does that work? And, AI slop is turning into AI sloppy joes as recipes found online are proving to be more of a mess than a meal. Finally, the Brits are embracing American Thanksgiving.  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

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Good morning. Daily Show, I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, sellers are pricing their homes way too high. Then beware of AI recipe slop this Thanksgiving. It's Wednesday, November 26. Let's ride. What a time to be alive. It's the day before Thanksgiving. Pound for Turkey Pound, the best holiday of the year. If you're heading out of town for the holiday, hope your travels have been smooth and cross your fingers for Toby and me here who are about to board a plane and train to see our families. Well, tonight should be interesting. For many younger folks, the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving is the time you hit up your hometown's local bar and have the most awkward encounters possible with people from your high school you haven't seen in years. All that childhood gossip about who's looking up with who and can you believe this guy went to prison is going to come rushing back.

Toby, I think I've aged out of this tradition at this point. But if you're like 19 to 25, it is pretty thrilling. If you haven't grown out of it, here's what you do to assert dominance. One, firm handshake, look people in the eye. Number two, strategically buy one of the first rounds when everyone can still remember it. If you are 19, do not do that. And then number three, suddenly bring up that you are running the turkey trot tomorrow, while everyone's getting a little bit slashed.

Everyone will hate you, but in my mind that asserted dominance. Also, my graduating class had a total of 47 people in it, so take all that advice with a grain of salt right there. And now a word from our sponsor, US Bank. Holiday shopping season is officially here, which means it is time to hunker down and stick to your budget. The last thing you want is an unexpected bill or expense to catch you by surprise. Luckily, you can soften the blow of an unexpected bill with the U.S. Bank split card. Introducing the U.S. Bank Split World MasterCard, a new type of card that lets you pay later on every purchase. With the split card, all purchases are automatically divided into three payments in place into a payment plan to be paid back over three months.

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and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Would-be home sellers are yanking their houses off of the market at the fastest pace in years, primarily because they're asking for too much money than someone is willing to pay. By taking inventory off of the table, the delisting phenomenon is keeping home prices elevated

and you out of your dream home. A new report from Redfin found that almost 85,000 U.S. sellers removed their homes from the market in September up 28% from a year earlier and the highest level for that month in eight years. The number one reason, their houses are getting stale. 70% of U.S. home listings were considered stale in September, indicating they've been on the market for at least 60 days without going under contract. Some are swallowing their pride and cutting prices to lure buyers. Realtor.com found that in October, 20% of active listings had a price cut, which is about twice the rate during the home price surge during COVID. But many other sellers would rather sit tight in their overpriced home than take a loss, which would be the reality for a good chunk of them. About 15% of the homes that were delisted in September were at risk of selling at a loss,

according to Redfin. That's the highest share in five years. Toby, this ain't 2021 anymore for home sellers. Basically, they need a friend to come along and tell them their standards are too high, and that's why they don't have a girlfriend. They're a little delusional, but I don't blame them because the people delisting are overwhelmingly people who bought from 2020 to 2023 or 2023 to 2025. 34% bought their homes during that period of peak home buying frenzy that was the pandemic.

So they are psychologically anchored to these prices. It's very hard to, one, to sell your home for a loss. No one wants to do that. But two, they have a price in mind of what they think their homes should be worth. And so they put it on the market. It goes stale. They end up taking it off. They want to reset that days on market calculator on Zillow.

And so you have this group of people who just can't let go of. what was their price in the past, and they are trying to, you know, do everything they can to not sell it for below what they think their home should be worth. Yeah, so once you delist, what is the possibility to relist? Well, 20% 1 in 5 homes that are delisted over this summer were relisted, and it's the old delist, relist strategy. It sounds like it's straight out of Seinfeld, but you don't want to have a price cut showing up on the listing page online, and you also want to reset that time on the market

to show that actually this thing is super hot. It's not getting stale. So 31% of the homes that were delisted in July, then put back onto the market have sold. So a good chunk of when you relist with a reset does help. But it does seem like there are overall, the expectations are too high. We are in a buyer's market right now.

Buyers have the upper hand for the past few months, as opposed to the past few years, where the sellers had the upper hand, and these houses are getting stale on the market. And where are the big, regional spikes where this is happening. Virginia Beach delisting spike of 74% Washington DC, 53%, but then Florida is kind of the epicenter of all of this. The Miami has a relisting share of 84% for Lauderdale, 84% Palm Beach or West Palm 82%. The lowest delisting rates, if you were

interested in that, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Chicago of all places. So the Midwest is very happy or they're pricing their listings correctly, whereas in Florida, it almost mirrors the entire pandemic trend in general. There was this huge boom in the pandemic. There was led to an oversupply, led to weaker demand, very stubborn sellers, and now this massive delisting churn. And the big deal here is that we've been wondering why prices haven't been going down in the home market.

The total number of U.S. homes for sale was up 8% year over year in September. Pending home sales were down about 2%. So you probably would think, hey, why don't we get some relief in home prices? There is more availability, but the frequency of delistings, according to Redfin, is keeping inventory tighter. Then it looks on paper. So home prices are still inching up 2% year over year.

We haven't seen them go completely negative. They have in certain markets like Florida. But overall, the national trend is still creeping higher. And this delisting phenomenon is a big reason why. One thing's become clear over the past few weeks. The AI race is a marathon, not a sprint, and the companies who took an early lead might not be the ones crossing the finish line first.

In another instance of the leaderboard being shaken up, Nvidia tumbled nearly 3% yesterday after a report that meta is in talks to buy billions of dollars worth of Google's homegrown processors in a deal that might previously have gone to Nvidia. These chips, known as tensor processing units or TPUs, were developed in-house by Google more than a decade ago for complex AI tasks, and in the years since, they haven't left the nest.

But now, other companies want their hands on them. Anthropic, back in October, said it would use up to 1 million TPUs from Google in a deal worth tens of billions of dollars, and now META is signaling interest in TPUs, which are cheaper than the chips, Nvidia cells. This is spooking Nvidia investors because it threatens a business that accounts for 10% of the tech giants revenue. It all amounts to the AI leaderboard being shaken up more than moving day at the masters. all of a sudden Google looks like the Alpha Dog,

while Nvidia and fellow GPU maker AMD are showing cracks. But the biggest loser of all, as a result of these changing winds, is OpenAI. What was once considered tech's era parent is scrambling to respond to Google going beast mode, only with fewer resources and a lot more skepticism. Toby, if there is such a thing as momentum in the business world, it's shifting fast. The vibes are weird out there right now because Nvidia is the biggest company in the world, and yet they spent the last few days responding to posts on X with very passive aggressive sounding tweets.

In response to Google and this meta deal being rumored, they said we're delighted by Google's success. They made great advances in AI and we continue to spy Google. But Nvidia is a generation ahead of the industry. It's the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done. So a lot of people respond to that with, you know, the smiling through tears emoji saying like,

oh, I'm so happy for you, Google, right now. And all of a sudden, InVidia looks a little bit wobbly. Some people even compared this to almost a deep seek moment. That time earlier this year where it looks like people were applying too much money into their AI buildouts because it was going to be a lot cheaper to train models than people expected. This is maybe another one of those moments. That turned out to be overblown. So maybe InVedia will once again res cement its position.

But just a lot of different vibes around both those companies right now, whereas Google looked like it was being lapped. Invideo was the kingmaker. Now it looks like almost those things have switched. And then when we're talking about OpenAI, Sam Baldwin, the CEO there, has been far more direct in how rough things are going to get. Then in Video, which has adopted this strange defensive position, he did tell employees that Google Search could create some temporary economic headwinds for our company. And in a sign of how the vibes have shifted, remember a few months ago when OpenAI would ink a deal with any company and that company's share price would surge, you know, 10, 20, 20, 30%, think back to Oracle when they announced a deal on Oracle popped 30%. Well, now instead of being a kingmaker, OpenAI, is now an albatross around all of these

companies next that are doing business with it or investing in it. Softbank, which is the huge Japanese investor, fell to a two-month low. Its share price dropped 9.9% on Monday and 10.8% on Tuesday. And that's because it is about to own 11% of OpenAI and investment. are fleeing Open AI right now. And we also have to talk about Oracle, which has lost $400 billion in market value since its peak over the summer. It announced that it had this massive revenue backlog of $317 billion, which investors were like, that is insane. We love you. They sent shares up 30 percent that particular day. The Wall Street Journal later revealed that $300 billion of that

$317 was in a deal with Open AI. And now Oracle has come crashing down as investors get little skittish about what Sim Altman is up to. Moving on, right now the American shopper is sending more mixed messages than your high school X asking if you'll be in town for Thanksgiving. On the one hand, the government's retail data is coming in after the shutdown-related delays, and the verdict is shoppers don't be shopping as much. US retail sales rose just 0.2% in September compared to a 0.6% jump the month prior, as consumers started to tap the brakes rather than tap their credit cards towards

the end of the third quarter. On the other hand, a bunch of retailers just reported some pretty impressive earnings. Abercombe in Fitch is still the Apple of Gen Z's eye, jumping 36% yesterday after it raised its full-year revenue outlook. Best Buy is looking like a decent buy after topping its Q3 expectations and saying shoppers are gearing up for a big holiday tech upgrade season. And Coles, yes, coals, soared over 40% after it adjusted its outlook to show a sales decline of just 3.5% compared to previous estimates of 6%. In general, companies that represent good value like T.J. Max, Walmart in Burlington Coat Factory, had a strong earning cycle. But remember, this is your high school X we're talking about, so things are anything but straightforward. Yesterday's consumer confidence reading just came in at its lowest level since Liberation Day tariffs were announced.

Neil, as we enter peak shopping season, how would you sum up the state of the U.S. consumer right now? Yeah, definitely a little confusing, definitely some mixed messages. but I'm going to take the glass half full approach here because there were a lot of warning signs that people were pulling back on spending. We had some companies say that in earnings earlier this earnings season. But yesterday, you know, most of these companies did really well. Best Buy Abercrombie, Dix, Coles all improved their guidance, which is surprising, given all of the news headlines we've been hearing.

Target and Hope Depot seemed to be the two retailers that aren't doing so well. But Walmart, T.J. Max, Burlington Coat Factory, Ross, are all doing really well. People are still shopping. They're seeking out value, but they are still shopping more than all of these warnings would suggest. And one note on this retail sales report, yes, it came in a little bit softer than an expected. Point two percent growth. But if you're looking at whether people are feeling financially healthy, look at sales at eating and drinking establishments, because that is completely discretionary. You don't have to go out to eat or go to a bar. You could do all of that stuff at your home for cheaper. But sales increase,

0.7% on the month. They're up 6.7% from a year ago. That matched expectations or even exceeded them. So it does look like people are still feeling okay enough to go eat and drink out, which is a sign of somewhat consumer health. All right, Chef Neal over there, just saying, flexing that, you could definitely cook at home. We know, but sometimes you just want to order out a little bit. There is a paradox emerging in retail spending right now, though, because MasterCard is predicting 3.6% growth in total holiday spend for 2025. it speaks to the fact that the consumer is feeling good. They're going to spend more money,

but they actually are saying that people will spend more dollars but buy fewer items. How does that happen? Prices have arisen. So inflation is driving a lot of that bump in spending. Inflated price tags makes the consumer look healthier, makes the total pie look bigger, even though actual gift volume may decline a little bit. And it speaks to this idea of the K-shaped economy that we have talked about

again and again where high-income households are still spending on luxury goods travel, dining out, as you mentioned, while middle and low-income households are feeling the pinch spending is falling a little bit. They are discount chasing more. So that is the story of the U.S. consumer right now. One is diverging and spending a lot of money, and then the other half is kind of spending less money as they are cutting across categories and living more paycheck to paycheck. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back and talk about AISLOP. and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get

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If you've eaten your way through enough Thanksgivings, you've inevitably ended up with some form of slop on your plate. For me, it's my brother's green bean casserole. For you, it may be your ants mashed potatoes. But increasingly, you have to be on the lookout for AI slop when you're searching for recipes to make slop. Bloomberg talked to food bloggers who say that Google is increasingly injecting AI-generated recipe summaries above the links to actual recipes. And sometimes those summaries end up giving worse instructions. than your drunk uncle. For instance, Eb Gargano, who runs the Easy Peasy Foodie blog, said that Google's AI spit out a Christmas cake base on her recipes that told people to cook

a six-inch cake for three to four hours at 320 degrees Fahrenheit. And that is a recipe for coal. Other than potentially burning your kitchen down, the jumbled AI nonsense is also stealing traffic. Gargano says traffic to her turkey recipe, for instance, is down 40% year over year. Across interviews with 22 independent food creators, Bloomberg found much of the same AI generated summaries eating away at traffic, AI generated images of food populating sites like Pinterest, and worst of all, fully AI cloned recipe sites with just enough changes to escape copyright scrutiny. You know, we've seen writing slop and short form video slop.

Now we've entered the era of Thanksgiving slop. So I tried this myself. I googled, how do you dry brine a turkey? And what I got was a pretty comprehensive, quote, AI overview of how to do this. And as I was reading through, I didn't actually go through with it because I don't have a turkey on me right now. But I did see how this would absolutely collapse traffic to food bloggers.

Because previously, if you kept scrolling down, you would see links to food blogs on how exactly to do this. In years past, that's probably where I would have gone. But now there's the AI overview. They say they put links and references in their, AI overview, Google says this, but you have to look closely. There's really small icon links, and you have to, like, squint to see them, and then you click on them, and then it opens up a new tab where you can see where they got this information from. It's from a few different food blogs like

the kitchen and a few other ones. But I can totally see just myself firsthand how this is absolutely hiving wave traffic from food bloggers who are facing really an existential crisis right now with AI overview scraping their content and then putting it above their food blogs in Google search results. And these food bloggers say that the number one aspect that makes us more valuable than AI is the fact that we've cooked the recipe before. If you are relying on a recipe that was generated by AI, they don't know, you don't know if it's going to work or not. So some of them spoke to the fact that their husbands came across a photo on Facebook and they thought it was legit because they saw a photo of it and they saw a recipe. And then once you actually go and try to cook the cookies,

they turn into these doughy mess that don't meld together correctly, you know, bake is a science. And if you are playing fast and loose with those ratios, like things can go south quickly. But I think the worst part is AI cloning entire sites where you literally just copy and paste almost everything about them, but you change a few images, you change a few words here and there. And it's just enough to skirt by, you know, copyright scrutiny. And yet you are basically directing traffic from someone who makes her livelihood off of it to try to hive off a few dollars for yourself as well. So it is, I mean, AI food blogs have been, face. an existential crisis for a while now, but AI is accelerating that for sure.

Yeah, so would you trust an AI overview recipe? One thing to know that that I saw with this dry-briening example is what these food bloggers called Frankenstein AI recipes, and that's why they may not work. It's because they are borrowing from a bunch of different, or borrowing, I should say, stealing, from a bunch of different food blog recipes. And they're combining together, and they don't really know the difference. So they might take one ingredient list from, from one blog and then another instruction manual from another recipe, put them together as if they were the same thing originally.

And so that when you make it, you look at this and you're like, I just created a monster of a dish and this doesn't taste good at all. So I think for maybe some recipes, very simple things are like what temperature should I cook turkey to, you can probably rely on AI overviews. When it comes to something a little more comprehensive, I would certainly be skeptical.

Here's the bright side. If you stink at cooking and you create something that is inedible, just blame it on the AI. over you. It wasn't you. You were like, I followed the recipe. It was just the wrong recipe. All right, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. In a twist of fate, Thanksgiving is becoming a big deal in the place where the pilgrims started their journey. According to The Guardian, people in England are increasingly embracing the most American

of holidays as they get hooked on U.S. cuisine and are jealous. We're all having such a good time and they're not. Searches for Thanksgiving in Britain have jumped 440% year over year, while searches for pumpkin spice are up 550% per online retailer Okado. The trend is driven by interest in American food, which is not surprising in a place that relies solely on salt and vibes for seasoning. Searches for Buffalo Blue Cheesegirls are up 410% from last year in Britain, and Newman's own ranch dressing 202%. More than half of British adults have ordered or are interested in ordering southern U.S. dishes, specifically, such as Louisiana Gumbo. Toby, are we okay with letting the Brits have Thanksgiving? Absolutely. Thanksgiving is delicious, and you're so right. I mean, the joke is that the food

stinks over there. And so Thanksgiving food seems delicious from afar unless you're following those sloppy recipes. One aspect that could be driving this as well is more Americans are moving over to the UK. Post-Trump getting reelected, we saw U.S. applications for U.K. citizenship jump to 26 percent year over year to 6,100 in 20, 24. there was a 40% year-over-year search in Q4 alone. So more people are kind of expatting over to the UK. But I don't blame the UK at all. I mean, American holiday traditions seem fun.

More people are getting involved in Halloween. 51% say that they are becoming a thing over in Britain now. So never knock someone for wanting to have a little bit of fun, wanting to have a little bit of mashed potatoes. It sounds delicious and it is delicious. And it is driven by young people who are maybe scrolling social media seeing us all have this beautiful feast. 42% of Gen Zian millennials in Britain

say they have attended a Thanksgiving meal and 16% plan to attend or host the holiday for the first time this November. So this is an absolute surge. And what do we want from them back? Like, should we do Boxing Day? Boxing Day is incredible. I mean, I only know it from the fact

that there's a million Premier League games on. So I associate Boxing Day with soccer. I don't want to steal anything else though. You know, I'm just happy to be where we are right now. and I also can't really remember any other British holidays. You got some for me other than Boxing Day? All right, Boxing Day. Guy Fox Night.

Guy Fox? Yeah, probably. All right, finally, who here loves Rush Hour? Yep, seeing a lot of hands. Who here loves tabbing a disgrace director to pull aging stars out of retirement at the behest of the president? Hmm, seeing a few less hands. Thus sums up the controversy surrounding Rush Hour 4, which is being pulled into reality by Paramount, who is closing in on a deal to distribute a fourth film. It would reunite Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker while quietly ushering controversial director Brett Ratner back into Hollywood.

Seven years after multiple women accused Ratner of sexual misconduct, allegations he denies, no studio would touch him or the long gestating quadriquel leaving the project in limbo. His slow climb back this year began with the Melania Trump documentary for Amazon and now, thanks in part to reported pressure from President Trump on Skydance's new owners, the Ellison family, rush hour four is suddenly back from the dead. Neil, does the world need another rush hour? Well, the market isn't asking for it, that's for sure. And I think in other domains, critics of Trump's meddling into the private markets would spark an uproar about him strong-arming a CEO into a business decision. We've seen this in things like having, you know, the Coke, not have high-fructose corn syrup

and move to real sugar again. But when it comes to Rush Hour 4, they're kind of throwing up their hands, shrugging and saying, well, all right, I guess. Just this morning, we were looking at clips of Rush Hour going, all right, the first one is pretty good. The second one was actually pretty good, too. The third one, it lost a little bit of steam here.

Which is why it wasn't picked up because, you know, cinemas want, these studios want to make money, and they're looking at the Rush Hour trilogy and saying, that is from a time gone by. But while you're greenlighting movies, Trump, I'd like to order another master and commander, please, and 20 more national treasures. I agree with the National Treasure Park, Nicholas Gage, National Treasure himself. All right, that is all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful Wednesday and Thanksgiving weekend.

On a logistical note, we'll be bringing you special episodes tomorrow and Friday, the perfect soundtrack for cooking and eating leftovers. On Thursday, we dive deep into the business of Thanksgiving from the Macy's Parade to the Cranberry industry. Then on Friday, you'll hear a great interview with a world-leading toy expert on how that industry is responding to all the adults scooping up hot wheels and Legos. Make sure to check them out. If you want to get in touch about this episode, send a note to Morning Brew Daily at Morningbrew.com or DM us on Instagram at Ambid Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Lute is our producer.

Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Hair and makeup is ready to flex on their high school classmates. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great Saturday, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. All. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package. The biggest prize in Yamava's history.

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