Morning Brew Daily - Unpopular Jobs Are Becoming Desirable & Communal Dining Makes a Comeback

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

Episode 716: Neal and Toby chat about bitcoin’s price dropping to its lowest level in six months, stirring fears across Wall Street. Then, a struggling labor market means job seekers are forced to take up jobs that are uncommon and unpopular. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos is jumping back into the startup world with a new AI company that has an eye popping $6.2B in funding to start. Plus, Toby looks into the growing dining trend for Gen Z of communal dining tables. Finally, Warren Buffett puts stock into Google…for the first time ever.  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

Many employees can't afford a hefty medical bill that pops up out of the blue, but it happens. And employees who are financially stressed are, understandably, more likely to be distracted at work, costing their employers greatly in lost productivity. Luckily, AFLAC plans help with out-of-pocket expenses not covered by health insurance and can be offered at no direct cost to businesses. Learn more at aflac.com slash morningbrewerdaily. That's aflack.com slash morning brewdaily. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Fryman.

And I'm Toby Howell. Today, the latest trend in dining, sitting next to complete strangers. Then Jeffrey Bezos is back in the arena this time with a new AI startup. It's Tuesday, November 18th. Let's ride. May I beat you? In four words, Bill Ackman just changed the dating game forever. In a viral ex post over the weekend that was apparently not satire,

the hedge fund billionaire offered advice to young single men. who are finding it difficult to meet women in public. Just walk up to them and say, may I meet you before advancing the conversation? Ackman said he used this pickup line in his younger years and almost never got a no. After his post went nuclear online, Ackman followed up writing that,

May I Meet You works much more effectively when you are in motion, so be sure to use it in places like subways, elevators, airplanes, buses, and even walking down the street. Toby, would you have used this in your single days? No, but a lot were very quick to point out that, hey, Bill, maybe the approach was working because your 6-3 went to Harvard and were super rich. But the general thesis does feel right here.

If the two options are A, you don't go up to someone or B, go up to someone and say, may I meet you? I do think option B is preferable, but it also has me thinking maybe a new tagline for the show. No more Let's Ride. It's all, may we ride? Let us know what you think about that. All right. Now a word from our sponsor, U.S. Bank. Picture this, your favorite band just announced they're heading on a big tour for their new album.

They're stopping by your city in just a few short months, but you didn't budget for concert tickets this month. Luckily, you can snag tickets without breaking the bank. 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 and place into a monthly payment plan to be paid back over three months. And if you're looking for additional flexibility, any purchase over $100 can be extended to six or 12 months with equal monthly payments for a low monthly fee. So whether you're splurging on those must-have tickets or are covering an unexpected bill, you can pay later on every purchase with the U.S. Bank split card. Learn more at usbank.com slash split card. That's usbank.com slash split card. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college 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.S. College PC. When jobs are hard to come by, flagging down traffic, being a prison guard, or dealing with a bunch of middle school brats, doesn't sound all that bad. According to a Bloomberg report, roles that are physically demanding and offer low pay have been drowning in applications in today's Chile labor market, a reversal from the worker

shortages that typically plague these industries. Take the Georgia Department of Corrections, for example, which operates in a notoriously high turnover industry. It said that it received more than 1,000 applications in each of the last three months for all roles up 40% from a year ago, or waste management, which said on an earnings call last month that turnover among garbage truck driver and technician roles was at an all-time company low, something echoed by its competitors in garbage collection. The flocking to what micro called dirty jobs comes as Americans are finding it hard to land a new gig long after they lost their old one.

According to the most recent government data, more than a quarter of unemployed workers have been out of work for more than six months, which is among the highest rate in decades. Toby, typically these kind of companies hardly turn away any applicants. Now they can be more selective than Princeton. Right. You're seeing this headline and saying, oh, people are getting jobs, that's a good thing. But it's actually not a bullet signal at all. These are the jobs that get filled. When there's no other jobs out there, one to look at is the military, which is typically a hard job to fill because you have to separate from your family and go back to

2022. They were missing their recruiting targets by 25%. This year, they were ahead of schedule and filled up all their recruiting needs before the deadline actually happened. So that is another canary in the coal mine job market that you're looking at and saying, hey, when the military starts, you know, filling up their quotas very frequently. That means things are tightening in other places than labor market. Another company that is seeing a boom in applicants is AQC traffic control. Now, this is a company that hires people who flag you down when you're driving into a construction site. They say stop, and you have to wait for the other cars to come in, and then they say you can go, and then you go along that one-way road. Well, two years ago, this company, according to the CEO, Marcus Rush,

fielded around 10 applications a week for long shifts directing drivers to speed up or slow down. Now he's seeing up to 80 applications a week, and he's also able to be more selective. He said two years ago he would hire almost anyone who passed a drug test or had a flagging certification. Now he's able to have employees with traffic flagging experience and only able to hire 50% of the workers who apply for flagging jobs these days. So it's just another one of those companies who don't offer. and think about that typically have to beg for workers, and now they're seeing a flood of applicants. And then the final entry I want to call out too is substitute teachers. You said that, you know,

the Bratz in middle school is not necessarily someone you want as your coworkers, but the substitute teacher pipeline is refilling. It is returning. We're hearing a lot of people say that they are now rebounding to pre-COVID levels. That's something you also are hearing a lot in many of these industries that this is where we were at before COVID. It took a long time to come back. But now with the job market being so stingy, we're seeing those. pipelines refill to our best hiring years since before COVID. So waste management, substitute teacher, military, traffic control, these are all jobs that aren't necessarily ones that you want, but they are ones that you will take if you are

sitting out of work for a long time, which most people are. 25% of job seekers have been searching for a job for six plus months, which is why you're seeing these roles filled. Jeff Bezos was tired of letting everyone else have fun with AI. So he pulled up a seat to the table, emerging from stealth as the co-CEO of a new startup called Project Prometheus, complete with $6.2 billion in funding right out of the gates. The company's core focus will be on building AI for engineering and other physical world domains. Think stuff like computers, aerospace, and automotive systems, not another chatbot.

Prometheus is joining a wave of startups setting their sites on developing what can be broadly described as world models. Traditional LLMs like chat chippy T learn by consuming massive amounts of text. pattern so they can eventually predict the next word in a sentence. But new physical intelligence labs want their models to learn by observing physical cause and effect in the real world. By watching how things move and change, they can guess what will happen next. And researchers hope that eventually they'll be able to understand things like gravity, collisions, and cause and effect without anyone having to teach them each rule. Neil, another way to think about it, startups pursuing world models are concerned parents who don't want their systems staying at home

and reading the internet all day. They want them out and about touching grass in the real world, asking, may I meet you to new data sets that you can't find via text alone? It'll be interesting to see what Bezos has learned in terms of management over the last four years because he has been in the news more for his personal life and his gallivanting on yachts maybe more so than his management of companies because it's going to be a change. When he left Amazon four years ago and turned the reins over to Andy Jassy, he was the CEO of more than 1.6 million employees. Now Project Prometheus has about 100. So Bezos has a little bit of

a different feel right now. It will see what he implemented at Amazon. He'll bring over to Project Prometheus. Maybe some of the strategies that he was known for will apply to this new era of work, which is more lean and relies less on a heavy workforce. He had that famous two pizza rule, which stipulated that team should be small enough to be fed with two Piz says. He also loved having memos and saying no slide decks. We'll see how we adjust his management style to what Mark Zuckerberg and other techseos have termed the era of efficiency. But also a lot of people are interested in this particular approach. Why is he not building an LLM like ChatGBTBT? LLMs learned by scraping the web. They read Wikipedia. They read news articles, book, web pages, and then

they pattern match based off of that text. But a lot of researchers say this is a dead end approach. Eventually, you're never going to reach human intelligence by having basically these predictors, these word predictors as your models. Instead, we want to run scientific experiments and run, use robotics, gather sensor and data camera from the real world and build these models that can figure out cause and effect and figure out how things are actually interacting with each other. So eventually you can get to things like accelerating scientific discovery, actually novel approaches to intelligence. And so a lot of big names in the AI world. are kind of distancing themselves from LLMs.

The biggest one being Jan Lacoon, who is considered a godfather of AI, spent a lot of time at META. He is leaving META to pursue a world model startup of his own because he does think that LLMs are a black box that will never result in the intelligence that we're promising. So world models is going to be something that you're going to see popping up a lot more in kind of AI conversations. Well, I'm not surprised.

I don't want to learn physics in high school either, but now you've got to learn physics according to these guys want to build world models in order to make any gains in AI. Final note on this, I think the name of the company is pretty cool. It refers to the Greek legend of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, giving it to the humanities, giving it to humans so they can build civilization. A lot of these AI guys think that that's exactly what they're doing with AI. You know, it's certainly a bold claim, but maybe a nice little difference from all the Peter Thiel, Lord of the Rings themed companies. Moving on, it was all going right for Bitcoin until it wasn't.

world's largest cryptocurrency has plunged from a peak of $126,000 last month to nearly 90K this morning, a $600 billion wipeout that was as sudden as it was shocking. These were supposed to be the best of times for Bitcoin. The Trump administration has implemented crypto-friendly policies and lifted the threat of a legal crackdown. Traditional financial institutions have piled in, legitimizing the industry on Wall Street, where it used to be a pariah. Bitcoin ETFs have given individual investors a seamless way to invest in digital assets.

except now seemingly all of a sudden Bitcoin is negative for the year. As Bloomberg put it, this is a market that trades on vibes and the vibes are bad. Bad vibes are rough on Bitcoin, but even worse for the more speculative crypto assets on the market, those altcoins your cousin is going to tell you about this Thanksgiving, or not because they're crashing. A measure of the 50 smallest digital assets dropped to its lowest level since the peak of the pandemic, November 2020, while the top meme token, Dogecoin, is down 13% in the past month. And the problem for a market based on vibes is it's nearly impossible to pinpoint a cause of the crash because there seems to be no clear trigger event. Is it the Fed wavering on

rate cuts? Is it the trade war? Or is it simply that the sugar high has worn off? Whatever it is, it's spooking the Bitcoin bulls. I do want to dive into the institutionalization of Bitcoin because, yes, this was something that the crypto crowd pursued for a long time. And then once it was validated and started having these widely tradable ETFs, they're saying, we made it. This is, it's a de-risk asset now. But now that that's happened, it actually makes it more of a boring asset and actually trades much more like a macro asset. That means it's very sensitive to things like policy, what the Fed is doing with the rate cut cycle, how much liquidity is in the market, what are interest rates. So it used to be kind of a fringe financial asset, but now that it's come into

mainstream, it is affected by mainstream cause and effect like things that I just mentioned above. So it is almost like, oh, we got our cake, but now we want to eat it too. If you're going to be an institutional asset, you're going to trade like an institutional asset, which I think is what we've seen happen over the past few months. Right. And as Bitcoin has been tumbling, so have stocks. I mean, yesterday the Dow fell for its third straight day. Stocks are going through their worst stretch since April and May when Liberation Day happened. There was all this chaos in the markets. The index has now moved below their 50-day moving averages. And that sounds very much like Wall Street jargon. And it is, but it's a clear threshold by which investors look at stocks and say,

are you going to move up or are you going to move down going forward? And once it moves below that 50-day moving average, that is kind of not a panic, but it's kind of a scary sign that once it hits that threshold, things can only go lower from here. So it was a really bad day on the market yesterday. The Dow was down 1.2 percent, NASDAQ down 0.8 percent, S&P down 0.9 percent. All these AI names are just tumbling like crazy. Invidia, meta, Amazon, AMD, Super Micro, Oracle, CoreWeave. They're all being bad along with Big. So I guess misery is company. And if you want kind of the confluence of both the stock market falling and the fact that

Bitcoin is falling, look no further than Bitcoin Treasury companies. These are companies like Micro Strategy, which is Sensory Band, did to strategy. They stuffed their balance sheets with Bitcoin earlier this year. They would use their stock to raise liquidity so they could buy more Bitcoin. And they were training at a premium for a lot of this time. Now that premium has completely evaporated. And some of them are actually trading below the dollar value of. their Bitcoin holdings, as you know, this rally has lost a little bit momentum. So if you see

stocks falling and you see Bitcoin falling, you kind of want to stay away from names like Micro Strategy, who has fallen 50% this year have halved in value as things have kind of lost some of the narrative tailwinds that they've been experiencing. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's Trends. Good Sleep is Everything. That's why Ali's science back support is made with a blend of melatonin and L-thianine for both kiddos and grownups. So when your mind won't switch off, you've got something that can help. You're racing thoughts and restless nights won't stand a chance. Find Ollie Sleep Solutions for the Whole Family at ollie.com.

That's OLLLY.com. It's time to refresh your yard during spring backyard days at the Home Depot. Get low prices guaranteed on propane grills starting at $179, like the next grill 3-burner gas grill. or get $50 off the select Weber Spirit Grill and bring big flavor to your backyard. Then set the scene with Hampton Bay string lights that bring it all together.

Shop spring backyard days for seven days at the Home Depot. Now through May 6th. Exclusion supplies to homedebo.com slash price match for details. Welcome to Toby's Trends, the segment where I take your hand and lead you down a rabbit hole from the business world that will have you thinking to yourself, dang, Toby has small hands. And today's trend is all about communal table.

being on the comeback trail. Commino tables have alternated between popularity and dining room pariah, but they are sliding back into fashion once more. New data from Rezi showed that 90% of Gen Z diners say they enjoy communal seating compared to just 60% of boomers. For younger diners craving real-life interaction, the proximity isn't awkward at all. It's actually part of the appeal.

Many report meeting friends or dates at these long banquet setups. They also see it as a low-pressure way to, to share plates, save a little money, join conversations, and feel plugged into something happening around them. Plus, restaurants are embracing them too because it means more butts and seats, but maybe more importantly, it also makes for more Instagram-able moments that could be shared on social media because long tables are selfie-city. Neil, I think this is a polarizing trend.

Would you want to break red with strangers at the table, or would you rather chow down at one of those solo ramen booths with dividers up? I think you have to really get inside the mindset of. Gen Z. They love a structured communal activity. This is the same generation that is obsessed with run clubs. They love paint and sit nights, group hikes, other things that millennials might cringe as, quote, forced fun. But at the same time, this is the group that grew up during the pandemic that had to leave college because of COVID and we're on Zoom classes all the time. They are craving social interaction. They are craving meeting people. They hate dating apps.

and they just want to meet people in some sort of controlled socialization setting. And that's maybe what this dining, communal dining offers, is that you don't necessarily, I'm not just sitting across from you one v.1. There's a group around. You don't have to manage the conversation yourself. There's a bunch of buffers on either side of you. So I can see the appeal. And especially if you want to meet new people, according to Rezi,

one in three said they met a new friend this way. And one in seven said they landed a date. I think it comes down to people love shit. I mean, in this Resi survey, they talked to 1,000 diners, and 94% of them said they're likely to share food when dining out. 97% of Gen Z surveyed said they liked sharing food when you're out. And what's the best way to share food is you have 15 people out of table. You eat to order something.

You need to pick from someone else's plate. And it's just more affordable, too, and you don't have to all order your own entrees. I don't know, though. Like going to a beer hall or something like that, you sit down. You're usually looking for your own table. you're not necessarily looking to merge with another group. So if it is like two friend groups that have some connective tissue, totally understand it. But if it's just strangers sitting next to strangers, call me old fashioned, call me a boomer,

but I guess I do want maybe my own booth in the back. And this is not new. I mean, this thing comes in cycles. Here's a headline I saw from back in 2014, quote, communal seating is all the rage in restaurant design. And Nation's Restaurant News wrote, the number of communal tables is growing, quote, exponentially. If we went back to last year, though, there was a trend about dining alone and how some dining

rooms were reconfiguring their setups to accommodate diners who eat by themselves. So you are right. Everything is cyclical. We went through a phase where everyone was just, you know, huddling over their dinners and eating by themselves. Now maybe it's where boomeranging back to these communal tables. Actually, I've already convinced myself, anything's better than eating alone. So communal dining, I'm back in on it.

One final trend that Rezi identified in this report that I do want to mention. is the table captain. Now, this is the person that maybe has been to the restaurant before, and you offload all the responsibility of ordering to a table captain. Rezzi found that 72% of its diners like to try new restaurants with a table captain. 60% said it improves the experience. And I was at dinner last night, and our friend named Laura was our table captain. We said, Laura, literally order everything you've been here before.

You know what we like. And so do ahead. And it was just an amazing experience. There's nothing better. It absolves you of one, all guilt. Like, if you order badly, then it's not on you. It's on Laura, unfortunately. And two, if it's great, you're like, oh, Laura, that was amazing.

Like, props to you. So I'm all in the table. Are you ever a table captain? And there's certain restaurants. It depends on where you are. If you're in your neck of the woods, then yes, you are by default the table captain. If you try to be the table captain at not your neck of the woods, though, uh-uh, not for me. That can only end poorly.

All right, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. President Trump will roll out the red carpet for a high, visitor from abroad today, Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. It's MBS's first visit to the U.S. in seven years and is first since the 2018 killing of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents, which led to widespread outcry at the time, but did nothing to dent the U.S.'s close relationship with the Middle Eastern Kingdom. In fact, the U.S.'s ties to Saudi Arabia are closer than ever, as MBS has turned the longtime Petro State into a global economic force with aggressive moves into sports, entertainment, and now.

AI, expect a slew of business deals to be announced during the visit, as MBS seeks access to advanced chips in American nuclear and military technology. Yesterday, ahead of their meeting, Trump already said that the U.S. would sell F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, which would make it the only country in the Middle East besides Israel to fly the cutting-edge plane. Yeah, both countries have a clear shopping list here. Saudi Arabia wants some security guarantees. They do want access to those high-end AI chips, and they do want support with their civilian a nuclear program and then Trump wants to cash in on the $600 billion that Saudi has pledged to invest in the United States. They also, yeah, just want to deepen these tides that have been

happening over time. But I do want to call out a dinner that they're going to have is going to be wild because in addition to MBS and Trump, Tiger Woods and Elon Musk are both expected to dine with these two gentlemen. So maybe in addition to everything else we'll get in a live golf and PGA tour merger, probably not the highest on the list of priorities. Brokered by Elon Musk. Warren Buffett, who has mostly avoided big tech giants over his illustrious career, just made an uncharacteristically bullish move as he heads for retirement. Berkshire Hathaway disclosed a multi-billion stake in Alphabet. The news landed late Friday in a routine 13F filing, revealing the conglomerate had built a position worth $4.3 billion. Now, the purchase likely came from one of Buffett's lieutenants

rather than the man himself, but the Buffett Halo still sends a powerful market signal. Some noted he decided the un-Buffet-esque timing since Google stock has already searched nearly 50% this year, a level that would normally scare off the famous value investor. Still, the stock jumped about 3% yesterday, the only green name amongst a sea of red as a bass in the Berkshire Globe. What do we think about Buffett dabbling in a little alphabet soup, Neil? This is the Buffett playbook. He loves going shopping at the T.J. Max of the stock market, And in terms of big tech companies, Alphabet is a bargain.

Its valuation is far less expensive than its other mega cap peers, trades at 25.5 times next year's earnings. Compare that to Microsoft 32 Broadcom 50.8, Nvidia, 41.9. So while it is maybe a zigzag from what Buffett usually invest in, it does follow his general strategy of going for value. And he's been eyeing Google for a long time. he said is one of his biggest mistakes that he missed out on because Berkshire Hathaway owns Geico, auto insurance, and Geico was one of Google's first major advertisers a few decades ago. So Buffett in an interview in 2018 said, I've seen the product work. I know what kind of margins they had, but I didn't know enough about technology to know whether

this really was the one that would stop the competitive race. So now multiple decades on in 2025. The one that got away. The one that got away, but he's still planting a small stake in Google. Google and look for a big announcement from Google this week. There are hints that it's going to release its newest large language model, Gemini 3 this week. 91% chance on prediction market polymarket. Finally, you can't keep the Australians away from their vegemite even when they're convicted murderers. According to the Associated Press, a prisoner serving a life sentence for

murder is challenging Australia's ban on inmates eating vegemite in court, claiming that the Prohibition infringes on his human right to, quote, enjoy his culture as an Australian. Vegemite, if you're unfamiliar, and in this case, I'm jealous, is a salty yeast-based spread that Australians love to put on toast and everyone else in the world despises. It's estimated that more than 80% of Australian households have vegemite in their pantries, but the inmates at 12 prisons in Victoria aren't able to partake, thanks to a 2006 ban that could change when the case goes to trial next year. There is a reason that that ban has been in place since 2006 because inmates in the past have used

Vegemite to throw off narcotics detection dogs because it smells so strongly you can smuggle contraband into prisons. Also, its yeast content can't be fermented to turn into alcohol, which is obviously a security risk as well. But yeah, the question here, is it a cultural right or is it contraband? And it will head to the Supreme Court of Victoria next year forcing Australia to decide. Neil, I do feel like you might like Vegeanite. Are you a Vegeanite for your person? I do like adventurous foods. Vegemite is not one of them. I believe I've

had it a few times and I'm just like, it's not for me. Also, a telltale sign that it's not good as Australians say, you're putting too much on. Well, if it was good, then there's no such thing as putting too much on. I think that is a signal that even they acknowledge that it doesn't really take that. I've had a marmite in England, which is a little milder,

and even that was something that I didn't really jive with. So I actually have never tried Vegemite. I should not have admitted that on air because now people are going to fill up our inbox saying you got to try it. All right. We'll see how many Australian listeners we have, actually. This is the litmus test right here. Okay, that is all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Tuesday.

For any feedback on the show, send a note to Morningbrewdaily at Morningbrew.com or slide into our DMs on Instagram at MB Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Lou is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham. and Olivia Lake. Here in makeup is scarred from a communal dining experience. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew.

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