Morning Brew Daily - Walmart and OpenAI Go Shopping Together & Silver Takes Gold

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

Episode 692: Neal and Toby chat about Trump’s tariffs on imported lumber and furniture, potentially having an outsized impact on American homes…literally. Then, Walmart partners with OpenAI to bring a streamlined shopping experience through ChatGPT. Also, Gold might be getting all the attention, but Silver could be grabbing the title of the most precious metal. Meanwhile, Toby examines the trend of album variants, which is a cheat code for a musician to boost their album sales. Ex. Taylor Swift. Finally, Instagram goes PG-13, podcasts on Netflix, and Apple drops the plus.  00:00 - Tune in for a chat with Chicago’s fed president 2:45 - Walmart partners with OpenAI 8:20 - Tariffs on wood and couches 12:00 - Silver takes gold 18:00 - Toby’s Trends: album variants 22:30 - Sprint Finish! Get your paper tablet at https://www.remarkable.com today 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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pwc.com slash U.S. slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brew AI. Good morning brew daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, couch potatoes are on notice. Furniture tariffs

have gone into effect. Then Walmart is teaming up with chat GPT so you can go shopping. It's Wednesday, October 15th. Let's ride. Good morning. If Toby and I seem a little nervous this morning, it's because there's a celebrity coming into the studio.

later today. Chicago Fed President Austin Goolsby. It's very exciting. I'm going to have him signed my Adam Smith jersey. Jokes aside, we're planning on talking with Goalsby for tomorrow's show about what the heck is going on with the economy, given the data blackout from the shutdown, and learned what actually happens inside the room where the Fed makes interest rate decisions, and we love your help. Yes, we want you to send us questions to ask Austin. This guy is in the room where it happens. So if you've ever wanted to know which data they're valuing the most, if they feel pressure when voting, or what Cologne Jerome Powell wears. This is your chance. You can DM us a question on Instagram or shoot us an email at

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but that system built by Google and perfected by Amazon is starting to break and open AI is the one holding the hammer. Yesterday, the company announced a partnership with Walmart to weave ChatGBTGBT D.T directly into the shopping experience. Walmart's CEO, Doug McMillan, called it the end of search bars and item lists, ushering in a new era of more conversational shopping. What he means by that is instead of Neil firing up Google and searching for pickleball shoes, then scrolling through a bunch of results, he would instead ask Chatchabotie, what are the best shoes for beating my co-host Toby, maybe ask some follow-ups about ankle support, then if a Walmart item comes up,

can check out straight from ChatGPT. The integration comes as part of Walmart's broader AI push. It already has its own in-house bot, Sparky, but the OpenAI partnership plugs Walmart into the biggest consumer AI ecosystem that powers millions of daily questions. It's a logical step for the retailer. Even before the partnership was announced, ChatGBTGBTBT had quietly become one of the most powerful new traffic engines in retail. Data from similar web shows that in August 20% of Walmart's referral clicks came

from ChatsbyT. Etsy, Target, and eBay also all saw over 10% as well. Consumers are increasingly clicking through products links embedded in AI responses, which has prompted ChatDBT to make its own play to become the checkout cart for the internet. Also, Neil, as Open AI looks to crank up its money-making abilities, taking a cut of product sales made directly through Chatchabit seems like a pretty decent start. And the pattern we've seen over the past few weeks where OpenAI inks a partnership with a company, and that company sees its stock rise happened. Once again, Walmart's stock was up 5% after this announcement. People are shopping a lot on chat chappee. This is what we are learning. Around 2% of all chatypd queries involving involving shopping. And now, while that may not seem

like a large percentage, that is about 50 million queries per day. A lot of retailers like Walmart, Etsy, Shopify are seeing major boost in traffic. And Walmart thinks this is, is the leading edge of where e-commerce is going. It thinks there's a paradigm shift and how people are going to shop on the web moving forward. They think it's going to be AI first, and that's why they're ranking this partnership because they want to get ahead of the trends.

And I want to compare and contrast Walmart's approach with Amazon's approach, because Amazon has actually blocked AI crawlers from combing its database of products, meaning that if you ask for pickleball shoes on Chatibati, you are not going to get any result surface from Amazon because Amazon has this very, very large advertising ecosystem. It was $56 billion advertising business last year,

and that relies on shoppers staying in the cozy Waldgarden of Amazon. They don't want you coming from ChatDBT. They want you going to Amazon and shopping on their app so you can see the ads that are popping up there. So it's going to be fascinating to see them kind of trying to invest in their own AI bot on their own platform called Rufus, whereas Walmart is saying, hey, we like all traffic is good traffic. Please come to us via chat, CBT.

Clearly, all of you guys are doing it already. We think this is a smart idea. So fascinating to see the differing approaches. Shades of Apple creating that walled garden and Microsoft blasting their operating system all over the place in the technology sphere. Yes, Amazon is creating a fortress around its marketplace that makes over $50 billion in advertising there.

But perhaps it's seeding some ground to Walmart. should AI be the new shopping frontier? And Walmart is happy to gain all of that exposure to all these people shopping online. It'll be very interesting to see how many people use AI tools to shop during the biggest holiday shopping season, which is coming up in the next few months. I don't think I've used it for shopping a lot that much

because I just feel like it's going to surface a lot of Reddit stuff because we know that Reddit is a big source of traffic from a big source to chat GPT. And I think I just don't totally trust it when making decisions on buying something over $100, $200. Picklebo shoes are pretty expensive. So I think there is a trust gap,

at least in myself personally. I do like to do a little of the discovery online without going to AI. But what do you think? Well, here is where they might respond that it's only going to get better over time because chat GPT recommendations are actually based on relevance to user prompts

that you've asked it in the past. So it has contextual data like potentially their budget or previous preferences, preferences that are stored in its memory features. So maybe the more you use it, the better will get. It starts to become your personal shopper. If you say, hey, I don't like black pickleball shoes, I like white ones, then maybe it will only surface white ones going forward. So maybe you just need to put some more reps in and it will start to learn your preferences more and more. Just an interesting future for shopping, especially this idea of AI optimization, AIO. Remember, we've just been on the backs of SEO, search engine optimization.

Now, how are brands going to surface their results so they show up higher in AI queries as well? I don't even know necessarily how you do it, but agencies are surely popping up left and right, saying, hey, we can promise to get your results up first. So fascinating just to see the next evolution of e-commerce, basically. Eventually, Open AI is going to ask people to pay to surface at the top of their at their feed, ads what Google did and turned it into one of the most valuable companies on earth. Moving on, maybe tariffs haven't impacted you personally just yet, but they are about to hit home literally.

Starting yesterday, tariffs on imported furniture and lumber went into effect, part of President Trump's plan to make more cabinets and couches here in the U.S. Specifically, the U.S. slapped a 10% tariff on imported wood and timber, 25% on imported upholstered furniture like sofas and chairs, and 25% on kitchen. cabinets and bathroom vanities. Rates on most of those products are scheduled to spike to between 30% and 50% come January 1st. In announcing the tariffs last month, Trump wrote that taxing imports will make North Carolina, which has completely lost its furniture business to China and other countries great again. And no doubt, North Carolina and the American furniture industry broadly

has been devastated by jobs moving overseas to places like China, Vietnam, and Malaysia where labor is cheaper. And many U.S. companies are excited by the movement. which would give them a leg up against foreign competition for the first time in decades. But others are concerned this is going to backfire because so many American manufacturers import goods to make their own household products and tariffs will force them to raise costs for consumers or absorb them. And then there's the plight of home builders whose key input would is about to get more expensive, which is the last thing the unaffordable housing market needs right now. Toby, I can guarantee you one winner from these furniture tariffs, Facebook marketplace.

Seriously, I'm going to do a little bit of shopping myself. But I do think that North Carolina is relatively pleased by this because let's go back to 1999. The state had 80,000 furniture manufacturing jobs. That has fallen a lot since then. Right now, only 28,000 remain. So if you were to look at where the furniture industry could bubble up and become relevant again, it's going to be in North Carolina. And a lot of these domestic producers are costly optimistic, but some are constantly not pessimistic because they say that even though that we might make some of the stuff here, we still have input costs that are coming from abroad. So this is going to just make things more expensive. But then the biggest gap in revving up the furniture industry in

North Carolina is just labor. There aren't necessarily, we skip the generation of trained upholsters. We skipped a generation of knowledge because all these jobs migrated overseas. So they say, great, you want us to make stuff here. We don't have workers to make it. And it echoes other kind of protectionism that we've had in the United States. If, hey, we want to make iPhones in the U.S. people aren't trained to make iPhones. You need the labor force to actually execute on these things. So that is one of the pushbacks we're seeing. Right. In the Hickory, North Carolina area, had an unemployment rate of 15% during the Great Recession after a bunch of factories closed there. But today, the unemployment rate is 3.7%. Even furniture for America,

which is a trade group that represents the furniture industry, says that we can't reopen factories that no longer exist because we just don't have the people to make them. The unemployment rates 3.7%. Everyone who has a job, who wants a job, has a job here in our area and the ones who have a job are likely to have moved on to the tech industry. And obviously, there's going to be a lot of focus on furniture prices with these tariffs coming into effect. They've already been creeping up over the summer in August furniture and betting prices. We're up four point. percent year over year, which was the biggest 12-month increase since December 2020. And then in particular, living room, kitchen, and dining room furniture prices were up 9.5

percent, also the biggest rise in three years. Those were on account of existing reciprocal tariffs that have been in effect. Now we have specific tariffs on this sector in particular. Look for those prices to rise whenever we get the inflation report, which we was supposed to get today, but it has been pushed back for a few weeks. Gold may be on a historic run this year, but it's actually not in line for 2025's gold medal investment. That would be silver, which reached a record high on Monday, eclipsing its peak in 1980 during a commodities trading scandal that would inspire the Eddie Murphy movie trading places. Silver prices are up 70% this year compared to gold's gain of 55%.

And to be sure, silver is surging for many of the same reasons as gold. It's a safe haven asset that investors embrace when fiat currencies look shaky, geopolitical storms start raining down, and government deficits look out of control. But silver differs from gold in that it also has practical applications in industry. As an outstanding conductor of electricity, silver is used in everything from solar panels to batteries to EVs, as well as for jewelry and the making of coinage. With supplies coming in lower than demand for years, investors have been scouring the globe to hoard silver, a sort of panic buying that's depressed stockpiles even more. In London, the mecca of the global silver trade, inventories have been. have fallen by about one-third since mid-2020, leading to a price squeeze that's gone parabolic.

Toby silver is not gold, never will be, but in many ways, it's a more dynamic commodity because it's involved in a lot more aspects of the economy than it's shinier cousin. Yeah, you have this AI and energy transition that needs a silver right now. It's almost more akin to copper in that regard with just how much it's used in very practical applications of renewable energy like solar panels in things like EVs as well. And then you also have the Haven aspect as well. really plowing into copper as a safe haze. And a lot of people obviously plow into gold as a safe haven. Silver occupies that middle ground. That's kind of it's the middle child of, you know, the precious

metal markets because it has both applications available to it. I also do just want to go back to this crazy story of the 1970s and 80s of the original silver boom. It starts the Texas oil heirs of a billionaire H.L. Hunt started buying silver as an inflation hedge, but then they looked at their wallets. They're like, wait. We have a ton of money here. Let's try to corner the market, essentially. So what they started to do is buy up more. They started borrowing against that collateral and using that to buy more.

And the more that they bought, the more valuable their hoard became. So the more they could borrow and you see how this cycle just perpetuates and perpetuates. Their influence on the silver market was insane. They brought it from $11 an ounce nearly $50. They had controlled over half the world's deliverable silver supply at their peak. And then the public panic came. People started melting down their grandfather's coin collections and selling that into the market. Regulators started to take notice.

They cracked down on the amount of collateral. You actually had to put up to crack down on these speculative purchases. And Silver Thursday came and the market absolutely collapsed. And it has taken literally until these past few weeks for the market price of silver to recover to that 1980 peak. So a fascinating story. Yeah. Go watch the Eddie Murphy movie. trading places if you want to see more about why these futures trades are illegal now.

And now, you know, there's no cornering of the market going on exactly by three billionaire brothers, but there is just such a wide array of events that have influenced silver prices going up. One of them is the threat of tariffs on silver, which is why investors have been moving silver in cargo planes from London to New York to get ahead of potential tariffs. And then when I'm talking about a wide variety of sources, I mean that because DeWally, is a Indian festival is happening, is culminating on October 20th. That requires a lot of demand for jewelry. So that's another reason why prices are going higher. You have the renewable energy transition, mines that don't have a lot of output and the safe haven overall vibe of the market. So all these

things are combining together to send silver higher than gold this year. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with a delayed version of Toby's trends. 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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Find Ollie's sleep solutions for the whole family at ollie.com. That's OLLL-Y.com. It's Wednesday, which is basically Tuesday because of the short week, which means I get to bring you a special edition of Toby's trends, the segment where I take a deep dive into the business world to emerge with a trend you should keep your eye on. And today's trend is about artists releasing more than one version of their albums in the hunt for more record sales. Unsurprisingly, Taylor Swift is the one driving the boat here. I want you all to take a second to guess how many different versions

of The Life of a Showgirl Swift release to the world. Was it 10, 20? Try 38. Between CDs, vinyl, digital and cassettes, Swift offered various accoutrements in the form of acoustic tracks, voice memos, bonus artwork, or even jewelry to entice Swift these two buy, buy, buy, and it worked, too. The Life of the Showgirl set the record for most first week album sales, beating Adele's 2015, $3.5 million for her album 25, which seemed impossible to top in the streaming era. While Taylor has perfected the art of the multi-album release cycle, she's far from the only artist doing it. The average top 10 album in 2023 came out. in 8.9 different physical variants compared to just 3.3 in 2019.

The top 10 albums by physical sales average 22 versions each. Critics call it chart gaming where you're just using volume to build sales, but super fans seem more than happy to snap up their favorite artists in any shape or form. Neil, most of these buyers don't even own a record or cassette player, and yet they buy anyways. Maybe the new Labuboos are just Taylor Swift Deluxe Wood Editions featuring Travis Kelsey's face on them. Yeah, I mean, I think you said it correctly.

These are becoming collectibles in line with loboos. Maybe, you know, the order is reversed there or bobbleheads at baseball game. And you're right. People don't really even listen to these records. So Showgirl sold 1.3 million copies last week as a vinyl LP, but a survey from Illuminate found that only 50% of consumers who paid for vinyl over the past year actually had a record player. So this is all about supporting your favorite artist

or having as many possible versions of any particular album as possible in order to show your love and fandom for particular musical artists. And Swift maybe pioneered this gaming of the system or interesting business model that artists are using to juice more sales in their first week of their record. But she's not the only one.

Yeah, she's not the only one. And also, if attention is the current, of the music game, then of course, flooding the zone with more albums is going to lead to more attention because if you release 30 different variance fans, go on social media, the debate which one they buy, they post their unveilings on the TikTok, more fans see it, the charts search. So it's a self-perpetuating cycle, and you have seen some of these face-offs happen between other artists. The one I'm thinking about is Travis Scott versus Sabrina Carpenter back in at 2024. Travis Scott released six different digital variants in a single day.

And then Sabrina Carpenter came back with three. She won by fewer than a thousand units to become the biggest album of the month of the year. So it was fascinating to see artists are looking at their album sales going, uh-oh, we're lagging behind right now. Let me just release some other versions into the wild to try to jumpstart that cycle again. So maybe don't hate the player, just hate the game because it's clearly working right now. Well, people are hating the game. There is a lot of backlash to what Taylor Swift is doing with these 38 different variants. They're calling it exploiting her fans or a very blatant money grab.

The Reddit pages have been blowing up with people saying, what are you doing, Taylor Swift? Like, this is, you are becoming a more ruthless business mogul than Jeff Bezos here by releasing all these different variants. What about actually just putting out your music to the world and letting your fans love it? Rather than introducing every single day, it seems like there's been a new one that she's asking people to buy. and they are buying it, so completely understand that this may be the business environment that everyone's operating in, but there's maybe concern that down the line, people are going to remember

Taylor Swift more for her business ventures or acumen rather than her musical artistry. Maybe we do Morning Brew Daily, Morning Brew Daily, Morning Brew Daily, Acoustic version, Morning Brew Daily, Neil and Toby's special deluxe version. I don't know, let's just drive up some downloads as well. All right, let's bring to the finish with some final headlines. Instagram is borrowing a page from the movie industry, slapping a PG, 13 rating for teen accounts. The meta-owned social media app said it would start limiting the content its teen users can view to something you'd find in a PG-13 film, a response to growing scrutiny

of the platform's child safety features. And crucially, the PG-13 rating also applies to conversations with its AI chatbots, an area where things have taken a dangerous R-rated turn for some kids. The PG-13 announcement builds on major changes Instagram introduced last year for teen accounts, including making them private by default, silencing notifications overnight, and blocking DMs from strangers. It said that it chose the PG-13 concept because it was already familiar to most parents who have a general understanding of what content falls under that umbrella, maybe a few swears, maybe some adult themes, but nothing human centipede level.

Yeah, it is a very interesting positioning that they are doing, very interesting messaging by adopting this PG-13 moniker, something that the motion picture association, by the way, quickly distance themselves from saying it wasn't consulted and it has no connection to the new rule. So even as meta has gone on this PR push, because you're right, it is very easy to wrap your head around exactly what that means. The person actually responsible for giving those ratings motion picture association said, uh-uh, this isn't actually PG-13. This is just a moniker in this sense. But yeah, Zoom out. This is happening across a lot of different AI first companies right now where there's a lot of backlash to open AI for, you know, getting entangled with kids.

who are using their chatbots un-safely. They actually have said that they figured out a way to determine the age of people who are using their chatbots and are going to let adults use it in an adult way. Sam Altman literally said that erotica is coming out this December as long as you are an adult. So it's fascinating to see kind of the battle lines being drawn around these AI bots and what access you give to children. Instagram is trying to thread the needle with this PG-13 moniker.

Moving on, if you've ever been listening to a podcast and thought, this would go great with K-pop demon hunters, you're in luck because Spotify announced yesterday it is bringing video podcasts to Netflix. The partnership will initially focus on bringing podcasts from the ringer to the streaming company by 2026, so no Neil and Toby on the medium screen just yet. But the idea is to help Spotify continue to fulfill its stream of becoming a multimedia experience company rather than just an audio only one. Both Spotify and Netflix have no down seeing the success of video podcast on YouTube and thought, I definitely want to get in on that action too. Neil, more people are tussing up pods on their TV these days. This partnership

makes a lot of sense, though. I don't know if we need to see Bill Simmons blowing up on a TV screen. If I went back 10 years and told you that people would watch podcast Bill Simmons on Netflix, you would have laughed me out of the room, but people really do consume podcasts this way. And YouTube is the top podcast platform in the world right now with more than one billion listeners each month, crucially with this partnership with Netflix and Spotify, all of the podcasts that are coming to Netflix are going to be taken down from YouTube. So it's very clear that Netflix and Spotify are bulking up in partnership in contrast with YouTube, which is the leader in the clubhouse. By the way, I'm going to plug the YouTube version of our show while we're

here because we were at our trivia night yesterday. A lot of people I met didn't even know we had a YouTube version. So if you want to see our smiling mugs, then maybe head on over to YouTube to listen. And finally, it appears we are past peak. Plus when it comes to naming streaming services. On Monday, Apple quietly announced that its streaming platform Apple TV Plus would become Apple TV, marking a potential turning point in company's obsession with slapping a plus sign to denote a streaming service. When ESPN rolled out its newest streamer earlier this year, it called it simply ESPN. But it's not clear whether removing the plus sign will be a positive change for consumers or just add more confusion. Because Apple already has two

different products with the name Apple TV, a set top box, and a content aggregation app. But hey, at least it's not as bad as HBO Max's rebrand to Max, which it reversed after getting bullied into submission. Yeah, the de-placification trend in streaming is alive and well right now. It does look like it's almost a maturation of the streaming environment. When these streamers were first coming out, they wanted to symbolize novelty and say, hey, you're going to get more. This is our new streaming venture. Now they almost want to symbolize stability and maturity. Like ESPN is just ESPN. You go there to watch sports. Apple wants to do the same thing. Like, hey, we're not, this is not a side show of our ecosystem. This is just Apple TV.

It just grounds it in the ecosystem a little bit more. So I did see people praising it for its simplicity, but then it is so ironic that like, wow, this is so much more simple now, even though they have multiple things named the exact same thing. I think they can get away with it because just context. You're not going to say, let's go watch Apple TV and stare at the tabletop box. So I think it's fine, but I do think consumers were ready for the de-plusification. It's just streaming now. Everyone knows what's going on. No one needs the plus anymore.

All right. That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Wednesday. Got to give a shout out to the winning team at trivia last night, The Life of a Morning Brew Daily showgirl. And thank you to everyone who played and said, Neil, you're taller than I imagined.

If you have any feedback on today's episode, send a note to Morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Lute is our producer, our associate producers, our Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Hair and makeup has been approved for all audiences. Devin Emery is our president and our shows of production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.

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