Morning Brew Daily - Women Are Winning the Job Market & UN Overhauls the World Map

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

#928: Women and Americans without college degrees are powering the job market. Diesel prices hit a record high, raising supply costs. The UN votes to adopt a new map that accurately depicts the size of Africa. Location sharing goes both ways as teens are also checking in on their parents’ whereabouts. Finally, Wimbledon doesn't want influencers at matches.  Learn more at https://www.hotels.com/morningbrew If you’re in NYC, come to our run club on 9/16: https://www.morningbrew.com/runclub Come to our trivia night! https://mbdtrivianight-september2026.splashthat.com/  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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Available for Vanguard Index funds that participate in investor choice, Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distribator. Good morning for Daily Show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, the world map is getting a makeover. Then gas prices are high, but diesel prices, oof, they're set in records. It's Tuesday, September 8th. Let's ride. This fall will bring us one of the most anticipated documentaries of all time.

In a surprise announcement over the weekend, the absurdist comedian Nathan Fielder, revealed he, alongside director Lance Oppenheim, had made a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced Theranos founder. Called You Can See Everything, the documentary runs three hours long and involves Fielder moving into Holmes's house two weeks before she heads to prison. After a secret screening at the Telleride Film Festival, Fielder said, I'm really struggling to this day to understand what I experienced. We can all experience what he did when it hits theaters, courtesy of A24 on October 16th. Apparently, it is nuts. Holmes and her boyfriend agreed to be miced up for 12 hours a day.

They go through storage bins and pull out the Theranos machine to show that it really did work. And Fielder gets in so deep that Holmes asks him to drive her to prison on her last day as a free person. Sounds absolutely crazy. I do have a little bit of a confession, though, Neil. I've consumed approximately five minutes of nymphs. Nathan Fielder content ever in my life.

And almost all of that has been over your shoulder as you giggle at something. I know his general bit, but I don't really get it. So I am curious to see what this is like. I don't know if this would be my starting place with Nathan Fielder, a three-hour documentary. So you may want to dabble in a little old episodes of Nathan for you or watch the second season of the rehearsal. That goes not just for you, Toby, but for anyone listening. It's not everyone's cup of tea.

It is so awkward, like similar to Borat. but I do think he is a genius. And I don't know whether I can sit through three hours of any documentary, whether it's Nathan Fielder produced or not, but this should be one that everyone is talking about. And now a word from our sponsor, Hotels.com. Neil, do you have any must-haves for business travel? After I stayed in the same hotel as the contestants in a dog show, no pets.

Sounds like you could use business preferences from Hotels.com. It helps travelers find the right hotel faster by remembering their go-to work trip requirements. Travelers set their preferences once, including fully refundable stays, Wi-Fi, breakfast, gym access, and more. Then future business trip searches automatically surface matching hotels. That way you can book work trips faster. Just set your preferences once and get results tailored to your business travel needs. Plus, get up to 20% off select hotels instantly with member discounts and earn rewards for future travel. Sign up for their free rewards program and start earning on every workstay at hotels.com slash morning brew.

That's hotels.com slash morning brew. Loyalty members 18 plus. It's fitting that Labor Day weekend brought us one of the most remarkable employment stats you'll ever hear. In August, women accounted for 98% of all the job growth in the United States, an unprecedented share. On Friday, the government released a jobs report that blew away all projections. The country added 162,000 jobs last month, more than tripling expectations.

But when you drill down to who was getting hired, you learned that 158,000 of those new jobs went to women compared to 4,000 for men. The lopsided number reflects the types of sectors that added jobs. Healthcare, in which four out of every five workers are women, added more positions to cement its lead as the U.S. economy's main driver of job growth. Local government and education gained 42,000 jobs, and within training libraries and education, women hold nearly three quarters of roles. Some caution against reading too much into this shocking 98% number, given its one month's worth of data, that can be volatile. Heather Long, Navy Federal Credit Union's chief economist, said, the reason that women were down in July and up in August is almost entirely driven by education hiring. The teacher effect, it's not like something dramatically changed for women. Still, well, maybe not as dramatic as 98%.

This speaks to a broader transformation in the labor market, where women-dominated industries are on the up and male-dominated. industries struggled to hire. Yeah, you don't want to look too deeply into one month, but it is not just a one month phenomenon. If you zoom out to the past 12 months, the number of employed women is up 870,000. The number of employed men is down one and a half million. So clearly there's something going on in the labor market right now. And that comes despite the fact that some people are saying there's a mom session out there. That is when mothers of young children are leaving the workforce at a quicker rate than they have previously. So, you would expect the labor market for women to be softer, but right now it is rip-roarin.

The other caveat that a lot of economists put forth is that the jobs that we are seeing these women get may not be as good of jobs as you are hoping for. They tend to, women in general tend to hold more multiple jobs. That means that the employment numbers that we're seeing is people taking second jobs or maybe third jobs. Also, just as a whole, women disproportionately account for more lower wage positions. So you have to look more closely into the context around these jobs, not just that the number overall was so big. And then another thing that we saw in the jobs report that was another winner besides women

was Americans without college degrees. So right now we are seeing one of the best labor markets in decades for people who do not have a college degree. And we're seeing the more physical in person the work, the lower the unemployment rate tends to be. The Wall Street Journal pointed to food services and drinking places, employment in that sector. That sector added 59,000 jobs in August, which was more than a third of all of those 162,000 jobs added to the U.S. economy last month. Meanwhile, it's never been tougher. Rarely has been for grads, people with college graduate degrees. So it's very interesting to see this

dichotomy play out between people who don't have college education. are doing really well in this particular hiring market. Well, if you do have a college education, the unemployment rate has not been higher in a matter of decades. These two portions, non-college degrees and college degrees, they tend to move in the lockstep. If it's a strong economy, both groups tend to do better. If it's a weak economy, both groups tend to do worse.

So it's very rare that we see them actually diverge. And it really is because there's not enough skilled tradespeople out there. A lot of older generations are retiring, and then there's no younger tradespeople to take their places. Immigration has dropped as well, which has hurt construction jobs, manufacturing jobs. And then on the flip side, more Americans have college degrees than ever. And yet, you look at AI is making white collar work a little bit under pressure right now. There's just more people competing for fewer jobs.

So that is part of the reason why this is happening. Who knows what happens next, though, even though AI has come for white collar jobs in the beginning. Maybe robotics comes for those manufacturing. those in-person, those physical labor jobs going forward. Just in general, though, kind of a really interesting jobs report. Top line number, super strong, this women number, really, really compelling. And yet there are weak spots everywhere you look. Wages are one that I was keeping tabs on.

Average hourly earnings group 3.1% year over year. That's down from 3.7% a year earlier. So any way you want to spin it, you can find the interpretation that you are looking for. Moving on, gas prices are getting out of control even by recent standards. Over Labor Day, gas average $4.15 a gallon, which means it was the most expensive Labor Day ever, but the bigger economic story may be diesel. The national average for diesel hit $5.90 a gallon over the weekend, which means not only was it the most expensive Labor Day ever,

but the most expensive diesel has ever been up more than 55% since the Iran War began. While gas prices make things particularly painful for individual drivers at the pump, diesel prices follow you basically everywhere. Diesel powers the trucks moving your groceries, the farm equipment that grows them, even the machinery that builds your house. As fuel bills rise, businesses end up passing the cost along to you via higher prices. The reason why diesel is going to the moon is the world is running out of the capacity to turn crude oil into usable fuels. Refinaries are in short supply thanks to disruptions in the Middle East and Russia, while refineries. in the U.S. are already running at 98% capacity. It's been fantastic for energy companies like Marathon and Valero, which are enjoying huge margins, but for basically everyone downstream and makes

things pricier. To make matters worse, oil futures are up this morning after fresh attacks on an oil facility in Saudi Arabia that refines 400,000 barrels a day amidst rising tensions between the U.S. and Iran. Neil, diesel is sort of a toll booth for the economy, annoying, expensive, but unavoidable. Yeah, there's two real pain points that I'm looking at for diesel prices going higher. One, I'm speaking to all my fellow New Englanders out there, heating oil, which is closely related to diesel. The prices there have jumped 70% since the war in Iran started. I know it's September. I know we're just coming off of Labor Day, but winter is coming. And people are thinking about heating their homes in the colder states. Well, it's going to be a lot more expensive when you get that monthly bill come the winter if trends continue. The other is food and groceries.

Fuel accounts for about 15% to 30% of the total cost of food, depending on which type of food. But basically every part of the supply chain of food is driven by diesel, whether it's the tractors that are going on the farm or the trucks that bring these food to the distribution center and the distribution center to your local grocery store. When diesel prices go up, that creates higher prices for everything you see at the grocery store, particularly refrigeration.

food. And you can see this in the consumer price index where refrigerated foods, foods that need be refrigerated all along the way and stay cold. They're seeing a much higher price increase than the rest of the broader sector in terms of grocery prices. One people who are celebrating is actually U.S. refineries because as I mentioned, as the world is under pressure in Russia and the Middle East, those refineries are being attacked constantly. U.S. refineries are just cranking away at nearly full capacity and they are making a record profits because the crack spread. This is one of my favorite things to talk about is it's the difference between the price refiners pay for crude oil and what they can charge for the refined products they make from it. That is at an all time high right now.

The crude oil prices are obviously up, but they're not up as much as diesel prices. So basically you can go down the value chain. Brent crude is up 30% since the war began. Gasoline is up nearly 40% diesel's up more than 55% and then your heating oil that you mentioned for New Englanders, that's up 70%. So as you get more and more refined, the prices get more and more expensive, which is why you're seeing these bigger profits from these energy companies. I wonder if it was named something different. You would be just as excited to talk about it. So final word from Patrick DeHan, CEO of GasBuddy, who's the Gas Price Whisper. He's looking at California and California diesel prices, said they could blow past $8 a gallon.

in soon and some pumps aren't even built to display what could come next. And I think by that he means four digits in their signs. Okay, moving on, the map of the world may never be the same. On Friday, the United Nations voted to officially retire the Mercator projection of the globe and replace it with one that better represents the true size of countries known as the equal earth design. No one will be forced to use the new map, but given the UN's heft, it's likely that many institutions, governments, and companies will adopt it. That's because pretty much everyone agrees it's time to update the map. 164 countries voted in favor of the map swap,

while six abstained and only one voted against it was the United States. The current standard is called the Mercator projection. It's the one you grew up with and see every day on posters and on Google Maps. Dating back to the 16th century, it was crafted with maritime navigation in mind and is extremely useful for sailors trying to get from point A to point B on the open seas. But critics have pointed out Mercator's flaws, particularly that it distorts the size of land masses.

To preserve straight lines for those navigators, it exaggerates the areas around the poles and diminishes those at the equator. So, for example, Greenland appears massive on a Mercator map of the world about the same size as Africa. However, in reality, the continent of Africa is 14 times bigger than Greenland.

Last year, the African Union endorsed a campaign to correct the map and tap the country of Togo to spearhead the effort. Over the weekend, they celebrated a map redrawn, a mission accomplished. Neil, we were doing trivia the other week, and we were on a team together, and there was a question, what name the countries along the longest contiguous route you can drive in the world. And your brain went to South America, or, yeah, South America, Canada, North America. My brain immediately went to Africa.

I think you've been Mercator-pilled, where you just don't realize how big Africa actually is. That is the entire point of kind of, not the entire point, but why? the UN was pushing this is to put Africa back in its rightful place as one of the largest landmasses on the earth. Mercator is very distorted because it was just built for a different thing. You're going to have to make tradeoffs no matter what map you are doing because it is inherently difficult to take a globe and put it on a single plane. So yes, Mercator was designed for sailing. The equal earth is better at showing the amount of landmass that countries actually have. But I want to shout out the azimuthal equidistant projection. That is actually the flag of the United Nations.

If you look at it, it has a single point, the North Pole, with all the continents raiding out from that. So it really goes to show you there are a number of ways to skin a cat here. You can make Africa the center of the world. You can make America of the center of the world. You can make the North Pole the center. It all depends on how you want to depict it. And, you know, Africa is saying that it matters socially, politically, economically, how you depict things. It's not just about, you know, trying to answer trivia question. Right. And activists have long talked about the Mercator projection as just being this imperial, European,

imperialistic view of the world. It's centered on Greenwich, London, and it diminishes Africa and pretty much everything at the equator. And African countries for a long time have said this just reinforces colonialism. And maps are not just a way to see how to get from point A to point B. It just reinforces your view of the world. This has put Africa at a disadvantage when it comes to trade ties and geopolitics and just people when they look at a map of the world under Mercator just don't, you know, you glance over

Africa because it's not big compared to Greenland. And we think Greenland is this big thing. But actually Africa is 14 times bigger. New Zealand has also run a campaign back in 2018 saying, look, the map of the world puts us over at the far edge of the earth, which, you know, it does feel like it is. But what if you just put New Zealand at the center? it is a globe after all. So it just speaks to the power of maps that to shape our worldview. And for a long people, this is a, for a lot of people, this is a long time coming to re-center

Africa and other equatorial countries and just change the conversation around maps. All right. We're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's trends right after this. Neil, what's your plan for managing your money? Good one, Toby. Tell me another. Listeners, please don't take after my co-host. Northwestern Mutual's comprehensive planning approach can give you peace of mind in an uncertain world. Whether you're just getting started or wondering if you're on the right track, they'll match you with a financial professional who will meet you where you are and ask better questions to uncover blind spots and find new opportunities. Get started at nm.com. Plus, to better understand your finances, tune in to the award-winning podcast, a better way to money. That's nm.com.

The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Cybersecurity, as we know it, is dead. It's a figure of speech, but the truth is the old model was built on protection. Safety nets, recovery plan systems designed to withstand the last era and maintain the status quo. The AI era demands confidence that you can secure and accelerate your business operations so nothing stops your momentum. Rubrik can give you that confidence. Their singular platform is designed to secure your data, control your

AI and protect your identity built as one architecture, not stitched together after the fact. To learn more, head to rubric.com slash mb. That's r ubrik.com slash mb. What is happening? I'm just excited for what a howling good time families can have at any of Great Wolf Lodge's 22 locations across the country. Splash away in the indoor water park, where it is always 84 degrees. There's a massive wave pool, a lazy river, and tons of water slides. There's also a bunch of great dining options, spacious suites, and complimentary daily events like nightly dance parties all under one roof. Book your stay at greatwolf.com. That's greatwolf.com. Find my friends might need to

rebrand as Find My Family because the location tracking app is increasingly being used for children to keep tabs on their parents, a trend I want to talk about on today's edition of Toby's trends. Life 360, another location tracker, has dubbed this phenomenon, famushing, a mashup of family and ambushing. Kids not only have their parents' locations, but often use it to their advantage, seeing when they're at Starbucks and asking for a Frappuccino, or if they can drive, rolling up to crash their dinner dates, aka a fam bush. This is happening more frequently than you'd expect. About a third of parents track their children's locations, according to a Pew survey, but Live 360 says its data shows teens.

particularly driving age teens, check their family's locations at a higher rate than their parents do. One daughter of the Washington Post spoke to checks her family's location 10 to 12 times a day, but for her it's less about keeping tabs on them and more about peace of mind. Seeing their icon, it's very calming, she told the post. Obviously, there is a fine line between keeping tabs on everyone and infringing on privacy. Things get dicey when a family member starts to feel like they are under surveillance, but for most families, it's a reciprocal relationship built around. safety and the occasional extra frappuccino.

Neil, kids tracking their parents would sound crazy 20 years ago, but sounds kind of normal now. I don't think it sounds crazy 20 years ago because I was doing it with my brother and didn't talk about probably one of the best use cases for this is if you're in high school. You're throwing maybe a little party. Your parents are going out to a movie or a show or something or they're out of town. I mean, we used to do this all the time. How did you track them? Find my friends.

Well, 20 years ago, it didn't really exist. 15 years ago. It existed. I promised you it existed. And this was when I read this story, I was like, oh, my God. Like, we've been doing this for decades. I had such a wholesome interpretation. You immediately went to throw in a party. Maybe we were just cooler in high school. But yeah, you're absolutely right that kids love to keep tabs on their parents for good and for bad. One mom tried to go Christmas shopping one time for kids, try to do it secretively. And within five minutes for dollars, like, why is your location off? Where are you? And again, they're saying that, It's a reassuring thing. You like to know where your parents are. You like to see that dot. But it is a little bit weird that you have so much insight into what your parents are doing. Yeah, but that's going to be increasingly important. And I'm not just talking about teens now. I'm talking about people in their 20s, 30s and 40s. We are members of the so-called sandwich generation, a quarter of U.S. adults do now have a parent age 65 or older and a child under 18. And I know I'm moving us up the age bracket, but a lot of companies are seeing this as a possible market for particular trackers.

There's recently, last month, Fitbit's co-founders launched this wristband called the Lufu link, which allows you to track your aging parents, not just tracking, but it basically is this, yeah, Fitbit or a Garmin device that captures all of your health data and your location data, and it shares it amongst the family. So I think this is something we're going to see more of as these teens, grow into their 20s and 30s, and it becomes normal for you to track your parents, especially as the age and see how they're doing. I wanted to hear a psychologist take on this because is it healthy to track people all the time? And Angela Narayan, she's a University of Denver psychology professor.

She says some uncertainty about another person's well-being is actually healthy. It's an exercise in our own distress tolerance to be able to have some uncertainty and still see that things are going to turn out. Okay. You can't lean on it as a crutch. you like to see what people are doing. Anything can happen in any given moment. But you also need to live your own life and let other people live their own life. So I definitely see it both ways.

My wife has none of her parents' location. I do have, at least my mom's location. It's nice. Like sometimes you're just checking in, but you don't want it to be overbearing and feel like you're under surveillance. It really depends how much beer you have to clean up before they get home.

I think that's the big factor. Back to part of mail. Let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Authorities are investigating the cause of an Amazon cargo plane, overshooting the runway at Miami International Airport on Saturday, slamming into vehicles and killing five people. A Boeing 767 flying for Amazon Air was seen on video attempting to land with unusual speed and far further down the runway than is standard,

before crashing into two vehicles 1,300 feet after the runway ended. Chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, Jennifer Homandy, called the scene utter devastation, saying there's debris everywhere. It led to a full ground stop in Miami at 2 p.m. local time, causing major delays once planes started to take off and land at the airport later in the afternoon. Yeah, the investigation is ongoing. They've recovered both flight recorders, and they say that they're in the fact-finding stays, and it's too early to determine a cause. One thing that probably is going to be a center of the investigation is one. There was an active thunderstorm nearby the airport shortly before the crash.

that means winds were gussing up to 26 knots. That could be one reason. And then the other thing that investigators will look at is, could the runway have stopped the plane? The National Transportation Board specifically plans to investigate whether the one way should have been equipped with an engineered materials arresting system in EMAS system, which is designed to stop aircraft that have overrun the runway.

Those are two of the initial kind of focal points of an investigation that I'm sure will take a few months going forward. Up next, Hunter Biden has been everywhere the past few months. Now he's coming to the blockchain. The Wall Street Journal reported that tomorrow, the former president's son will launch a meme coin trading under the ticker laptop, a reference to his laptop that was discovered in 2020 and contained all sorts of salacious material. At least in part, this seems to be a troll of President Trump, who has dove into crypto

ventures, including a meme coin of his own, which has since crashed in value. Founders of laptop coin will hold 30% of the tokens, 20% of the tokens, 20% of the, will be sent to crypto wallets of people who lost money on Trump coin, 20% will go to charity and administrative costs, and as much as 30% will be destroyed if a series of 30 events reach certain outcomes, including a Democrat winning back the White House and Bitcoin, reaching a new record high. Hunter Biden has recently come out as very pro-crypto. He's called it the inevitable future. It all comes along a bigger political crypto backdrop as well. Mean coins have no underlying value, no underlying cash flows or asset, but they have been increasingly popular with

celebrities and politicians. This one is like a meta meme coin because you're going after people who lost money on Trump coin. Who knows what will happen at this point? Just checking in on Trump coin right now, you know, it reached a market cap of $15 billion soon after his launch. It's now trading around $800 million market cap. So a lot of its value has gone away. But I think this is 100 Biden's kind of foray into the political sphere even more, and then two is foray into the meme coin space. Unfortunately, they're very interlocked in our country at this time. Finally, the U.S. Open has turned into an influencer's playground and the rest of the tennis world is pushing back. The All-England Club, which hosts Wimbledon every year, has seen what's

been going on in Queens and wants to make sure the same thing doesn't happen to their tournament. It announced it will confiscate items like ring lights that could be used to disrupt matches, and will not grant passes to influencers like the U.S. Open has. The tennis has taken a backseat at times in New York as players from Cocoa Gough to Naomi Osaka have called out spectators etiquette at times while videos of cringy TikTok videos being filmed in the stands have gone viral on social media.

Neil, the U.S. Open invited this upon itself when it nearly doubled its creator credentials to close to 100 this year. But players are fed up at this point. There's a smell of marijuana on the court, noise everywhere. The truth is it's turning. into a bit of a zoo, friends player, Adrian and Monario said.

Yeah, the purists are a little ticked off at what's happening in the stands. But as a tennis fan myself, while I want to focus, what's happening on the core, there's plenty of intrigue. One trend I am watching is the death of the one-handed backhand. So for the first time in 149 years of Grand Slam tennis, no male player using a one-handed backhand has reached a major semifinal during the 20, 26 season. This dates back to the first Wimbledon in 1877. Definitely no influencers there, but there's a lot of one-handed back-in. I see you practicing there. It's tough. Roger Federer was probably the last

great player to use a one-handed backhand. And he was talking about this two weeks ago. He was asked about the death of the one-handed backhand. And he said, look, when I was growing up, my coach used it a one-handed backhand and my coach taught me a one-handed backhand. But now the coaches of these young kids all grew up with a two-handed backhand. So they're teaching their kids two-handed. their students two-handed back hands. So it's been interesting for those who play tennis. I'm sure most of you, the vast majority, use a two-handed backhand.

So the first time in 149 years, we're not going to see a men semifinalist in a major use one. I stink at it. I've tried. My wrist is weak or something. I don't understand how he generates so much power. He also was saying that the game has just changed

just way on the way on ground strokes a lot more than, you know, up at the net. But there is so much artistry to one-handed backhand, so it is a little bit sad to see it out of style. There is some great matches today if you want to put on some tennis later. We have the daughters of billionaires in America

facing off Jessica Bagula against Emma Navarro. And we also have some men male Americans playing Francis Tiafo. He's playing another American and then Ben Shelton is taking on Carlos Alcraz. Ben Shelton looks great. But who knows when you run into

Carlos Alcraz, it's pretty tough. All right, that is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Tuesday. To share your thoughts on the episode or anything else, send an email to Morning Brew Daily at Morningbrew.com or DM us on Instagram at MB Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our supervising producer. Raymond Loo is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer is Olivia Lake. Technical direction by Nina Miller. All this time, hair and makeup was tracking us. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew.

Great show, Danielle. Let's run it back tomorrow. Life throws a lot of challenges at you. How you adapt is what matters. Rising Stars on Amazon ads is all about rising to challenges. This docu-series follows small business owners as they grow and advertise their brands with the help of Amazon ads. You can see them go from building awareness to driving sales. They didn't even need huge budgets to get started advertising. Watch the full series at advertising.

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