AI Boom Splits SF Housing in Two & America is Running Out of Honey?

0:01Consider this comparison. PwC data found the percentage of CEOs who report revenue gains or cost reductions from AI is almost equal to the percentage who say they're still stuck. What separates these two groups? PwC points to a clarity issue. Even for CEOs, it's hard to tell what's AI hype, what's reality, and where this tech can make a tangible difference. Learn where AI can actually make an impact and what successful adoption looks like at pwc.com slash us slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brew AI.

0:37Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, America is catching honey fever just as bees are making less of it. Then AI money is breaking the SF housing market. It's Thursday, May 28th. Let's ride. Romance plus hockey seems to be a winning formula. Months after heated rivalries spawned a million group chats, you wouldn't want to be made public. A new hockey romance is blowing up. Off campus, based on a 2015 book about college hockey players, has become the third most watched debut series in the history of Amazon Prime Video, reaching 36 million viewers in just 12 days of streaming.

1:17and among female viewers age 18 to 34 it is number one toby what the puck is going on one other side effect of off-campus doing so well is that j-lo's iconic green dress is back in the zeitgeist because one of the characters played by mika abdallah wears it in a scene and here's my fun fact about j-lo's versace green dress it led to the creation of google images this is from google ceo at the time eric schmidt who said people wanted more than just text the first that first became apparent after the 2000 Grammy Awards where Jennifer Lopez wore a green dress that, well, caught the world's attention.

1:52At the time, it was the most popular search query we had ever seen. So they made an image search function. Now it's coming full circle as Abdalit wore it in off campus and it turned it into one of Amazon's most popular shows of all time. If you don't know the dress I'm talking about, use the house that J-Lo built to go look it up. And now a word from our sponsor, LinkedIn Ads. Toby, what are you chasing? A sense of joy I haven't felt since childhood. Okay, well, marketers are expected to chase impressions, views, and reactions, but don't always see revenue. That's why LinkedIn Ads helps you invest in what looks good to your CFO.

2:30They generate the highest ROAS, 121 % of all major ad networks. Reach the right buyers with LinkedIn Ads. You can target by company, industry, job title, and more. Spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a$250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com slash MBD. That's linkedin.com slash MBD. Terms and conditions apply. If you've ever wanted to live in San Francisco, you probably have a better chance of tackling Christian McCaffrey in the open field than affording a nice home there. Luxury home prices in the Bay Area, defined as those that cost between$3 and$7 million, have jumped 13.4 % since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.

3:11However, if your trash can isn't hidden behind ornate cabinetry, you probably wouldn't know it. Lower end Bay Area home prices actually fell 3.8 % over the same period. The two markets used to move relatively in lockstep, but now that AI money has rolled in, it has totally thrown things out of whack. Open AI alone had about 600 employees who collectively cashed in on$6.6 billion of shares last year. That's who you're bidding against, and it's why the upper half of the market is just going bonkers. Pending luxury home sales in SF, up 48 % year over year. Average luxury sales price, up to$6.7 million.

3:50Condo prices are up 24%. So, Neil, you have this very weird juxtaposition where a recovery in the housing market isn't being driven by normal things like falling mortgage rates or middle-class purchasing power, but by an insane infusion of cash, thanks to AI startups, warping the top echelon of the market. There are so many horror stories of people looking for rental apartments in San Francisco. Bloomberg profiled Jenny Lee, who's a tech worker in Chicago, was looking to move in with her boyfriend in the Bay Area. She spent six months looking for a San Francisco rental, doubled their budget to$6 ,500 a month for a two-bedroom.

4:29They looked at a bunch of different places, one$7 ,000 a month home, didn't come with a washer or a dryer. Finally, she found a place that she actually applied, only to get a text one hour later from the landlord saying someone else was willing to pay a full year's worth of rent up front in cash. So the bidding wars are absolutely cutthroat because of all this AI cash. I mean, those AI employees,$6 ,000 cashed out, 75 of them took them$30 million and they're spending it on this housing and it's warping the market. And this warping of the market blooms outwards. It's not just in San Francisco because when luxury booms happen, the ultra, ultra rich, we're talking, you know, very tip of the iceberg, bid up homes in San Francisco, but that may push affluent buyers into slightly cheaper neighborhoods, but also it pushes them into different metro areas altogether, which is why you might see spikes in places like Austin, Denver, Nashville, Tampa, these other places that are less expensive.

5:30But again, when you're not in the 1.1110 % of AI money users, these price effects ripple outwards nationally. And the other thing that's happening, I mentioned that mortgage rates are still elevated. And usually when mortgage rates falls, that revives a housing market. Most of these buyers are all cash buyers. They don't need mortgages. When you are competing for these homes and you run into situations where people are paying an entire year's worth of rent, cash is king, which is why, again, you are seeing kind of it go against the grain. Mortgage rates are still extremely elevated right now, but San Francisco luxury market doesn't care.

6:08Some people aren't even paying in cash. They're paying in anthropic stock. So there's this guy who's an investor, Storm Duncan. He wants to sell his 13-acre estate on a hillside in the Bay Area. And he's like, well, I could either get cash or what I really want, which is the ticket to the lottery, is Anthropik shares. So he is selling this 13-acre house in exchange for shares of Anthropik. So people are going all sorts of creative ways just to get their hands on OpenAI or Anthropik stock because we haven't even mentioned these companies are about to IPO as well, including SpaceX. So that's going to unlock a whole bunch of other millions and billions that's going to flood this market.

6:49If you wanted a physical representation of the K-shaped economy where, you know, the top half of the economy is doing very well, the bottom half is struggling, this is the emblematic of it. This embodies it in San Francisco. That's where a lot of people have been using the term kind of in jest, but the permanent underclass. Like if you missed out on these AI startups, then you're never going to be able to afford a house. You're never going to be able to live in a place with a washer and dryer. So K-shaped economy is a word we mention all the time on this podcast. Just look at the SF housing market to see it playing out in real time.

7:23Moving on, somewhere in Omaha, Warren Buffett is doing the mother of all face palms. Yesterday, Robinhood announced it would soon allow you to let an AI agent trade stocks and spend money from a credit card without you barely lifting a finger. It's central to Robinhood's push to bring tools typically used by hedge funds and other professional investors to the masses. In this case, you can become the quant, the quantitative. So here's how it works. For stock trading, what Robinhood calls agentic trading, you can link Claude, Cursor, or any other agent your heart desires to a distinct portfolio separate from your primary one.

7:57Then you let the agent build it and trade by giving it instructions, which could be something like, I want a basket of companies poised to benefit from the boom in nuclear energy. Or buy all the bull slop companies like Chipotle and Cava but if they fall 20 % from their current peak, or something as silly as create a portfolio of all the companies with a single letter stock ticker, the options are infinite. Because handing the keys of a stock portfolio to an AI system has inherent risks, Robinhood emphasized the guardrails it installed as part of a safety always mindset, such as sending you a push notification every time the agent makes a trade and letting you disconnect the agent at any time.

8:31And then there's the credit card feature, which enables Robinhood Gold cardholders to direct an AI agent to monitor prices and even shop on your behalf. That could mean booking a hot restaurant reservation when it becomes available or buying a sneaker if the price falls below a certain threshold. Again, this won't be the Wild West. You can set a monthly spending limit and require manual approvals before your agent decides to make an impulse purchase. So this will be a big test to see how much control over their personal finances people will hand over to AI. So I was reading Bloomberg's Matt Levine and his thoughts on this and the trickle-down effects of agents getting involved with stock trading is that retail investings might become a lot more similar because maybe the agents start recommending a lot of the same stocks to retail buyers.

9:16If the most stereotypical retail buyer, Matt Levine says, is buying the dip. So you go onto your agentic protocol, you say, hey, every time this market dips more than 2%, buy. That becomes something that is reliable on a mass scale. And then maybe hedge funds realize that, hey, we're going to get all this exit liquidity as soon as the market opens because all these agents are executing the same trades. That's kind of the broader picture of if we go down this path. The other counterpoint to that, though, is how popular this is actually going to be because, again, it's a little bit more complex than Robinhood is making it sound.

9:49This is from Robinhood's own overview that says, you'll first need to connect a third-party AI agent and then follow the on-screen steps to connect it with your agentic account through the Robinhood trading model context protocol. So maybe it's not as simple as they're making it seem, and it won't lead to these large ripple effects. But it's fascinating to see which path this is going to take. Is it going to be popular? Is it going to be not? And what does that mean for the market as a whole? And Robinhood isn't the first brokerage platform to roll this out. Public is another one. It's a smaller one.

10:18But a couple months ago, they rolled out AI stock trading as well, where you can just type in plain text language into Public and it will give you a portfolio or buy or sell stocks at any given point. I just want to make one note. Robinhood said this only starts with stocks for now. Now you can't do crypto or options or oil or gold or anything like that, but that will be coming soon. So public allows you to do this. And Toby, you've actually been your customer or your user of that. And you've been using this to create a portfolio. Like what's that experience been like? I've figured out that I'm lazy because ETFs exist.

10:52Like a lot of these things already are out there where like if you wanted a semiconductor, buy all the, you know, the most successful semiconductor stocks, someone has put together that ETF. There's a lot of ETF providers out there, but I'm not going to track those down. I'm really not going to work very hard beyond, but I will do something like, I know semiconductors are doing well right now. Just find me, you know, the 10 biggest market caps and 10 that you think will do well in the future. Put that together in a fund and then I invest in that. So in terms of the amount of research I'm willing to do, it is very easy to type in a plain text prompt and then get something back.

11:28And I played around. I did like three or four of my own custom ETFs. They've done all right. Like, again, it's just my brain doing these things. So from a perspective of a pretty, you know, like casual investor, I do think it's going to be great because you can do more complex investments without putting in more complex effort. Moving on, you know when a cartoon character sees a pie on a windowsill and their eyes pop out of their heads? That's how Airbnb is looking at this summer as it tries to capitalize on the World Cup and establish itself as an everything app. So far, that vision has run into some tough sledding.

12:02Excited hosts plowed money into renovations and raised prices, expecting a flood of foreign visitors. But as the tournament grows closer, many cities still sit below 50 % occupancy and are forced to rely on hope for some stragglers to come through. But hope is not a strategy. CEO Brian Chesky says Airbnb wants to become the everything app for traveling and living, using this summer as the launching pad. One big shift is that for the first time, the app will have a dedicated hotel category, a major switch up for a company that used to be proudly anti-hotel. It's also reaching its tentacles into other areas of the travel stack from car rentals and grocery delivery to airport pickups.

12:43Neil, as the core home rental business is facing oversupply issues in some markets and regulatory headwinds in others, Airbnb is trying to keep customers within their ecosystem in other ways. big summer ahead to see if they can pull that vision off. Yeah, almost 20 years ago, Airbnb burst on the scene as a huge disruptor. It was the hot new thing poised to take down hotels. Fast forward today, there is a bit of stagnation and slowing growth. CEO Brian Chesky told Skiff that there was 40 % growth in 2022, 18 % growth in 2023, 12 % growth in 2024, and about 10 % in 2025. And if you look at their stock chart, I mean, since they IPO'd maybe five or six years ago, it's essentially a horizontal line.

13:27Their stock is actually down 5 % since they IPO'd. So they need something to kickstart growth. Maybe that's the 2026 World Cup and all these new services that they're bolting onto the app. The thing that scares Airbnb the most is that they turn into a commodity because we've spoken about this before. Or if a AI style agent can eventually handle booking, if I can go on to ChatGPT and say, find me a home in, you know, the Sonoma Valley for the summer, that means I'm not going to Airbnb anymore. I'm going to a chat bot. So they are at risk of losing that direct customer relationship, which is, you know, the end all be all for an app like that.

14:05So they are looking at some other apps. You know, a lot of apps out in China are everything apps. WeChat, Alipay. this is where you can handle lots of different parts of your financial life and your travel life. And so Airbnb and Uber is actually pursuing this. They want to use the proprietary customer data that they have that they know Neil likes to travel to Sonoma in the summer to bolt on other features like, hey, if you want to go to Sonoma, but you don't want to stay in a house, here's a hotel for you. Here's a car for you to pick you up from the airport. Do you want to order food when you get to your house?

14:38Here's a way to do that. That's how they want to keep that direct customer relationship because if they lose that, you lose Airbnb as a company. I am enjoying the collision course between Airbnb and Uber because they are trying to become maybe something a little similar. Remember, Uber had this partnership with Expedia where you can book hotels on Uber. And then Airbnb last week announced that it was going to partner with third-party companies to offer airport pickups and car rentals. Airbnb even hired an Uber veteran who's been there for many years to come over and work for Airbnb. So these companies, both disruptors in their own right, Airbnb for hotels, even though now it's offering hotels, Uber for taxis that are on this a bit of a collision course to see who can perhaps become America's first super app.

15:25All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Neil's Numbers right after this. Toby, how's your bone density these days? Well, according to my doctor, it's not very good. That's not how air quotes work, but maybe you should try FlavCity's all-in-one protein smoothies. Not only do they have 10 grams of collagen, good for those bones, but they're also made with real whole food ingredients, 25 grams of protein, and functional mushrooms. They've got delicious flavors like mint chocolate, banana bread, brownie batter, and more that are as good as any dessert. Head to shopflavcity.com to get your protein fix.

16:00That's shopflavcity.com. toby have you ever made something with less than ideal ingredients yes do not use can tuna to make sushi same rule applies for supplements and sports products that's why iherb requires brands to provide certificates of analysis coas reflecting batch testing for ingredient identity composition and quality and iherb stands behind every purchase if something doesn't meet your expectations they make it right with easy returns and simple refunds head to iherb.com slash mbdaily and use code mbdaily for 20 off your purchase that's iherb.com slash mbdaily did you happen to catch what emily told us to absolutely not do on next week's episode no i missed that i usually meditate during our team meetings that's where plod no pro could come in handy it's an ai powered note taking device that magnetically attaches to your phone and helps capture and organize real world conversations from meetings to deep work.

16:59Instead of scrambling to take notes or relying on memory, Plod automatically transcribes and summarizes the discussions, turning long conversations into clear, structured notes and actionable takeaways. It meets enterprise-grade standards including SOC to HIPAA and GDPR compliance. Start at plod.ai slash brew. Use code brew for 10 % off. Welcome to Neil's Numbers, the segment where I share three steps in the week's news that will make you feel like Isaac Newton when the apple landed on his head. For my first number, America has entered its Winnie the Pooh era. We're eating more honey than ever.

17:35In the year leading up to late March, Americans bought$1.6 billion worth of honey, a 10 % rise from the year before, and record consumption per capita, according to Circana. Honey's meteoric rise can be chalked up to what Bloomberg calls a vague health halo with traits like antioxidants that make it feel healthier than other sweeteners. It's also expanded its range into new flavor profiles. And of course, I'm talking about hot honey, which is blown up as an ingredient on everything from pizza to cream cheese. In the first quarter of this year, hot honey appeared on nearly 12 % of restaurant menus, more than triple the percentage from 2021 per data essential.

18:11But just as Americans are scrambling for honey, producers are making less of it, leading to surging prices. With 60 % of honeybee colonies dying off over a year and a half, U.S. honey production has reached an all-time low in records going back to 1987. Toby, people just can't get enough of this sticky, sweet stuff. I am a victim of marketing from Big B because the vague health halo that you described, I absolutely agree with that. When I am having a sandwich with peanut butter and honey on it, I'm like, this isn't too bad for me. It comes from bees. How bad could it possibly be? And I think a lot of other people kind of think similarly to me.

18:48I was digging into honey as a business because you are right. Right when it's peaking, a lot of bee producers are at their lowest levels of all time. But honey has a very unique business advantage in that it does not expire. So you can always kind of stockpile inventory when times are good and smooth out the prices when times are bad right now. So that's why even though honey prices are going up, it hasn't straight up Hormuzed it and gone up to record prices at this point. Let's get the bees back though, because I'm a big fan of honey. And what about hot honey? Not a fan of hot honey at all. Honey is great enough as is.

19:26I think people are trying too hard. Some people absolutely love it, but it's just not for me. I would rather have a pepperoni slice without honey on it. I don't need the hot honey. I'm with you. Okay, for my next number is pickleball hysteria petering out. According to the Trust for Public Land, the number of pickleball courts in the 100 most populous U.S. cities rose just 4 % in 2026 from the year before, compared to 13 % and 14 % growth in the two prior years. The Trust Director of Parks Research, Will Klein, told Axios, cities are still out in courts, but not at the breakneck pace we saw over the last two years and since 2017.

20:00Might be a heartening trend for tennis fans watching the French Open this week and thinking, it's a real shame that my town swapped out all of our tennis courts for pickleball, and they would have a point. Despite the recent slowdown, Parks in the biggest cities now have 3 ,765 pickleball courts, a 900 % spike from 2017. And the city that loves pickleball the most, Madison, Wisconsin, with 2.6 pickleball courts per capita, followed by Lexington, Kentucky and Honolulu. Toby, maybe people are waking up to the fact that tennis is just superior. It's actually other park amenities that are catching up.

20:34So garden spending jumped 8%. Disc golf spending was up 4%. And then outdoor fitness zones up 3%. So even though you are a tennis fan right there, it does look like just the park ecosystem is maturing and branching out from just, you know, these racket-based sports. But yeah, you mentioned that 900 % stat. So to say the pickleball boom is leveling off, it's more like it's just maturing. There's only so much space that you could possibly put a pickleball court in, and it looks like those spaces have been taken up. So I wouldn't say it's shrinking. It's just expanding less quickly. Take down the pickleball courts, put up the disc golf courses, because that's my next pickleball.

21:10It feels like they're not exactly the same terrain. Like disc golf, you need much more space for. Maybe a nine-hole disc golf course. Okay, for my final number, top movies are more likely to feature a lead actor named Chris and a lot more talking animals as leads than a female lead actor over the age of 60. The study, conducted by the anti-ageism campaign Age Without Limits, looked at the 100 top grossing movies at the UK box office from 2023 to 2025. And they found that just five starred a woman over 60, including Demi Moore in The Substance and Jamie Lee Curtis in Freakier Friday. Compare that to the six Chrises that starred in those films, half of those being Chris Pratt with A Pine and Hemsworth thrown in, and 20 were led by Talking Animals.

21:57Emma Thompson, the Oscar-winning actor and booster of the Age Without Limits campaign, said this should be a wake-up call for representation of older women in cinema. In a statement, she said, women are half the population and we get older. So where are the stories about us? The older we get, the more interesting we are. I want to see more films center aging women. We are compelling, relatable, and overdue for center stage. Older women don't need permission to exist on screen. They already exist in the world. Cinema just needs to catch up. Maybe the Oscars do too. Just seven women over 60 have won the Academy Award for Best Actress and only two have won over 70.

22:31There's probably a feedback loop here too because if studios don't greenlight women over 60 in lead roles, audiences aren't conditioned to seeing them as lead roles at the box office. And then that gets used as justification to avoid making the movies in the first place. So it's a self-defeating prophecy right there. But that's the business contradiction at the heart here is that studios are always complaining about not having original stories. Here are original stories to tell and they're not selling them because audience also like it. Audience data in a survey says that more people would be more likely to watch a movie led by a woman over 60 than less likely.

23:08So the demand is there. The audience is there. It's just Hollywood is not serving that demand. No, they are. And they are absolutely serving Chris's and talking animals. Too many Chris's. What is the number one movie this year, the highest grossing movie? It's the Super Mario Galaxy movie that stars both Chris Pratt and talking animals. Wait, is Toad? What are the animals in Mario? Is Yoshi an animal, I guess? Yeah. He doesn't even talk, though. He just says Yoshi at that point. So someone needs to weigh in as a Mario lover. What are the Koopa Troopas? Is that an animal? They're all animals. What else are they?

23:44What else are they? They're creatures. You threw me in a blender there. All right, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Drake is officially a bigger artist than Michael Jackson. I know, I know. Don't shoot the messenger. I'm just relaying the stats here. After releasing not one, not two, but three albums this month, Drake reached 14 number one hits, passing Michael Jackson for the most ever by a solo male artist. He now sits tied with Rihanna and Taylor Swift and trails Just Mariah Carey and The Beatles. The song that eventually ascended to the top was Janus STFU, which was one of 42 songs that charted in a single week after he flooded the zone with more Drake than anyone could reasonably ask for.

24:25In fact, nine of the top 10 songs on the charts right now are from his three albums, with only Ella Langley's Choosing Texas squeezing in there to break up the Drake monopoly. Neil, the strategy of inundating the top 100 to snag records, what do we think about it? Yeah, I don't know. It seems to be a flooding the zone strategy, and I'm not sure we're at the point where we're saying Drake is bigger than Michael Jackson, but this seems to be one particular strategy that Drake and Morgan Wallen are pursuing. But kudos to him. We all thought he was down and out after his beef with Kendrick Lamar. I've not heard any of these songs, but I guess it'll be my weekend playlist.

25:00But while Drake may be winning the chart battle, he seems to be losing the reputational war still. So remember how the Social Security Administration came out with their baby names list of 2025? Well, one of the fastest declining baby names was Drake. It fell 168 spots in popularity from 2024 and 2025 to just 827th on the list. It was the 16th fastest declining baby name in the country. What about Aubrey Graham though? The Drake's real name. How's that doing? Give me the stats on that. I haven't heard any of the songs either, so I don't know if that's going to be part of my weekend playlist, but if you're listening to it, then I'll listen from a distance.