Fake AI Artist Goes Viral on Spotify & More Americans Are Surviving Cancer

0:02Good morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today the AI singer rising up the Spotify charts. Then the U.S. workforce is older than ever. It's Thursday, January 15th. Let's ride.

0:20Good morning and happy 25th birthday to Wikipedia, the website your history teacher said you couldn't use as a source. On this day in 2001, the earliest edit on Wikipedia homepage proclaimed, This is the new Wikipedia, and the user-generated information storehouse has now grown to more than 66 million articles across all languages. If you were to try to read every English Wikipedia page, it would take you about 38 years. But here's my favorite bit of Wikipedia lore, the Scrappy-Doo article. By 2020, the Scrappy-Doo Wikipedia page had become absurdly long at nearly 26 ,000 words, a higher word count than Kafka's The Metamorphosis, and almost 2 ,000 words longer than the Wikipedia entry for the history of Poland.

1:04It had six sections, 15 subsections, and 19 sub-subsections. It's since been shortened by editors, but just goes to show you how niche things can get on Wikipedia. Oh, scrappy-do. I never understood where he came from or what his vibe was, so I needed, you know, 26 ,000 words in order to illuminate that for me. I also never understood why our teachers put the fear of God into us about using Wikipedia. It is incredibly helpful, one, to just get a general grasp on a subject, and then two, you can go deeper with the primary sources in the footnotes. But I do hope our children have a chance to also be lectured about Wikipedia because it's not so clear if it will maintain its relevance.

1:46It still receives 15 billion visits monthly, but the nature of those visits are shifting. According to the 1440 newsletter, human traffic fell by 8 % last year and roughly 65 % of its most intense traffic now comes from bots who are scraping articles to train AI models. And now a word from our sponsor, Indeed. Neil, the World Economic Forum is coming. Yes, Toby, you sure seem excited. Boy, am I ever. I'm already packed for Davos. Can't wait to see what Indeed is cooking. That's right. Toby and I are going to the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos next week. Plus, Indeed is going to be there giving business leaders the inside scoop on all things hiring.

2:27With real-time insight into the global labor market and more than 20 years of hiring expertise, Indeed is bringing a data-driven perspective to the conversations shaping the future of work. Hope your passport's up to date because mine is not. You can explore the insights at Indeed.com slash 2026 hiring trends. That's indeed.com slash 2026 hiring trends. The latest artist climbing Spotify charts, Sienna Rose, has an unreal voice. As in, her voice might literally not be real. Rose hit the mainstream this week after Selena Gomez posted a Golden Globes Instagram carousel to her 415 million followers, accompanied by Rose's soulful rendition of Where Your Warmth Begins.

3:10Who was this mysterious artist Gomez was platforming? As people started to dig deeper into Rose's catalog, they found a red flag signaling she might be AI. First of all, her Spotify bio says she's anonymous. The singer also apparently has no public interviews or social media despite 2.6 million monthly listeners and three tracks on Spotify's viral USA chart. The rumors intensified after the streaming platform Deezer told Rolling Stones that many of Sienna Rose's albums and songs are detected and flagged as AI. Spotify's official position on AI artists is that they are allowed on the platform and encouraged, but not required to label themselves as such.

3:51When it comes to Rose, users have reported being recommended her music after listening to the similar sounding real artist Olivia Dean, a move that critics describe as the algorithm siphoning listeners away from real human artists. Toss in Selena's post, then subsequent deletion of Rose's background track, and we have another AI artist controversy on our hands, Neil. Not to brag, but I saw Sienna Rose at the Mercury Lounge a few years ago. I'm always discovering those up and coming artists. I knew she had great potential. No, there is a lot of backlash to the fact that Spotify is promoting and showcasing AI artists.

4:28And one of the reasons why, just go to Spotify's core mission. It is, quote, to unlock the potential of human creativity. And they go on to say that Spotify gives a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it. So Spotify at its core talks about elevating human artists and allowing them to make a living through the streaming platform. But at the same time, they are promoting AI artists that are crowding human musicians out. And I think that's where you're seeing a lot of the backlash from. Also, people are saying, so you have this AI powered discovery algorithm that is pushing songs into my feed.

5:04You know, when you go on Spotify, you're getting algorithmically fed content to you. And now that content is also created by AI. It's like AI all the way down. It feels like it took a lot of the human discovery out of music, which is why people love music. And then there's just this tension too because Spotify has come under pressure for not compensating its artists fairly. And so one thing that they might be incentivized to do is encourage AI artists who you don't have to pay as many royalties to because it's someone just sitting at a computer. So there's just a lot of kind of ickiness around this, especially when it comes to someone like Olivia Dean and then having her sound copied by an AI artist and then having listeners siphoned away from her directly into this AI artist.

5:51It just is not something that people who consume music want to support. So it's actually looking at the poll numbers of how people feel about AI music is pretty interesting. The first thing that people need to wrap their head around is that 97 % of people cannot tell if a song is made by AI or humans. That's according to a recent Deezer and Ipsos study. So they can't tell the difference. But what they do want to know is just whether it's AI or not up front. They want these platforms to be transparent. 80 % of people in the same poll want AI music clearly labeled on streamers. 72 % said they would want to be told if a streaming platform was recommending music created entirely by AI but I think the most interesting part of this poll is that people don't seem totally averse to AI music if they know that it is made by AI about half would rather filter AI music out completely which means that half would be okay with listening to AI music 4 in 10 said they'd skip it if AI music popped up their way which means that 6 in 10 said that they'd be totally fine if AI music popped up I think the big question facing Spotify right now, it doesn't have an AI label front and center when people like Sierra Rose, Sienna Rose come on your playlist.

7:06And that is something that users are pushing. I thought you saw her at the Mercury Lounge. You don't even remember her name at this point, Neil. Come on. Moving on. China released an astonishing stat yesterday. In 2025, it posted a trade surplus of$1.2 trillion, an increase of 20 % from the year before, and the largest trade surplus in the history of the world ever, even when adjusting for inflation. Wherever you go shopping in the world, there's a good chance that what you're buying was made in one of China's sprawling factories. For some background, a trade surplus is the value of a country's exports minus a country's imports.

7:40The United States has consistently recorded a trade deficit because as a consumer-driven economy, we import more than we export. Not so with China. Unlike Art Vandele, they are solely focused on the exporting. They sent$3.77 trillion worth of goods to other countries last year, a 5.5 % increase. At the same time, imports held steady at about$2.6 trillion. The United States was not a contributor to the swelling trade surplus. Because of high tariffs, China's exports to the U.S. dropped 20 percent in 2025 from the previous year. But Beijing easily filled that hole and then some just by selling more stuff to other regions.

8:17Exports to Africa soared 26 percent, to Southeast Asia 13 percent, to the EU 8 percent, and to Latin America 7 percent. Toby, I feel very comfortable using the word unprecedented to describe how prodigious China's industrial base is. And this flood of exports is shaking up economies all across the world. Yeah, this is when you break up with someone and then they go and find someone immediately after and you realize, oh, wait, maybe I wasn't as special as I thought. That's what the U.S. essentially did here is say, hey, we're done. We're decoupling from you, China. You're going to miss our big consumer market.

8:49China said, fine, we'll just go to the rest of the world and we'll fill that gap, that America-sized hole in our hearts, in our trade strategy. Also, another issue that the tariff regime that Trump has tried to put on China has faced is trans-shipping, which is where you just reroute goods through a different part of Asia, usually Southeast Asia. They are assembled there or they're relabeled there, and then the goods are coming into America anyway. So those have been some of the issues that Trump has tried to ostensibly narrow this massive trade surplus that China is putting on the rest of the world.

9:25It hasn't happened. It's only grown bigger. Let's talk about some comparisons with history. And actually, there aren't any. So Japan's surplus peaked in 1993. Japan is a huge exporter back in the 90s. That peaked at$96 billion, which is worth$214 billion in today's dollars or less than a fifth of China's surplus last year. Germany, another major exporter, especially after Europe's financial crisis. Its surplus peaked in 2017 at a sum equal to$364 billion in today's money, not even close to 1.2 trillion that we're seeing from China. And then in terms of how much these exports account for China's economy, just the surplus itself,$1.2 trillion, is now more than 10 percent of China's entire economic output.

10:10And go back to World War II, that is far bigger than the United States after World War II, when we were seen as the world's factory. So we've just never seen anything like this. There's been a lot of backlash from not just the United States, but Brazil and the EU and other countries saying you are actually decimating our domestic factory base by putting all of these cheaper goods into our economies. And this is something that a lot of governments, not just the United States, are going to have to grapple with for the next few years. You asked if you could use the word unprecedented, and I grant you access now because I think you are correct.

10:41Moving on, if your coworker is complaining about their neck, their back, their knees, and their slack, you are not alone. The U.S. workforce is getting older. That's the takeaway from a recent Revelio Labs report that found the average age of new hires in the U.S. shifted from 40 and a half years old in 2022 to over 42 years old by the end of 2025. The labor market is increasingly putting age before beauty. Hiring inflows for workers 25 and under are down 45 % compared to six years ago, while hiring inflows for workers 65 and older are up nearly 80 % over the same period. This flip-a-rooney comes from older workers staying in their roles longer, leading to less turnover and fewer entry-level openings at the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder.

11:27Zooming out to the wider job market, the jobs report released last week showed that 2025 was a no-good, lousy year for the labor market, marking the worst year for job creation since the pandemic. So if you're a young person looking for a job right now, there's fewer than ever out there and your corporate ladder is getting clogged up by coworkers your parents' age who are working much later into life than ever before. Neil, I'm getting lower back pain just thinking about it. Yeah, younger workers are getting shut out of the workforce for this and other reasons. The share of workers 25 and younger in the United States was at 15 % in 2022.

12:02Now it is just at 8.8 % in 2025. So that is remarkable shrinking of entry-level workers in the United States workforce. force. It kind of speaks to the broader labor market, as you mentioned, which is slowing down when there is slower economic growth. According to Revelio Labs, they say hiring doesn't necessarily stop, but it gets more conservative and you place priority on things like experience and immediate productivity and just being ready for your role. You don't want to go out and train somebody who might be ready to do this role in six to 12 months when you're being more conservative in terms of your hiring.

12:36So that's one reason why we're seeing these seniors and boomers stay on longer because they just know how to do the job. And you see more conservative employers saying, we're not going to take a chance on maybe a younger hotshot. That might be the dynamics that employers are kind of bringing to the workforce, but there's also some just demographic and life expectancy things going on here. People are living longer. And usually that means that they're working later into life. Some people are delaying a lot of life's major milestones are getting married later. They're buying a house later. They're starting families later, which usually means that you're working longer as well, especially in an era where affordability is a massive issue for a lot of people.

13:13Sometimes it's just a economic reality that you're going to have to work later into life. So just look at median home prices, for instance, like all of these things feed into people staying in the workforce a little bit longer, sometimes unretiring, like you boomerang back from retirement because you realize, hey, I actually need a little bit more economic security here. So it's part just the fact that businesses are being a little bit more conservative with their hiring, but it's also just part financial necessity. Both my parents are now in their seventies. They're waking up this morning and going to work.

13:45I hope not for that much longer, but they are going to work. And I'm sure a lot of their peers are still going to work. I think a lot of that is like, they find satisfaction. I think a lot of people do feel that way, but also yes, it's financial and people are living longer. So So yeah, have a good day at work, mom and dad. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Neil's Numbers. Pretty much everybody is using AI agents these days to automate just about everything. I even made one to respond to all your emails and texts. That explains the deleted files, unauthorized changes, and nonsense messages I keep getting.

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15:22Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities. Get started at public.com slash morningbrew and earn an uncapped 1 % bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash morningbrew, paid for by public investing, full disclosures in podcast description. Welcome to Neil's Numbers, the segment where I bring you three stats from the week's news that will give you full body goosebumps. For my first number, humanity is making incredible progress with cancer. 70 % of people who were diagnosed with cancer are still alive at least five years after their diagnosis, a record high and way up from a 50 % survival rate in the 1970s.

16:05The American Cancer Society, which released the great news in its annual report, called it a stunning victory that can be attributed to a decrease in smoking, better early detection strategies, and improved treatments, all the result of decades of cancer research. The biggest gains were seen in the most fatal cancers. The five-year survival rate for myeloma, a cancer-affecting bone marrow, nearly doubled since the 90s, going from 32 % to 62 % now. Liver cancer, another devastating one, now has a 22 % survival rate, tripling from the 7 % back then. Rebecca Siegel, ACS's Senior Scientific Director for Surveillance Research, Some things up saying new treatments are, quote, turning many cancers from a death sentence into a chronic disease.

16:48Yeah, immunotherapy is in where you engineer the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells. There's also targeted therapies, which tries to find the specific genes or proteins that drive cancer growth. These are two of the treatments that have been highlighted as making these game-changing strides. And then also in the same breath, a lot of these researchers are saying, hey, we've made a lot of progress over the last few decades, but a lot of that was funded by the U.S. government. And if we are pulling back at a time where we're making these strides, that's not necessarily a good thing.

17:20It is a bad thing. So that was like the message that they also finished with is that we need to continue putting money into researching these treatments. Yeah, they said in the first three months of 2025, the National Cancer Institute grant funding was down 31 percent from the previous year due to cutbacks in federal spending. For my next number, it might be time to start talking about Delta as a luxury brand on par with Hermes and Lamborghini. Its earnings report from Tuesday showed just how much the airline caters to the rich to fuel its bottom line. For the first time ever, sales from Delta's premium seats topped those from economy.

17:56Main cabin ticket sales fell 7 % annually, while premium cabin ticket sales like first class and business surged 9%. On X, Thrifty Traveler editor Kyle Potter pointed out that Delta posted a$5 billion profit despite selling$1.1 billion less in economy tickets than a year before, made up for by growth in the premium segment. Expect Delta to keep leaning into its 1 % customers for growth. CEO Ed Bastian said in the coming year, effectively, none of our growth in seats will be in the main cabin. Virtually all will be in the premium sector. Shows that the airline industry, if you want to make any money, has become an all out arms race to cater to wealthy travelers with even fancy air lounges, loyalty programs and best in class experiences when you're on the plane.

18:42Toby, at this rate, Delta is going to start putting economy travelers in the overhead bins. You're joking, but you're not that far off. Delta plans to raise seat capacity by 3 % this next year. That is all coming in the premium part of the plane. So they're slowly squishing us normies back and back towards the bathrooms. Also, we've talked a lot about the K-shaped economy over the past few years where the rich, the 1%, are driving a lot of the spending where more mass market consumers are getting left behind. That's the two parts of the diverging K right there. And there's no better psychological representation of that than when you are boarding a plane because first class gets to board first.

19:23You have to walk literally by the top half of the K-shaped economy towards the back of the plane. So Delta is just emblematic of everything that is driving the economic forces, our economic reality right now. And Delta is also a great example of what people are starting to call airlines, just credit card companies with wings. Delta's co-branded Amex credit card made it$8.4 billion last year. So maybe that nickname is pretty apt. For my final number, there's a new largest private landowner in the United States. Stan Kroenke, the billionaire rancher and sports team owner, has amassed 2.7 million acres of land in the U.S., which is considerably more than two Delawares.

20:04Kroenke jumped to the number one spot on the land reports annual rankings after buying nearly 1 million acres of ranch land in New Mexico last month. When he's not buying land, Kroenke is sitting in the owner's box at arenas around the world. He is the owner of the Los Angeles Rams, the Denver Nuggets, and Colorado Avalanche, teams that have recently won championships, and Arsenal Football Club, a team that has not. But at his core, Kroenke is a landman through and through. Since his start investing in real estate in the 70s, he now owns at least nine ranches in the American West and Canada, including Kew Creek in Wyoming, the biggest single ranch in the Rockies at 560 ,000 acres.

20:40To be sure, Kroenke isn't the only billionaire scooping up rural land. It's become one of the hottest investments for the ultra wealthy in recent years. According to the Land Report, a decade ago, the top 100 landowners held an average of 378 ,000 acres. Today, it's 430 ,000. Toby, how many ranches is too many ranches? When you start measuring your ranches in terms of Delaware, I think that's when you've reached too many ranches. It is just an unfathomable amount of land, but it makes sense. Erica O 'Keefe, the editor of the Land Report, said that a lot of capital is moving into American land for multiple reasons, mainly because land offers a very slow, steady appreciation.

21:18It's a proven investment. There's not more land being created anytime soon unless we can get to the moon and Mars. So of course, this is something where the ultra-rich are attracted to. It's just so much. You need your fishing ranch, you need your hunting ranch, you need your chilling ranch. Like, I totally get it. I mean, that's, it makes a lot of sense. The logistics of it kind of gave me hives. You're like, he's not running the ranches himself, but still that is a lot of, you know, ranch hands. I've seen Yellowstone. There's a lot that goes amiss when you have all these ranches. So Kroenke has his hands full for sure.

21:49Okay. Let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. If you texted me yesterday and I didn't respond right away, I promise it wasn't my fault. Verizon had a major cell service outage that lasted about eight hours. At its peak in the early afternoon, at least 175 ,000 Verizon customers were affected, according to DownDetector, and over one million outage reports were submitted overall. My phone, perhaps like many of yours, showed an SOS in place of network bars, and cell service was completely shot. Not everyone with Verizon was affected, and the outage seemed to cluster in the eastern half of the country.

22:23The company issued a statement saying, today we let many of our customers down, and for that, we are truly sorry. By 10 p.m. Eastern, Verizon said it had fully fixed whatever the problem was, so if I didn't respond to your text then, well, interpret that as you will. So I'm a T-Mobile guy, and the reaction I was seeing online was, there's this flippening that's happening in reliability and reputation of characters, because people used to kind of rate T-Mobile as a tier below AT &T and Verizon, And then everyone was like, wait a second, maybe this is wrong. Maybe T-Mobile is a more reliable carrier now than Verizon is.

22:58T-Mobile, of course, jumped in and started trolling Verizon yesterday. They said, we've confirmed that our network is operating normally and as expected. However, due to Verizon's reported outage, our customers may not be able to reach someone with Verizon services at this time. So clearly, you know, putting the blame, wink, wink, nudge, nudge that, hey, we're doing a lot better than Verizon is right now. moving on it sucks to be sax right now the parent company of sax fifth avenue and neiman marcus filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy yesterday a little more than a year after the two joined forces the idea was to create a luxury powerhouse when what they created instead was a 2.7 billion dollar mess a slowdown in luxury sales massive debt payments and some iffy vendor terms all contributed to the retailer's downfall.

23:45As it tries to get its back of house in order, suppliers are left holding the bag, wondering if they'll ever get to be paid for their goods, while Neil is wondering if he'll ever get that tuxedo he ordered for my wedding. The most likely path forward now is for Saks Global to emerge from bankruptcy as a slimmed-down entity with fewer stores. Neil, the writing was on the wall, but Saks ran out of time. Mickey Chata, vice president of corporate finance at Moody's ratings called the tie up between uh sacks and neiman marcus the fastest failure of an acquisition of this magnitude that i've ever seen so this was a complete debacle from the very beginning it all went down downhill fast but i just hope these are iconic names and just very legendary space that they occupy in the american history and imagination of shopping so i hope they figure it out and come back stronger than ever but yeah overall i mean i would say the headwinds are are challenging to begin with when you're a department store to begin with.

24:39Especially because department stores used to have kind of this power dynamic over their suppliers. Like we were department stores used to be the main distribution channel for a lot of these brands. Now that it's totally flipped, like luxury brands, LVMH, Louis Vuitton, they have more power than Saks Fifth Avenue does. They don't need Saks to sell their goods anymore. So there's this very interesting flip that's happened in the vendor relationship with department stores that is not in favor of department stores. Yeah, they have their own brands. If you just go to the Saks Fifth Avenue flagship store and you just keep walking up the avenue, you see all of the brands that they have inside that store with their own retail locations as well.

25:17So just a big sea change in retail in the past 10 years. That's not going Saks' way. Okay, to wrap things up, here's an awesome story from the world of tennis. An amateur player named Jordan Smith won$1 million Australian dollars, about 670k US after winning the Australian Open's million dollar one point slam, defeating the sport's top tier players like Yannick Sinner along the way. This tournament was built for David to take down Goliath, an exhibition ahead of the Australian Open. The one point slam is precisely what it sounds like. Each match is one point. You won that point, you advance, you lose, you're out.

25:53The 48 player draw consisted of pros like Sinner, Alcaraz and Iga Sviatek, as well as Australian celebrities and amateur qualifiers like Smith. Toby, incredible concept, great execution. One of the coolest things tennis has done in years. My question is, could you win one point off of center? Here's the thing. It sounds dumb as heck. You said it's a great concept, but a single point match, it's very hard to wrap your head around. But I, along with a lot of people were proven wrong because somehow it was electric. Taylor Fritz, who's one of the best American players right now said now that I'm actually watching it on TV massive L for me not to be playing the one point slam this looks like so much fun and it was really fun because you do have these matchups that are just absurd on paper like what do you mean it's an amateur qualifier playing Yannick Sinner the number two player in the world and yet you asked me could I win a point off Sinner the answer is yes because Sinner dumped his serve into the net you only get one serve if you are a pro in this bracket.