France Wants Social Media Banned for Kids & Gold Shines Past $5,000

0:01Neal Freyman:Recently, I got an ad for the best lawn fertilizer. But here's the thing. I live in an apartment in New York City. I don't have a lawn, let alone need fertilizer. That's why your ad needs the right audience and LinkedIn ads can help. LinkedIn has 130 million decision makers and you can reach the right ones for your business. Target by job title, industry, company, the list goes on. 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. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman.

0:40And I'm Toby Howell. Today, gold smashes a new record. Why that isn't good for the economy.

0:46Neal Freyman:Then France just voted to ban social media for kids. It's Tuesday, January 27th. Let's ride.

0:58As you walk about the wintry streets, because this snow ain't going anywhere, keep your eyes out for sneckdowns. What is a sneckdown, you ask? There's sections of a street that cars don't use, and you can tell cars don't use them specifically after a big snowfall because it's the areas at intersections that trucks don't feel the need to plow. Urban planners and walkability advocates love sneckdowns since they oh so elegantly reveal space that is currently reserved for cars which could be handed over to humans, making streets safer for pedestrians. What an awesome natural experiment.

1:30Neal Freyman:It is awesome. Instead of engaging in these expensive traffic studies to see where cars are actually going, you literally just take an aerial picture of a city or a town after it snows. Snow is sort of like nature's tracing paper, but what do you do if you don't have nature's tracing paper? Well, in the 1980s, city planners in Australia actually threw cake flour into the road to create their own flower neckdowns, a fleckdown, if you will. Also keep an eye out for leckdowns, which are the fall leafy version of this. There's neckdowns in every season, Neil. And now a word from our sponsor, Sandals.

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2:54Neal Freyman:France has had it with kids these days being too obsessed with their phones. Yesterday, French legislators voted to fast-track a ban on social media use for children under 15, with a goal to have it in place before next school year begins in September. The vote was supported by French President Emmanuel Macron, who said, The brains of our children and adolescents are not for sale, warning their emotions are not to be manipulated, whether by American platforms or Chinese algorithms. The bill passed overwhelmingly with a vote of 130 to 21. It will now go to France's upper house ahead of becoming a law.

3:29Neal Freyman:France is taking up a rallying cry that is gaining momentum in much of the Western world. And the U.S. jury selection begins today in Los Angeles for a landmark civil trial brought by parents who accuse Meta, TikTok, and YouTube of causing children to develop social media addiction. The U.K. government is considering a similar social media ban for kids. And Australia is a month deep into navigating their own law that restricts under-16s from having social media. That ban is in full swing now with over 4.7 million teen accounts deactivated or removed since it went into effect. Neil, the world is clearly souring on these platforms, especially after the Aussies showed that a ban is possible.

4:10Neal Freyman:Not since Hugh Jackman starred in Les Mis have we seen France take inspiration from Australia like this. I can hear the people sing, Toby. No, I know this story is about the power of social media, but I first want to start by talking about the power of a book. And that book is The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. Now, he is a psychologist at NYU, and in 2024, he released this book called The Anxious Generation, which proposed a ban on smartphones in schools and on social media for kids under the age of 16. The wife of the South Australian premier was reading this book and telling her husband, yo, you got to do something about this.

4:50Like, I'm reading about all these problems, according to hate, that social media is inflicting on young people. And he was the guy, this premier, that introduced the bill in Australia that eventually they became the first country to ban social media for kids under 16. Now that blueprint is being adopted by France, by England, by Denmark, by all these countries around the world, not only banning social media for kids under 16, but also to take phones out of schools, which this France bill does as well. So really, these ideas are what sparked a global moment here.

5:19Neal Freyman:Why else is this so popular around the world? It's because it is literally popular with voting bases. France is sort of looking at this as a win for a very fractured government because both the pro-Macron parties and the right-wing populist parties are rallying behind to support this legislation. The Wall Street Journal also recently conducted a poll of American readers and 71 % of respondents support banning most social media for kids under 16. So these are seen as political wins for deeply divided, you know, political bodies right now around the world, which is why we're seeing it from France all the way to Australia and maybe some momentum in the U.S.

5:57Neal Freyman:as well. Companies are absolutely on the back foot. Meta, TikTok, Snap, and YouTube are the ones that were sued in this particular case. But so this is the first case that will go to trial over personal injury related to social media addiction. But there are 3000 lawsuits waiting in the wing in California alone and another 2000 are pending in federal court. So this is going to be a landmark trial. It's a new era for social media companies defending their algorithms. and how this case goes, how the jury rules in this particular case, will have a widespread impact on those thousands of cases that are pending.

6:29Neal Freyman:And a lot of people are drawing comparisons to a similar kind of movement against tobacco companies back in the day because the argument is that they knew the risk of cigarettes and knowingly concealed it. If social medias are in this, companies are in the same boat where they did studies that found that, yes, these platforms and these infinite scroll and algorithms we developed are negatively impacting teenagers' mental health, and we still put it out to the world, that's where you start to see some liability pop up. The big question here is correlation or causation. So far, no studies have really been able to pin the mental health issues of teens on social media companies from a causation perspective.

7:11Neal Freyman:So I think that's the hurdle that still needs to be jumped in order for these cases to actually land the knockout blow that they're going for. Yeah, the companies are absolutely gonna cite those papers, And they're also going to say that over the past decade, we've spent billions of dollars putting safety features in our social media platforms to protect kids. We'll see what a jury finds. But it's absolutely a bellwether trial. Moving on, the only thing climbing higher than Alex Honnold is gold. Yesterday, the precious metal surged above$5 ,100 a troy ounce just three months after it hit$4 ,000, a level most thought was unthinkable a few years ago.

7:48And then there's silver, whose prices are going haywire. It popped nearly 14 % Monday in its biggest one-day gain since the financial crisis in 2008, before tumbling back down to earth in a historic reversal. While several factors are boosting the volatility of precious metals, the umbrella theme seems to be uncertainty. Uncertainty over the Trump administration's tariffs, geopolitical adventures and attacks on the Fed, concern over rising debt loads among governments around the world, and worries that major currencies will decline as those governments fail to address deficits and try to inflation their way out of debt problems.

8:21And what do you know, the US dollar tumbled to a four-month low yesterday. All those jitters are causing a flight to safety, to gold, humanity's comfort food dating back millennia. And it's not exactly a good sign. Some economists see the gold rally as a reflection of something profoundly rotten in the global economic order, claiming it heralds the start of a global debt crisis. Robin Brooks, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former chief FX strategist at Goldman Sachs, called the rise in precious metals, quote, breathtaking and profoundly scary.

8:50Neal Freyman:My breath is taken, and I'm profoundly scared sitting here, Neil. You are right, though. The safe haven bid has returned in force for gold. Max Belmont, a First Eagle investment manager, told Bloomberg, gold is the inverse of confidence, so that's another way of framing it. But I do want to just zoom out and look at these price charts that are happening. It looks like mania. It smells like mania because these things have gone parabolic. And it sort of is a little bit of a speculative mania right now. The place that is the ground zero for mania in the investing world is WallStreetBets' Reddit forum.

9:26Neal Freyman:The two most popular tickers by far in that forum are gold and silver ETF. So those are what's being mentioned over the past 12 hours, the past 12 days. It truly is just becoming, you know, the Tesla or the GameStop of these retail investment crowd, even though there are all these geopolitical forces feeding into it as well. Yeah, I guess the question that traders have to suss out, is it a speculative meta or is something more fundamental going underneath the surface? And that something more fundamental would be something called the debasement trade. Now, the debasement trade is the expectation that governments are going to continue to devalue their currencies because of high debt, fiscal deficits and inflation, which means if you're an investor looking at all that, you're saying, OK, well, I'm going to get into harder assets.

10:10I'm going to hedge a little bit. So often during a debasement trade, you'll see assets like gold and real estate go up and also perhaps Bitcoin. But if you looked at the debasement trade and wanted to bet on it and you put your money into Bitcoin instead of gold, well, you would have left a lot of money on the table. A number of prominent investors have come out saying, yes, the debasement trade is absolutely happening. Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates, Ken Griffin of Citadel last year all said that there's what's happening is there's going to be a devaluation of the dollar of the U.S. dollar.

10:43Its prominence in the global stage is going to be diminished because of all these geopolitical events and perhaps some of the policymaking of the Trump administration. And that's why we're seeing gold reach new heights seemingly every day.

10:54Neal Freyman:If governments keep printing and borrowing, I want assets that they can't print. That's probably the best summary of the debasement trade that I at least can give. Moving on, the Super Bowl between the Patriots and the Seahawks is nearly two weeks out. So why are brands releasing their commercials now? Yesterday, Budweiser and the NFL unveiled their spots for the big game, while Grubhub, State Farm, TurboTax, Uber Eats, and Pepsi Zero Sugar all released teasers for theirs. It's clear we're in a new era of Super Bowl marketing, one where impact is measured not just on the Sunday night of the game, but also by the conversation you drive on social media in the weeks leading up to it.

11:29In fact, according to Sportico, just 10 to 20 % of brands will keep their ads a secret before the game itself, hoping that the wow factor of seeing something for the first time is outweighed by the digital reach of an extended campaign. And with 30 second spots in the Super Bowl going for over$8 million, you wanna make the biggest splash possible. Why so expensive? you won't find a bigger captive audience anywhere else. Last year's Super Bowl on Fox drew nearly 128 million viewers, the biggest audience in the history of the game. This year, NBC is hopeful it can beat the record with teams on each coast, two young, intriguing quarterbacks, and arguably the world's most popular musician, Bad Bunny, headlining the halftime show.

12:08Neal Freyman:Those are kind of two conflicting reports you just gave there though, because yes, the Super Bowl is still absolutely this must-see event with a lot of eyeballs glued to their televisions, But brands are also saying, we do need more bang for our buck, so we should release it two weeks into advance because the new meta in advertising right now is you have to create these cultural moments around your ads. You want it to be a multi-week long thing, not just a one-day thing. And the case study that I think best exemplifies this is in 2024, Sarah V had this very successful ad campaign that featured Michael Cera.

12:43Neal Freyman:That started months before the big game where they had these stunts of Michael Cera shopping for CeraVe at pharmacies. They were posted on social media. It became this big mythos around the commercial. Once the commercial actually aired, then it got overall the entire campaign got 15.4 billion social impressions before the Super Bowl. They saw a 25 % sales bump. So I think a lot of brands are looking at what Sarah V pulled off and how they just put in so much legwork before the actual ad aired and they want to do the same thing. What's the relationship between the legwork before the ad and the ad itself?

13:21Is it some sort of journey that leads up to the ad? Because Budweiser just released their ad yesterday. So what's my incentive? What is sort of the impact of the actual ad itself in the Super Bowl? Because I've already seen it online.

13:33Neal Freyman:I don't like that brands do this. If we're going to be totally honest, I like what Sarah V did where they built up like Easter eggs and then revealed the ad at the Super Bowl. That to me is how you actually build anticipation. For Budweiser who just put it on YouTube, yes, you'll probably get more views overall. But it's just not as fun. There's no anything surrounding it necessarily. So I think some brands do it better than others. And a bunch of brands actually released teasers, like the actual movie teasers for their Super Bowl commercials. A number did that, including Grubhub. And I want to talk about Grubhub because they're part of a new kind of theme that I want to talk about, which is that they're bringing in huge directors to direct Super Bowl commercials.

14:14Grubhub is working with Yorgos Lanthimos, who is the director behind Bugonia and Poor Things. Now, he does really weird stuff. These movies are quite bizarre, so I'm interested to see what Grubhub is doing there. And then Instacart is bringing in Spike Jonze, who's most famous for his movie Her. So these are Hollywood directors that are parachuting into Super Bowls. And then let's talk about one of the best directors of them all, Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast has been hired by Salesforce to direct their commercial. They're giving away$1 million. So not only are companies bringing the big guns to act in these commercials, but they're also bringing in big name directors behind the scenes.

14:51That is such a cursed sentence.

14:53Neal Freyman:Mr. Beast is directing a Salesforce Super Bowl ad to give away$1 million. Will I be entering? Probably. I also feel for these brands in a certain sense, though, because remember, this creative direction process starts eight, ten months ago. And they're trying to thread the needle of what the current moment is, the current cultural temperature is. Should we be funny? Should we be serious? Should we be pro-America like Budweiser's ad is? So this is not necessarily something that is easy to basically split the difference. Well, they don't have to spend$8 million on a 30-second ad. I guess you don't.

15:27Neal Freyman:and actually I go back to Sarah V. They haven't done a Super Bowl ad since because like we did really well last time. Like we got our brand name out there. We don't need to spend$8 million going forward. All right, we're gonna take a quick break and come back with Toby's Trends right after this.

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17:12Neal Freyman:Sign up now at Venmo.com slash college card. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A. Select schools available. Venmo Stash terms and exclusions apply at Venmo.me slash stashterms. max$100 cash back per month. What is dead may never die, but rises again harder and stronger. It's the motto of the Ironborn in Game of Thrones and also co-working spaces, which are having a surprise comeback. It rags the riches tale. I want to talk about on today's edition of Toby's Trends. A lot of you likely remember peak co-working. It was 2018. WeWork was the largest occupier of office space in Manhattan, commanded a valuation of just under$50 billion, and CEO Adam Newman's mission was to elevate the world's consciousness.

17:56Neal Freyman:Yeah, that didn't work. The pandemic soon upended office demand, coworking bore the brunt even more so than traditional offices, and in 2023, WeWork filed for bankruptcy. However, coworking has since flickered back to life. Hybrid work has become the new normal for most employees, meaning companies are on the hunt for short-term office commitments with the option to scale space up or down quickly. Industrious, a WeWork competitor, has quietly been on a heat or two, expanding to 50 new locations last year to bring their total footprint to over 250 spaces. Even WeWork is making a comeback post-bankruptcy, renting smaller spaces, sharing some risk with landlords, and staying away from deals that rely on instant full occupancy.

18:39Neal Freyman:Neil, feels like coworking was always a good idea, just maybe not on the massive scale that WeWork tried. Yeah, at least to my pea brain, co-working was a concept that always made sense intuitively because it clearly scratches an itch. Companies want flexibility when it comes to their office space. And yes, co-working is slowly coming back from that big blow up a few years ago. Three years ago, co-working space in the U.S. totaled about 115 million square feet at about 5 ,800 locations. Today, co-working space in the U.S. is about 158 million square feet in nearly 8 ,800 locations. So there's been a ticking up.

19:17That's according to the data from Yardi. And Yardi expects this growth only to continue. Currently, co-working counts for about 2.2 percent of U.S. office stock, which is up from 1.7 percent three years ago. But Yardi expects that this number, this share, will actually go to 10 percent as things kind of shake out and companies find the right business model for co-working that can actually work.

19:38Neal Freyman:One thing that I think WeWork did get right is the fact that they made their spaces very nice to be in. I mean, Morning Brew started in a WeWork. You had like the coffee on tap. There was like the kombucha. There was just – it felt very bougie and nice. And a lot of coworking operators are saying we still have to bring the heat there because if you ask people to return to offices these days, they better be nice. You better have the amenities here or else they're going to get very, very mad. Back in the day, you used to be able to have a satellite office with just a chair and a computer, and that would be enough for an employee.

20:16Neal Freyman:But now that there's a little bit of leverage now with the rise of remote work and the rise of hybrid work, you have to make it a nice space for people to want to be in. So if you force people back to the office and it's a crappy experience, that is not going to go well, which is why still people are kind of WeWork-ifying their co-working spaces. And you mentioned satellite offices. That's one of the biggest drivers of growth in this industry right now. Say you're a company based in New York, but you have employees and you have like 10 employees in Austin. You have 10 employees in Denver. You have a couple more in L.A.