Google Search Gets AI Makeover & Pizza Hut’s Retro Revival

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. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Amazon is removing support for old Kindles.

0:42Can it not e-read the room? Then Google just changed search forever. It's Wednesday, May 20th. Let's ride.

0:53Good morning and happy Wednesday. Two more days until the long weekend. We got this. So you've heard of girl dinner, but do you know about boy kibble? It's the new food trend taking over social media, the Wall Street Journal reported. Essentially, it's super customizable bowl slop, typically anchored by ground beef and rice as a base than any veggies and sauce combos you want to throw on top. It's often accompanied on the side by another big trend on social media, cucumber salad. Gen Z boys are the primary consumers of boy kibble, but plenty of women have embraced it too. Toby, what's this obsession with a dish that looks like something you'd feed your dog?

1:31I'm just going to tell you, my fiance is going out of town for her bachelorette today and a bowl of lightly seasoned beef and rice is calling my name in the future. Here's my contribution to the boy kibble discourse. If you put a runny egg on it and any sort of herb, it's okay. White rice and beef, kind of sad, kind of boring, but white rice, beef, an egg, and some green onions, you're nearly to a bulgogi bowl at that point. But the reason why I'm Team Boy Kibble and the reason why so many people are Team Boy Kibble is it's efficient. You don't have to think about things. It is budget-friendly.

2:05It's macro-friendly as well. It's very easy to know what you're eating when you just reduce the amount of ingredients. So I am Team Boy Kibble for life and will be indulging at a later date this week. And now a word from our sponsor, LinkedIn Ads. Neil, did you ever invest in something that just didn't live up to the hype? Yes, a young writer slash social media account manager. They sound like a real jerk, but a great podcaster. That's the same feeling marketers get when they optimize for the numbers that look great, impressions, reach, and reactions, but then it doesn't show revenue. LinkedIn Ads helps you invest in what looks good to your CFO.

2:40They 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. Google search is getting a makeover. The blue links are out and AI is in. And the biggest change to its search box since it launched over 25 years ago, when you search for Morning Brew Daily's latest episode, you won't be greeted by a wall of links anymore, at least not in the top slot.

3:20Instead, you'll increasingly enter an interactive experience that's become familiar to AI chatbot users the company announced at its I.O. conference yesterday. The changes will show up in minor ways like a dynamically expanding search box to accommodate longer natural language requests. Or in more major ways like being able to upload photographs and videos directly into your queries. Then ask follow-up questions all within the main search page. Eventually Google wants you, the human, to stop searching altogether. Instead AI agents could stay on top of which West Village restaurants have 5pm reservations available.

3:55or monitor the stock market and send you alerts so you can afford that West Village reservation. Neil, to sum it up, Google no longer wants to help you search and navigate the internet. If possible, it brings the answers right to you without ever having to leave the cocoon of its AI-generated experience. At the scale that Google operates, it's not an exaggeration to say this will absolutely change how we interact with and even conceive of the internet forever. I think that's fair. So why is Google doing this? Simply put, according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, quote, when people use our AI powered features in search, they use search more.

4:30And Google's making more money than ever from advertising via search. Last year, Google's ad clicks were up 6 percent and it charged 7 percent more for each click. The company's profit per year has more than doubled since 2022 to one hundred and thirty two billion dollars. Remember when ChatGPT was released in November 2022, everyone was calling this the end of Google search, but it's managed to lean into AI and is now making more money than ever. And now it's completely changing the way we use the internet toward artificial intelligence. I think that on the daily basis of searching, it's not going to be a massive change for what Google has already been doing because we've already gotten those AI overviews.

5:12They've gone through some growing pains. Remember, it used to be like, someone searched, can I put glue on a piece of pizza? And they're like, absolutely, you can make pizza with glue. It's graduated from that level. But where I think the big changes might eventually come are these AI agents that are rolling out later this summer that are basically a souped-up version of Google Alerts. But you can track topics. You can track the markets. And they can do things for you autonomously in the background as you go about your daily lives. That, I think, will be a big change. But then the other thing that I think will change everything is Google wants you to build your own mini apps within search itself.

5:48So for instance, if I want to do a meal planning app, I can just ask Google to automatically sync it to my Gmail, automatically sync it to my calendar, all within the ecosystem of Google. So it just wants you to expand your definition of what search can be into a much broader thing. And then on the other side of the equation are publishers or the people who blog and write articles that populate the blue links that have dominated Google search for 25 years. This whole industry called SEO, search engine optimization, where you write articles to rank highly on Google search. And for many, this is a lifeblood of the Internet.

6:23People posting user-generated content, providing information to people that Google search used to be a guide to direct you to those. and with Google AI overviews kind of subsuming the entire search process is that we won't have these blue links anymore, and that might kill a lot of companies. So we had the CEO of Condé Nast, one of the biggest publishers in the world. They make Vogue, New Yorker, GQ, Bon Appetit, all the biggest magazines. He directed all of his company's brands to operate as if their search traffic to their properties will go to zero. They call it Google Zero because there will be no search traffic going to your website now that Google has completely leaned into AI and you can't help imagine that all of these ad-supported websites might completely bite the desk because of Google's changes.

7:11The question is, though, once all the websites can't afford to keep the lights on anymore, once their business models are completely subsumed, where's the information going to come from? Where do you actually train the AI models on? Because already we've run out of training data for these big LLMs. If those websites can no longer afford to keep operating, then it starts to become a chicken or the egg thing. What is the Google AI search actually surfacing anymore? The final thing I want to mention is a lot of people are talking about the fact that there's just too many AI things at Google already.

7:46Marques Brownlee, who's a tech reviewer, said it's genuinely getting difficult to keep track of all the names of the AI products being unveiled. In the last hour, Google's unveiled Google Picks, which is not Google Photos, updates to Google Flow, Nano Banana, Vio, Google Antigravity, Gemini Spark, Gemini Omni, Gemini 3.5 Flash. So it seems like we're reaching a tipping point. A lot of people already have reached a tipping point of too much AI infiltrating too many parts of their lives online. And I think just naming all of those products shows how bad the problem has gotten. But one product you might be able to wrap your head around or might wrap around your head is that Google is bringing back Google Glasses.

8:25And not exactly Google Glasses. This was the other big announcement that Google is going to do these smart glasses coming in the fall with Warby Parker. And it's taking a page out of Meta's book, which has had this very lucrative partnership with Ray-Ban for Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. So we're getting Google smart glasses infused with AI in a partnership with Warby Parker coming this fall. Moving on, it's speaking of Meta, It's D-Day. Today, the tech giant will cut 10 % of its staff, about 8 ,000 employees, as part of its full-court press to take command of technology's next frontier, artificial intelligence.

9:02The move was telegraphed weeks ago by a memo from Janelle Gale, Meta's head of HR. Gale didn't explicitly blame AI for the layoffs, but wrote that the cuts will allow the company to, quote, offset the other investments we are making. It's not exactly a secret what those other investments are. Meta is projected to spend$145 billion this fiscal year on AI infrastructure, including data centers. Gail added, I know this leaves everyone with nearly a month of ambiguity, which is incredibly unsettling. And unsettled might be a generous description for how meta employees have been feeling lately. According to reports from numerous media outlets, morale at the company is lower than Washington's troops at Valley Forge.

9:40Not only did meta single mass layoffs were coming, but days later, the company announced it would start tracking employees' work computer use to train internal AI systems. So for workers, it felt like they were onboarding AI to take over their jobs, and they staged a mini-mutiny voicing their outrage when the CTO, Andrew Bosworth, wrote that employees couldn't opt out of the tracking program. They reportedly littered his message with over 100 angry and surprised emojis. Toby, Meta isn't the first tech firm to cut jobs because of AI, but this 10 % cut feels like a watershed moment. Yeah, we're talking about Meta right now, but we could be talking about any number of companies within Silicon Valley at this point, because it really feels like this has been the defining story of 2026.

10:21Fewer workers, more AI investment, just leaning out the entire org structure. We talked about Coinbase and block reshuffling teams, getting rid of middle managers, trying to compress the layers of the organization. This is the main story of the tech world. And it is so fascinating because there's been such a cultural shift over the last 10, 20 years. The old image of big tech in Silicon Valley was that you won the lottery if you got a big tech job. It was a little bit more cushy. You were paid very well. Your stock options would just rise to infinity. You had free gyms, nap pods, all these great perks.

10:58And now it's so much more cutthroat. It feels like you're always on edge. It feels like at any moment, AI could take your job. You're being surveilled. And it's just such a massive shift from what tech used to be to what it is right now. And CEOs are not offering a lot of sympathy. Let's go back to 2022 when Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, announced this big year of efficiency push where they did other mass layoffs. They cut 21 ,000 employees in total over those two years because of perhaps overhiring from the pandemic. And to employees, Zuck was very remorseful. He said, I got this wrong and I take responsibility for that.

11:35Fast forward to this morning. They're sending they told everyone to work from home. They're sending an email out at 4 a.m. in three different batches to people who will be laid off. Zero apology. Like, this is just completely ruthless right now. Said this is the biggest game in town. This is the biggest competition that we as a company will ever fight. And sorry, not sorry. Yeah, roughly 110 ,000 tech workers have been laid off so far in 2026. That's almost to the entire figure from 2025, which was 125 ,000. And the peak was in 2023 when 260 ,000 plus people were laid off in the tech industry.

12:09So it looks like we are on pace to either match or exceed that, which just shows where the vibes are right now in the tech world. Up next, dear owners of old Kindles, hope you like playing with Legos because your device is about to turn into a brick. Today, Amazon is going to end support for Kindle and Kindle Fire devices released in 2012 or earlier, according to an announcement made last month. That includes Kindle First Generation, Kindle 4, Kindle 5, and the Kindle Paperwhite First Generation, along with a bunch more. If you're not sure what kind of Kindle model you have, go to Settings, Device Options, and Device Info to find out whether your geriatric e-reader will survive the purge.

12:47If you have one of the affected devices, your Kindle won't actually turn into a brick. You'll still be able to read all the books you downloaded on it already. However, you won't be able to download any new content on the Kindle, and there will be restricted functionality. Needless to say, people who are clinging on to their old Kindles are pretty upset at Amazon about the move because Kindles aren't these high-tech devices. Many folks have kept theirs throughout the years and can't understand why Amazon would pull the plug on them. As one Pittsburgh woman told writers about her 15-year-old Kindle Touch, I've never felt the desire to have another device.

13:18It's a part of me, a lifesaver. I fell asleep with it almost every night. So why, Toby? Why is Amazon killing off these old Kindles? Basically, Amazon's like, listen, guys, these are 14-year-old devices, and we can't support them forever. We have a limited amount of resources, so we're going to devote it more towards new devices. And it shows the attitude of most big tech firms when it comes to these older pieces of tech. If they can prematurely end support for them and save a few bucks in the process, they are going to do that. I think of other examples that we've talked about on the show before.

13:50Remember the car thing from Spotify? you might not remember it because it is a very niche device but it was this$90 device that with a big knob that you could plug into your car and it basically lets you do one thing which was help you play Spotify music they bricked it as well and got a very similar sort of backlash from people who were baffled like why you you can stop making it but why do you need to cease supporting functionality for the software and it brings up this broader debate about what you actually own because you may own a physical thing, but the software that it runs on is arguably more important than the hardware itself.

14:27And just like that, they can pull the rug out from underneath you and make your beloved Kindle a brick as you described it. So yes, this is not just a Amazon thing. It's something that you see all across the tech world. And one reason why Amazon might be doing this is to get you to buy a newer Kindle. And Amazon does dominate this market. It owns 72 % of the e-reader market. What Amazon is doing to people with old Kindles that won't be supported anymore, It's offering a 20 % discount that people can apply toward one of their new Kindle models. And you're also getting a$20 e-book credit that will be automatically applied to your account.

15:01But the thing about these old Kindles, they had manual buttons and they just felt like a part of the old tech world that was honestly very low tech. And that's why people had them for decades because they didn't really need to be upgraded. They did one thing, which was help you read books without a book. And they did that very well. So that's why people are really clinging on to them and have a soft spot for these old Kindles. I love that people are turning off Wi-Fi and putting it permanently in airplane mode because if it ever connects, then it will update to the new thing. So they're putting it in, you know, the back of their closet.

15:32They're saying never connect to Wi-Fi going forward just to keep, you know, the Eden that they currently have within their e-reader world. If I'm Amazon, though, you've got to know that people have intense, intense feelings towards their Kindles. So just from a PR perspective, yes, maybe it will take some more resources to support this functionality. But in terms of your most passionate readership base, they're definitely Kindle owners. We all know someone who just like really, really loves a Kindle, maybe even a little bit too much. So interesting PR play from Amazon. But from a business perspective, you can see why they're doing it.

16:07All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with a story about Pizza Hut 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 flav city'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.

16:43That's shopflavcity.com. Toby, have you ever made something with less than ideal ingredients? Yes. Do not use canned 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 I-H-E-R-B dot com slash MBDaily and use code MBDaily for 20 % off your purchase. That's Iherb dot com slash MBDaily.

17:23Neil, do you have any idea how expensive the housing market is? You're just finding out about this. Yes, but thankfully there's Built. Built is the membership for where you live that rewards you with points on every housing payment. Renters and owners can earn points to use toward flights with United and Hyatt, Lyft rides, Amazon.com purchases, and so many more. Built members also get access to a neighborhood concierge. It can make restaurant reservations, book fitness classes, and find new local spots. Check it out at joinbuilt.com slash mbd. That's join b-i-l-t dot com slash mbd. Pizza Hut built its brand on slightly too greasy pizza and red roofs that were a beacon of family-friendly fun.

18:05It's leaning into the latter to try and grow sales of the former. Franchisees are converting their locations to old-school classic Pizza Huts, complete with red plastic cups, Tiffany-style lamps, vinyl booths, and of course a salad bar in a bid to win back customers. The push for the past comes as Pizza Hut is struggling, with sales falling 1 % last quarter, leading parent company Yum! Brands to close 250 U.S. stores. But the way back to profitability might run through Pac-Man arcade games and steepled red roofs. and all 144 dine-in spots have been converted into Pizza Hut classics since 2019.

18:41One franchise owner, Tim Sparks, told CBS that customers are driving two to three hours away just to visit some of his 38 revamped locations to marvel over the nostalgic details they remember from their youth. The thought process is sterile remodels, tablet ordering, and modern minimalism has made the restaurant experience boring and uninviting. By bringing back some of the rough edges to sit-down dining, It might also bring back all the kids who loved Pizza Hut from the 90s who now have adult money to spend as Vice framed it. Neil, people yearn for the glory days of opaque red cups and oddly shaped roofs.

19:15This is kind of like the anti-cracker barrel, right? They're going retro instead of modern and it's working really well for them. I think the funniest part of this whole thing is that Pizza Hut corporate doesn't really know about this. They don't acknowledge it on their websites. The New York Times talked to a bunch of execs like the CMO was like, huh, we're going classic. So it does seem to be sort of a grassroots effort by these franchisees to go to the classic model. So it does their Pizza Hut is not completely in the dark. There's this arrangement that they have with franchisees where they provide some of the accoutrements that you know of for a classic Pizza Hut, like the checkered tablecloths and things like that.

19:57But when it comes to the Tiffany style lamps and other things, this is completely on the franchisees to go get those scouring, I don't know, yard sales or, you know, niche websites to find all of this stuff. But, yeah, it's really working for Pizza Hut and it sure needs it because sales have been down for nine straight quarters. Domino's is completely laughing, lapping it. But in terms of PR when this is huge, I mean, you can't go on a Pizza Hut forum, which I'm on all the time on Reddit or any other sort of blog. and people are just absolutely loving it. They're driving five, six hours to go to these Pizza Hut classics.

20:29Makes them feel like they were kids again, where they went to eat with their families in the 80s and 90s and it's just a good feeling all around. It's great for content creators too. You know, it goes viral whenever you can sit down at a tablecloth and say, hey, this is what we all used to experience. The problem with the roofs and the problem with doing this in general and why maybe Pizza Hut corporate is not so on board is that once you reconvert a Pizza Hut into that iconic steeple roof. It makes that building and that location a lot more difficult to sell should you have to close that store, should another buyer come in the spot.

21:04There's a church near me in Michigan and it was always the Pizza Hut Church because the roof is so iconic. Once that roof is in place, it's very difficult to become something else, which is why you've seen this blanding out of a lot of fast food locations. Think about what McDonald's used to look like and think about what McDonald's looks like now. Now, it's basically just a gray box because it's a lot more modular. You can put a Starbucks in there if you need. You can put something else in there if McDonald's or Pizza Hut leaves. When you customize these locations to look very much like what they used to, it becomes much more difficult to sell to any other person.

21:37What was your favorite part about an old Pizza Hut? I was a big salad bar guy. I know it sounds weird because I'm anti-boy kibble, but I did like taking – I just remember the peppers from the Pizza Hut salad bar being a huge – I was just a huge draw for me. That was crazy to me when you said that yesterday because I'm like, who goes to Pizza Hut and gets fired up by the salad? I loved the pizza. Like it had a little bit more heft to it than any other, you know, Papa John's out there. So I just loved how greasy it was, how cheesy it was. You can go eat your salad in the corner. I'm chowing down some pieces of pizza.

22:08If you want to go visit a Pizza Hut classic, there's no database. But there is one that's probably the most famous of any that people have driven long nights for. it's it's in Tunkhannock Pennsylvania which is northwest of Scranton and I went to the Google reviews of that yesterday and people were like I we had nothing to do on Saturday afternoon so we drove three hours from like Binghamton New York or other parts of the country how do you spell that oh god you and you're making me find it here Tunkhannock all right well people can look T-U-N-K-H-A-N-N-O-C-K the most Pennsylvania sounding yeah I only asked because you've showed some Pennsylvania talents to me that I literally could not pronounce.

22:48So I'm glad it's a little more. It's about an hour west of Balakana, which you definitely can't pronounce. Okay, let's sprint to the finish with our final headlines. A much hyped book called The Future of Truth, which examines truth in the age of AI, contains more than six quotes that were made up or misattributed by AI. Steven Rosenbaum, the author, acknowledged that the book had, quote, a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes after being approached by the New York Times, which discovered the fakery. He said he was transparent about his use of chat GPT and Claude during his research process, but now was working with his editors to correct the passages.

23:22This isn't just any bottom of the barrel beach read. Rosenbaum is a well-known media expert who received promotional blurbs on the book from the likes of the Atlantic CEO and a forward from a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Rosenbaum said that if his embarrassing mess up serves as a warning about the risks of AI assisted research and verification, that is why I wrote the book. That's one way to spin it. Obviously, very ironic that this happened and plays into a lot of consumers fears too, that AI is taking over a lot of the creative arts. One part of the book industry that isn't that mad or scared of AI is actually Barnes & Noble.