Job Market Comes Roaring Back & Ring Ad Sparks Mass Surveillance Fears

0:28Recently, I got an ad for the best lawn fertilizer. 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. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, rings Super Bowl ads spark spheres of mass surveillance. Then the jobs market appears to have roared back to life. It's Thursday, February 12th. Let's ride.

0:57Here's a business lesson you won't find in the textbooks. When the going gets tough, hand out free socks. Yesterday, McDonald's, which had been on the struggle bus for most of the past couple of years, reported a 6.8 % U.S. sales boom in its fourth quarter, thanks in large part to its limited edition Grinch meal, which included a pair of colorful socks. CEO Chris Kamzinski told analysts that for one week in December, McDonald's was the biggest seller of socks in the world. Toby, did you snag a pair? I didn't, but the scale of McDonald's is unfathomable. During the first few days of the campaign, they sold about 50 million pairs, 50 million pairs of socks.

1:36This is a burger company. Also, I found some more McDonald's fun facts courtesy of Harris on X who works for the market research firm Quarter. McDonald's serves 70 million customers every day and 80 % of the population visits at least once a year in their largest markets. 17 different individual menu items all generate over$1 billion annually. So McNuggets, French fries, those are billion-dollar items, and they have 17 of them. And finally, in Austria, which has a population of 9 million, about 2 million are loyalty members, which means 22 % of the entire country want their rewards, points, and their Grinch socks.

2:15It's not like the cuisine in Austria as much of a competitor to McDonald's. Sorry, I'm throwing shade. Okay, and now a word from our sponsor, FlavCity. Toby, are you trying to get stronger this year? Yes, me and my fiance are really dedicated. Every morning she tells me a mean truth about myself and I do my best not to cry. Does that work? No. Well, to get physically stronger, you could always try FlavCity's all-in-one protein smoothies. They come in all sorts of flavors like peppermint shamrock, banana bread, brownie batter, and more. Okay, sure. Next, you're going to tell me that they have 25 grams of protein, real ingredients, 10 grams of collagen, and don't taste like chalk.

2:49All of that is true. Well then, head to go.shopflavcity.com slash mbds to try any of their delicious flavors. That's go.shopflavcity.com slash mbds. Just when you thought the labor market was more frozen than your significant other's feet as soon as you climb into bed, your calves did their job and brought it roaring back to life. According to the delayed January jobs report, the U.S. economy added 130 ,000 jobs last month, almost double what economists were expecting, while unemployment ticked down to 4.3%. It's the strongest hiring month we've seen since late 2024, but there's a couple of catches.

3:29A lot of those jobs, 82 ,000 of them, were concentrated in healthcare, the most jobs added in a month in that sector since 2020. While healthcare has been putting the team on its back of late, it did have some help with construction pitching in 33 ,000 jobs and manufacturing eking out 5 ,000, its first gain in more than a year. The second catch is that these monthly reports have a habit of overstating actual jobs growth. Since this is a new year, the government went through their annual benchmarking process where they go through previous employment numbers and adjust them using more granular data and found that the U.S.

4:03economy added just 181 ,000 jobs in 2025 versus the 584 ,000 previously estimated. On a monthly basis, that means just 15 ,000 jobs were added instead of 50 ,000, making 2025 the worst year of employment gains outside of a recession in more than two decades. So, two takeaways. While the labor market appears to have gotten out of the gate fast, and dang, last year was even bleaker than we thought. Yeah, I'll focus on the positive. Great way to start the year, like marching down the field and scoring a touchdown on your opening drive. Because not just the top line numbers were good. There were other nuggets sprinkled throughout this report that you could really hang your hat on.

4:42It was the biggest drop in people working part time because they couldn't find a full time job since June 2022. More workers left their job. This has been something that we talked about earlier this week, that the labor market was frozen over because people weren't just leaving their job. If they do leave their job more, then that shows they have confidence to find a new one. So another good sign. There was a notable drop in the number of people out of work for at least 27 weeks. So that long term unemployment is shrinking. average hourly earnings rose a solid 0.4 % from December. That was higher than expectations.

5:14And also manufacturing had its first monthly gain in employment in more than a year. So a lot of dots out there that if you connect them paints a pretty rosy picture of the labor market as we start off 2026. But I did see the reaction to this report from a lot of people on social media saying like, oh, they're just going to revise it. Why do they even put these numbers out if they're going to revise them. So why is the data feel like it's so messed up? Because we have this massive monthly or yearly revision, the highest negative revision on record since 1979. And there's a variety of factors of why sometimes the data misses the mark.

5:48There's been declining survey responses. Remember, these monthly BLS reports are surveys where they go talk to business owners and ask for the response. If they don't have responses and they're not getting good data, Sometimes big revisions happens too when the economy is quickly shifting. Right now we've seen AI disrupt a lot of industries. So sometimes it's just a little hard to react in real time to these things. And it's not misleading. It's not deliberately misleading, but it's just difficult to figure out new and closed businesses. You can misestimate jobs. You can misestimate the amount of foreign-born workers in the United States.

6:23All of these things go into the fact that it's an imperfect number we get every month. then you cross-reference it with better data and you get these big revisions. Yeah, and another slightly concerning trend is just how much healthcare has propped up the labor market. 82 ,000 positions out of 130 ,000. And you didn't even mention that 42 ,000 other positions came from the social assistance sector, which is very adjacent to healthcare. That's jobs like home health aides, residential care workers. Without healthcare, without social assistance, jobs growth would be negative for the past bunch of months.

6:56So if you are looking for some warning signs for some alarm bells in these reports recently, besides the revisions, it would be just how outsized the growth has been in health care compared to the rest of the economy. Obviously, it's risky to have such heavy reliance on one industry. But the counterpoint to that is healthcare is not the worst industry to rely on because the jobs are usually pretty geographically dispersed. It's not just concentrated in Silicon Valley or something like that. It's stable across economic cycles. Like people usually always need healthcare. And so if you were to rely on one industry, you might as well have it be a robust one.

7:32and it's just less volatile than something like manufacturing or construction that kind of goes through ebbs and flows. So yes, there's risk when you have just immense concentration in one industry. But if we had to pick one, healthcare would be it. Okay, we've reached the point in our jobs report story where you have to say, so what does this mean for the Fed? Because that is obligatory. Well, it means that we're not probably not going to see any interest rate cuts anytime soon. If the labor market is coming back, then the Fed is in this wait and see era where it It needs to see a very strong deterioration in the labor market for the central bankers to cut rates even more.

8:09It looks like the job market is rebounding, as Jerome Powell said a few months ago. So, yeah, don't expect a rate cut anytime soon. Moving on, no one wants to feel like they're being watched, but sometimes the digital eyes doing the watching come in handy. On Tuesday, the FBI revealed footage of a masked man on the doorstep of the still-missing Nancy Guthrie, mother of Today Show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie. The man was caught on Guthrie's Nest camera, but the footage was thought to be lost until engineers at Google, which owns Nest, were able to recover it. Guthrie's Nest was disconnected the night she disappeared, and the subscription only saves around three hours of video history before being deleted, and yet, footage earmarked for deletion was ultimately recoverable.

8:51While it's been an asset in the case, that set off red flags for privacy advocates. Similar backlash has followed Amazon Ring's Super Bowl ad, which showed cameras surveilling neighborhoods to locate a lost dog. From there, it wasn't hard for people to extrapolate that, hey, couldn't you use this dog-finding AI technology to also track humans? This definitely isn't about dogs. It's about mass surveillance, Senator Ed Markey, a critic of Ring's coziness with law enforcement, posted on X. Another quote tweet said, This is how Batman found the Joker in the Dark Knight, and I don't like it. A ring spokesperson told The Verge that the dog-finding feature can't currently detect human biometrics, but another new ring feature called Familiar Faces can.

9:34So, Neil, two separate instances of camera products being used ostensibly for good, but with dystopian undertones. Okay, so here's how Search Party works. This is the feature that was shown in the ring ad on Super Bowl that everyone's talking about. You lose your dog in your neighborhood. You actually notify the Ring app that you lost your dog. That pings all of the Ring cameras in your neighborhood. And what they do is search their archival footage using AI, of course, to see if the dog walked in front of this camera. If the camera, if a homeowner's camera does indicate that the dog was found at this particular area, it pings the owner of that particular camera.

10:13and they have the option whether to share that with, in multiple different ways, share that with the dog's owner. So that is the search party feature. Yes, of course, a lot of people were saying, okay, that's great that the dog was found, but you could easily extrapolate that to go on a hunt for little Toby who got lost. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people were responding to the ad saying this is a very smart way to gaslight people into accepting mass surveillance into their life. But I think the narrative violation here is that the ad was pretty well received by a lot of people. Ring actually had the second most liked ad during the Super Bowl, according to iSpotData, which is a market research firm.

10:52They also earned the highest purchase intent score in the top 10 most liked ads. So a lot of people weren't thinking about the fact that this could be turned into a mass surveillance tool of humans. They were probably just thinking, wow, this is a great way to locate my lost dog. And that led to a very positive reception of the ad. And then as for the Nest situation in Arizona, But what was surprising to many people is that allegedly Guthrie's subscription had lapsed to Nest, and yet it was still recording footage. Well, in the fine print that you sign when you sign up for Nest, Google does say that it could potentially record three hours of what's known as event-based video history that it doesn't store on the device itself.

11:32It sends to its data centers all around the globe. And perhaps this is why it took many days for Google's engineers to go search far and wide in these extensive databases This is for the footage that eventually found this masked person. Yeah, a good analogy to wrap your head around this is that when you send an email to Trask, when you delete it, that is still on servers somewhere. There's still retention policies for these tech companies, especially a company as large as Google. This data leaves a trail across many data centers, across many storage systems. So it was technically complex, but they were able to track it down.

12:07And it is. It's a two-sided coin because it is helping the case. You want this thing to come in handy when you have a high-profile kidnapping such as this, but it also raises a ton of privacy red flags. Yeah, tech and law enforcement have been frenemies for years. I remember in 2016, Apple was battling with the FBI. The FBI wanted them to open the locked phone of one of the San Bernardino shooters. And Apple went to court with law enforcement and actually won over a series of cases. Moving on across the world, countries are sounding the alarm about falling population numbers. Not Switzerland. In fact, just the opposite.

12:44The European country will hold a vote this summer on whether to cap the population at 10 million. Yesterday, the government announced that a vote on the population ceiling will take place June 14th after supporters gained enough signatures to put it on the ballot. Those supporters are led by the People's Party, a right-wing group that has long advocated for anti-immigration policies. They argue Switzerland has gone over its cross-country skis when it comes to welcoming outsiders, leading to unsustainable pressures on infrastructure and the cost of living. Over the past decade, the Swiss population has grown about five times faster than the European Union, fueled by foreign workers arriving for quality, high-paying jobs.

13:19Now, according to Bloomberg, more than one-quarter of the people living in the country aren't Swiss citizens. Opponents of the cap, which include the Swiss business community, say it will lead to widespread labor shortages for Switzerland's economic engines, pharma, banking, watches, and Kit Kats, aka Nestle. Plus, it'll likely violate existing free movement agreements Switzerland has with the EU, risking trade to the country's largest export market. As the campaigning starts, the vote looks like it'll be close. In a recent poll, 48 % said they were supportive of the population cap, showing how there's serious frustration about the way things are going.

13:53There's a lot of risks to adopting this strategy, because in general, you do not want a shrinking population. If you look over to Asia, you look at Japan, you look at Korea, they are doing everything in their power to try to get people to have babies first and foremost because they've had a declining population for a long time because you are risking lower economic growth. You need people to drive the economic engines. You need young people so you don't have an aging society kind of weighing on those young people. You risk this trade disruption if you do pull out from kind of the EU agreements.

14:26You just risk export competitiveness as well. This is not an insular economy. Switzerland is not just, you know, making chocolate. They are very ingrained in the wider global economy. Now, there are proponents that say there's counterbalancing effects that do make this a wise strategy to pursue because if there's less people, maybe housing rents will become more affordable. Maybe there's less strain on just infrastructure in general. there will be lower public welfare costs if there's less people to take care of. And then there's an environmental aspect as well. So you see both sides of the argument here, but in general, you don't necessarily want to restrict population growth.

15:03Yeah. I mean, there has been stagnating economic growth. GDP per capita in Switzerland has not grown in the last three years. Real wages have declined. So the people who are from Switzerland are saying, well, I'm not doing so well. And they're seeing it's not just scapegoating, poor immigrants from other countries. It's scapegoating wealthy foreign workers coming in, working at these banking and pharma jobs and ostensibly driving up housing prices and raising the cost of living overall. But then the business community is saying, look, we're not going to invest in Switzerland because we can't find the workers if you cap the population.

15:37Right now, the population's at 9.1 million. So there's not that much room for growth. So if you cap it at 10 million. You know, Roche is a big pharma company and employs 15 ,000 people from 100 nationalities in Switzerland alone. And then you look at some of those blue chip companies that come out of Switzerland. Many of them were not even founded by Swiss people. Nestle founded by a German. Rolex, also founded by a German and a Brit. Richemont luxury goods founded by South African. Logitech co-founded by two Italians. So those are some of the biggest companies in Switzerland. And if, you know, this cap perhaps had been in place when these companies were invented, they would not be located in Switzerland.

16:14Side note, Switzerland has 9 million people yet. They're absolutely wiping the floor with us in some Olympic events. We just lost super G to them. So it's amazing how much better, you know, these European countries are at the Winter Olympics than the US. What's also interesting about what Switzerland does in its political system is has this concept of direct democracy where the whole population just kind of votes on particular initiatives. This happens at least or up to four times a year where they just hold a popular vote. Like the electoral college means nothing to them. And they just go to the polls.

16:45They say, hey, the Switzerland government says, hey, do you guys want to vote on this? And they all go to the polls and they vote on it. So it will be a very interesting experiment seeing what happens on June 14th. All right. We're going to take a quick break and come back with Neil's numbers right after this. Neil, have you heard of public.com's newly launched generated assets? Yes, helps you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. Start with any prompt, say renewable energy companies with high free cash flow or semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20 % year over year, and it'll get to work.

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18:37That's right. So find a better way to money at nm.com. That's nm.com. The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Company. Welcome to Neil's Numbers, the segment where I share three stats in the week's news that will make you a gold medalist in the Knowledge Olympics. For my first number, let's talk about two companies who were America's most valuable of their eras. Back in 1985, it was IBM. They were extremely profitable and employed almost 400 ,000 people. Today, it's NVIDIA. Nvidia is five times as profitable as IBM, is worth nearly 20 times as much, but it employs about one-tenth as many people.

19:20As The Wall Street Journal's Greg Ip notes, this discrepancy says pretty much everything you need to know about the 2026 economy. Companies are richer than ever before, but the spoils are going to capital instead of labor. That helps explain the difference between excellent top-line economic numbers like GDP, but consumer confidence that's at its lowest point since 2014. Let's define some terms. As Ip explains, value is added to the economy, which is measured as GDP. And that gets distributed in one of two primary ways. To capital, as profits and interest, or to labor, as wages and benefits. The hallmark of today's economy is that the former is being prioritized over the latter.

19:58It's not a new phenomenon, but one that's been steadily encroaching for decades. Back in 1980, 58 % of the total proceeds of economic output went to labor. Today, that's 51.4%. Toby, I feel like everything I learned in Econ 101 is outdated, but realistically, I didn't go to class. I was not great at micro econ either. This explains everything. This explains everything about why people are feeling like the economy is doing so well, and yet I'm not doing well myself because your paycheck has an increase in commensurate with the actual GDP growth of America. You have these massive companies with fewer workers than ever generating higher returns than ever before.

20:38Just look at Alphabet. revenue is up 43 % in the past three years. Their headcount has stayed flat. So you have very few workers generating massive amounts of money. And then the other thing about why the economy feels so strong is stock wealth has just accrued in a lot of people's brokerage accounts. In 2019, household stock wealth was 200 % of their disposable income. Today, it is 300%. And again, that is concentrating in people that invest in stocks, usually in the higher end of the market. So wealth is now the biggest driver of consumption, not actual income, which is why we are seeing this discrepancy between labor and the actual returns they're generating to the economy.

21:21Maybe the stock market is the economy. For my next number, if you want to send your kid to a private school in New York City, it'll cost you more than most colleges. Around the city, at least seven schools are charging more than$70 ,000 for tuition this year, Bloomberg reported. a shocking rise from a median tuition of$40 ,000 as recently as 2014. Schools say they're dealing with higher costs just like everyone else, especially paying high-quality teachers enough to afford living in New York. They point out tuition also can cover things like meals and field trips, which at these schools is not a trip to the museum but a visit to Europe.

21:54They also point out they're doling out more financial aid than ever before. Polyprep, for example, said it provided about 22 % of its students with more than$14.5 million in aid. That's probably not going to prevent sticker shock, even from parents who thought they were comfortably in the upper class. Toby,$70 ,000 to learn that Y equals MX plus B. We'll just see how inelastic a good private school is. Oh my gosh, we're back to microeconomics again here. Because yeah, you're right. These prices are highly inelastic. Demand for education does not drop when prices increase because it's seen as a necessity.

22:28It's seen as very high value. And there's not really something that you can substitute education with. so that means it's an inelastic good. Why are parents paying these astronomical prices? It's because the public school system in New York is under a lot of pressure right now. They actually lost 22 ,000 students last year. More than one in three students were chronically absent in 2024. And more than 40 % of students are below proficiency in reading and math. So that is why you're seeing more people trying to crowd into the private system because they think it's a better education for their child.

22:59For my final number, appropriate ahead of Valentine's Day, a matchmaking platform is consuming Stanford University. According to the Wall Street Journal, of the 7 ,500 undergrads at Stanford, more than 5 ,000 have used Date Drop, a site that aims to pair up singles fed up with the swiping grind. Started by a grad student and launched in September, Date Drop requires you to fill out 66 questions about yourself, which will be fed into an algorithm that pairs you up with a potential date. The Date Drops, get it, happen every Tuesday night at 9 p.m. and it's turned into an appointment event for students with many gathering together in dorms and libraries to see who they'll be matched up with.

23:35Students told the journal that Date Drop has been so popular because Stanford undergrads are socially awkward and simply having a normal conversation is tough, let alone a romantic one. At the same time, they despise dating apps. Date Drop works because it spares you from making the first move in real life, but also gives you a match that doesn't require endless scrolling. Do you like this idea? Like, would you want to have a 99 % compatibility score? I feel like that sets up so much pressure for the first date is like, this algorithm has said, we are meant to be together. Do you think this would be good?

24:05I think perhaps for the first few times, you would have high expectations, but as it keeps going and maybe those dates initially fail, the expectations get lowered and you're like, okay, now I'm just talking to somebody interesting. I think the smartest part about this date drop, this version of date drop, because we have seen it at other colleges, is the fact that they drop at the same time. It's very like HQ trivia. It's very ritualistic where everyone can be together. So I think that is part of the reason why it's so viral and so sticky on this campus is because you have these just shared moments of who did I get?