Unpopular Jobs Are Becoming Desirable & Communal Dining Makes a Comeback

0:01You could create the best advertisement known to man, but if you're not getting it in front of the right audiences or tapping into meaningful scale, it'll sort of be a tree falls in a forest situation. Enter Disney Campaign Manager. It is simplified streaming TV ad buying, allowing you to set up, launch, and optimize campaigns all from a single easy-to-use platform. Your ads can then appear alongside iconic content on Disney +, ESPN, and Hulu streaming platforms. So in translation, massive reach, all with one partner. Learn more and get started at DisneyCampaignManager.com. That's DisneyCampaignManager.com.

0:41Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, the latest trend in dining, sitting next to complete strangers. Then Jeffrey Bezos is back in the arena, this time with a new AI startup. It's Tuesday, November 18th. Let's ride.

1:02May I beat you? In four words, Bill Ackman just changed the dating game forever. In a viral ex-post over the weekend that was apparently not satire, the hedge fund billionaire offered advice to young single men who are finding it difficult to meet women in public. Just walk up to them and say, may I meet you before advancing the conversation. Ackman said he used this pickup line in his younger years and almost never got a no. After his post went nuclear online, Ackman followed up, writing that may I meet you works much more effectively when you are in motion, so be sure to use it in places like subways, elevators, airplanes, buses, and even walking down the street.

1:38Toby, would you have used this in your single days? No, but a lot were very quick to point out that, hey, Bill, maybe the approach was working because your 6 '3 went to Harvard and were super rich, but the general thesis does feel right here. If the two options are A, you don't go up to someone, or B, go up to someone and say, may I meet you? I do think option B is preferable, but it also has me thinking maybe a new tagline for the show. No more Let's Ride. It's all May We Ride. Let us know what you think about that. All right, now a word from our sponsor, U.S. Bank. Picture this. Your favorite band just announced they're heading on a big tour for their new album.

2:16They're stopping by your city in just a few short months, but you didn't budget for concert tickets this month. Luckily, you can snag tickets without breaking the bank. introducing the U.S. Bank Split World MasterCard, a new type of card that lets you pay later on every purchase. With the split card, all purchases are automatically divided into three payments and placed into a monthly payment plan to be paid back over three months. And if you're looking for additional flexibility, any purchase over$100 can be extended to six or 12 months with equal monthly payments for a low monthly fee. So whether you're splurging on those must-have tickets or are covering an unexpected bill, you can pay later on every purchase with the U.S.

2:53Bank Split Card. Learn more at usbank.com slash splitcard. That's usbank.com slash splitcard. When jobs are hard to come by, flagging down traffic, being a prison guard, or dealing with a bunch of middle school brats doesn't sound all that bad. According to a Bloomberg report, roles that are physically demanding and offer low pay have been drowning in applications in today's chilly labor market, a reversal from the worker shortages that typically plague these industries. Take the Georgia Department of Corrections, for example, which operates in a notoriously high turnover industry. It said that it received more than 1 ,000 applications in each of the last three months for all roles, up 40 % from a year ago.

3:32Or Waste Management, which said on an earnings call last month that turnover among garbage truck driver and technician roles was at an all-time company low, something echoed by its competitors in garbage collection. The flocking to what Mike Rowe called dirty jobs comes as Americans are finding it hard to land a new gig long after they lost their old one. According to the most recent government data, more than a quarter of unemployed workers have been out of work for more than six months, which is among the highest rate in decades. Toby, typically these kind of companies hardly turn away any applicants.

4:02Now they can be more selective than Princeton. Right, you're seeing this headline and saying, oh, people are getting jobs, that's a good thing, but it's actually not a bullish signal at all. These are the jobs that get filled when there's no other jobs out there. One to look at is the military, which is typically a hard job to fill because you have to separate from your family. And go back to 2022, they were missing their recruiting targets by 25%. This year, they were ahead of schedule and filled up all their recruiting needs before the deadline actually happened. So that is another canary in the coal mine job market that you're looking at and saying, hey, when the military starts filling up their quotas very frequently, that means things are tightening in other places than labor market.

4:40Another company that is seeing a boom in applicants is AQC Traffic Control. Now, this is a company that hires people who flag you down when you're driving into a construction site. They say stop and you have to wait for the other cars to come in. And then they say you can go and then you go along that one way road. Well, two years ago, this company, according to the CEO, Marcus Rush, fielded around 10 applications a week for long shifts directing drivers to speed up or slow down. Now he's seeing up to 80 applications a week, and he's also able to be more selective. He said two years ago he would hire almost anyone who passed a drug test or had a flagging certification.

5:21Now he's able to have employees with traffic flagging experience and only able to hire 50 percent of the workers who apply for flagging jobs these days. So it's just another one of those companies you don't often think about that typically have to beg for workers, and now they're seeing a flood of applicants. And then the final entry I want to call out too is substitute teachers. You said that, you know, the Bratson Middle School is not necessarily someone you want as your coworkers, but the substitute teacher pipeline is refilling. It is returning. We're hearing a lot of people say that they are now rebounding to pre-COVID levels.

5:52That's something you also are hearing a lot in many of these industries that this is where we were at before COVID. It took a long time to come back. But now with the job market being so stingy, we're seeing those pipelines refill to our best hiring years since before COVID. So waste management, substitute teacher, military, traffic control, these are all jobs that aren't necessarily ones that you want, but they are ones that you will take if you are sitting out of work for a long time, which most people are. 25 % of job seekers have been searching for a job for six plus months, which is why you're seeing these roles filled.

6:25Jeff Bezos was tired of letting everyone else have fun with AI, so he pulled up a seat to the table, emerging from stealth as the co-CEO of a new startup called Project Prometheus, complete with$6.2 billion in funding right out of the gates. The company's core focus will be on building AI for engineering and other physical world domains. Think stuff like computers, aerospace, and automotive systems, not another chatbot. Prometheus is joining a wave of startups setting their sights on developing what can be broadly described as world models. Traditional LLMs like ChatGPT learn by consuming massive amounts of text to identify patterns so they can eventually predict the next word in a sentence.

7:06But new physical intelligence labs want their models to learn by observing physical cause and effect in the real world. By watching how things move and change, they can guess what will happen next and researchers hope that eventually they'll be able to understand things like gravity, collisions, and cause and effect without anyone having to teach them each rule. Neil, another way to think about it, startups pursuing world models are concerned parents who don't want their systems staying at home and reading the internet all day. They want them out and about touching grass in the real world asking, may I meet you to new data sets that you can't find via text alone.

7:42It'll be interesting to see what Bezos has learned in terms of management over the last four years because he has been in the news more for his personal life and his gallivanting on yachts maybe more so than his management of companies because it's going to be a change. When he left Amazon four years ago and turned the reins over to Andy Jassy, he was the CEO of more than 1.6 million employees. Now Project Prometheus has about 100. So Bezos has a little bit of a different feel right now. And we'll see what he implemented at Amazon he'll bring over to Project Prometheus. Maybe some of the strategies that he was known for will apply to this new era of work, which is more lean and relies less on a heavy workforce.

8:26He had that famous two-pizza rule, which stipulated that teams should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas. He also loved having memos and saying no slide decks. We'll see how he adjusts his management style to what Mark Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs have termed the era of efficiency. But also a lot of people are interested in this particular approach. Why is he not building an LLM like ChatGPT? LLMs learn by scraping the web. They read Wikipedia, they read news articles, book, web pages, and then they pattern match based off of that text. But a lot of researchers say this is a dead end approach.

8:59Eventually, you're never going to reach human intelligence by having basically these predictors, these word predictors as your models. Instead, we want to run scientific experiments and use robotics, gather sensor and data camera from the real world and build these models that can figure out cause and effect and figure out how things are actually interacting with each other. So eventually you can get to things like accelerating scientific discovery, actually novel approaches to intelligence. And so a lot of big names in the AI world are kind of distancing themselves from LLMs. The biggest one being Jan LeCun, who is considered a godfather of AI, spent a lot of time at Meta.

9:39He is leaving Meta to pursue a world model startup of his own because he does think that LLMs are a black box that will never result in the intelligence that we're promising. So world models is going to be something that you're going to see popping up a lot more in kind of AI conversations. Well, I'm not surprised. I didn't want to learn physics in high school either, but now you've got to learn physics, according to these guys who want to build world models, in order to make any gains in AI. Final note on this, I think the name of the company is pretty cool. It refers to the Greek legend of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, giving it to humans so they can build civilization.

10:15A lot of these AI guys think that that's exactly what they're doing with AI. You know, it's certainly a bold claim, but maybe a nice little difference from all the Peter Thiel, Lord of the Rings themed companies. Moving on, it was all going right for Bitcoin until it wasn't. The world's largest cryptocurrency has plunged from a peak of one hundred and twenty six thousand dollars last month to nearly 90 K this morning. A six hundred billion dollar wipeout that was as sudden as it was shocking. These were supposed to be the best of times for Bitcoin. The Trump administration has implemented crypto friendly policies and lifted the threat of a legal crackdown.

10:48Traditional financial institutions have piled in, legitimizing the industry on Wall Street where it used to be a pariah. Bitcoin ETFs have given individual investors a seamless way to invest in digital assets. Except now, seemingly all of a sudden, Bitcoin is negative for the year. As Bloomberg put it, this is a market that trades on vibes, and the vibes are bad. Bad vibes are rough on Bitcoin, but even worse for the more speculative crypto assets on the market, those altcoins your cousin is going to tell you about this Thanksgiving, or not because they're crashing. A measure of the 50 smallest digital assets dropped to its lowest level since the peak of the pandemic, November 2020, while the top meme token, Dogecoin, is down 13 % in the past month.

11:27And the problem for a market based on vibes is it's nearly impossible to pinpoint a cause of the crash because there seems to be no clear trigger event. Is it the Fed wavering on rate cuts? Is it the trade war? Or is it simply that the sugar high has worn off? Whatever it is, it's spooking the Bitcoin bulls. I do want to dive into the institutionalization of Bitcoin because, yes, this was something that the crypto crowd pursued for a long time. And then once it was validated and started having these widely tradable ETFs, they're saying we made it. This is it's a de-risked asset now. But now that that's happened, it actually makes it more of a boring asset and actually trades much more like a macro asset.

12:04That means it's very sensitive to things like policy, what the Fed is doing with the rate cut cycle, how much liquidity is in the market, what are interest rates. So it used to be kind of a fringe financial asset. But now that it's coming to the mainstream, it is affected by mainstream cause and effect like things that I just mentioned above. So it is almost like, oh, we got our cake, but now we want to eat it, too. If you're going to be an institutional asset, you're going to trade like an institutional asset, which I think is what we've seen happen over the past few months. Right. And as Bitcoin has been tumbling, so have stocks.

12:35I mean, yesterday, the Dow fell for its third straight day. Stocks are going through their worst stretch since April and May when Liberation Day happened. There was all this chaos in the markets. The index has now moved below their 50-day moving averages. And that sounds very much like Wall Street jargon. And it is, but it's a clear threshold by which investors look at stocks and say, are you going to move up or are you going to move down going forward? And once it moves below that 50-day moving average, that is kind of not a panic, but it's kind of a scary sign that once it hits that threshold, things can only go lower from here.

13:09So it was a really bad day on the market yesterday. The Dow was down 1.2%, NASDAQ down 0.8%, S &P down 0.9%. All these AI names are just tumbling like crazy. NVIDIA, Meta, Amazon, AMD, Supermicro, Oracle, CoreWeave. They're all being bad along with Bitcoin. So I guess misery is company. And if you want kind of the confluence of both the stock market falling and the fact that Bitcoin is falling. Look no further than Bitcoin treasury companies. These are companies like MicroStrategy, which is SensoryBand, did to strategy. They stuffed their balance sheets with Bitcoin earlier this year. They would use their stock to raise liquidity so they could buy more Bitcoin.

13:47And they were trading at a premium for a lot of this time. Now that premium has completely evaporated and some of them are actually trading below the dollar value of their Bitcoin holdings. as you know, this rally has lost a little bit of momentum. So if you see stocks falling and you see Bitcoin falling, you kind of want to stay away from names like MicroStrategy, who has fallen 50 % this year, halved in value as things have kind of lost some of the narrative tailwinds that they've been experiencing. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's Trends.

14:21Neil, are you hitting your protein goals? Check out these guns. Do they not answer your question? They do not. So maybe try David Protein Bars. Nothing hits better after a gym ses than their red velvet flavor. Seriously, how can a bar taste that good and have such good macros at the same time? They have 28 grams of protein, 150 calories, zero grams of sugar and taste great. It's a perfect snack for staying full and hitting your protein goals without excess calories or sugar. More protein and fewer calories help you increase muscle and decrease body fat. To celebrate them restocking on their website, they're offering our listeners a special deal.

14:57Buy four cartons, get the fifth free when you use davidprotein.com slash mbd. That's davidprotein.com slash mbd. If you prefer to shop in person, David is now in over 5 ,000 stores nationwide. Check out their store locator to find a location near you. The crypto landscape changes daily. Keep up with some of the best launches and new tech all in one place on your commute. Join Ripple for a series of crypto and blockchain conversations with some of the best in the business. Learn how traditional banking benefits from the blockchain. Or how your digital assets can be kept safe and secure thanks to their all-in-one custody platform.

15:33Or how you can convert fiat to stablecoin faster than you can get home. Or how you can send a transaction halfway across the world before you make it to work. Or how you're probably already using crypto technology without even realizing it. Level up your commute and join Ripple and host David Schwartz for a special series of blockchain conversations on Blockstars, the podcast. Payments, custody, stablecoin, it's happening with Ripple. Welcome to Toby's Trends, the segment where I take your hand and lead you down a rabbit hole from the business world that will have you thinking to yourself, Dang, Toby has small hands.

16:08And today's trend is all about communal tables being on the comeback trail. Communal tables have alternated between popularity and dining room pariah, but they are sliding back into fashion once more. New data from Resi showed that 90 % of Gen Z diners say they enjoy communal seating compared to just 60 % of boomers. For younger diners craving real-life interaction, the proximity isn't awkward at all. It's actually part of the appeal. Many report meeting friends or dates at these long banquet setups. They also see it as a low-pressure way to share plates, save a little money, join conversations, and feel plugged into something happening around them.

16:47Plus, restaurants are embracing them, too, because it means more butts in seats. But maybe more importantly, it also makes for more Instagrammable moments that could be shared on social media because long tables are selfie city. Neil, I think this is a polarizing trend. Would you want to break bread with strangers at the table, or would you rather chow down at one of those solo ramen booths with dividers up? I think you have to really get inside the mindset of Gen Z. They love a structured communal activity. This is the same generation that is obsessed with run clubs. They love paint and sit nights, group hikes, other things that millennials might cringe as, quote, forced fun.

17:24But at the same time, this is the group that grew up during the pandemic that had to leave college because of COVID and were on Zoom classes all the time. They are craving social interaction. They are craving meeting people. They hate dating apps and they just want to meet people in some sort of controlled socialization setting. And that's maybe what this dining communal dining offers is that you don't necessarily I'm not just sitting across from you. One V one. There's a group around you. You don't have to manage the conversation yourself. There's a bunch of buffers on either side of you. So I can see the appeal.

17:58And especially if you want to meet new people, according to Rezi, one in three said they met a new friend this way. And one in seven said they landed a date. I think it comes down to people love sharing food. I mean, in this Resi survey, they talked to 1 ,000 diners, and 94 % of them said they're likely to share food when dining out. 97 % of Gen Z surveyed said they liked sharing food when you're out. And what's the best way to share food is you have 15 people at a table. You each order something. You each pick from someone else's plate. And it's just more affordable, too, when you don't have to all order your own entrees.

18:29I don't know, though. Like going to a beer hall or something like that, you sit down. You're usually looking for your own table. You're not necessarily looking to merge with another group. So if it is like two friend groups that have some connective tissue, totally understand it. But if it's just strangers sitting next to strangers, call me old fashioned, call me a boomer. But I guess I do want maybe my own booth in the back. And this is not new. I mean, this thing comes in cycles. Here's a headline I saw from back in 2014. Quote, communal seating is all the rage in restaurant design. and Nation's Restaurant News wrote, the number of communal tables is growing, quote, exponentially.

19:06If we went back to last year, though, there was a trend about dining alone and how some dining rooms were reconfiguring their setups to accommodate diners who eat by themselves. So you are right. Everything is cyclical. We went through a phase where everyone was just, you know, huddling over their dinners and eating by themselves. Now maybe we're boomeranging back to these communal tables. Actually, I've already convinced myself anything's better than eating alone. So communal dining, I'm back in on it. One final trend that Rezi identified in this report that I do want to mention is the table captain.

19:38Now, this is the person that maybe has been to the restaurant before and you offload all the responsibility of ordering to a table captain. Rezi found that 72 percent of its diners like to try new restaurants with a table captain. Sixty percent said it improves the experience. I was at dinner last night and our friend named Laura was our table captain. We said, Laura, literally order everything you've been here before. You know what we like. And so do ahead. And it was just an amazing experience. There's nothing better. It absolves you of one, all guilt. Like if you order badly, then it's not on you.

20:10It's on Laura, unfortunately. And two, if it's great, you're like, oh, Laura, that was amazing. Like props to you. So I'm all in. Are you ever a table captain? There's certain restaurants. It depends on where you are. If you're in your neck of the woods, then yes, you are by default the table captain. If you try to be the table captain at not your neck of the woods, though, Not for me. That can only end poorly. All right, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. President Trump will roll out the red carpet for a high-profile visitor from abroad today, Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.

20:40It's MBS's first visit to the U.S. in seven years, and his first since the 2018 killing of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents, which led to widespread outcry at the time, but did nothing to dent the U.S.'s close relationship with the Middle Eastern Kingdom. In fact, the U.S.'s ties to Saudi Arabia are closer than ever, as MBS has turned the longtime petro state into a global economic force with aggressive moves into sports, entertainment and now AI. Expect a slew of business deals to be announced during the visit as MBS seeks access to advanced chips and American nuclear and military technology.

21:14yesterday ahead of their meeting. Trump already said that the U.S. would sell F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, which would make it the only country in the Middle East besides Israel to fly the cutting-edge plane. Yeah, both countries have a clear shopping list here. Saudi Arabia wants some security guarantees. They do want access to those high-end AI chips, and they do want support with their civilian nuclear program. And then Trump wants to cash in on the$600 billion that Saudi has pledged to invest in the United States. they also yeah just want to deepen these tides that have been happening over time but i do want to call out a dinner that they're going to have is going to be wild because in addition to mbs and trump tiger woods and elon musk are both expected to dine with these two gentlemen so maybe in addition to everything else we'll get we'll get in a live golf and pga tour merger probably not the highest on the list of priorities yeah brokered by elon musk warren buffett who has mostly avoided big tech giants over his illustrious career, just made an uncharacteristically bullish move as he heads for retirement.

22:17Berkshire Hathaway disclosed a multi-billion dollar stake in Alphabet. The news landed late Friday in a routine 13F filing, revealing the conglomerate had built a position worth$4.3 billion. Now, the purchase likely came from one of Buffett's lieutenants rather than the man himself, but the Buffett halo still sends a powerful market signal. Some noted he decided the un-Buffett-esque timing since Google stock has already surged nearly 50 % this year, a level that would normally scare off the famous value investor. Still, the stock jumped about 3 % yesterday, the only green name amongst a sea of red as it bass in the Berkshire globe.

22:53What do we think about Buffett dabbling in a little alphabet soup, Neil? This is the Buffett playbook. He loves going shopping at the TJ Maxx of the stock market. And in terms of big tech companies, alphabet is a bargain. Its valuation is far less expensive than its other mega cap peers trades at 25.5 times next year's earnings compare that to microsoft 32 broadcom 50.8 nvidia 41.9 so it so while it is maybe a zigzag from what buffett usually invests in it does follow his general strategy of going for value and he's been eyeing google for a long time he said is one of his biggest mistakes that he missed out on because Berkshire Hathaway owns Geico Auto Insurance, and Geico was one of Google's first major advertisers a few decades ago.

23:42So Buffett, in an interview in 2018, said, I've seen the product work. I know what kind of margins they had, but I didn't know enough about technology to know whether this really was the one that would stop the competitive race. So now, multiple decades on, in 2025. The one that got away. The one that got away, but he's still planting a small stake in Google. And look for a big announcement from Google this week. There are hints that it's going to release its newest large language model, Gemini 3, this week. 91 % chance on prediction market, polymarket. Finally, you can't keep the Australians away from their Vegemite even when they're convicted murderers.