August 03, 2026

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Good morning. Billy Joel has “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.” We have “Scenes from Making the Morning Brew Newsletter on a Sunday.”

Yesterday, we pondered this article that essentially says online reviews are ruining our lives because there are too many, and everyone likes and dislikes everything to some extent. That prompted some deep thoughts at work.

Holly: What’s the best worst-reviewed thing you ever pursued? In college, friends told me to drop a literature course when they saw who the professor was, as she had terrible Rate My Professor reviews for being too hard. In reality, she was thorough, and the course was transformative.

Brendan: All of the reviews for my vacuum said it sucked big time—and it’s been great.

Reader, this is why we ask you the questions for Crowd Work…

—Holly Van Leuven, Brendan Cosgrove, Neal Freyman

In today’s newsletter, we’ll look at: why AI wants to crack parenting, the Google Earth feature that quickly got pulled, and a totally tubular competition.

Markets: Year-to-Date

Nasdaq

25,373.85

+9.17%

S&P

7,489.72

+9.41%

Dow

52,485.03

+9.20%

10-Year

4.745%

+58.2 bps

Bitcoin

$63,073.27

-27.92%

Palantir

$123.06

-30.77%

Data is provided by

*Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 11:00pm ET. Here's what these numbers mean.

Markets: The dog days of summer have been especially rough on the Nasdaq, which finished July down 3.2%. The tech-heavy index has a little momentum heading into August, though, after Friday’s 1% gain.
Stock spotlight: Data analytics firm Palantir, down nearly 27% year to date, will deliver quarterly results today, helping kick off another busy earnings week (more on that later).

family business

Altman’s rec sparks debate about AI in parenting

A photo collage of Sam Altman, and a mother and daughter looking at a smart calendar at home

Getty Images

OpenAI may have an AI agent that promises to produce “share-ready work,” but the company’s CEO went public with an arguably unshare-ready take on what to do with it.

On Friday, Altman posted on X that “a cool use case” for the company’s ChatGPT Work agent is to “connect your family calendars and explain your kids’ interests” and then “have it make a podcast that talks about one kid’s soccer game that afternoon, one kid’s upcoming birthday, some news, etc.” every day on the drive to school.

He didn’t exactly get ratioed…but several snarky replies got way more likes than the original post. One of the more modulated criticisms said: “using AI in place of real human connection is the worst possible use case for it.”

But AI execs want busy parents’ bucks

And some use cases for AI for family management are gaining more traction than others. In a recent feature, the New Yorker overviewed the myriad ways AI is trying to monetize relief from “the cognitive load of domestic admin”:

AI-enabled family support apps include Ollie, Cozi, and Ava, which can pull data from emails and calendars to send family text messages about important daily activities, remember birthdays, manage shareable lists, and flag deadlines for registration and bills.
AI-enhanced smart calendars, like Skylight and Cozyla, create shared visuals for all family members to keep them on track, and can also serve as reward trackers and photo albums.

Allison Stern, the founder of a VC firm focused on mothers as consumers, recently wrote for Fortune that moms “need outcomes, not interfaces.” When AI companies can really solve problems, she argues, they gain entrée into the market of 85 million American moms.

Zoom out: Stern noted that “mothers make 85% of household purchases and control roughly $2.4 trillion in annual consumer spending in the United States.” A recent market analysis for AI in childcare and parenting predicted that the segment would be worth almost $42 billion by 2035.—HVL

reader poll

Which of these best characterizes your thoughts on using AI for parenting tasks and household management?

It remembers lots of stuff that might get forgotten otherwise.
It makes the division of labor more equal.
It comes up with ideas, but it can’t physically help.
It’s just marketing.
Make it stop.

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World

Tour de headlines

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

🌏 Trump said he called off “biggest attack since World War II” against Iran. While aboard Air Force One yesterday as he returned to Washington from Bedminster, President Trump told reporters he made the decision at the behest of US allies in the Middle East, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. “They said we would much prefer a deal as opposed to an attack, because you don’t know where these attacks lead,” he said. Trump had spoken to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Saturday before he announced on X that “perimeters of a deal” were in place to end the war.

🇯🇵 The US and Japan worked together to help the yen. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made good on the “Buy Japanese Yen” note he put on his to-do list on Friday. Yesterday, President Trump said that the US bought Japanese yen for the first time in a decade in “a signal of friendship,” confirming earlier reports from the Financial Times that the Federal Reserve Bank sold euros for yen on behalf of the US Treasury. The intervention aimed to boost the yen from its 40-year low against the dollar. Bessent wrote on X yesterday, “We strongly support Japan’s decisive market and monetary steps to correct the substantial undervaluation of the yen.” The US dollar weakened sharply early today on the news.

🕸️ Spider-Man: Brand New Day had second-biggest opening weekend ever. Say what you will about Marvel Studios, but it officially owns the four biggest openings of all time at the domestic box office. The latest Spider-Man movie debuted at $355 million this weekend, where it three-point landed between 2019’s Avengers: Endgame ($357 million) and 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home ($260 million) in opening weekend history. And hopefully Tom Holland and Zendaya, who star in the Marvel flick, feel pretty good about their careers: The other movie that they’re currently both in, The Odyssey, joined forces with Spidey to post the biggest collective weekend in box office history, at $430 million.—HVL

wrong turn

Google Earth abruptly reverses course on AI feature

The Google Earth and Google logos. Sopa Images/Getty Images

Apparently, even mapping experts aren’t completely sure whether something’s about to go south. At least that was the case with Google Earth and the new feature it rolled out last Thursday, Google Earth Image Generation, which allowed users to generate hyperrealistic AI images and add them to actual satellite imagery. The feature lasted exactly one day.

What was the point of it? Google Earth said Image Generation would be a fun way to visualize future projects, like building a house, or ponder how things might’ve looked in the past. It even showcased the feature by imagining what Pompeii looked like before disaster struck—symbolism so direct that even Nathaniel Hawthorne would scoff at it.

Concern about deepfakes: Journalists immediately sounded the alarm, since Google Earth is often used to verify claims and authenticate news stories. One open-source researcher told NPR that he was able to easily create fake images that could be used for disinformation: “Refugees at the Mexican border, a nuclear plant in Iran, a crash in Amsterdam, a hospital with a bomb crater in Gaza. Nothing was refused.”

Google said it pulled the feature on Friday to implement “stronger guardrails” and offered reassurances about what was already out there from the tool, stating, “It’s important to note that generated images didn’t appear in the main Google Earth experience for others to see and were watermarked as AI generated.”

Zoom out: Google isn’t the only one that thought it would be fun to add an image generator to a popular platform, but couldn’t quite stick the landing. Last month, Meta pulled its AI-generation feature, Muse Image, after less than a week, following complaints that it automatically opted in all public Instagram accounts.—BC

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calendar

The week ahead

A promotional poster for ‘Ted Lasso’ Season 4. JB Lacroix/Getty Images

Spacing out: After soaring to historic heights in June, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has experienced a bit of a rapid unscheduled disassembly, temporarily dipping below its IPO price last week. The rocket/communications/AI company will get a chance to change the narrative tomorrow, when it reports earnings for the first time as a public company. Then, on Thursday, a lock-up period for the company’s stock will expire, potentially freeing up more than 900 million new shares for trading. And if you’re into metaphors, on Wednesday, one of SpaceX’s old rockets is expected to (unintentionally) crash into the moon at seven times the speed of sound.

July jobs report: The labor market had a lackluster June, adding only 57,000 jobs, but analysts expect Friday’s July report to be a little better, predicting an increase of 88,000 jobs. If the labor market is any hotter than that, it could tip the Federal Reserve into rate-hike territory at its next meeting (in September). For months, the Fed has opted to keep things steady amid persistent inflation.

Earnings season rolls on: Palantir and Snap get the earnings party going today, followed by Advanced Micro Devices, Paramount Skydance, Spotify, Caterpillar, and McDonald’s tomorrow. Sandisk, Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, Uber, Shopify, and Disney are up on Wednesday. Then, on Thursday, we’ll get results from a slew of energy companies, like ConocoPhillips, Petrobras, Constellation Energy, and Monster Beverage Corporation (it should count as an energy company).

But wait, there’s more:

Believe: Season 4 of Ted Lasso premieres on Apple TV this Wednesday.
The NFL action begins on Thursday, when the Arizona Cardinals and the Carolina Panthers play in the 2026 Pro Football Hall of Fame Game.

Brendan’s Got Good News

Gnarly and me: Surfing canines hang 10 for charity

Dogs surfing at the 10th annual World Dog Surfing Championships

Stella and Moxy compete. Godofredo A. Vasquez/Getty Images

Mondays are bad enough, so the Brew’s own Brendan Cosgrove scoured the internet for a positive news story to help you start the week off right.

Smelling wet dogs may have never been more fun than it was on Saturday at the 10th annual World Dog Surfing Championships in Northern California. Pooches of all ages and sizes participated in the competition, taking advantage of the opportunity to shred something without being lectured by a human.

Participating pups were judged based on length of ride, technique, confidence, wave size, and style. The aptly named Rippin’ Rosie, Iza Surf Dog, and Bradley “Shortboard” Cooper were among those that took home gold medals, or, from their perspective, gray medals. There were losers, too, but don’t worry, wet dogs are pretty good at shaking things off.

The event, which helped raise money for local animal charities, also had dogs available for adoption.—BC

News

What else is brewing

Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio said that his former son-in-law, US Rep. Max Miller, should not be serving in the House of Representatives and should “seek professional help” following Miller’s denial of domestic abuse allegations made by his former wife, Emily Moreno.
President Trump rebuked US Attorney Jeanine Pirro, after her office dropped criminal charges against former Olympian David Hearn and concluded that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was “the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented.”
A shooter killed three people and injured seven at an Idaho In-N-Out on Saturday before killing himself. An armed bystander was credited with distracting the gunman and preventing further loss of life.
Flight attendants for WestJet, Canada’s second-largest airline, walked off the job yesterday after failing to reach a contract agreement over the weekend.
Netflix was sued by a UK-based production company for allegedly losing the “master copy” of an unreleased Nicolas Cage movie.
Science YouTuber Hank Green apologized and said he is reducing his creative output as an attempt to scale back his AI usage, after fans questioned if ChatGPT wrote one of his recent video scripts because he said “A better way to say it, and I appreciate the pushback,” a common phrase used by the chatbot.

recs

How to stop browser fingerprinting, which tracks internet activity even if you disable cookies.
This is why Costco can sell gas at an average of 9 cents below the price per gallon of its biggest competitors.
Parents are bringing newborns to morning showings of The Odyssey to avoid FOMO.
A book by a Nobel prize-winning economist explores thorny financial issues, like organ sales.**

With rent prices rising, it could finally be time to make your dreams of homeownership a reality. Check out the pros and cons of buying vs. renting from Mortgage Matchup.*

^{*A message from our sponsor. **This is a product recommendation from our writers. When you buy through this link, Morning Brew may earn a commission.}

Play

Turnable: Your central letter for the week is M, surrounded by G, N, O, K, I, and D. Can you make 29 words from those? We recommend you think about gerunds. Play Turntable here.

Trivia goes to the dogs

Name one (or try for more, if you want) of the five most popular dog names in the US.

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Answer

Bella
Luna
Max
Coco
Daisy

(Source)

Word of the Day

Today’s Word of the Day is: gerunds, meaning “verbs that end in -ing and serve as a noun.” Thanks to Deb from Vermont and several other readers for making and submitting this suggestion (yep, those are two gerunds). Submit another Word of the Day here.

✢ A Note From Pendulum

*Based on preclinical studies. This product is not intended for weight loss.

Written by Holly Van Leuven , Brendan Cosgrove, and Neal Freyman

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