Google’s Brain Drain & Surgical Robotics Showdown

**John Coteau** (0:00)
This episode is brought to you by Charles Schwab. Timing the market, fighting inflation, managing risk? Financial decisions can be tricky. Investing isn't just math, it's psychology. Your neurons are playing favorites, and the market doesn't care. Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, can help.
Join host Mark Reapy as he breaks down practical strategies to help overcome the mental traps that may affect your investing decisions.
Listen at schwab.com/financialdecoder.

**Ann Berry** (0:31)
Papa John's, Celsius, Burger King, it's a food and beverage earnings showdown. We survey who's winning, who's losing and why.
Surgical Robotics, competition in this space is heating on up. We look at the players and break down the impact that GLP ones are having on the industry.
And Gmail, Google search, Google Maps, all the Gs. One of the most influential engineers behind these ground breaking apps is leaving alphabet and investors are sitting up and paying attention. We have the latest. For Thursday, August 6th, it's Brew Markets Daily and I'm Ann Berry.
More market details to come, but first, people. Yes, the real engines behind the companies we cover here on Brew Markets. Big name tech founders and media icons have a tendency to capture the headlines. Marky product innovations get mind share, and numbers, of course, drive the narrative. We talk stock moves after all. But it's the people who make decisions day in, day out that create those returns. Well, we've seen this crystallized in lots of focus around certain CEO moves. Take the example of Brian Nichols. When it was announced that he would be joining Starbucks, the coffee shop giant stock soared 24 percent, while Chipotle saw a drop of nearly 8 percent on news that he would be leaving the CEO job there. Such is the confidence the market had in his personal ability to drive value creation.
It's much less common though to see such stark stock price swings outside founder or CEO changes, which is why this week's volatility in Alphabet's trading caught our eye. As one of the most influential people in artificial intelligence you've probably never heard of, is leaving Google. Jeff Dean, chief scientist and one of its earliest engineers, is departing after 27 years in a move that's sending shockwaves through Silicon Valley and Alphabet's share price down. If you've used Google Search, Maps, Gmail or today's AI tools, chances are you've touched technology that Dean helped create. He was Google's 30th employee and co-designed many of the company's foundational systems, including MapReduce, Bigtable and TensorFlow, software that anchors much of modern AI.
While Dean is departing alongside several other top AI researchers to launch a new public benefit AI company called Discovery Loop, aiming to focus on accelerating progress in drug development and clean energy and the like. Google is backing the new venture, suggesting that it's not a bitter break up. But it's interesting because the set of departures alone would certainly rattle investors in Google's parent alphabet. These are big hitters in the organization, but likely not usually enough to drive the 6% drop we've seen in the past 48 hours. He was bound to retire from the company at some point, and companies this big are used to succession planning. The problem is that there's even more afoot. Demis Hassabis, the Nobel Prize winning co-founder of DeepMind and the architect behind Google's AI strategy, is stepping away from day-to-day management of DeepMind to become chair. He's becoming Alphabet's new chief scientist for a more big-picture role in building Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, at the tech giant. So here's why this matters. Hassabis is known for being a hard-charging doer, a grinder who gets stuff over the line, sometimes against the odds. Dean, the engineer who helped build Google's past, will do his doing elsewhere.
And when people like this, the hands-on doers, change roles or move companies, the impact can be as profound, if not more so, as a switch in CEO. A reminder that with the right people, the right products and performance can come, but without them, the market watches uneasily. Coming up in a moment, a spin through the headlines that are moving the markets today, including why investors are cheering on Versant's move beyond the TV screen. But first, this episode is brought to you by Charles Schwab. Timing the market, fighting inflation, balancing risk. No one says financial decisions are easy. In fact, it's the exact opposite. Financial decisions can be really tricky, and it's often your own thinking that can lead you astray. Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, can help.

**John Coteau** (4:47)
Join host Mark Reapy, head of the Schwab Center for Financial Research, as he offers modern strategies to help combat the, wait, what in your head? Mental traps like overconfidence, loss aversion and recency bias may cloud your investing decisions. When you understand those patterns, you can take steps to make better informed financial decisions.