Major American Cities Are Losing Kids & Ford Wants You to Customize Your Car

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to Sephora.

**Neal Freyman** (0:01)
I'm looking for a perfume that's not too perfumey.

**Toby Howell** (0:06)
I got you.

**Neal Freyman** (0:06)
Serum moisturizer or moisturizer syrup.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:10)
Let's get into layering. My concealer is making me look worse. Sounds like the wrong shade. Let's get you matched. There's only one store that really gets what you're going for. Get beauty from people who get beauty. Only at Sephora.
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Let's get you a basket.

**Neal Freyman** (0:31)
Good Morning Brew Daily show. I'm Neal Freyman.

**Toby Howell** (0:34)
And I'm Toby Howell.

**Neal Freyman** (0:35)
Today, American cities are becoming less Sesame Street, more Bourbon Street.

**Toby Howell** (0:39)
Then Ford wants more customers to pimp their rides. It's Tuesday, July 28th. Let's ride.

**Neal Freyman** (0:56)
I've seen enough. There is a definitive song of the summer, and it's Ella Langley's Choose In Texas. The country song just spent a record-setting 15th week at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, passing Mariah Carey's We Belong Together and I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston, Absolute Classics, as the longest-running number one by a single-song band. The country song has been a hit for the past two years, and is the longest-running number one by a solo woman outside of the holidays. Toby, it's a great track, catchy, twangy, pairs well with a porch beer, I dig it, and apparently tons of people do as well. Are you an Ella fella?

**Toby Howell** (1:27)
I am an Ella fella. She won me over eventually because the song is actually good. Most songs in the summers, they get a little annoying to me by the middle and the end of the summer. I'm thinking of Espresso a couple of years ago. But this song is just awesome and it's also so versatile. I was reading a Rolling Stones article about how do you declare a song in the summer? And it needs to be a couple of things. Easy to sing along to, obviously. It needs to be a little danceable. It needs to work equally from road trips, backyard parties, bars and summer playlists. So it's just LeBron James. It's versatile across five positions. It's still viral on TikTok too, which helps. So most songs of the summer don't even necessarily need to be the biggest hits. They just need to create that feeling of summer and that nostalgia associated with it. And I think Choosing Texas checks all of those boxes.
And now a word from our sponsor Anthropic, the team behind Claude.

**Neal Freyman** (2:21)
Toby, you like asking questions.

**Toby Howell** (2:23)
Do I?

**Neal Freyman** (2:23)
See, there you go. Always asking questions like ones about AI, like who decides the rules. And it's not just you, Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude, heard questions like that over and over in more than 120,000 interviews about people's hopes and fears around AI.

**Toby Howell** (2:39)
Anthropic's addressing these questions head on because their goal is to make sure AI actually works out well for people.

**Neal Freyman** (2:45)
They published the Advanced AI Framework, a proposal that would require the biggest AI developers, including Anthropic, to test their models, publish the results and submit to independent review.

**Toby Howell** (2:55)
Head to claude.ai/mbd to submit your question to Anthropic and explore how they answer questions. That's C-L-A-U-D-E dot AI slash MBD.

**Neal Freyman** (3:06)
If you walk around a major American city, you'll notice something lacking. Adequate public transportation, sure, but also kids. Where are the kids? The number of children under 18 living in major US cities is down big time over the last decade, according to a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal. The urban kids population has fallen 6% over the past 10 years compared to a 1% drop nationwide. The decline is especially pronounced for those who still don't know their ABCs. The number of children under five in major cities has plunged 15%.
The family falloff has gripped most cities rich or poor, north, south, east or west, according to the Journal of the 38 American cities with more than 500,000 residents. We'll sporkle that later. Two thirds suffered a decline of kids under 18
Why is this a problem? After all, adult time at the local pool is kind of nice. Well, first of all, it's a symptom of the broader tumble in birth rates, which has alarmed demographers after falling to a record low, but also it presents an existential threat to the economies of these cities, they've long relied on middle class families to pay taxes that get spent on public services or to patronize local businesses, creating jobs and incomes that fuel an upward spiral for all. If families are moving out to the burbs or city dwelling couples swear off having kids altogether, your economy and vibrancy will suffer.