Hollywood’s Elite Protest Paramount-WBD Merger & Zuck Makes AI Clone of Himself?

0:01Neal Freyman:Marketers, tell us if this sounds familiar. You invest in something that seems incredible, like millions of views, but then don't see any revenue. Instead, invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a$250 credit. Just go to linkedin.com slash mbd. That's linkedin.com slash mbd terms and conditions apply good morning bro daily show i'm neil freiman and i'm toby howell today hollywood stars warn of a job's apocalypse in an anti-paramount merger plea then zuck is making an ai clone of himself it's tuesday april 14th let's ride so i was at the gym the other day and a listener came up to me and told me, hey, are you Neil?

0:54I love the show, which was very cool. But it was the next thing he said that will probably stick in my mind forever. You have my vote for the Webbys. Morning Brew Daily has been nominated for a Webby Award for the best business podcast and winning would be pretty fantastic for MBD's visibility and highlight the amazing community of listeners this show has. It's all decided by a fan vote. So we'd be so grateful if you took one minute out of your day to show your support. That happened to me too, Neil.

1:21Neal Freyman:A guy came up to me at the gym and said, you can bench 315? I was like, yes, for reps. But yes, last time we did a Webby shout-out, you all helped us eat into a 20 percentage point deficit. We were losing to Pivot Pod, which is hosted by Kara Swisher, Scott Galloway. This time we finished the deal. This is an all-hands-on-deck situation. If you listen to MBD for years now, take out your phone, head to the link in the show description, and vote. If this is your first episode, phone out and vote. If this is the 17th episode you've listened to, you don't have to vote, actually. But only if you're 17 episodes in exactly.

1:56Neal Freyman:Everyone else, you guys have to vote. And the deadline for voting is April 16th, which is Thursday. So make sure you do it today. This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, host Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insight into what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Liz Ann as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting, and what sectors are on the move right now?

2:32Neal Freyman:You can download the latest episode of On Investing and subscribe so you never miss an episode at schwab.com slash oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts. The people who normally walk the red carpet are raising red flags around Paramount's acquisition of Warner Brothers. More than 1 ,000 Hollywood stars, including Ben Stiller, Kristen Stewart, Bryan Cranston, Glenn Close, and J.J. Abrams, published a letter warning that the proposed$110 billion mega merger would raise prices for consumers and cost Los Angeles' already shaky film and TV industry to enter a free fall. The letter claims this transaction would further consolidate an already concentrated media landscape, reducing competition at a moment when our industries and the audiences we serve can least afford it.

3:15The result will be fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world. Back in February, Paramount's Skydance prevailed in a grueling battle against Netflix to take over Warner Brothers in a deal that will combine two storied Hollywood giants. If it closes, the unified company will control two movie studios, two major news networks, CNN and CBS, and two of the biggest streaming services, HBO Max and Paramount Plus. The actors and directors who pen the letter see only danger in consolidation, but ultimately it's not up to them.

3:48Antitrust regulators in the US, UK and elsewhere are scrutinizing the deal and are expected to approve it.

3:53Neal Freyman:The actors have a point. Hollywood studios are making fewer movies, they're making fewer TV shows than they did even a few years ago. There's been a 30 % drop in employment too since 2022 for actors, carpenters, costumers all the professionals that make up the movie industry that is according to labor department data and most big budget movies if they even are happening are no longer happening in hollywood anymore a lot of them are shooting overseas they want to take advantage of tax credits so when you talk about the industry anxiety right now yes they're centering it on this particular merger between uh paramount and warner brothers but just in general the movie industry and Hollywood in general is not in a very stable place right now.

4:37And these stars are probably going to be fine because they make millions of dollars for each movies. But they say in their letter that they're looking out actually for the little guy, just the regular average blue collar workers who work on these sets and who work in the industry. I thought Damon Lindelof had an interesting comment. He's the creator of Watchmen and other shows. He said that I actually know David Ellison, who's the CEO of Paramount. It might be the new CEO of Paramount Warner Brothers and said he's, yeah, he's a great guy. bright, ambitious, and passionate executive who loved movies and trusted the people he made them with.

5:07So I think David Ellison has been maybe a boogeyman a little bit in this industry as someone who's going to come in and try to cut jobs. But Damon Lindelof said, look, I think David Ellison loves movies. Just I'm looking out for the quote, thousands, thousands of grips and gaffers, drivers and decorators. And so it's those blue collar workers that these stars are using their platform to look out for.

5:27Neal Freyman:And Ellison has said, listen, we hear you creative community. We want to maintain the theatrical releases that Warner Brothers has done in the past. They've pledged to release at least 30 movies in theaters annually, but that is kind of going against the grain of where the industry is moving right now. Netflix used to crank out tons of movies, tons of Netflix originals. And in Q1 of 2026, they released 23 original movies. It sounds like a lot of movies. I mean, 23 and one quarter, Ellison is pledging 30 over the entirety of the year, but that's actually Netflix's lowest output since 2017. They've been pulling back on films.

6:04Neal Freyman:This feeds into their strategy of making better content, not more content. But if you are an actor or you're a grip or you're anyone who works in the industry and you see Netflix say, hey, we want to make less movies, of course, you're a little bit anxious. Well, this deal, as I said, is expected to close later this year. It's undergoing reviews in the UK, the United States, but they're not expected to sort of raise any antitrust concerns as actors and some politicians have worried about. OK, the American consumer is getting pinched and squeezed like a cute baby being introduced to the friend group.

6:37New fees, surcharges and add-on costs are increasingly getting tacked on to the end of bills as companies dip into customers' wallets to pay for their own growing expenses. Some of these add-ons are new as a result of the war in Iran. Think fuel surcharges for flights. But fee proliferation has been going on for months, even years, the Wall Street Journal reports. Per a 2025 J.D. Power survey, 34 % of small businesses were adding credit card surcharges, and one-fifth of restaurants are currently adding surcharges or fees to checks, up from 16 % four years ago, according to the National Restaurant Association.

7:11A dollar here, two dollars there may not break the bank, but it sure is annoying, which is exactly how researchers have described this nickel and diming. A report released earlier this year explored the so-called annoyance economy, the extra fees, the mountains of paperwork, the difficult cancellation processes Americans deal with on a daily basis, and concluded that the annoyance economy costs up to$165 billion a year in time and wasted money for American families. And it's taking a serious toll. On Friday, the University of Michigan's consumer sentiment reading fell to its lowest level ever, worse than in the 2008 recession or the pandemic.

7:46Neal Freyman:What's even worse is that as we're being nickel and dimed, the customer service experience has gotten ever worse. Customer service phone time has gone up 60 % over the last 20 years because companies are basically betting on the fact that you are going to lose steam. You're going to lose enthusiasm for whatever issue you brought in and just give up. And that actually ends up driving revenue for those companies. Because if you go into a call with the intention of canceling a service and you end up giving up, that's still revenue going into the pockets of the service that you were trying to cancel.

8:18Neal Freyman:A consumer raid survey found that 74 % of customers reported a problem last year. That's up double the rate that was recorded in 1976. So people are not happy with their products or services they're receiving. And yet when they go to customer service lines, they don't get good service there either. And then a separate study found that companies' revenue does tick up 14 % to 200 % simply by making it harder to cancel subscriptions to their product. I'm thinking back to Cash App, which was fine last year for providing literally a fake customer service line that just directed customers to a prerecorded message.

8:52Neal Freyman:This is how the companies are treating you right now, and that's why everyone feels so annoyed. And one of the reasons maybe why we're so beaten down, why we acquiesce to this is that what companies are doing is they're shifting the blame with these surcharges. So Delta, United, all these airlines are raising fees and bag fees. And they're saying, look, this is out of our control. We didn't start the war in Iran. We didn't block the Strait of Hormuz. This is just an external variable that was foisted upon us. And now we have to, you know, our expenses are growing. Jet fuel is our second largest expense.

9:21So we have to raise money to cover our expenses. We need to make a profit. And so they're shifting the blame. There are other reasons for this, too. Maybe last year there was an e-commerce retailer that added a tariff fee. And so they're just externalizing the blame. And maybe that's one reason that consumers are saying, you know, like, I get it from their perspective. I don't like it, but I'm still going to pay up.

9:44Neal Freyman:By the way, as midterm elections approach, if you want the one issue in politics today that unifies America, it is the annoyance economy. It's universally disliked. A YouGov poll from 2024 found that 87 percent of respondents strongly support restrictions on telemarketers use of robo calling. Another poll found that two thirds of likely voters said they wanted Congress to make addressing these issues a priority. So it really is. I mean, we're talking 87 percent, two thirds of voters like this is a very good. unified issue. I want to know the minority in those folks who are just like, you know what, no problem.

10:19Neal Freyman:Some people just want to chat with a telemarketer from time to time. All right, moving on. In 1996, Dolly the Sheep became the first animal to be successfully cloned. In 2026, Mark Zuckerberg has become the first CEO to be successfully cloned. Now, there's not going to be two Zucks walking around doing Murphs and showing up to UFC fights, but Meta is building a photorealistic AI-powered virtual version of its CEO that employees will be able to interact with according to the Financial Times. The model has been trained on his voice and look and also his mannerisms, tone, and recent thinking on company strategy.

10:54Neal Freyman:The idea is for the AI doppelganger to be where Zuck isn't, answering questions from employees and laying the foundation for what could be other AI-powered characters that are reportedly in development. Automating a CEO has become a very trendy industry conversation lately. Sam Altman told Axios last week that the CEO job is, quote, one of the more automatable jobs out there. His thinking is that since AI can have 10x the context that any one executive can carry, a CEO bot can be very helpful in bringing everyone in an organization up to speed on what the head honcho is thinking. Neil, all of us have at one time or another been in a meeting and thought, dang, I wish I could clone myself so I wouldn't have to sit here.

11:35Neal Freyman:Zuck actually is going out and doing it. Genius move by Zuck. I mean, think down the line when he has to make a difficult announcement. Maybe you have to tell everyone that they need to come back to the office. Maybe you do mass laughs. Who's going to do that? The real Zuckerberg or the AI avatar Zuckerberg? Obviously, you're going to have your AI avatar do it. But I am interested in how this might look like in practice. So you're a meta employee going to work, you open up your laptop, and there's just a face of Mark Zuckerberg face there, like clippy that you can ask questions to? I mean, maybe that's not so ridiculous, but Zuckerberg himself, he has a history of doing this.

12:09He loves digitally cloning himself. Go back to 2022 when they introduced the metaverse. The first thing that they showed was a very cartoonish looking Mark Zuckerberg in Horizon Worlds, which was their metaverse space. So he seems very okay with just someone taking his likeness and just putting it anywhere.

12:25Neal Freyman:The idea is to make employees feel more connected to him because if you work at Meta, there's tens of thousands of employees there. You're not getting a lot of face time with Mark Zuckerberg. You probably go your entire career without ever talking to him. So by having the Mark Zuckerberg clippy version there, you can ask him questions. You can bounce ideas off of him. And just to be clear too, this is separate from another CEO project that Zuck is cooking up. He is designing a CEO agent that helps him do his job as a CEO where maybe he wants to retrieve information quickly about the organization meta.

13:00Neal Freyman:Instead of having to go through multiple lieutenants, he can just prompt his CEO bot. So clearly he's trying to walk the walk here as he's telling his organization to adopt AI. He's cloning himself and using a AI agent to help him do his job as CEO. He might be the guinea pig also for larger ambitions meta might have in creating AI avatars of influencers and creators, which are so integral to their social media ecosystem. I would say Meta, more than any other AI company, is really interested in photorealistic embodiments of AI characters in a way that certainly like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft are not, or Google.

13:39So maybe they're using Zuckerberg as a test case to see whether people like interacting with AI photorealistic versions of real people because then they can take it to influencers and creators on Instagram. And if that drives better engagement, then that could be great business for them down the line.

13:55Neal Freyman:Everyone's just waiting to see if this version of Zuck has legs because the metaverse version did not. So as long as it got legs to stand on, I think it's an improvement. I thought you were going to say either less or more robotic than the original version. Yeah, that too. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's Trend right after this. I hear we're talking about acting today. No, we're talking about TaxAct. Then why did I bring a skull? I have no idea. But the reason we're talking about TaxAct is they help small business owners get their taxes done. They make it easy by providing the only online DIY filing software for small businesses.

14:34Neal Freyman:With TaxAct, you can file your business taxes any way you'd like, whether that's by yourself or an expert can prepare and file for you. Just head to TaxAct.com slash business dash returns to get started. That's taxact.com slash business dash returns. Neil, it feels like everyone's trying to get more protein these days. Yeah, I've seen protein popcorn, protein cookies, and even a protein martini recently. I think I'll stick to Flav City's all-in-one protein smoothies. They've got delicious flavors like mint chocolate, banana bread, brownie batter, and more that are as good as any dessert. No martini flavor yet.

15:12They're made with real whole food ingredients, 25 grams of protein, 10 grams of collagen and functional mushrooms.

15:18Neal Freyman:Head to shopflavcity.com to get your protein fix. That's shopflavcity.com.

15:27Neal Freyman:Marketing your brand these days probably feels harder than finding a good avocado at the grocery store at 5 p.m. Lucky for you, Instacart built a one-stop shop for grocery retail media across more than 2 ,200 retail banners to help you reach all sorts of high-intent consumers. Instacart's ad platform covers the entire shopping journey, and it's all backed by real-time optimization and closed-loop reporting. Keep your brand top of mind and top of the grocery list with Instacart. Hit the checkout with Instacart at ads.instacart.com. That's ads.instacart.com. Do you ever find yourself craving some caffeine but don't want to commit to a full coffee?

16:04Neal Freyman:Matcha tastes too much like grass. Water is boring too early for a beer. perhaps a refresher is the beverage that you're looking for. And it's the rise of the refresher category that I want to talk about on today's edition of Toby's Trends. A quick refresher on what a refresher is. It's sort of whatever you want it to be. There are two essential components, according to Alyssa Butecofer, who leads marketing at McDonald's. One, they are cold. And two, they come in vibrant colors. They are very Instagrammable. The base of a refresher can be anything from a lemonade to a green tea. Sometimes they have carbonation in them.

16:39Neal Freyman:Other times, there's caffeine involved. It's almost easier to say what a refresher is not, says Claire Conahan, a trendologist at Data Central. It is not a coffee or a tea. But restaurants are suddenly very interested in this not easy to define drink. McDonald's is diving into the crowded category this May with the launch of unnaturally bright fruit-flavored drinks following a successful pilot program across 500 stores. Taco Bell, Dunkin' and Sonic have all been in the refresher game for a while now. Starbucks credits itself with inventing the category all the way back in 2012 and it's since become a$2 billion a year business for them.

17:16Neal Freyman:Neil, can't say I've ordered a refresher before, but clearly lots of other people have. Yeah, McDonald's coming into the space is a sign that refreshers have arrived on the big stage. McDonald's has actually been testing overhaul of its beverage program for years now and it's finally launching this this summer. What do you think of these? Red Bull Dragonberry Energizer, Dirty Dr. Pepper and Mango Pineapple Refresher is just some of the new drinks that McDonald's is releasing this summer. And you know what? We're all gonna be seeing a lot of refresher content because McDonald's maybe has the biggest marketing engine of any company in the world, maybe outside of Coca-Cola.

17:55So when they turn that on, we're all gonna be seeing a lot of refreshers because they've spent a lot of time in the lab figuring out their cold beverage situation, they think this is the way to move forward.

18:04Neal Freyman:Yeah, I mean, they want to get younger customers in, younger customers, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, love these fancy drinks. There's also more money to be made in drinks as well. There's more margin in, you know, putting a little bit of Red Bull and berries in a cup rather than serving a burger. So definitely they have their eyes set on that. Also, just iced beverages in general are the de facto way that people consume liquids at this point. Remember, iced coffee used to be a seasonal thing. It used to be summer rolled around. You start drinking iced coffee. When winter comes back, it's back to hot. But ice beverages surpassed hot beverage sales at Dunkin' two years ago, and no one's looked back since.

18:44Neal Freyman:So right now, just some crunchy ice in a cup. That is what young people want to drink. I mean, this is maybe a Tobias trend that has had the biggest business impact, because it's not just a trend, but if you look at what these companies are saying, it's like this is the biggest growth driver that we've had as a business in the last decade. I mean, Inspire Brands, which owns Duncan and Sonic, said Refreshers have been the single largest contributor to our incremental sales growth over the past couple of years. It's growing by double digits. And then Dutch Bros, shout out Dutch Bros, their energy drinks have helped it become the third biggest U.S.

19:17coffee chain. So, I mean, the Refreshers is a huge business. I still have never seen anyone ordered one, but I guess Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and others absolutely love them.

19:27Neal Freyman:Okay, so Starbucks says that they invented refreshers in 2012. I think I invented refreshers because you know what I was doing when I walk into a soda fountain? It's lemonade, Sprite, and Powerade in there. That feels a little refreshery. It does feel very refreshery, Toby. Okay, let's bring to the finish with some final headlines. Pope Leo arrived in Africa for an 11-day tour of the continent, a trip that is being overshadowed by an unprecedented spat with the President of the United States. Over the weekend, Trump unleashed a tirade against Leo, calling the first American Pope weak on crime, weak on nuclear weapons, and catering to the radical left in a post that was widely criticized by people across the political spectrum.

20:03The subtext is that Pope Leo has been a vocal critic of the war in Iran, which was launched by Trump at the end of February. In response, Leo said, quote, I'm not afraid of the Trump administration. I speak of the gospel and I will continue to speak loudly against war. I have no intention of entering into a debate with him.