‘One Battle After Another’ Dominates Oscars & David Protein Lies About Calories?

0:28Recently, I got an ad for the best lawn fertilizer. Just go to LinkedIn.com slash MBD. That's LinkedIn.com slash MBD. Terms and conditions apply. Good morning for your daily show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, the Oscars minted movie royalty with dark clouds gathering over Hollywood. Ben, is your favorite protein bar Regina Georgian you? It's Monday, March 16th. Let's ride.

0:57Good morning and welcome back to the week. Nasty winter weather isn't done with us yet. Today, what AccuWeather calls a triple threat March megastorm is affecting nearly 200 million people across the United States, dumping feet of snow in the upper Midwest and threatening mid-Atlantic cities like Baltimore and Washington, D.C. with high winds and possibly tornadoes. And that's before an unprecedented heat wave bakes the western United States later this week, which weather analyst Colin McCarthy said ranks among the most extraordinary heat waves the United States will ever see. Palm Springs is forecasted to hit 111 degrees this Friday, seven degrees warmer than any other March day Palm Springs has ever seen.

1:37Glad they finished up the tennis tournament yesterday. I know. Congrats to Sabalenka. I want to keep it close to home because that's where we live. According to New York Metro weather, there's actually way more than four seasons in New York. There's winter, and then there's first fake spring. Then it's cold and cloudy, which is where we are right now. Then there's second fake spring. Then there's winter in April, which is still coming down the pipeline. until you finally reach the great pollening and then rain clouds and mud before you get actual spring for one hour. All that to say, I'd rather experience that than what the West is going through right now.

2:10What do you mean Denver has had more 60 degree days this winter than Myrtle Beach has? Hope you like skiing on mud and rocks. And now a word from our sponsor, LinkedIn Ads. Toby, do you ever think you've seen a billion of something all at once? Yes, I eat a lot of rice. I think you're severely underestimating how much is in a billion. For example, LinkedIn ads has a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision makers. That's a lot. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company role, seniority skills, company revenue, so you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience.

2:45Plus, LinkedIn ads generates the highest B2B, that's business to business, ROAS of all online ad networks. Spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com slash MBD. That's LinkedIn.com slash MBD. Terms and conditions may apply. On an Oscars night that gave us one award after another, after another, it was fitting that one battle after another, a saga about an ex-revolutionary searching for his daughter, won Best Picture in the end. Paul Thomas Anderson also won Best Director for the film, giving one of the most renowned filmmakers of our time his first trophies.

3:22In the other major categories, Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor for Sinners, defeating Timothee Chalamet in Marty Supreme. Jesse Buckley won Best Actress for making us all sob in Hamnet. And absent, Sean Penn won Best Supporting Actor for his lockjawed role in One Battle. And Amy Madigan won Best Supporting Actress for Weapons. Overall, One Battle notched the most Oscar wins, with six coming out ahead of four for Sinners, which received a record 16 nominations going in. Feels like we say this every year, but cinema's biggest night arrived at a time when Hollywood is facing an existential crisis.

3:54A mega merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers is set to reduce the number of studios. Movie production is fleeing Los Angeles. Theater going is way down. And concerns that artificial intelligence will take creatives' jobs is pervasive. Host Conan O 'Brien even opened his monologue by saying, I am honored to be the last human host of the Academy Awards. Next year, it's gonna be a Waymo in a tux. He also alluded to the encroachment of tech into the movie world, dissing Amazon for not scoring any Oscar nominations. why isn't the website I ordered toilet paper from winning more Oscars? He wondered.

4:25Toby, it's a great question. It's a good question. Conan got the laugh, but it's also not like big production studios had an off night. Netflix left the ceremony with seven Oscars. That's the most in its history. Thanks for to a haul from Frankenstein. Also, you mentioned Warner Brothers Discovery. Warner Brothers had an incredible night. One batter after another was their film as was Sinners. And those wins sort of came at the expense of indie darlings, indie flicks like A24's Marty Supreme. Marty Supreme, nine nominations, zero wins, which I did see a tweet saying that's the most Marty Supreme thing that could have happened to Marty Supreme.

5:03Also, Blank, though, were The Secret Agent, which was this Brazilian film that a lot of people love. Bogonia was nominated for four but came away with nothing. So it wasn't like it was an indie fest. Fest. It wasn't a feel-good story like that. The big studios did very well. Right. Netflix won two for K-pop Demon Hunters, which won Best Animated Movie and Best Song for Golden. It became the only movie not made by Disney or Pixar to win two Oscars. Some other interesting tidbits. So casting became the first new competitive award since 2001, which honors casting directors. The woman who won for One Battle After Another, Cassandra Kulukundis.

5:46Fun fact, she also did the casting for a classic of our time, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. So that was the peak of her career, and she won the Oscar a few decades later. Leonardo DiCaprio didn't win for Best Actor, but fun fact, he was the main actor for One Battle After Another, giving Paul Thomas Anderson his first win. That is the third time he's been in movies where directors have won Best Picture. James Cameron, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson won their first directing Oscars for movies starring Leonardo DiCaprio. So maybe he's not always the leading man he won for The Revenant, but he is the kingmaker for these directors.

6:25I feel like Timothee Chalamet is on a little bit of a Leonardo DiCaprio arc as of now. One battle after another. Another fact that I thought was interesting is that it's a rare best picture winner that had a budget of over$100 million. That's even after adjusting for inflation. It's not the first one, but it typically is a threshold that not many films exceed. Oppenheimer actually was right on the borderline just before that. But then you have to go back to things like Gladiator, Lord of the Rings, Titanic. And then if you go all the way back to the 60s, you have Ben-Hur, My Fair Lady, and Lawrence of Arabia, which adjusted for inflation, were very expensive movies for their time.

7:03But for the most part, these are films with smaller budgets. But when you have a cast like One Battle After Another did, you got to pay up. We got to talk about the existential crisis facing Hollywood. This year, none of the 10 Best Picture nominees were primarily shot on a Hollywood soundstage or studio lot. Movie production is fleeing for lower tax and lower cost areas, not even within the United States like Atlanta, but overseas, like places like Ireland. Film L.A., which tracks permits in Los Angeles County, reported a 16 percent decline in shooting days in 2025 and a drop of nearly half from the peak in 2018.

7:41Then you look at how many people are actually going to the movie theater to see the movies that were honored last night. Well, it's not as many as it used to be. The North Americans are going to the movies at about half the rate that they used to a decade ago. So times are – seems like we've been saying this for the past few years that times are dire in Hollywood. But there are – there is like quite an amount of data to back it up. We saw the Oscars viewership tick up last year to 19.7 million viewers. I was up from 19.5 million the year before. Do you think we break the 20 million barrier this year?

8:12It seems like there was a lot of buzz around the Sinners, one battle after another kind of duopoly here. It feels like people were locked in. We could. I mean, it seems like it'll be right around that number. It's tough to say, but we'll get that data at least today or tomorrow. Let's end this Oscars recap on maybe a positive note because there's a lot of dire warnings about artificial intelligence taking over Hollywood and movie productions not being in Hollywood anywhere. But there are some green shoots. And for one of those, let's look at that movie Iron Lung, which was created by the YouTuber Mark Fishback.

8:45Remember that? He made this movie completely by himself. It cost$3 million. That took in$51 million at the box office. A lot of his YouTube fans came out, and it showed that people still crave that big picture experience. And meanwhile, young people still want to go to the movies. At least they say they do. According to a survey by the National Research Group, moviegoing is the most popular among people born in 2013 and after, which I haven't met somebody. Can't process that. Can't process that, but it is estimated that 59 % of children in that age group preferred to see a film on the big screen, which propelled huge movies like a Minecraft movie.

9:25And it seems like the movies that only make a billion dollars these days are those family-oriented movies. The movies are not dying. The youth are going to save them. All right, moving on. David Protein Bars are under fire for allegedly containing 83 % more calories and 400 % more fat than advertised, according to a class action lawsuit filed earlier this year. The bars, whose golden packaging and flavors like fudge brownie, red velvet, and blueberry pie, have quickly become a favorite of the fitness crowd, boasts outstanding macros, which include 28 grams of protein and just 150 calories. However, all of the above has also made them the subject of skepticism, and the lawsuit seemed to prove what many suspected.

10:04David was simply too good to be true. But founder Peter Rahal, whose previous company was RxBar, called the allegations simply wrong, maintaining that David is fully FDA compliant and hasn't been overstating its nutritional info. Rahal said the lawsuit rests on a flawed and misleading interpretation of how calories are determined. He's talking about the lab using a bomb calorimeter to come up with their caloric readings, which involves burning ingredients to see how much heat they release. No one is getting Regina George, Rahal responded on social media after people started to compare themselves to Regina George in that Mean Girls scene when she realizes she's been eating weight gain bars instead of diet bars.

10:43Rahal argues that the calorie count listed on David's bars is based on just the calories your body can absorb. For instance, fiber releases more energy when you burn it than your body can extract, as does the specific type of synthetic protein that David puts in its bars because there's non-digestible elements in both. Neil, this David story comes as America is fully in its protein-obsessed era. What if one of the hottest bars is a fraud? Yeah, it definitely is hot. This is the product for the moment. High protein, low calorie maybe. You can take it on the go. Endorsed by influencers and podcasters like Andrew Huberman.

11:19It is Maha in a bar. And I think it is telling about what particular pop culture reference you think of when you hear this story. Because I know a lot of people thought of Regina George and I did as well. But the first thing that went to my mind was the Seinfeld nonfat yogurt episode where they're touting all these nonfat yogurts. And in fact, these yogurts had a lot of fat and it made everyone gain some weight. But truly, yeah, a very interesting story about what is definitely one of the buzziest products on the market today. At the center of this debate is this new type of synthetic plant-based fat substitute that is called EPG.

11:55I won't actually go in and tell you what the EPG stands for. Asterified, propoxylated glycerol. Okay, so it was actually a little bit easier than I expected. Well done, Neil. But basically, EPG is designed so that fewer calories are absorbed into the body. It basically moves through the body without being digested, which is a little freaky because you might think that leads to some diarrhea issues, which has been reported if you consume excess amounts of EPG. But that is why you're seeing a difference between what the bomb calorimeter showed and what actually David claims is in the bars is because this substance does not get absorbed in the way that other substances would.

12:32So this is kind of like the thing that unlocked David's insane macros. When this first came out, I remember people saying, how can this possibly be true? You cannot fit that much protein in a bar with this little amount of fat, with this little amount of calories. But EPG is at the center of it. That is why you see this class action lawsuit. And that's why Rahal said, anytime you're on the forefront of innovation, there's confusion. We stand by our product fully. And a lot of other people are standing by their product. So Rahal sold RXBAR to Kellogg's for$600 million back in 2017 and then went back in the lab and then rolled out David in 2024.

13:07Just in the, I mean, it's been a year and a half. It's grown into a 725 million business. They're looking at new product lines. So there's, yes, there's been some backlash, but it's already a bigger company than RxBar by leaps and bounds. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with our winners of the weekend. Neil, I want to tell you about something I personally love very much. Is it me, your good friend and co-host? No, it's not my work friend and co-host. It's Spectrum Business, which keeps businesses of all sizes connected seamlessly with fast, reliable internet, advanced Wi-Fi, phone, TV, and mobile services, all backed by 100 % US-based support.

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15:04Yes, I'm the one who originally told you that And you can read all about it, too, at shopflavcity.com. That's shopflavcity.com. Welcome to Winners of the Weekend, the segment where Toby and I picked two things that took home more hardware than Chalamet. I won the pre-show karaoke contest, so I get to go first. And my winner is Dick's Sporting Goods because it's been the main beneficiary of America's youth sports explosion. This story actually begins a few weeks back when Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT were battling for the top spot on the App Store As everyone watched the heavyweight AI drama play out, you couldn't help but notice that another app, almost comically out of place, was right up there with them.

15:44Dix. Apparently, a viral post on X touted the Dix app as a place where you could log fitness goals and receive store credit when you achieve them. This success is not a coincidence. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Dix has positioned itself at the center of a youth sports industry that's absolutely booming. American families spend$40 billion every year on their kids' athletic journeys, and much of that spending takes place inside the iconic sports retailer. Over the last decade, Dick's revenue has just about doubled, and last year it raked in$14.1 billion in sales, a new record. And in addition to its busy brick-and-mortar locations, Dick's has built a suite of increasingly popular digital products that are boosting its bottom line.

16:21Toby, Dick's is in the right place at the right time. Yeah, this app is actually a bigger story than even that one screenshot showed it to be because this is data science at its finest. What they found basically is that when it started expanding to new markets, they were pulling stuff off shelves earlier than was expected. Like, for instance, when they went into the South in the 1990s, a lot of storm managers are like, hey, we're putting away our baseball stock in January. People still buy stuff in January when you live in Florida, and a lot of that data comes from app and how people purchase and spend there.

16:57So basically, they have turned themselves into a much more optimized company, riding a wave of massive spending right now in youth sports. I also thought an interesting tidbit that helped power Dix's rise is that MLB changed its rulebook in 2019, and they loosened color restrictions on player cleats. all of a sudden the amount of skews exploded in the baseball world kids wanted the hot new cleats they wanted the hot new bats and it just powered dicks to a massive massive rise over the last decade or so just owing back to the slight rule book change when they saw the when kids see like pros wearing colorful things they want them as well yeah baseball does seem to be behind the rise of dicks it was already the most expensive of america's most played sports according to the average family's annual spending on baseball increased nearly 70 percent between 2019 which is when that rule change happened and 2024 maybe the one thing that dicks is not doing so well or has is struggling with is it bought footlocker last year for 2.5 billion dollars footlocker is not doing well it is not profitable it has a lot of underperforming stores so the main thing that dicks is doing right now and it reported earnings last week and it was mostly optimistic.

18:11They crushed on both the top and bottom lines, but they predicted maybe some lower profit guidance than investors wanted. And that's because they have to figure out what to do with Foot Locker and that$2.5 billion they spent with them and turn it into a deal that works for them. I'm pretty bullish on Dick's House of Sport megastore bet. Basically, as a lot of retailers are maybe trying to scale back or put a lot of energy into DTC, Dix is saying like, hey, we're going to make our stores places that you want to hang out in. That includes, you know, putting batting cages inside the store, a climbing wall, golf simulators, fields to run around in cleats before you actually buy them.

18:51So these are very big places. They talk a lot about dwell time, which is how much you spend wandering around, you know, the aisles of Dix's sporting goods. I think it's a great idea because I was doing that at Dix when they were just a normal store. I wouldn't know. I remember shooting in the basketball hoops. They don't have actual rims available. Like they would, I would just get the ball stuck. But I think it's a great bet. It's something that like Bass Pro Shop does very well, where you just make these places meccas of their necks of the woods, like Bass Pro Shop, obviously for, you know, fishing outdoor.

19:22Dick's is just a wonderful place to hang out in. I remember, you know, the golf clubs. There's just so many sections. All right, moving on. My winner of the weekend is this Australian tech entrepreneur who used AI to design a custom mRNA cancer vaccine to save his rescue dog's life. Paul Cunningham is an electrical and computer engineer who did what any dog dad would do after finding out his rescue. Rosie was diagnosed with cancer in 2024. He set to work designing a bespoke treatment for the tennis ball-sized tumor affecting her. Despite having zero background in biology, Cunningham used ChatGPT to brainstorm possible cures for Rosie, with the bot pointing him towards a center for genomics that Cunningham paid$3 ,000 to sequence her DNA.

20:05He then took that data and fed it into an AI to develop a plan, which included using AlphaFold, Google's AI protein structure program, to figure out which proteins were mutated and match them to existing drugs. But after being turned down by a pharma company whose drug could have helped Rosie, he pivoted to mRNA vaccines, the same type of vaccine used during the pandemic, and used AI again, this time Grok, to develop a bespoke shot for Rosie that an RNA institute helped create for him. And the shot worked for the most part. After sifting through pages and pages of red tape and getting an ethics approval to administer the shot, he first injected Rosie in December of last year.

20:43And as of March of this year, Rosie is alive and well. And though the cancer hasn't fully disappeared, the tennis ball-sized tumor has shrunk roughly in half. Neil, call it what you want. Citizen science. A miracle. My takeaway is Paul Cunningham really loves his dog. It is a heartwarming story because of his determination and how he helped his dog. But talk about one battle after another. This devolved into a raging debate about what this whole thing means, mostly pitting tech guys against biologists. On one side, the tech people were like, wow, look at what AI can do and how it's democratizing science and medical discovery.

21:21And, you know, we can take what he did and apply it to, yes, other dogs, but also to humans and the potential for mRNA vaccines. and overall like this is just a huge win for ai and then you had the biologist coming back and saying well actually this wasn't like the most crazy thing in the world we know exactly how to do this and that everybody is kind of blowing this up a little more than they should yeah let's dive into some of those skeptics including hank green who has been diagnosed with cancer he said wrote out a pretty long post saying like there are six things you got to know about cancer one of them is that cancers are different from each other.

21:56Specifically, human cancers are different than dog cancers. He said dog cancers are often easier to treat because they are bred into specific breeds. And obviously humans are a little different from dogs. He also says that you can't necessarily compare outcomes because each treatment is different. It's not world-changing on its own to see one shot perform well for one subject. What becomes life-changing is if you can prove that across multiple controlled trials, across multiple types of people. So it was basically just saying, hold your horses a little bit here. This doesn't mean that the entire medical community now should just rely on designing bespoke spots for individual, just bespoke shots for individual humans.

22:39It's a long jump from one shot for one dog that worked kind of on the tumor, the tumor is still there, to saying that this is going to shake the entire foundations of how shots are designed. Yeah, I thought this was insightful from Ash Joe Galakar, who's a chemist working in AI and biotech. right in the middle of this story. He said, the real novelty here is not the biology, but the combination of three things, a non-specialist orchestrating a complex biomedical pipeline, AI acting as a navigational layer across multiple technical domains, and the resulting decentralization of capabilities that were once confined to institutional research environments.

23:14And I would say there is one thing that both sides, both camps of the debate did agree on is that there was too much red tape and regulation when it came to medical discovery. In his explanation of how he went about developing this treatment for his dog, Paul Cunningham said, I had to do everything by the book because you can't just willy nilly create a vaccine in Australia. The red tape was actually harder than the vaccine creation. Took him three months, putting two hours aside every night to create a hundred page long document. And he was only helped out by an American researcher who's who saw it on some website in Australia and intervened on his behalf.

23:50So I think if there was one thing that everyone came together and said was there's too much regulation and our regulatory bodies are not equipped to handle what AI is about to do to our medicine. The fact that he had no biology background whatsoever, though, is what makes this just such a buzzy story is that he really went in blind. But he did say every time I showed up and I talked to a new scientist, I did my homework. That homework was, you know, helped by Chachapiti, helped by Grok, helped by all these AI platforms. That's why I think this is such a good story is because he went from zero to literally saving his dog's life with no experience whatsoever.

24:24Right. And even even with all the cats, yeah, caveats. It is inspiring just to see how how dogged he was to save his dog. OK, it's Monday. So here's what you need to know to stay ahead in the week ahead. The Federal Reserve meets with dark clouds gathering over the economy as the war in Iran causes energy prices to surge. The central bank is a lock to keep interest rates steady this time around, but all eyes are on its projections for a future in which the war threatens to drive up global inflation and slow down growth. This will also be Jerome Powell's second to last Fed meeting as chair before giving up the role in May.

24:55Oh, Jay Powell, should we throw him a party when he finally leaves? But also a classic final puzzle to unravel for him in the Fed with the Iran war. Speaking of, oil is currently trading at$106 a barrel, up over 43 % this month. The average price for a gallon of gas in the U.S. is now$3.70. That is up nearly 30 % from a month ago. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump spent the weekend working on building a coalition of countries to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz, though a deal isn't in place. That's probably the biggest development that happened over the weekend. War is certainly the focus of central bankers this week.