Ozempic the Anti-Addiction Drug, Age of Streaming Mergers, & Bezos's Boat

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1:04digging into the latest viral phenomenon on social media, the saga of the blue couch. Neil, it's Tuesday, May 23rd. Let's ride.

1:16Neil, I totally forgot to tell this story on Monday, so I'm telling it now. I got recognized over the weekend. It's my first time getting recognized. I was having brunch with my girlfriend and another couple was sat right beside us. And this guy goes, are you Toby from Morning Brew? I listen to you guys every day and I was like, oh my gosh, I started blushing the best part though He was from jamaica. He was just in town visiting his girlfriend who lives in queens And I was like, holy crap. We're global, baby. Pretty cool. The uh, the west village brunch scene Brings out all of the morning brew daily Uh listener seriously, but the fact that he was sat right right across from me That's that's a small world moment right there.

1:57So shout out jay chin and his girlfriend for for listening I appreciate the ego boost over the weekend. And he's probably going to be happy because yesterday we announced that we are moving this podcast up to 7 a.m. release, which means we're going to tape at 6 a.m. So I'm like literally training for a marathon like this. I'm setting my alarm clock 10 minutes earlier each day. And right now it's already at like 515. Oh, my God. So we have a week. I think it's a week from tomorrow. So next Wednesday, we'll be coming to you live at 7 a.m. Eastern time, which would be great for the morning commute.

2:33So it's definitely a positive and we just got to get ready. There we go. I'm getting my sleep, getting my what do you take? Melatonin pills ready. All right. Let's get into the news. Today's top story centers on everyone's favorite miracle drug, Ozempic. So just some background. Ozempic was originally conceived as an anti-diabetic medicine. and then it was kind of adapted into this weight loss drug. But Ozempic is now being hailed as an anti-addiction drug. So The Atlantic published a piece recently where they talked to people who found that their desire to smoke, to drink, to do drugs, to bite their nails, or even to shop had disappeared after taking Ozempic.

3:16So the main point of the piece was basically that this drug that suppresses the desire to eat might actually suppress the desire for a whole lot more. Neil, did we just discover like this miracle drug that solves for the entire human condition? It's very serendipitous because the fact that this, you know, led to weight loss was also not known. And now everyone, this is all anecdotal things, but people who are taking semaglutide, which is the generic form of these medications, have been saying that they've stopped biting their nails. They have absolutely no desire to drink. That seems to be like a big one where they say that they feel repelled by the taste or the the consumption of alcohol and these people who were Drinking wine a few days a week or even more than that.

4:01We're just like I have absolutely no desire The the interesting part of it is that it all was positive Experiences they weren't like this, you know, my my life isn't bad now like I it it doesn't reduce pleasure It just reduces these very obsessive addictive behaviors and everyone's like this is crazy it is it it truly is a while that it just seems like a miracle drug if we want to get into the science just a little bit you did mention that it's still pretty untested so we just want to have a caveat that none of this has been carried out in clinical trials involving humans there's been some involving animals but it's mostly anecdotal but the kind of prevailing theory is that semaglutide which yeah as you mentioned is like the generic brand name for ozempic and wagovi kind of attacks and works on these reward centers of the brain and so we have these reward pathways that basically deliver dopamine after certain activities like if we want to go really back into what makes us human it's like when we do a good thing like eat food or like reproduce uh we get a little dopamine hit and so sometimes those dopamine pathways get a little corrupted by stuff like alcohol these bad habits, like even biting your nails can release dopamine in a certain way.

5:19And semaglutide is kind of hitting those dopamine receptors and they're not firing as intensely when patients were looking at alcohol, for instance, or something like that. And so it is like this wild thing that semaglutide is working on the brain pathways. They didn't know that. You mentioned they did test it out on animals and there were some really interesting findings that mice with this you know a semi-glutide cousin they they have less of a dopamine hit from alcohol rats sought out less cocaine i know when they were on this thing and then african vervet monkeys who which are predisposed to alcohol which i did not know that was the thing also drank less so this is definitely in the very early stages for human trials and scientists are saying even if it was even if it did curb addictive behaviors it might work on some people way more than others.

6:09So they're saying like, don't get so hype about this. But, and this thing has only been on the market since 2017. And usually these studies need decades to be carried out. So we're definitely in the early stages, but anecdotally, it's, it's quite interesting to see what people are saying after they've taken this. Yeah. And just to zoom out to a business angle real quick. So Pfizer is developing this oral, uh, like version of, of someone glutide basically that seems to be just as effective. That just went through a mid-stage trial and it showed that it was achieving results similar to Ozempic. And its stock kind of jumped on that news, had like a little 4 % boost, which just kind of goes to show that a lot of people are looking at Ozempic, Wagovi, Semaglutide, these weight loss drugs as kind of the big moneymaker over the next decade.

6:57Because it is such a cash cow. Like it is an expensive drug. It can run you over$1 ,000 a month without insurance. And the thing about these drugs is you have to stay on them. If you stop taking them, people have found that the weight often comes right back on. So you're looking at this drug that is ultra effective, may even be an anti-addictive drug that you need to stay on. Like drug companies are kind of like licking their chops right now and stockholders as well because this is the future basically. All right. I just realized you're wearing a hat backwards. Is that a first? It's a backwards hat pod day for me.

7:33Yes. Backwards, Havpod. All right, let's move on. It is just Max now. Beginning today, Warner Brothers Discovery is changing the name of its streaming service, HBO Max, to become just Max as streaming enters this new consolidated era. But first, what is Max and how is it different than HBO Max? Max is a mash. I've said Max so many times that word has completely lost all of its meaning. Max is a mashup of programming from HBO Max and Discovery following Warner Media's merger with Discovery last year So now here's what you get with Max You get the classic Sunday HBO shows Last of Us, Succession, Euphoria There's the DC Universe and Warner Brothers films including the Harry Potter Universe And then you have Discovery's reality and lifestyle content like Food Network, Discovery Channel, HDTV all of that kind of mashed into one max i guess that is an app name for the the level of content that is going to be on there yeah i mean this was kind of it rubbed some people the wrong way when it was first announced because they're like how can you get rid of the hbo brand like that was the premium brand but now when you mentioned all those things that are being stuffed into this one streaming program it actually makes a lot of sense to me because how it's not hbo anymore like it's all these things like you have dr pimple popper from tlc right next to euphoria from hbo so i we were both kind of bullish when the announcement happened and we think max is actually not the worst name right world for it because all these execs there like you guys don't get it hbo is popular amongst a very small loyal crowd but the vast majority of people don't watch these prestige shows on on hbo and they watch reality tv and they watch all this lifestyle hgtv stuff and you can't ignore them as we search for new areas of growth.

9:20Yeah, for sure. No, they have the normal person. I also really want to talk about the rebranding exercise. It changed from purple to this more neutral blue. And this actually, there's a ton of psychology around like color psychology and marketing professionals were weighing in on it and if it was a good idea or not. So blue is like widely considered to be this thing that appeals to the masses, which if you are the CEO of Warner Bros, you literally have said that you want to appeal to the masses, like we just talked about HBO. And so blue is consistently found to be the most popular color in the world.

9:57But then a lot of people are saying this is what happens when a committee decides on the new color for something, is that if you put 20 people in a room and ask them to come up with the color for something, they're always going to come up with blue because it's just such a neutral color. Morning Brew is blue. Morning Brew is blue. And it's interesting because blue used to be associated so heavily with Silicon Valley. Like Venmo's blue. Twitter's blue. Facebook's blue. And now all these streaming companies are also becoming blue. Disney Plus is blue. Amazon Prime is a little blue. Paramount Plus.

10:27Paramount Plus is blue. And now Max is blue. So it's kind of this blanding. They're not trying to rub anyone the wrong way. And they got rid of the purple, which was kind of polarizing to this nicer blue. Is Netflix going to become blue? Oh, I certainly hope not. Can you imagine? Yeah. No, we have Netflix and YouTube that are rocking the red right now. But all of this is to take on Netflix, really. Right. And all these streaming services are kind of consolidating. There was this great explosion of streaming services during the streaming wars era, which is now effectively over. You have Disney Plus is planning to fold Hulu into itself next year.

11:04And then in June, Paramount Plus is going to fold Showtime in with it. So you have this, there was this explosion and now there's a consolidation and fewer amount of streaming services offering a wider variety of content within them. It was all, everyone wanted a la carte television. We wanted what we wanted on demand kind of in the mid 2010s. And now we just have this huge mess. And so we're seeing, it's what happens in business. There's bundling, there's unbundling. We're back in the bundling stage. So I'm sure we'll get an unbundling stage in like 10 years time. Meanwhile, the writer's strike is still going on.

11:38And I just want to mention that over the weekend, Warner Brothers Discovery, David Zaslav gave a commencement speech at BU and he got heckled and booed. And all of the students were chanting. They turned their back. Some of them turned their back on him and chanted, pay your writers. I know. So that thing is still going on. No one's really talking about it because I guess we don't watch scripted shows anymore. And they've stockpiled a lot of scripts. Yeah. But we'll see if this thing extends to a couple months because the fall TV calendar will be impacted. The holiday TV calendar will be impacted.

12:08But I think it's just a sign of how much content there already is out there. And, you know, say there's no TV show, we can always just go on TikTok. Man, college students, though, brutal. The hardest to please. Let's move on to the environment. The Colorado River. We saved it for now. So yesterday, Arizona, Colorado and Nevada agreed to a 13 percent cut in their water use from the lower Colorado River Basin. This is a huge step forward in preserving water from this river. The West is experiencing its worst drought in twelve hundred years. I don't even know how they measured drought twelve hundred years ago, but I guess they did.

12:44And not even all the rain and snow there this winter will change this sort of longer term trend of drying up of the Colorado. The river's flows have dropped by one third in recent years compared to the historical average, threatening the prosperity of the Southwest. And I just want to emphasize how important the Colorado River is to the development of the Southwest as we know it. Phoenix, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, these booming cities would not exist without water supplies from the Colorado. Many of the agricultural products we buy at the supermarket would not exist because of the Colorado. So it is a critical source of drinking water and power to more than 40 million people down there.

13:19and it provides water to more than 5.5 million acres of farmland. Yeah, I mean, it is very clutch for the Southwest, to put it lightly. Just also that you mentioned briefly the hydroelectric portion of it, that people were scared that the river was going to not be able to power the dams that also provide power to the surrounding area. Lake Mead and Lake Powell. Right, and so it's just crazy. We got bailed out, by the way, by the crazy weather that happened over the winter because without this kind of momentary boost in some of the reserves, it was going to be a very dire situation. And I just think that also the politics around paying people to reduce their water consumption is interesting.

14:02If we didn't get this little boost from the winter months, it was going to be like this state versus state where you got California versus Arizona trying to figure out who has to ration more water supply from each other. So luckily, the timeline got pushed back a little bit because it got boosted up. But it could have been a really, really ugly scenario between negotiating politically. Right. And you mentioned paying states. So the Biden administration is shelling out about one point two billion in federal funds to Native American tribes there and various states and power supplies. So they can.

14:38So, yeah, they're saying, OK, take this money to reduce your water use. But this is going to have a big effect on still people. 13 % is a pretty sizable cut. The federal government was going to step in and cut up to a third if they didn't work something out. So that was kind of the cloud looming over this. But this is going to affect farmers. It's going to affect people. And I just hope it doesn't affect the golf courses in Scottsdale. Gosh. That's very important to me. That should be the first thing to be cut if we're being totally off. I know. You go to a desert and it's like nothing around.

15:06And then you go up to the first tee box and it's like this lush green landscape. And you're like, this does not seem right. It's against nature for sure, but they are fun to play. Okay, Neil, let's take a quick break before we jump into our next story. When you walk into a Burlington, you're walking into amazing prices and great gifts. That's main character energy. Because at Burlington, the holiday savings aren't the only things turning heads. Discover quality finds and perfect presents for everyone on your list, even those who are hard to shop for. toys and jewelry to new beauty brands and styles these gifts go seamlessly from our stores to under your tree seriously with these savings why shop anywhere else

15:52meet the computer you can talk to with copilot on windows working creating and collaborating is as easy as talking got writer's block share your screen with copilot vision to help spark inspiration and use Copilot Voice to have a conversation and brainstorm ideas. Or maybe you need some tech help. With Copilot Vision, Copilot sees what you see. Let Copilot talk you through step-by-step guidance so you can master new apps, games, and skills faster. Try now at windows.com slash copilot. All right, Neil, have you heard of this comedian who goes by Uncle Roger on TikTok? I think I saw one clip of his.

16:31And it's like the clip that we need to talk about. Dang, you are up to date on Uncle Roger. His real name is Nigel Ung, and he's this Malaysian guy who kind of rose to fame by putting on a kind of a Malaysian accent and judging people for cooking Asian food, usually pretty poorly. But he's in the news because his Weibo account, which is China's version of Twitter, has been banned from posting recently after he promoted this special where he kind of makes some jokes at China's expense. Now, I can't really do his comedy justice, so we're going to play a quick clip of the jokes that landed him in trouble.

17:07You're from Boston. Originally from Guangzhou. Guangzhou, China. China, okay. China, good country. Good country. Good country. Good country. Woo! We have to say that now, correct? Oh, they're phone listening. Oh, they're phone listening. i mean he kind of continues on through that set where it's tongue-in-cheek like yeah good country china and at the end he says don't make uncle roger disappear so he kind of knew that he was poking the bear a little bit but dang what comes to my mind is how tough it would be to like be a comedian in the chinese like influence space at all because the hammer gets dropped on you like immediately yeah i mean china the whole point of stand-up is to make fun of people in power and politicians like we go to stand-up basically all they do is make fun of dc or things that you know people in power and if you can't do that in china which you can't then it's really hard to find that narrow expanse you just have to be kind of like jerry seinfeld like what's the deal with airplanes yeah you know like these very banal uh uh things you talk about so it must be it's really hard to be a comedian in China.

18:18I thought what was interesting was that actually stand-up has become a lot more popular in China, the Western version, due to this television show that there was a stand-up battle that grew in popularity over the course of the pandemic when people were locked down and just needed something to watch. So Western-style stand-up has grown in China, but what you can say has very much shrunk during the presidency of Xi Jinping over the past 10 years. 10 years ago, it was kind of okay to criticize the government, and then over the past few years, like he is completely clamped down. For sure. I mean, there's another Chinese comedian who goes by the name of House, who was just hit with a$2 million fine for making a really minor joke about the Chinese army.

19:00And basically, Beijing opened this whole investigation into him saying he had seriously insulted the military, and that it caused bad social impact. That's like a big phrase in China, like your social capital. And so it is really, really tough. Because yeah, you're right in 2021 china enacted a law to ban any insult or slander on military personnel and when you're doing stand-up like the line between insulting and slandering and making a joke is really really thin what i also thought if going back to uncle roger he's actually had a run in with the chinese government before in 2021 he collaborated with this youtuber who had been a known critic of beijing on twitter just collaborated with them and he actually removed that clip and issued an apology on Weibo.

19:43So it was really weird because Uncle Roger has like basically cowed to Beijing in the past. And then here he is again, kind of poking the bear, getting kind of slapped on the wrist. His account is banned. So it's really interesting how he's like navigating this, the political environment as a comedian. But apparently there's a lot of Chinese standup happening in New York City that's selling out within 60 seconds. There's this monthly standup thing where it's all in Mandarin and these women young comics in New York City are using this as a platform to just kind of air their grievances and take out like their their concern with what's going on in China and the fact that they can't say anything that would criticize the government there and so these small immigrant communities have popped up in North America and not just in New York City where comedy is being used as an outlet to criticize the government because you can't do it within the border.

20:33I know. I mean, it does make you grateful or just kind of thankful to be in a country like America where you can make these standup routines. I know Dan Toomey is deep in the New York comedy scene, so I'm sure he's grateful because he probably has said some things at the expense of at least the big banks, we know. So, okay, let's move on. Toby's Trends is back. By popular demand, Neil, it's been a while since I've been out of town. So, Toby's Trends is where I break down an extremely online trend I came across over the last few days for you, Neil, and our listeners. Today, I want to tell you about the story of the Blue Couch.

21:12So the Blue Couch saga begins on TikTok, where this creator called Anna Joy posted a video where she stumbles across this supposedly$8 ,000 Roche, and I'm going to bungle this a little bit, Roche, buboys bubble sofa. It cannot be that. It looks like buboys. So she says that she had seen it sitting out on the curb and 24 hours later, her and her dad came by to pick it up and kind of store it in her warehouse. The video goes on to show her, her and her family vacuuming, scrubbing, you know, cleaning it up, making it look nice before it ends with her putting the couch in her apartment. It feels like a relatively innocuous video, right?

21:52Wrong. This thing racked up 53 million views and it was because some controversy erupted around it one bed bugs were this huge huge thing saying that like welcome you just brought in like a huge colony of bed bugs in your apartment and like the top like 20 comments on the video are all about bed bugs and then two no one everyone anyone who would throw away an eight thousand dollar couch they're saying like oh my god they must have a reason you don't just throw away an eight thousand dollar couch. And then people were also questioning whether it was an$8 ,000 couch at all. They're questioning the veracity of her claim that it was this, this famous designer couch.

22:29So that's like all the recipe for enough controversy to make a video go viral. So, but Neil, the question that really comes up is, would you pick up this couch? If you saw an$8 ,000 couch, would you bring it in from New York and put it in your apartment? First of all, I'm definitely not plugged into enough to know that it would be$8 ,000. I would not be able to tell whether it's a hundred dollar couch like really dumb couch or an eight thousand dollar couch i would absolutely not pick it up um because of the dirt factor first of all i wouldn't want to move it that yeah it's like a lot of work for sure and then the dirt factor like i was thinking about what i would pick up and it's anything without a semi-permeable membrane yeah so things could get stuck in that couch but if i saw a wooden chair or a desk or just like a more more sturdy item that's just kind of wood based that i I can kind of see what's going on there with the couch.

23:20There's a lot of things that could happen under the surface that I am just that I don't know about. And I don't want to be anywhere near me. So that's what I would pick up. Right. I would just literally walk. I would probably walk by this couch, be like, and then just keep moving. Right. And this was so funny because obviously culture starts on TikTok, but then bleeds into other platforms. So on Twitter, it really went viral, too. And these are some of the tweets I saw. I've seen that blue couch more than I've seen my dad this week. is the and then someone said is the blue is the couch blue and black or white and gold for you parking back to the old uh dress combo and then the the main mean was people were saying pretending that they were the previous owners of the couch and basically saying like um i i had to say goodbye to my eight thousand dollar couch because i found two million individual bed bugs in three different colonies of bacteria inside it and it stinks really bad so if you logged on to twitter the last few days or TikTok, you probably saw this blue couch.

24:14So if you're wondering where that meme came from, hopefully this is why this is why we don't need TV because we have the couch and we talk about and we have Toby's trends and we have Toby's trends. All right. For our final story, Toby, I'm not sure how you are planning to propose to your girlfriend, but it probably will not top what Jeff Bezos just did. Sorry, Celia. Bezos is now engaged to his girlfriend, the journalist Lauren Sanchez, after proposing on his new$500 million super yacht in Cannes, where they're at the film festival. Pretty sure if you proposed on a$500 million yacht, you're going to have to say yes.

24:48So this is going to be Bezos' next marriage after he divorced from McKenzie in 2019. McKenzie has remarried and divorced once since then while giving away gobs of money to charity. So yes, happy for Bezos and Sanchez, but we have to talk about this yacht, which is named Coru. This yacht is beautiful. I know we're not supposed to like the mega yachts of the super rich, but we were reading these articles about people were praising it because it's much more classic. It's a sailing yacht, which has just this mystique to it. It's not as powered by a gas engine. And people are also saying it kind of goes against the grain of the current mega yacht trends, which is just to make the most outrageous craft you can.

25:32People were calling some of the mega yachts lizard-like and otherworldly, whereas this one - Classy. Very classy. Early 20th century, J.P. Morgan style. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, it looks great. And we also have to talk about this thing at the bow, which is not a thing. It is a mermaid statue that looks curiously like Sanchez. I know. This actually disturbs me a little bit because he literally put a sculpture of his bride-to-be on the front of his yacht. But, I mean, again, if you got a$500 million yacht, You can put whatever you want on the back. And do you remember the controversy with this yacht?

26:07When it was being built in Rotterdam, to get it out to sea after it was built, they were going to have to dismantle this old bridge that people loved. And so the people in Rotterdam rose up and threatened to throw eggs at the yacht if they dismantled the bridge on its way out. I've loved that. Eventually, a compromise was worked out where they put the mast on the yacht outside of the bridge or at another location that they didn't have to dismantle this bridge for Bezos'$500 million yacht, which is probably not the best look. So they got that all worked out. But I remember that from a few years ago was this big controversy.

26:40I love that. Their plan was let's just egg the boat, which is such a juvenile thing to do, but probably would piss you off if you just bought a$500 million yacht. We should say something nice about Bezos because we've been kind of trashing him. And I don't mean to just like let's say something nice for the sake of it, but I was listening to this podcast with Kevin Kelly, who's the founding editor of Wired. And he's not somebody to be, you know, to praise a tech leader or anything. Like he's, you know, he's going to be very critical. He was asked like who, which person he knew that handled power the best.

27:12And he immediately said Jeff Bezos. That's interesting. Yeah. Because everything we've talked about, buying a$500 million guy is not necessarily someone you think. But Kelly, you can trust him to be like. Yeah, impartial. Yeah. And he's like, I've been very impressed with Bezos. And I think he like understands his responsibility being the third richest person in the world. So I was like, huh, I was not expecting Bizzou. So that was kind of curious to hear. He's also jacked now, we have to mention. He is totally jacked. That is our show. Please write us in with any questions or comments at Morning Brew Daily at morningbrew.com.

27:46Huge shout out to our entire crew who makes this possible. Bryce Beloff is our producer. Have a great trip to England, Bryce. Samantha Veles and Raymond Liu are the associate producers. Yuchenna Waogu is our technical director, and he's been known to bowl above 250 at times. Billy Menino is on audio. Hair and makeup took semaglutide and lost their desire to work. Hate that. Devin Emery is our chief content officer, and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.