Saudi Arabia Takes Over EA & Scientists Create The First Allergy-Proof Dog

0:01Whether you're hitting the road this summer or just parking for some peace of mind, AT &T connected car turns your vehicle into a Wi-Fi hotspot with fast, reliable, and secure internet access. You can connect multiple devices to stream, browse, play games, or get a little work done all inside or in proximity outside of your vehicle. To learn more, head to att.com slash morningbrew. That's att.com slash morningbrew. Requires eligible vehicle service and coverage not available everywhere. Good morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, would you bring your parent to a job interview?

0:40Then Saudi Arabia is officially the new owner of EA. It's Thursday, August 6th. Let's ride.

0:54We've all watched football games where your team's coach draws up a stinker of a play and you think to yourself, gosh, I could do better than that. Well, you might just have your shot. In a viral promotion, the Akron Zips college football team announced it'll randomly select one fan, any season ticket holder, to call the team's first drive in its season opener on September 12th. It's been a massive success. The initial post drew more than 16 million views in the first 24 hours, which has translated to a ticket sales bonanza. Akron sold out its sweet inventory for the first time in history and already beat its ticket sales targets weeks before the season begins.

1:34Toby, genius idea. I would absolutely go three and out. This can only go one of two ways. One is the three and out way. Awful play calls and we forget all about this. Or two, the person leads a touchdown drive, gets offered a full-time coaching job, and we get the offensive coordinator version of Rudy. I hope we get the second one. And it got me thinking, too, should we run a similar promo, Neil? If you buy tickets to our next event, then you'll be entered for a chance to win the opportunity to say, let's ride. I actually don't want that because I feel like there's better let's rides out there.

2:08Not a bad idea for everyone other than the 4 a.m. wake up. Saudi Arabia has been trying to buy up global influence via sports for decades now. Now it's moving on to sports in video games. A consortium led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund completed its takeover of the video game developer Electronic Arts yesterday, valuing the company at$55 billion for what is officially the largest leveraged buyout in history. The investment firm led by Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, also participated in the deal. The maker of iconic games like Madden, The Sims, Battlefield, and the franchise formerly known as FIFA now embarks on life as a private company, a life that comes along with a lot of debt.

2:51The deal is being financed with a$20 billion loan from JP Morgan, which puts the leveraged in largest leverage buyout ever. All that debt now hits EA's balance sheet, which analysts fear could lead to a much more conservative strategy going forward. When you have IOUs that large, there is usually less willingness to take a risk on a new game or IP, which means Madden 36 and Battlefield 15. Here we come. We've seen a lot of video game mergers and deals over the last few years, which have not aged well. Specifically, Microsoft's$68 billion deal for Activism Blizzard has curdled in hindsight. But the Saudis are making a bet that EA still has the juice.

3:28Neil, EA Sports. It's in Riyadh. It's not just EA Sports in Riyadh. It's the entire video game world. So far, the Public Investment Fund has invested about$30 billion into video games. They own the publisher of Pokemon Go. They own the publisher of Monopoly Go. They own stakes in Nintendo, Take-Two Interactive, some of the biggest video game publishers, and now they're taking all of EA. I mean, they have an entire city devoted to gaming and esports. It's called the Kadia Esports and Gaming District. It has four different gaming arenas. They want 10 million visitors a year by the end of this decade to visit their esports city.

4:09So this is a kingdom. This is an MBS ruler who is all in on video games. So Saudi Arabia has been accused of sports washing, where you use investments in sports, in gaming, entertainment to try to improve the country's global image. And a lot of video game fans fear that they might use these iconic properties to kind of push an agenda because they've done that before. One game that they own is Fatal Furious City of the Wolves. It's this Saudi-owned fighting game. They added Cristiano Ronaldo to the game, which a lot of fans were like, oh, it's kind of fun. but also they're clearly trying to push an agenda here.

4:47They're trying to put a player who plays in the Saudi Football League in a game, and gamers are like, this doesn't respect the history of the game. You're trying to showcase Saudi relationships more so than the actual franchise itself. So that's one thing that pure hardcore gamers are maybe worried about is that it could become a mouthpiece for Saudi Arabian talking points. And you hear a lot of fans of The Sims, which is part of this deal, especially have an outcry because they have long championed inclusivity, LGBTQ relationships. That is not something that the Saudi government likes. Some of it is punishable by death there.

5:25So we've heard a lot of outrage and fear among video game players who love EA games, especially The Sims, say we don't know what's going to happen to our favorite games. But it looks like Saudi will, or the new ownership, whether it's Saudi or Jared Kushner, investment fund will put their stamp on ea because this is a leveraged buyout as you mentioned there's a ton of debt they're gonna have to make changes when a private equity firm takes over a company they don't just let it sit there i mean the one example that we talked about recently was jersey mikes which is perhaps the out the exception to the rule of them saying okay you guys are doing well but usually when a private equity company does a huge leverage buyout they are going to cut jobs they are going to shake up management they're going to put their print on the company Because why are you buying this if you're not going to shake up management?

6:12You're going to shake up a lot of the operations and the strategy at EA. So it looks like those changes will be coming. There's not only fears of layoffs, but there's also fears that you took on so much debt that you might have to sell off some intellectual property, which again, these are iconic properties that we are talking about. Saudi Arabia too has been a little bit of a mercurial investor when it comes to entertainment. I'm thinking of Live Golf actually, because this was their foray again into the sports world where they tried to create a golf league to compete against the PGA tour. It recently cut off funding to live golf.

6:45It's kind of left it in the lurch. It recently sold one of its soccer teams as well. So just because they go down the path doesn't mean they aren't afraid to cut ties. They feel like it's not working. So they think EA is a still good, albeit very expensive property. It's 35 years old. Maybe they think 35 years in the future, people are still going to want to play Madden. and they're still going to want to play FIFA, which is now called FC, which I hate. But that's the bet, is that this franchise has longevity. Yeah, don't be surprised if you open up FIFA or EA Sports FC and the default teams that are playing is Newcastle United, which is one of the English Premier League teams that they owned against Al Nasser, which is Ronaldo's club.

7:26Usually it's Arsenal Tottenham, which has led to a huge Arsenal fan base here in the United States. But yeah, don't be surprised if that happens. Okay, Disney knows you're watching TikTok instead of Disney, so it's putting Disney on TikTok. Ahead of its earnings report yesterday morning, Disney announced that it would allow certain TikTok creators to use its characters and scenes on the platform, remixing them as they see fit. It shows that in the entertainment industry these days, all roads lead to short-form video. And if you don't have a game plan for bite-sized phone clips, you're as relevant as Woody in an iPad world.

7:59Under the partnership, a pilot for now in the United States, Disney said that creators will be handed the keys to, quote, an expansive collection of thoughtfully curated content from characters and stories in Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars films. If you know Disney, you know this is the equivalent of breaching Helm's Deep, the final fortress. The House of Mouse is more protective of its children than Phil Dunphy, fiercely defending its IP with an army of lawyers. But recently, it's changed its tune. it has to in this age of user-generated content competing with its own. Last year, it inked a $1 billion deal with OpenAI's Sora that allowed certain characters to be used in the AI video generation app.

8:37That deal fell through when OpenAI shut down Sora earlier this year, but it's clear that Disney has resigned to letting its prized possessions out of their cage in the name of exposure. Of course, it also has its own short-form video feature now because who doesn't? verts located in the disney plus app and tiktok content using its ip will be cross-posted in verts toby get ready to get ready with moana let's break down the two strategies that disney is going after here one i love that instead of just relying on professionally produced content from their own studios they want fans creating content themselves that is skating where the puck is going that is you know going with the times edits are the thing that bring cultural relevance to a show or a movie long after it actually premieres.

9:22I mean, I am still seeing obsession edits and obsession fan theories much later after the movie actually came out. So they're like, this is the lifeblood of the current entertainment landscape. Let's insert ourselves into that in a way that we still have some control. And then the other reason is they want to give people a reason to open Disney Plus every day and check out this new Vert strategy. That I'm a little dubious about because why would you go to Disney Plus when you can go to TikTok? TikTok serves you up all the Disney content you want, plus everything else that you are algorithmically showing a kindred liking to.

9:58So I don't know why you would want to go to this very closed garden of just Disney Plus. HBO Max recently did something similar. I'm very skeptical. It sounds good on the service. Like, look at all this engagement we're going to drive in the app, But no one really wants to go to this siloed off version when they have the entire buffet of TikTok. And especially because TikTok is obsessed with entertainment clips. The platform, this statistic, I didn't believe. TikTok said it has an average of 6.5 million posts relating to film and TV per day last year. But previously, at least for Disney properties, if you clipped one of their shows or movies, they would force you to take it down because that's their IP they're protecting.

10:38And I remember that sports leagues had this exact same problem, whether it was MLB or NFL. People would want to post clips on social media because they want to show highlights or something really cool that they saw and edit them and manipulate them. And the sports leagues were like, well, you have to take that down. But then they realized that actually this is insane exposure for us. So it's probably worth letting our IP out of this walled garden and into social media where millions and millions and millions of people can see it every day. So they just made that calculation. Disney for a long time has protected its IP.

11:12And you can understand that it has some of the most iconic characters that they don't want fans messing with. But now they just have to. It's from a position of defense. I have watched multiple shows in bite-sized clips across Instagram reels or across YouTube TV. I think I've said this on the show before, but The Mentalist, for some reason, showed up on my Instagram feed one day and has never left. And the way they get around it is they put the same sort of like music behind it or they have some sort of weird thing that allows it to skirt copyright filters. So I do think Disney is aware this is happening.

11:48And they're like, again, you might as well flow with the tide instead of trying to fight it. Moving on. One of the cruelest twists of fate in life is the person who absolutely loves dogs, but is extremely allergic to them. My fiance is in that boat and is forced to direct her awes towards TikTok videos instead of a real life pet. But one company, Kindred Companion Sciences, might have figured out a way around the sneezes and congestion gene edited puppies. It sounds a little science fictiony, but Harvard grad Matt Walker founded Kindred Companion to see if he could eliminate human dog allergies, which he and 15 % of the world's population suffer from, at the source instead of relying on so-called hypoallergenic breeds.

12:30The protein responsible for your sniffles is called CanF1, which is found in the hair and saliva of dogs. Walker and his team of researchers used the gene editing technology called CRISPR to eliminate the problematic protein producer, cloned the edited cells to create embryos, then implanted them in surrogate beagles. Two developed successfully in Bailey and Alfie, the non-allergenic dogs were born. While DNA sequencing of Bailey and Alfie's genomes showed the edit was there, there was only one way to truly test if the adjustment worked. Take someone who was super allergic before and make them live with a dog, which Walker took upon himself.

13:05He's happy to report that he's made it a year and a half with Bailey and is no worse for the wear. Neil, gene editing is still in the early innings and is a controversial practice, but an easy way to get people on board with the technology is to, one, make some cute beagles that, two, don't make your head fill up with snot. I love the origin story of this because Matt Walker was like, well, I've been allergic to dogs my whole life. I've never been able to have one. I could get a golden doodle after I graduated from college. Those are hypoallergenic. But still, like I was sneezing. I was scratching.

13:37This stinks. And then he goes, oh, wait, I am a geneticist with a PhD. Maybe I can actually do something about it. So he founded this company along with this other guy and took it upon himself and published. This happened a couple of years ago and monitored the results, brought this beagle home with him and said, I am perfectly fine. and it's just a shocking amount of people that are allergic to dogs. About one in seven, 15 % of the world's population has the same experience as Walker. They are allergic to dogs. So this seems like a breakthrough. Obviously, it's just a very, you know, just small sample size, two dogs for now, but they'll be looking to commercialize this, bring it to other dog breeds in the future.

14:17Yeah, what's the big picture here? One, there's more dog allergens than just can F1. Two, actually, I thought this was an interesting use case, creating hypoallergenic service dogs because some people need these companions and yet they can't have them because they are allergic. My other big question was, does this work for other animals? I am allergic to cats. Specifically for cats, because again, there's some cat owners out there and dog allergies and cat allergies are caused by different proteins. So you need your own Matt Walker cat lovers to come in and try to remove some of those allergens, which Matt Walker might be located in Korea if you're a cat lover.

14:56South Korean scientists reportedly produced the first gene-edited hypoallergenic cats back in 2024. So you can have pet lovers alike. You can have your hypoallergenic pets, even if you're a dog or cat person. And he mentioned CRISPR is controversial. And I was looking at some expert commentary on this to say, like, is there any backlash? Like, what do they think? What do ethicists think? And most said, yeah, this is great. Like we're solving a problem here. The slippery slope is when you try to get into designer dogs. And we've heard about this with designer babies. We have some scientists at a company called Embryo Corporation, which is located in Texas.

15:34They're trying to make glow in the dark rabbits, actual unicorns. Those things are enhancements rather than fixing a problem. So this is a Pandora's box here. It looks like Matt Walker's all above board. This is kosher. Everyone endorses what he's doing, but there are other companies out there that want to make glow-in-the-dark rabbits, glow-in-the-dark dogs, who knows what's going on using CRISPR technology, which is very powerful. So watch this space. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Neil's numbers right after this.

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17:24Up first, a shocking number of parents are inserting themselves in their kids' job application process, with many even inviting themselves to attend interviews. In a Zeddy survey of over 1 ,000 Gen Zers, 20 % had a parent come to a job interview with them. Sounds extreme, but it's part of a real phenomenon of helicopter parents taking an unusually active role in their children's professional prospects, alarming hiring and career experts who warn of career co-piloting. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the trend has become so widespread that it made the agenda of an HR organization's national conference earlier this summer.

17:59The speaker asked the room if a parent had either called them to vouch for their child or attend an interview. And of the 250 human resources pros in attendance, more than half raised their hands. Many have vented on social media about overbearing parents. The problem, they told the journal, is that this kind of obsessive parenting just hurts their kids' chances in the job market. A, it signals a lack of independence from the applicant, and B, it shows the company that this parent is going to be all up in their business even after their kid is hired. No one wants to get a call from an angry mom that their perfect angel of a child wasn't selected as employee of the month.

18:33Toby, just like their kids, their helicopter parents have graduated. There are horror stories around this. Stephen Clark, he's the CEO of an Alaska staffing firm. He told the Wall Street Journal that he had to fire a 24-year-old construction worker after he was late or absent four times during his first week. And literally hours later, the employee's mother called him up asking it to reconsider. He said, the first time this happened, I was appalled. Since then, it's become more of a here we go again situation. I can't believe it's as common as this article made it seem like it was. But then I thought back to my career in youth sports and the tendencies, those helicopter parents kind of developed.

19:12And I'm not surprised at all that it's spilled over into the workforce. The things that I've seen parents do to coaches that they are now probably doing to bosses and hiring managers that connected the dots for thanks for giving me PTSD to little league when we're all 10 years old and the parents are taking it, you know, the most serious thing on earth, but you can understand that, okay, they're doing it in little league for 10 to 12 year olds. Now they're doing it for their kids getting a job. I'm trying to think that me myself, when I become a parent, won't do the same thing, but I'm going to say some stuff to coaches.

19:43I just know it's going to happen. The cycle is going to continue. For my next number, Hollywood may say it's against AI, but secretly it may be in love with it. Just look at job openings, the LA Times found that as of late June, more than one in 10 postings in the entertainment industry was probably related to artificial intelligence. Amazon MGM Studios wants to find a principal AI executive. Netflix is hiring for a manager generative workflows, and Disney is seeking a production innovative technologist. You won't hear them hype it up because AI is a third rail topic in showbiz. Actors, writers, and other creatives are worried it's coming for their livelihoods and ultimately could degrade art altogether.

20:25James Cameron called AI actors horrifying. And yet companies believe that AI is the future of their industry, enabling more efficient production to lower costs. To be clear, none of these job postings reviewed by the LA Times were AI scriptwriters or actors, but instead for the more nitty gritty aspects of moviemaking like dubbing, visual effects, and sound. Some film icons have endorsed to AI too much backlash. George Lucas of Star Wars fame said rejecting AI is like choosing a horse and buggy over a car. Quote, artificial intelligence means it's much easier for us to make movies. There's nothing you can do about it.

20:58That's progress. It's the future. I thought it was interesting that a lot of filmmakers see it as a fundraising strategy, actually, because financing is difficult to come by. But they have found that if you attach AI to a studio or a project, all of a sudden venture capitalists come knocking at your door. And that is very helpful to some struggling filmmakers. Roger Avery, who is a Pulp Fiction co-writer, said that traditional financing had become almost impossible. But then once he branded his company as AI Focus, investors came pouring in. Now he says he's producing three films. So maybe it's kind of like you're making a deal with the devil for a lot of these creative types.

21:37But if you want your movies made, and this is what you have to do is embrace this new technology, Some of them are saying, yeah, I'll take a bite of that apple. I will go down that path because I want to make movies. And money is absolutely flowing into this sector. Investment in AI video and media startups is up 43 % year over year. For my final number, quick story. I went for a run the other day and shuffled the playlist of the Billboard Top 100 to see what the kids were listening to. And I noticed that pretty much every other song was a country track. I wasn't hallucinating. country is the dominant music genre in America right now.

22:12For the first time in history, country songs claim all top five spots on the charts. They are Choose in Texas by Ella Langley, which has been at number one for 16 weeks now. Been by Now by Morgan Wallen. I Knew It, I Knew You by Taylor Swift. I Can't Love You Anymore, a Langley-Wallen duet. And Boston by newcomer Lefty. Country's rise to dominance has been years in the making back in 2023. Last night by Wallen and Luke Combs' Fast Car went one and two. The first time country songs had done that since 1981. The next year, Shabuzi's bar song logged 19 weeks at number one. But until those breakthroughs, it had been decades since country conquered the airwaves.

22:49Before last night in 03, the last country song to go number one was Amazed by Lone Star all the way back in 2000. Toby, it's a country music world. We're just living in it. I think part of the reason why country is more accepted now, too, is because it's just broadened out. Now you see lots of artists from different parts of the musical canon, pop artists, hip-hop artists, kind of diving into country as well, which has just made it more widespread. So if more people are embracing it, it's obviously going to fill up the charts more. But it got me thinking back, too, to Old Town Road and how that was extremely genre-blending at the time.

23:26And also, I got this wedding coming up, and we were having this debate, too. Is Old Town Road an acceptable wedding song? And you were pretty pro. I think it's, you know, you want something that people will sing along to. And I think once you hear those banjo twings come in, in the intro, I think people would sing along, but I think it's not on your playlist. Yeah. The argument was from my fiance, not very chic, but also it's not quite, you know, nostalgic enough. It needs another five more years. And then I think it will be a wedding playlist mainstay, but yeah, it's cool to see country kind of accepted like this.

23:56The big question mark too, is if the Grammys are going to embrace it because it has tons of commercial success, but the critics have never quite embraced it. But now if you have the biggest song of the year, multiple top 10 hits, is Ella Langley going to win country music in one of the major categories? Is she going to be rewarded? That remains to be seen. Let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. It's hard for corporate shakeups to really get the blood moving, but what just went down at Google yesterday was Seismic. First, four of the architects behind Modern AI left the company at the same time.