"The Odyssey" Creates Insane Demand for IMAX 70mm & Diarrhea Parasite Linked to Taco Bell?

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0:31Good morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, a drink that tastes like fermented back sweat is taking over America. Then singin' me, oh muse, Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is here. It's Friday, July 17th. Let's ride.

0:54Good morning. Public health is in a rough spot right now. If you aren't coughing up a lung from the Canadian wildfire smoke, you're getting explosive diarrhea after eating fresh produce. But good news, we may have learned the source of that stomach-churning parasite. Investigators have identified shredded iceberg lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms to Taco Bell restaurants as the potential source of the major cyclosporiasis outbreak that has sickened thousands of people across the U.S. Cases have been reported in 34 states, with more than 4 ,300 in southeastern Michigan alone, including at least 100 hospitalizations.

1:26that led health officials to believe the cases shared a common source. While snooping, they found that a high percentage of patients had eaten at Taco Bell and lettuce was the ingredient that repeatedly showed up across their orders. Taco Bell, for its part, said it had removed potentially afflicted lettuce from a supplier in certain states. Unfortunately, outbreaks like this cause a crisis in confidence across the industry. It is so ironic that it's the people who went for lettuce, the one healthy part of a Taco Bell meal that are getting diarrhea. When I saw this too, I was like, dang, Taylor Farms sounds so familiar.

1:59This is not the first high-profile food outbreak that Taylor Farms has been involved in. Remember the E. coli outbreak at some McDonald's locations that was tied to yellow onions? Also, Taylor Farms. It's really just a size thing. It is the world's largest producer of salad. They supply lettuce to Chipotle, McDonald's, Costco, Walmart, Trader Joe's, and others. So if there is going to be an outbreak, it's probably Taylor Farms related. we're uh seeing some impact in the market too sweet green stock has fallen on scares tied to this outbreak so wash your lettuce or don't go to taco bell uh and i hope your stomachs survive the summer and now a word from our sponsor ultra running we've talked a lot about shoes lately huh toby you never bring up elizabeth's performance in karate kid what are you talking about no shoes as in ultras shoes the ones designed to give you room for your toes for comfort balance and strength Most other shoes are narrow at the toe, but Ultra has more room for your toes so they can spread out and your feet can stay in a natural position.

3:00Shoosh. I know what I heard. But Ultra does make shoes shape like feet. What a concept. Use promo code MorningBrew10 for 10 % off your first pair of Ultra Running shoes at ultrarunning.com slash morningbrew. That's A-L-T-R-A running.com slash morningbrew. So last night, I gave Neil a call at around 6.30 p.m. He didn't pick up. I called him again one hour later. Still nothing. I was ready to cancel the podcast because my co-host was ghosting me until I got a text. Sorry, can't talk at the Odyssey. Yes, Neil ignored my calls because he, like hundreds of thousands of other people, were sitting down to watch the biggest movie of the year.

3:39Christopher Nolan's take on the epic is by all accounts epic. It is the first feature-length movie ever filmed entirely on IMAX 1570 film, which for non-movie people like myself means it looks really cool on really big screens. The cast includes four Oscar winners, including Matt Damon as Odysseus and Anne Hathaway as his wife Penelope. The score includes 35 bronze gongs, which composer Ludwig Gornsen rented to help create the film's ominous soundscape. Apparently, those cost a lot of money because the production budget for this thing was$250 million, which means it's got to make a lot of money.

4:15And so far, it seems like it's on track to do just that, scoring a 98 % on Rotten Tomatoes, the highest rated film of Nolan's storied career. Perhaps a reason to be bullish that the movie is going to rip at theaters is how popular the nearly 3 ,000-year-old poem has become. Emily Wilson's 2017 translation has seen sales spike 40 % for its last year, crossing 1 million copies sold. And people are flocking to book clubs like Prime Oprah is urging them on. Neil, still not sure if I've forgiven you for ignoring my calls, but you can start digging yourself out of this hole by giving us a quick review of what you thought.

4:49Nope, I'm going to resist the siren's call to share spoilers, even though y 'all did have 3 ,000 years to read it, but I don't want to break Zeus's law. The one thing I do want to talk about, though, is that I couldn't see it in IMAX, because the big IMAX 70mm theater here in New York City is at Lincoln Square AMC, and that is booked solid for weeks. I mean, even 7 a.m. shows, you cannot find a seat. 3 a.m. shows on Sunday morning, you cannot find a seat. And that's symptomatic of just a lack of IMAX theaters in the United States and around the world. Only 24 cinemas across the United States can show this odyssey like Christopher Nolan intended.

5:32Only 41 theaters around the world. There is a paucity of IMAX theaters. It's very interesting to hear that IMAX CEO was interviewed. and they asked him, why aren't there more IMAX series? I mean, this was huge for Christopher Nolan films because he wants you to watch it the way he intends to, and it made$180 million for Oppenheimer. Once that blew up, we knew that three years later he was doing the Odyssey, and they just didn't build more. You cannot tell the story of the Odyssey without talking about the fact that he went for an IMAX approach because the Odyssey, believe it or not, is actually shorter than Oppenheimer, which sounds insane to say because the Odyssey is literally just a sprawling story.

6:13It's 172 minutes shorter than 180 minutes for Oppenheimer. And part of the reason why is that cameras had to be reloaded every two and a half to three minutes because there's only so much film that you can fit in an IMAX camera, 70 millimeter camera. So a lot of the story of the Odyssey is kind of centered on how it was filmed, what theaters it's supposed to be shown on because it is just such a unique format. I mean, 2.1 million feet of IMAX 70 millimeter film were shot. We're talking literal feet because this is on film. So it's just a fascinating approach that Christopher Nolan has fully embraced.

6:53I want to use these IMAX cameras. I want you to see it in IMAX and it's really the main storyline here. But the shortage of IMAX theaters is a huge problem because we can't see it on IMAX unless you want to wait a long time. And the CEO of IMAX was interviewed and he said, well, actually, they haven't made a new IMAX film projector in about 50 years. And it was a very perplexing interview that went very viral because he's the CEO of IMAX. And he's saying, well, they haven't made any new film projectors for my company. And it's true. Variety went digging. And they essentially said that basically the blueprints for making these film projectors have been lost.

7:29We don't know how to make them. So after Oppenheimer came out, when New Odyssey was coming, what IMAX did was go around the world, found broken down, discarded IMAX projectors and put them back together because they can't build any new ones. So we're still in a shortage of IMAX theaters, but they did the best that they could by going around the globe and finding these spare parts for projectors and making as many as possible for what Christopher Nolan put out today. Neil, did you use the Trojan Horse popcorn bucket? Did you buy that? I did not. I did not. That's also becoming a main storyline here because in the last couple of years, the popcorn buckets have become just a massive part of every big movie.

8:09I mean, do you remember Toon's viral sandworm bucket? The F1 movie put out a racing helmet. Gladiator 2 had a Coliseum bucket. So everyone was waiting to see what the Odysseys would be. And it is a Trojan horse. And the idea is it becomes a collectible. It obviously drives higher concession spending, but it also leads to a lot of social media attention. And it becomes like the bucket is part of the marketing campaign in a very large sense at this point. This is a pretty good one, even though it's a pretty awkward design because you have to get it out of its belly and it barely holds any popcorn at all.

8:43But I think the souvenir aspect of major movie events is becoming just as much a part of actually seeing the movie. You want the collectible as well. This movie is going to make a Trojan horse bucket load amount of money. It's projected to open at$90 million to$100 million at domestic theaters this weekend. That is more than Oppenheimer, which is a surprise hit because maybe it came out with Barbie at the same time. But that made$82 million. And if it opens, if the Odyssey opens at over$100 million, it would be only the third movie this year to open at that number. Toy Story 5 did$160 ,000, and the Super Mario Galaxy movie came in at$131 million.

9:24So if it does more than$100 ,000, I mean, it's on potentially its way to make a billion dollars. I definitely, I'm not going to say what I thought about the movie, but you should definitely see it. Moving on, Netflix entered its second quarter earnings report yesterday facing more hard questions than Thomas Tuchel. Engagement is falling. People were dumping shows after the first season, and competition from YouTube and TikTok is only getting fiercer. It didn't manage to silence the critics. Shares fell 9 % after Netflix forecast a second straight quarter of slowing sales growth, piling on more concerns that the streaming giant has run out of ideas.

9:56Even before earnings, the stock had lost more than 40 % over the past year, as Wall Street soured on Netflix's ability to hold people's ant-sized attention spans. Adding to investors' anxieties, Netflix continues to pare back the amount of information it releases publicly. Years after deciding to withhold subscriber numbers, Netflix said it would move its What We Watched report, revealing show viewership from twice a year to just once a year. The company says it has a plan to keep people glued to Netflix, one that's already in motion. It's moved decisively into the creator economy, bringing podcasts and short-form video into the platform to bring the fight to YouTube.

10:29It's also considering going the cable route, adding live channels and bundling up with other streaming platforms like Peacock. And when in doubt, you can throw up the bat signal by mentioning AI. Netflix said it used generative artificial intelligence on about 300 shows, claiming it delivers higher quality output at a lower cost than traditional methods. Toby, this wasn't a disaster, but Netflix had to display confidence to win back Wall Street's trust, and it did not do that. It kind of all stems back to Netflix trying to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. That's kind of when the stock started to slip a little bit because the big concern was maybe management doesn't have any plans.

11:06They need more content, so they're going shopping outside of their traditional means to go get it. And since that moment, Netflix shares really have almost halved in value. The other big question mark here is why would you give out less info? Why would you bring that what we watched report to once a year? Because all Wall Street wants to know is like, are you keeping audiences engaged? And yet here is Netflix paring back the amount of information that they're giving. And it did, to their credit, explain why they were doing this in an investor letter. It said that the goal of separating the publication of the report from our earnings results is to to keep the focus on our primary financial metrics, revenue and operating profit.

11:45That's a story that they've been telling us since they took away subscriber numbers, but it is a little odd that if you want to inspire confidence, less info is probably not the way to do that. And we're seeing Netflix and YouTube go on a crash course to become each other. I mean, Netflix now is adding three to 20 minute videos. That's really the bread and butter of YouTube from the likes of Bon Appetit, Variety and Cosmopolitan. They're also bringing on a bunch of YouTube creators to the platform. We've already seen a bunch of podcasts go over their short form video. They want you to watch on mobile and YouTube is doing the same as well.

12:19They're putting out big bucks for creators and other higher budget productions to come onto YouTube. So these two are converging. Seems like YouTube is still in the lead there. Netflix is still in the lead in terms of just the streaming landscape over its competitors. But we'll see whether that is a strategy that can keep people on Netflix because remember a few weeks ago, we talked about this pretty damning report from the viewership numbers that was released. Maybe that's why Netflix doesn't want to do it anymore. That people were absconding after the first season. Many of their hit shows on Netflix had just lost 50, 60, 70 % of their viewers after the first season.

12:55I do want to talk about podcasts a little bit, not just because we are one, but if you looked at their engagement report, they did not include any individual podcast viewership. And that's because the threshold for a show or something or a podcast to appear on that report is 50 ,000 views. And none of the titles that they brought on the platform actually exceeded that. And these are big podcasts, Bill Simmons podcast, breakfast club, part of my take, the Pete Davidson show. They spent a lot of money to bring these people on the platform, but it seems like no one showed up to watch them. But Netflix is not panicking because they still are investing in this mainly because they want you to view these podcasts in the morning and early afternoon.

13:35Most, actually half of all Netflix viewing happens in the evening. They're trying to bring content on that you consume kind of passively throughout the daytime and they think podcasts can fill that niche. So maybe it's not paying off in the near term right now, but they still like podcasts. They still think it's filling a gap in viewership behavior, even though not that many people are actually watching slash listening to them. All right. It's stock of the week, dog of the week time, the segment where we pick one stock whose phone is always charged and one stock that lives in the sub 10 % range.

14:05I won the pre-show game of Freeze Tag, so I'm up first. And I'm feeling a little pessimistic, so I'm starting with our dog of the week, Lucid Motors, which spent the past week fending off rumors that it was going bankrupt. The trouble for Lucid began after an EV publication reported that the company was working with a restructuring firm that advised them to consider going private or filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Lucid immediately pushed back saying, nuh-uh, we have plenty of cash to last us until next year, but the damage was done. Lucid shares briefly lost more than half of their value, falling over 50 % on Tuesday before clawing back all its losses after it had time to explain itself.

14:42The panic spread because the rumor fit a story investors were already telling themselves. Lucid is not doing great. It lost more than$1 billion in the first quarter and delivered fewer than 4 ,000 vehicles, a squished bug on the windshield of the broader car industry. You put that against the backdrop of Trump pulling the$7 ,500 federal EV tax credit and the fact that China is producing roughly 75 % of the world's electric vehicles these days. It's no wonder that investors pulled the emergency brake at the first sign of trouble. Neil, the bankruptcy report may have been overblown. And if you look at Lucid's stock chart, it's actually up for the week, but it exposed a real lack of confidence in Lucid and America's EV companies as a whole.

15:21I mean, the EV industry in the U.S. looks like Troy after it was sacked by Odysseus and Achilles. I mean, it's horrible. Go back to 2021. Lucid was part of a wave of EV startups that went public, and there was so much momentum around these companies. Lucid was once valued at$91 billion. Now it's worth$2.3 billion. I can't do that math, but it's probably a 99 % drop. Rivian is another EV startup that is doing maybe a little bit better than Lucid, but it was once worth$150 billion. Now its market cap is about$26 billion. You have Tesla, which is the leader in EVs, but it's distracted. It's chasing humanoid robots instead of trying to sell actual cars.

16:08And then all these legacy automakers that dove into EVs and retrofitted plants and built all these battery factories are writing down tens of billions of dollars in losses. is Stellantis wrote down 26 billion in EV related losses. Ford reported a$19 billion loss on EV. So across the board, whether it's legacy automakers that pivoted to EVs in a horrible strategy decision, it seems, or EV startups like Lucid Rivian or EV leader like Tesla, no one is doing well and China is eating our lunch. Part of the issue too, is that all of these US EV companies outside of Tesla basically have sugar daddies that are keeping them alive for uh lucid it's the saudi arabia's public investment fund the piff they own more than half of lucid's entire company and if they decide to pull the plug then lucid essentially no longer exists as a company because it's not expected to turn cash flow positive this side of 2030 so that's happening with lucid but then if you even look at rivian which you said is doing a little bit better uh their strategic backer is volkswagen so they depend on Volkswagen for a lot of its outside funding as well.

17:17So they're in very precarious positions. And if you are an investor looking at this and saying, we are one boardroom decision at another company away from losing our investment in this company, obviously you would approach the EV industry with a 10 foot long stick. You don't really want to go down that path because of just how tenuous their position actually is. Are there any glimmers of hope for electric vehicles in the United States. If you look, there are a few. So EV sales were up 15 % from the start of the year after absolutely collapsing in Q4 2025 and Q1 2026. And that could be because of just higher gas prices from the war in Iran.

17:55And then, you know, companies haven't fully given up on EVs. They're just going the more affordable route, which is not, we should say, is not what Lucid does. That's a luxury automaker. But we have Ford coming out with a EV pickup truck, a light pickup truck that's going to cost around$30 ,000 going to debut next year. And then there's Slate Auto, which is a startup that's backed by Jeff Bezos. And they started pre-orders for this $25 ,000 truck that is truly bare bones. You can customize it any which way you want, and then it'll tack on some costs. So it looks like some of these companies are saying, well, maybe we're going to throw a Hail Mary and go the really affordable route to see whether people will finally start buying EVs in the United States.

18:35All right, we're gonna take a quick break and come back with our Stock of the Week right after this. When demand slowed for HydroJug, Amazon Ads rising star Hayden Wadsworth pivoted. When our bank account hit near zero, my brother Jake and I had one last shot to save HydroJug. So we engineered the Traveler, a leak-proof, cup holder-friendly Tumblr. Amazon Ads enables a business to be able to expand their product shelf because of the visibility and the reach you can get. Each week, our new-to-brand customers make up about 95 % of all of our sales. Watch HydroJug's story at advertising.amazon.com slash rising-stars.

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19:44Toby, you got an idea and a browser? Browser, check. Idea? I can't wait for my first one. Why? Because that's all you need to build real software. Whether you need a CRM, an internal tracker, or an app, Bolt.new builds it with you. Describe what you need and Bolt.new can build it and you can have it shipped by the weekend. Not a prototype, the actual thing. Get started at Bolt.new slash MB. And the first 100 listeners to use code MB26 will get a free month of Bolt.new Pro. That's Bolt.new slash MB. My stock of the week is Malort, the Chicago-based spirit many consider too disgusting to even sip.

20:25This month, Malort is leaning into that it's so bad, it's good ethos with a new marketing campaign that aims to continue what has been a remarkable run of growth, quadrupling sales since it was taken over by CH Distillery in 2018. According to the Wall Street Journal, Malort's new campaign leans into people's first experiences with the drink, calling on Americans to submit their descriptions of losing their Malort virginity. It builds on a similar successful strategy. Last year, when the brand asked drinkers to create colorful comparisons of what Malort tastes like, Some of the more vivid responses, fermented back sweat, a nail polish enema, and back allergy surgery and pesticides.

21:01Look, this may not entice you to try Malort, but it is working. While once a regional spirit you could only find in upper Midwestern bars, Malort has expanded into 37 states and posted an annual compound growth rate of 26 % in the five years through 2025. That wipes the floor with the overall American distillery industry's 2.7 % growth. Toby, I can't tell you how many times a friend from Chicago has said, you got to try this Malort at least once it's a rite of passage. I think the time might have arrived. I am not going to do that. The rise of Malort actually might be able to be tracked back to Drake because Drake posted a bottle, posted a picture of a bottle on Instagram in 2023 and said, there's no way Chicago enjoys this.

21:42And everyone in the comment section was basically like, we hate it too. Like you just don't get it. Like you are supposed to hate it. And the company kind of watched that and said let's lean into the we love to hate it ethos and they've done that extremely successfully you know what this also reminds me of is splitting the g with guinness it is such a communal experience like you get a guinness in part to enjoy it but mostly to say hey let's try to split the g with your friends so it's about the experience of drinking it not actually getting drunk from it same exact thing goes for my lord you want to be around your friends you want to try it for the first time you want to see the disgusted reaction on their face so So it's very much they found their unique value prop and they are now speaking directly to that crowd.

22:24And it is a risky strategy because it feels weird to openly talk about how disgusting your product is, but it's absolutely hitting the nail on the head for Malort. What even is this drink? So it is a herbal liqueur, a digestif that's made from wormwood, which is not actually a worm. It's just a plant. And it was popularized in Chicago by a Swedish immigrant named Carl Jepsen. And it's called Jepsen's Malor. It's been around since the 1930s or even before. So this is a very legacy drink that if you go to Chicago, you'll find it on a lot of bars. And it is tastes, I haven't tasted it, but allegedly it tastes like fermented backslide, but also very bitter.

23:05So that is the thing that makes you just grimace and it's hard to put down. another reason why it has been so popular it's because it you can pair it with an old style beer which for a what's known as the chicago handshake so it's the shot in a beer combo and i think that that has also fueled its rise one reason i think it's been popular and bars have adopted it is because if you go into a bar and you see malort on the shelf then you're gonna be like okay this is a cool bar yeah it's like you you're very insidery they they're in on the joke. Can I read some of these fan descriptions though? Because you've, you've said fermented back sweat, but moist dumpster residue, liquefied existential dread, octane fueled Chicago gutter water, a rat's fart hole and donkey blank dipped in gasoline.

23:51So I guess we got to try it. I need to drink that. Okay. Let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. President Trump's longtime teleprompter operator, Gabriel Perez is reportedly being investigated by federal regulators for placing bets on Kalshi as to what Trump would say in speeches. Shocker, he won a lot over$100 ,000 because he knew to a word the content of those speeches. The news broke just hours before the president delivered a primetime address last night, raising unsubstantiated doubts about the 2020 election he lost and urging Congress to pass a voter ID law. While Perez probably didn't bet on that speech because he is suspended now, he did reportedly wager on more than a dozen Trump presidential addresses over a three-month period this year, including the State of the Union, a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and remarks at a Medal of Honor ceremony.

24:39He is currently in talks with regulators for a settlement after admitting to at least some of the trades. What is ironic about this insider trading is that Trump's speech style very much complicates the bet. So even though he had access to the teleprompter and by all accounts, Perez was the last person that Trump would go over edits with and load into the teleprompter. But Trump himself has said, I go off teleprompter about 80 % of the time, which is why maybe Perez actually, investigators found, was exiting positions during speeches because Trump's going rogue again, essentially. So very funny that even the person that knew word for word what Trump was supposed to say still couldn't win some of the bets that he was placing on Trump's speech.

25:23I just opened last night's Kalshi market on what will Trump say during his speech to the nation. China fraud transgender were some of the words that you could bet on. This attracted over$10 million in volume. Yeah, I don't even know what to say about that. That's just indicative of the world we live in right now. Finally, nothing says fun afternoon at the beach like an F-A-18 Super Hornet sandblasting your towel into another zip code. The U.S. Navy has officially opened a safety review after a Blue Angels jet made an unusually low pass over a crowded Pensacola beach during an annual flyover. Viral videos show the Super Hornet ripping just above spectators' heads before banking over the Gulf while its exhaust sent umbrellas and chairs flying.