C (2:27)

No, no, you need it. You need it. The computers are talking to each other. Okay.

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Learn more @disney campaign manager.com that's disney campaign manager.com Warner Brothers discovery, the entertainment behemoth home to Batman, Ron Weasley and Anderson Cooper, is putting itself up for sale. The company announced yesterday that it was considering a variety of deals, either offloading certain assets or taking bids on the kit and caboodle. Earlier this year, it said it was planning to split its streaming and studio business from its cable networks, and it could still pursue that approach if no attractive buyer is found. But executives bragged they were kind of hot stuff and suitors were blowing up its phone to take it out for a drink. In a statement, Warner Bros. Discovery said, while we aren't going to get into the specifics of who has expressed interest, it is safe to assume it is multiple parties. And it's not hard to see why. Warner Bros. Discovery is an alluring target. It owns HBO Max, a growing streaming service with loaded ip, a film studio featuring Superman, Batman and Harry Potter, and cable networks like cnn, TNT and hgtv, which, while in decline, are still highly profitable. The announcement is also a signal that it's not enticed by existing offers, most notably by Paramount, which has reportedly sent in two takeover bids already, but both of them rejected by the board. Now it wants to play the field to spark a bidding war, and all the big players are circling Comcast, Netflix, Amazon, Apple and yes, Paramount is also in play. Toby if Warner Brothers does get scooped up, it would help inspire become one of the most competitive entertainment companies around and certainly challenge Disney or Netflix in terms of scale.

C (5:01)

Yeah, Warner Bros. Kind of thinks it's the Belle of the ball right now. They think, hey, we got all this ip. Everybody wants it. David Zaslav is the CEO and he wants to split the two. You know, shave off the legacy TV division from the, you know, more attractive IP and streaming assets. Paramount is coming in saying we actually want the whole thing. Because, remember, David Ellison is actually pretty bullish on news media still. Remember, he bought the Free Press, brought in Barry Weiss, run cbs. He wants to get CNN and CBS under the same umbrella here, which is maybe why Warner Bros. Keeps kind of shying away from that bid and just seeing if anyone else out there, any tech giants, want to come in and submit your bread as well. But what might undermine that approach is that a lot of them are saying we're actually good. Apple doesn't necessarily. They've said on a podcast, some of their streaming leaders have said, we don't necessarily want to go out and buy. Apple's brand is kind of, you know, this premium brand. They don't need to buy their own ip, they want to make their own. Same thing with Netflix. They're more of a build and not buy mentality at that company. So maybe even putting yourself up for sale and saying, hey, we got so many offers, it's not actually looking like the case because Paramount is the one that keeps banging on the door. Banging on the door because clearly the most motivated buyer here.

B (6:13)

And you know, these huge mega mergers in media have a pretty awful track record. And for that you just have to go to the merger that created Warner Brothers Discovery. Back in 2022, WarnerMedia and Discovery merged and they created this media behemoth that was exposed that was supposed to take on Disney, Netflix, Comcast, etc. But this company took on $40 billion in debt. And here we are three years later talking about this company being broken up or sold after that merger in 2022. So these mega mergers have historically not exactly worked out. One that maybe has worked out for both companies is go back to Disney and 21st Century Fox's deal. So Disney paid $70 billion for a bunch of Fox assets. They brought over the Simpsons, they brought over the the movie studio. But they also left Fox News and a few other cable news assets with Fox. So maybe that's a template for a particular deal that Warner Brothers Discovery might entertain from any of these companies that are interested.

C (7:14)

Meanwhile, we also got Netflix earnings yesterday, speaking of one of the potential suitors. And they had a pretty good quarter if you actually look at the fact that they had membership growth, they had record ad sales again, they're saying that AI Tailwinds are, you know, making their content recommendations even better. They actually did miss revenue expectations, even though it was up 17% year over year, which led to a 6% decline in the stock after they reported earnings. But some of the more fun parts of the earnings were just some of the kind of IP announcements that they did. They are doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on K Pop Demon Hunters. They're partnering with Mattel and Hasbro to roll out a line of K Pop Demon Hunters toys, which, you know what, I might twist my arm here. I've seen the movie a couple of times at this point. So doubling down on their most popular movie of all time. And then obviously the most, the biggest news of the day is that they're acquiring the global, global rights to Catan Settlers of Catan, which is a board game that is very near and dear to my heart, to develop a sort of unscripted TV live action, I don't know, animation spin off of that ip. So a couple of fun IP announcements, even though necessarily the top level earnings weren't what investors wanted to see. Moving on, Amazon has spent the last 20 years or so defining the modern warehouse job, hiring millions of workers to man its miles of fluorescent lit fulfillment centers, all to help get you your toilet paper in less than 24 hours. Now it's sort of preparing to unmake all that it's created. A cache of leaked internal documents obtained by the New York Times reveals Amazon's plan to replace more than half a million US Jobs with robots over the next decade. The audacious goal calls on Amazon to double the number of products it sells by 2033 without hiring a single additional warehouse worker. That means that the company will forego onboarding 160,000 humans in the US between 2025 and 2027. While the robotics team ultimately aims to automate 75% of Amazon's operations as one of the largest employers in America expects backlash from this automation push, and the leaked docs show that leadership is well aware of the incoming criticism. Executives outlined how external communication should avoid using terms like AI or robots and should instead use phrases like advanced technology and cobots, as in collaborative robots, to soften the blow. Though the company denies any coordinated PR campaign, the docs also reveal a concerted effort to boost community engagement through toy drives and local events to offset some of the heat they may take in affected regions. Neil I wouldn't exactly call it a secret that Amazon is looking to automate much of its fulfillment workforce, but this New York Times piece shows both the scale of the effort and how the company plans to wriggle out of some of the scrutiny that comes along with it.

B (10:04)

Yeah, totally. This is not a secret. I mean, back in 2012, Amazon really juiced up its robotic push in its warehouse warehouses. It paid $775 million to buy the robotics maker Kiva. And this was a big pet project of Jeff Bezos when he was CEO. And now it is the same for Andy Jassy because they are in a cost cutting, profit boosting push. Go back to 2020 and talk about Amazon as one of the largest employers in the country. This is really when it kicked into gear. So 2020 was the pandemic. Everyone was buying stuff on Amazon in 10 months. In 2020, Amazon hired 427,000 employees. That amounts to an average of 1400 new workers a day. So it brought on an astonishing amount of workers. This is the biggest hiring spree in American corporate history. Now we're in 2025. E commerce growth has slowed down. Andy Jassy is under pressure by the board to boost margins and cut costs. What way are they going to do that for? By developing robotics and cutting down on the new amount of humans they are hiring. And it's really, you know, astonishing and a milestone moment. Daron Acemoglu, who won the Nobel Prize in economics last year, told the New York Times. Kind of distilled what this means. It means one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator. And that filters down to everyone else because as you mentioned, Walmart really sets the tone in terms of hiring strategies for warehouse, e commerce, retail across the board, even Freudian.

C (11:36)

So you said Walmart sets the tone, but Amazon and Walmart do kind of set set the tone here because yeah, Amazon still has 1.2 million workers. That's up 3 times 3x since 2018. And you're right, this is in pursuit of savings. They think that they can save about $0.30 per package, which again, doesn't sound like much until you realize that equates to $12.6 billion saved over the next two years just by removing some of the humans from the loop. Also, Amazon is very much a robotics company already. They have a million robots in action throughout the world right now. Like this is not some pipe dream of automation. They are automating big parts of their warehouses already. They just want to double, triple and quadruple down on this because the cost savings are there. If they can pull this off. And you are right, it does ripple through the entire workforce because as Amazon goes, others will follow. If FedEx sees how they can more effectively manage their warehouses, of course they're going to do it to save costs as well.

B (12:36)

And Amazon did respond to this. We should mention they said the documents viewed by the Times were incomplete, did not represent the company's overall hiring strategy. They say they have a history of using savings from automation to create new jobs. And I should mention that the people who won the Nobel Prize in economics this year talked about that creative destruction. They also said that we're hiring 250,000 people for the upcoming holiday season, which as we talked about last week, is half of what everyone across the United States is hiring. So they mentioned those points, but I think there's no question, and they're not going to deny it, that they are trying to automate their warehouses heavily and that will lead to a lot less humans being hired there.

C (13:16)

Beyond Meat is finally living up to its namesake with its stock mooning to infinity and beyond over the last three trading sessions, did people finally acquire a taste for burgers made from beet juice and methylcellulose? No. The stock run up has been nothing but a good old fashioned short squeeze straight from the meme stock playbook. On Friday, things started off innocuously enough with shares jumping 24% to close the week. Then Monday came along and brought with it a 127% gain, only to be topped by the 146% run up yesterday, its largest one day gain ever. On Tuesday morning it was the fourth most traded stock in the US and today it's already up 90% pre market. While retail traders piling in on the fund likely can't tell you what a Beyond Burger is actually made of, it's easy to see the appeal of the company to a specific audience. It's got a low nominal share price catnip for retail investors who love stocks who look quote unquote cheap. It also has elevated short interest, which sets up the potential for a squeeze where bearish traders have to buy shares to cover their positions, adding fuel to the fire. The stock even has its own roaring kitty esque messiah figure on Reddit who goes by Capybara stock, a man named Dmitri Seminekin who has been evangelizing the company on Wall street bets. Neil, there is a tiny speck of real news here. Beyond Meat is expanding into 2,000 more Walmart stores nationwide, but this move clearly had a little to do with fundamentals. It's been a While since we had a good old fashioned meme stock pop.

B (14:46)

Like that, you mentioned low nominal share price. This company was literally a penny stock as recently as last week trading under a dollar. And now after this huge three day surge, it's up to a whopping $3.62 now. Beyond Meat has always had a little meme stock DNA in it because I remember its IPO in 2019 and its stock price surged 163% on the first day of trading. It had a market cap of over $3.7 billion. No one knew what a meme stock was back then. I think the enthusiasm was genuinely around the plant based meat sector. This was a growing and very exciting time for that. It's not anymore. And now in the last five years since that first day pop, Beyond Meat has been one of the worst performers in the stock in the entire stock market. Think of all the stocks in the stock market. This is one of the worst. I mean it's still down 99% after these three day surges. Like it is a company that is down bad. But this guy, he was a real estate, real estate developer in Dubai, has put on his roaring kitty hat and said, well, I'm seeing things that other investors are not. There was a big move last week that beyond made related to a debt deal and a lot of investors viewed that negatively. And the stock crashed 67% last week alone. And he said people are missing the bigger picture here. He posted a YouTube video, explained why he bought 4% of Beyond Meat shares. And it seems like this has become a rallying cry for, for a bunch of retail traders.

C (16:17)

And then another thing that happened too is that it was added to that Roundhill meme ETF that we described a few weeks ago, which was the second reincarnation of the meme stock ETF. The first one was basically the GameStop AMC era, this one that you want to rebalance more quickly week to week basis to find names like Beyond Meat that are mooning. And so it almost immediately validated the premise of this meme stock ETF that it got on Beyond Meat. It allowed owners of the ETF to participate in this large share run up, as you like to call it. And so it really was a meta moment where the meme ETF was fueling a meme rally in a particular stock. So that's an interesting self fulfilling cycle that we might see happen with more meme stocks. As you know, the market continues to have a little bit of frothiness in it.

B (17:05)

Final note on this is if you are in a room with some amount of people today. There is a likelihood that they were trading Beyond Meat stock yesterday because trading volume in the afternoon on Beyond Meat shares had topped 700 million compared to an average of less than 20 million. And Sherwood News kind of did some calculations. They found that Plant Beyond Meat has done plant based meat sales of 487 million pounds over its entire career as a publicly traded company. And so that means on Monday, more than twice as many shares were traded as pounds sold from Q1 2018 through Q2 2025.

C (17:43)

That's what you want, more shares trading hands than actual volume of the thing that you sell going out into the world. That means the fundamentals are in the right place. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back and talk about that invention neil teased at the beginning of the show. Marketing your brand these days probably feels harder than finding a good avocado at the grocery store at 5pm so why.

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B (19:24)

New Zipper Just dropped YKK the Japanese company that supplies half the world's zippers is rolling out an updated zipper and the biggest change to zippers in more than a century according To Wired, how can you possibly improve upon the OG zipper? It's not simple, because as it's constructed, the zipper is nearly a perfect tool, left largely unchanged since the 1910s. It's like trying to reformulate my dad's matzo ball soup recipe. Unthinkable. But YKK said challenge accepted and went into the garage and came out with a new zipper style it thinks works better in the context of modern 21st century apparel. The Arri string zipper, as it's known, removes the fabric tape that keeps the zipper's teeth on your clothes, creating a new fastening system that Wired says sinks into the garment instead of sitting on top of it. This may not seem like that big of an update, but YKK believes it's mission critical in our new fashion environment, which prioritizes lighter and more flexible apparel that intends to move naturally flush against the body. And existing zippers, which are more clunky and stiff, feel inconsistent with a more streamlined approach to clothing. So when will you see this new zipper on your fleece? Maybe not for a bit, unless you're super outdoorsy. YKK debuted the technology at a Trade show in 2022 and is working with mostly technical sportswear companies like North Face on test runs for the Arri string zipper. To gain real traction, factories will need to buy specialized sewing equipment for mass production. But given YKK's unbeatable track record as the zipper king, they'll probably make the investment.

C (20:54)

I mean, after we read this article yesterday, we went up to everyone in the office and looked at their zippers because we were trying to figure out one what the issue is with having this additional fabric tape. And we actually went to our co worker who does a lot of knitting, and she's like, it mainly is just, it's a little bulkier, it's a little less streamlined when you have additional pieces of fabric there. And if you can get rid of those, it does create a whole new world in terms of zippers. If one company can pull this off, it is YKK. YKK. They sell zippers. They did $6 billion in revenue in 2023. They operate in 70 countries. They have 180 different trademarks. This is the zipper king, as you like to say it. But the thing that they did, wisely, as they were kind of coming up through the ranks, is they made the machines that you need to attach zipper. So they won all of Levi's business back in the day by selling them these specialty machines. It literally reminds me of asml, who, you know, manufactures these silicon chips. They are doing the same thing, but in the zipper industry, because they just have the specialized machinery you need to attach these things to. To clothes around the world. And that's why it's become such a big company.

B (22:01)

Yeah. If you go down the clothing forums on Reddit, actually, and they talk about zippers and what zippers work best for backpacks, it's this company seems like the one quasi monopoly that people actually appreciate. And they say you need to get one with a YKK zipper because these are just the best quality. So that's why they supply half the world's zippers. And I just want to mention they're not just on clothing, but they go on literally everything, purses, luggage, sleeping bags, tents, a bunch of other accessories. And they also have a great relationship with the medical equipment community. So they have their. They have fasteners on CPAP machines, they. They're on electrocardiography machines. And so they are just absolutely everywhere in the clothing industry and beyond.

C (22:42)

What's very funny too, is that they allocate 5% of their total operating budget towards R and D annually. And you're like, again, what could they possibly be research in developing? But there's a lot of UK use cases for fastening and this is the one that they're most excited about. So I kind of take their word for it. I do want to see it in action. I want to see this, you know, seamless attachment in action, because I don't necessarily know how you sew directly into the teeth of the zipper. Again, I need.

B (23:10)

Well, you don't need a garment.

C (23:11)

So to begin, I know I need a garment expert to, you know, break it down for me like I'm smarter than a fifth grader, but I am excited to. It makes me want to go into a north face and see exactly, is it better? Does it feel lighter? Does it feel more streamlined? Because clearly YKK is excited about it.

B (23:26)

Let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. OpenAI wants to control how you browse the Internet, releasing a web browser called Atlas. Atlas presents another challenge to Google, which owns the dominant global browser in Chrome. With 3 billion users worldwide, investors were a bit anxious about the threat, sending Google shares down more than 2% on the day when you use OpenAI's browser chat, CBT will be your guide to the web. In fact, there's no traditional address bar. Instead, you just type the address you want to go to into ChatGPT chat window. Analysts say the move is intended to increase distribution for chatbots and to help it collect User data to build future products could also be a way to introduce AI agents to more people, which are AI systems that do tasks for you autonomously, like book flights or shop for clothes. CEO Sam Altman says he believes the chat experience, rather than the URL bar will be the way people use the Internet going forward. Tabs are great, but we haven't seen a whole lot of innovation since then. He said. Tabs are great, Toby, does this improve upon them?

C (24:27)

I did my homework and it downloaded Atlas and I actually made it my primary browser to just really dive in the experience and I could not have had a worse experience. One, the switching costs whenever you adopt a new browser is very high because, you know, Chrome has all my passwords and it's logged into all the news sites. And as I was doing, you know, my research for the show I kept, I would open Wall Street Journal. Not signed in there. I would have to re sign into all these things. So you just like the very nuts and bolts of switching browsers is annoying. But then also ditching the search bar I'm not a fan of because I would, you know, I was looking up Netflix earnings and it said what it did was give me, you know, the chat CBD rundown of Netflix. But I wanted multiple news articles that I could read about it and instead it was, you know, feeding me this other thing. I did have it go and do something for me, you know, adopt the try out the agent side of things. And what I did is say, please respond to my mom's email with this response. And that was eerie because I saw it. It doesn't know my mom's email. It contextually figured it out based off of my previous exchanges with her. I could see it moving my clicker around the screen, clicking on the email thread, drafting the email, and then before it sends it, it actually stops. So that did feel like I was glimpsing the future. Probably this is not the most exciting thing that you could have, you know, an AI agent do for you, but that was interesting. It also took about three times as long as me just go doing it myself. So overall I actually made it not my primary browser after experiencing it because it just wasn't very well suited to my specific workflow. Maybe, you know, a writer is not the person that this is necessarily for. Maybe it's for someone who is in the coding world or something like that. But for me, it didn't actually set my suit, my needs very well.

B (26:11)

Great review. All right, if flying gives you the jitters, maybe skip ahead to the Next story. Last Thursday, a United Airlines flight from Denver to Los Angeles was struck by something which cracked a large window at the front of the aircraft. Pictures show the pilot's arm being cut and a little bloody, probably from shards of glass. But the plane made a safe landing in Salt Lake City where it was diverted. Now what hit the windshield while this plane was flying at 36,000ft in the air? Aviation Twitter was a flutter after the flight's captain claimed it was space debris, which would be the first time a human made space object struck a plane. But a new, more plausible theory emerged this week. A weather balloon. The co founder of weather prediction company Windborne Systems said he thinks it was one of his firm's weather research balloons that cracked the plane's windshield and is working with investigators to figure out how this happened.

C (27:04)

This was an exciting time on aviation Twitter for just a little bit because there was a space debris hypothesis. But then people are saying there's no scorch marks, like this doesn't happen. It's a one in a trillion chance. Then the next prevailing theory was hail. Hail was from someone that we trust. We're like, oh, it's definitely hail. But then a YouTuber kind of got on the case. YouTuber and Pilot. He cross referenced the flight path of the flight with the live tracking data from Windborne Balloon and found that it was a perfect match. So again, this is not something that happens ever really. It really was a one in a million chance. These balloons are not necessarily very big either. Each weighs about 2.6 pounds. So it's not a massive thing in the air. But when you're going that fast, obviously it can lead to some complications. So a fun little aviation mystery for a while there before it was solved by, you know, a balloon company coming clean finally. Travis Kelce has been flagged a total of 67 times over his storied NFL career. I looked it up. But he wants to add six more of them to his repertoire. Taylor Swift's Groomed to be is teaming up with an activist investor to take a stake in Six Flags Entertainment to help reshape the future of the struggling theme park operator. The group that includes Jana Partners, Kelsey and some consumer and tech execs, revealed yesterday it had built up a stake of roughly 9% in the company, hoping to explore ways to, quote, enhance shareholder value and improve the guest experience. And to be clear, Six Flags could use help with both. The stock is down about 48% this year following bad weather, increased competition and a sluggish rebound from the Pandemic how did the market react to the tight end joining their formation? The stock jumped 15% yesterday following the news. Now, you got to respect this move from Kelsey. He grew, grew up 65 miles away from Cedar Point park, which is now under the Six Flags umbrella, and said in an Instagram post that he's a, quote, theme park lover, which checks out. Now he gets to ride the investment roller coaster, too.

B (29:01)

As a roller coaster tycoon myself, I know exactly how to fix Six Flags. You got to place one entertainer near the entrance. You got to place the food drink stalls as far away from possible from the roller coaster so you don't get puke all over your park. You have to put benches near the coasters too, so people can take a beat. Get Handyman to patrol about five or six patrol tiles. I'm sure Travis Kelsey knows all of this, so he's going to.

C (29:25)

You really played roller coaster.

B (29:27)

So they're going to, they're going to need to go to the board. With all of these changes, Six Flags is in a bad place. Stock is down more than 50% year to date. But I also want to mention that Jana Partners has a history of bringing in celebrities and other activist investors of bringing in celebrities to their activist campaigns in order to drum up more awareness around them. Jana has tapped Dwyane Wade and Cece Sabathia as special advisors on a campaign for pet food maker Fresh Pet. And then probably the most famous example of this is that Shaquille o' Neal joined the board of Papa John's after he teamed up with the activist investor Starboard Value to push for changes over there. And that is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Wednesday. As Bon Jovi said, we are halfway there. If you have any feedback on today's episode, send a note to Morning Brew daily at Morning Broadcom. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milian is our executive producer. Raymond Lu is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Hair and makeup likes to stock. Devin Emery is our president and our shows are production of Morning Brewing.

C (30:30)

Great show, Danielle. Let's run it back tomorrow.

B (30:40)

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