Morning Brew Daily - Hollywood’s Tech Founder Villain Era & Meta’s Muse Soars to Top of App Store

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

#937: A searing Elon Musk documentary nears US release as Hollywood is increasingly putting out critical portrayals of today’s tech founders. California lawmakers vote to increase transparency over influencers’ paid political ads. While regulators are scrambling to get a handle on AI, AI agents are taking over the internet. Football star Kylian Mbappé leaves Nike and signs a partnership with On, dealing another blow to the struggling shoe brand. Finally, what you need to know in the week ahead.  Learn more at http://advertising.roku.com/mbd  Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When West Jet first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion, inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to WestJetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. Good morning for Daily's show. I'm Kayla Lopez.

And I'm Kyle Hage. Today, why you may never have to be on hold. again. And why California creators might get fined for undisclosed political posting. It's Monday, September 21st. Let's ride. Good morning. It's a per my last

email takeover. That's crazy, Kyle. Neil and Toby are out today, so Kyle and I are filling in. That's right. Very excited to do the show with you, Kayla, a different show today. We might as well start off with a hard hitting topic. That is toilet talk. Let's do it. New York City is

deploying robotoilets across the five boroughs, which can be opened only by texting a number via a smartphone or by using a special tap card. And once inside, a 10-minute timer will start. And when it hits zero, the users will say, hey, you have no time left. And then the doors will open, exposing them to the public. And if someone still refuses to leave the futuristic bathroom, workers for Throne Labs, the company that makes these robotoilets, will get an alert to go check things out in person, which sounds like a very fun job. And then obviously could ask you. escalated and call the police from there if someone is hold up in the robotoilet. Kayla, I have a question.

I never thought I'd ask you. What do you think about robotoilets? You know what? I got to be honest, I think 10 minutes is plenty of time. I don't know what's all the hullaboo about here. And I'm super pro this because I think New York City has only a thousand public bathrooms across five boroughs. Yeah.

So like if, yeah, if that's what it takes is a robo toilet to make sure that there's more accessible bathrooms that isn't like a hotel lobby. I'm pro that. I like it. I do need this robo toilet at home, so I stopped scrolling Twitter in 10 minutes, so we'll have to look into that. Now a quick word from our sponsor, Roku Ads Manager. Some decisions are an easy yes, like if you get offered an upgrade to first class on a flight. Yeah, I'm still waiting for that to happen to me.

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Founders are becoming more uncool than skinny jeans, and it's impacting what we see at the box office. A documentary on Elon Musk is making the festival rounds, and it got such good reviews that its U.S. distributor pushed the release date up by a week to October 9th. The film is from Oscar and Emmy-winning director Alex Gibney, who's known for documentaries like Going Clear about Scientology and Enron, the smartest guys in the room, about, well, Enron. This new documentary, which is nearly four hours long, with a 10-minute intermission, reportedly covers Musk's entrepreneurial start, then follows his rise to fame, and covers his more recent political involvement with President Trump and the creation of the Department of Government

Efficiency, or Doge. Musk has not let this movie sink in, calling it a hit piece back in 2023 when the film concept was announced and calling Gibney a bitter old man with zero integrity after it premiered at the Venice International Film Festival earlier this month, though there's no indication that he's actually seen the movie. After a decade plus of content celebrating people with founder in their LinkedIn titles, as quirky, if not flawed geniuses, this documentary fits into a recent pattern

of media portraying real and fictional founders in a more negative light, pointing to signs that Hollywood's love affair with tech founders is over. Kyle, a four-hour movie's a hard sell, but after one reviewer called it, quote, a horror film about a man with the potential to destroy us all, I may have to go check it out.

There we go. I don't know if I need four more hours of Elon Musk. I feel like I hear about this guy every day. I don't know if I can handle that, but it will be an interesting to see how the public reaction to this movie is. I think there's a few interesting things here. The first is there's this kind of current underneath this film about coming after or analyzing a Trump administration ally, which Elon Musk has been in the past. Obviously, we've seen this play out where media companies have been a little afraid, potentially, or offered some concessions because they don't want to antagonize the Trump administration.

ABC News and Paramount had some lawsuits. they settled that they thought, you know, people outside said, these lawsuits are actually pretty weak. They don't need to settle. They did. Obviously, the Trump administration was pretty heavy-handed in the CBS decision about Stephen Colbert being removed, and there's some controversy there. And so the film already is a lightning rod a little bit because of the subject matter and the ties

to the Trump administration. The second interesting thing that you talked about is that we're now covering founders, maybe in a different light than we did pre-2010. I think the social network has been pointed at a turning point in how media and Hollywood covers founders, where the Aaron Sorkin, film written by Aaron Sorkin, directed by David Fincher, social network, kind of covered the Facebook founding story in a way that I don't know if it was super critical, but it was a little more balanced and not overly. We love Mark Zuckerberg.

He's a genius. And this film seems to be continuing with that trend. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, big tech is increasingly involved in the ownership and operations of media and production companies. So obviously this is impacting how and what comes to market and when. The New York Times dove into the subject a little more and highlighted the story of Luca Guadonino. Hope I said that right. His movie Artificial, which actually stars Andrew Garfield as the OpenAI co-founder, Sam Altman.

It was dropped in June by Amazon MGM. And it was reportedly a movie that was nearly finished and was testing well with audiences. but it came just four months after Amazon invested in and announced a deal with OpenAI. And so there was, of course, some questions there about whether or not that was related. And it's hard not to maybe make that distinction. The movie did end up getting picked up by Neon and is expected to premiere at the end of the year. But there were a lot of other production companies that were looking at potentially buying the rights to distribution here, but didn't. again, who knows why, perhaps the economics didn't work, but because some of them had maybe some

investments or conflicts of interest around Open AI as well. So it's hard not to ask, you know, if the trend of big tech involvement in media continues, is it going to be harder to tell these more unflattering stories? That's right. And I think we've seen that big tech has kind of taken over the world and owns pretty much everything now. I think when they were more viewed as the weirdos in Silicon Valley, they were disruptors. You wanted to cheer for the, the underdogs taking on the incumbents. Now tech is the incumbent, and Amazon owns MGM studios. Google has invested in Indie Darling A24, Thrive Holdings, Joshua Kushner's company,

has invested in the same company A24. And so we've seen tech become big tech, and I think naturally people are going to be more critical towards incumbents than they are the underdogs. And so I think it makes sense that maybe some of the ways we're talking about tech in Hollywood and in film, in TV have changed. In California, you'll now know if social media influencers and creators naturally have spicy political opinions or if they're at least being paid for spicy political opinions.

That's right. Governor Gavin Newsom of California signed a legislation on Saturday that will penalize social media influencers for up to $5,000 if they do not properly disclosed paid political content that they post. Now, the Federal Trade Commission or the FTC has rules regarding undisclosed paid post and deceptive advertising, but these only apply to content that is, quote, in or affecting commerce and do not apply to political speech, which falls outside of the FTC's regulatory boundaries. Because of this lack of a federal law governing paid political posts, states have started to come up with solutions on their own. Texas also has mandates the disclosure

of paid political content online. New York is considering similar regulations, and there are some efforts at the federal level to make this more clear as well. As an example, the billionaire Tom Steyer, who most recently ran for governor of California, paid dozens of creators to post favorably about his campaign on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit. And many of these creators did not include a disclosure to their audience that these were paid posts. And so under this new California law, these creators that failed to disclose could be subject

to a fine of $5,000 per violation. Kayla, do you think a creator's heartfelt message to, to vote for one candidate loses a bit of luster when it ends in hashtag ad. Well, yeah, I mean, of course it does. But it's really showing this like interesting no man's land that social media promotion is. So obviously, as you mentioned, the FTC outlines that if you're making an endorsement of a product, you need to disclose if you have a relationship with that brand in some way. And the relationship could be that the brand paid you for an ad, of course, which is the way

that we're always thinking about. But it could also be that you have a personal or family. connection or that you got discounted products or services in exchange for or even without being, you know, asked specifically to make an endorsement. So the reason this gets a little grayer is because as you mentioned, the FTC says it's only about commerce, doesn't mention politics. The federal election commission, which is charged with monitoring political spending, doesn't apply the traditional disclosure rules from political advertising to social media. So it's a bit of this gray area. and some campaigns took advantage of that to get their message across to young voters.

But the reality is it's not just young voters, right? The way that we've consumed news has changed. And it's so much more now on social media versus perhaps, you know, a traditional media organization. And according to Pew Research, about 53% of U.S. adults at least sometimes get their news from social media. So this gray area has created opportunities for misinformation. I want to know the people who sometimes don't get their news from social media. I'm a little jealous of them. Yeah, I think this is the story here is that creators and social media influencers are now actually just media.

And I think we, again, we viewed them as disruptors maybe 10 years ago as new media. It's clear that they are just kind of normal media now and a part of a normal contentite of how people get their information. And because politics kind of by definition is a little more reactive, the laws are now trying to catch up to the idea that, yeah, This is media, and it's important to disclose if you're being paid to post about certain political candidates. The other thing that's really interesting with social media is when you pay a content creator to kind of boost a particular opinion, it also affects how the algorithm surfaces other opinions that are similar. And so people call this quote like political astroturfing, where if you pay a bunch of creators to talk about something, the algorithm thinks that it's important. It surfaces other things related to that, and you kind of get a little more bang for your buck. And so there's an interesting kind of astro-turfing angle here.

The other thing is I think campaigns, brands, businesses have realized that they don't only need to work with the biggest creators in the world, but also they can work with niche creators that have, you know, smaller following, but maybe more authenticity with their audience. They haven't gotten so big where people are like, okay, you know, I don't care what the celebrity thinks. But, oh, my favorite creator that only has 10,000 followers feels like an actual friend of me. I do actually care what they think about. So we're seeing campaigns work with a lot smaller creators.

I mentioned Tom Steyer. He was paying dozens of creators that weren't super, super massive to talk about him. And I think we'll get to a point where people are a little more skeptical about the creators that they follow. And I think laws like the California law help people understand what's real and what's actually paid. Moving on, it's time for the winners of the weekend. The segment where we pick two stories that had a better weekend than your friend who snag the last Snoopy Cup at Starbucks. My winner this weekend was Muse. No, not the early 2000s English rock band, but Meta's standalone app for its personal AI agent, which hit number one on Apple's U.S. App Store on Friday.

So what is Muse? Well, while generative AI chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT are pretty solidly interwoven in many consumers' lives, AI agents are a newer trend. Instead of answering questions or helping to craft LinkedIn influencer posts, agents are designed to take action outside of the chat box actually acting on a user's behalf. AI agents have become a part of work life for some time, but now it's spilling into your personal life. Muse and other personal AI agent offerings can do anything from book your flights, call customer service, scan Facebook marketplace for a deal, or run your calendar.

For example, one user posted about how Muse was able to look at his current auto insurance policy, find a new policy saving him $3,500 a year, then cancel his old policy and book the new one, within five minutes. But while booking that doctor's appointment you've been avoiding seems like a huge unlock, AI agents like Muse need access to your personal information in order to work. That includes email logins, bank account details, calendar access, and more, which may be a tall order. The Wall Street Journal reported on a survey of U.S. consumers, which found that just 8% would trust META with their passwords. But meta stock is up about 9% since the Mews launch, so investors may not be too worried. So the pitch is this.

Hand over your email, your contacts, your credit card, and let the bot run your errands. The catch is you're also handing over your sensitive information and hoping it doesn't use that for nefarious purposes or glitch and book a flight to the wrong Portland. Kyle, I feel like I already know the answer to this, but would you outsource your most annoying life tasks to an AI personal agent? Well, first, Portland, Maine. Okay, it's my favorite. I don't know if I would. Maybe some of them, I think as long as Mews cannot host a podcast. yet. Our jobs are safe. I think we are entering the era of kind of AI for personal use. The AI for

work use cases, I think have been very well documented. Now we're seeing kind of hit after hit, open claw, instinct, now Muse, get into the AI for personal use space. And I think there's like two sides of this argument. One is, yeah, people hate the friction in their life, trying to get a reservation, trying to find your Southwest Airlines rewards number, which I struggled with this weekend flying back from Denver. If I had a bot that could just go find that, that would be really, really helpful. On the other hand, I think in people's normal lives, they're not thinking about like productivity maxing. A lot of people just want to chill, drink a beer, watch football. They don't need, you know, muse going off and like scheduling a dentist appointment for them. So I don't know

about the adoption for this product just to an everyday consumer. I do think the quote unquote tech elite have really taken a liking to it. And it is pretty remarkable what it can do. You've mentioned some of the drawbacks. The other thing I think is how if this becomes popular, it will change the world a bit. I've already seen that some people using tools like Muse to get a restaurant reservations, they go and they will ping a Resi or an open table like a million times. Rezi thinks it's a bot and then bans the owner of the Resi account because you've given your account over to Muse, for example. And so people writing into Resi like, please give me my account back. It wasn't me. It was my AI bot for personal use. And so I think if

everyone starts using this. The world has to change and it gets used to this. In some ways, these are like super bots. So it'll be very interesting to see how this plays out. I'm not personally ready for it yet, but I'll have to give it a try. I have to be honest, it's a little shocking. I thought you're going to be all in on the personal AI agents. When I'm done at work, I'm like, maybe I don't need any more AI, you know. No more optimization. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, it's very interesting. Obviously, Mews has been a first mover with the big tech companies, but you mentioned Instincts, you mentioned OpenClaw. These are smaller businesses. that have developed something similar that you can then personalize if you desire,

but of course it's been a little bit more popular with the work crowd. Instinct, which is a personal AI assistant that you interact with by texting, is actually in talks to reportedly raise money at a $10 billion valuation, according to information, which when you're thinking about generative AI companies is kind of small potatoes, but is still like pretty intense. And OpenAI actually just hired the creator of OpenClaw, reportedly to, quote, drive the next generation of personal agents. So when this comes in the heels of Open AI, Anthropic, other big generative AI companies

looking to go public, it makes sense that they're trying to kind of open up their base of people that are willing and able to use it and also the context in which they can use certain agents to justify some of their bonkers valuations up to a trillion dollars. Well, if one of your tech friends starts texting you back super, super fast, they might be using a muse or another tool to do that. So should be careful out there. We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, why Nike just took another L.

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Sign up for their free rewards program and start earning on every workstay at Hotels.com slash morning brew. That's Hotels.com slash Morning Brew. Loyalty members 18 plus. My winner of the weekend is the Swiss-based sportswear company On, which has been on fire over the past decade, but may have recently pulled off its biggest W yet. Stealing Killian Mbapay from Nike, Mbapapap will sever his 20-plus year relationship with Nike and become a global ambassador for Onn, working directly with Ones product team as they build out their global soccer presence. In addition, On An announced that Thierie-on-ri, the former. French soccer star as their director of football supporting this global effort for On to support the sport. Over the past decade, there has been no off switch for On, which started as a relatively

unknown running shoe company, but has slowly become a full sportswear brand that has a presence across multiple sports, soccer, running tennis, to name a few. Roger Federer became an investor in champion of the brand in 2019, and Ben Shelton, who was runner up at this year's U.S. Open tennis tournament is also sponsored by On. Now, coinciding with On's rise has been Nike's demise. Nike, which was the original disruptor brand across many of the same sports categories and really pioneered the athlete as sponsor and ambassador model is now being disrupted by brands like On and others. Besides losing several big names like Mbapu do competitors, Nike's stock price has also taken a historical tumble hovering around 12-year lows.

Kayla, are you on the on hype train? Are you still rocking the shoes with the swush? Honestly, I don't own either. All right. We have an impartial judge. Yeah, exactly. I have to say, I love how many on puns you managed to sneak in there. I could have gone even for more. Yeah, it was great. It was very, very dad-jokey. But I want to focus a little bit more on the demise of Nike. Nike has been having a tough year. So its stock is down 44% year-to-date and nearly 80% from its 2021 peak.

The turnaround effort is basically taking a little bit longer than expected for investors to kick in. And as investors are waiting, they're just selling and selling. You're also seeing, actually, this news didn't impact the Nike stock that much. It only fell 1 to 2% after the news. But the reality is this is a longer trend. And it is a tough week for Nike because actually today, Nike is exiting the S&P 100 after 18 years in the end. index, though it's still in the S&P 500, which of course is the larger index for major blue chip companies. Yeah, it's interesting. I think Nike was always perceived as kind of the cool brand with a lot

of cloud, and they still made very solid sportswear and sports apparel products, but they were cool. And now you're seeing other brands instead of Nike have the line down the block in New York City waiting to get the latest release on being one of those. And so Nike is facing a ton of disruption from these kind of newer, cooler brands, and we'll see how they respond. Yeah, and I think it's really interesting. I mean, Mbapé was only eight years old when he signed with Nike in 2006. Why was Nike not scouting me at eight? I was about to say, that's like a generational snipe. But this is not the first major celebrity to leave big brands for newer offerings in November 2025. Steph Curry left a 13-year partnership with Under Armour and announced in May

this year that he was going to sign with the Chinese sportswear brand Lening. But I was really curious, Like, do celebrity endorsements actually work? There's so much buzz when a celebrity joins or leaves a company. Does it actually have an impact? Especially when we're talking about, you know, really splashy partnerships like the Sydney-Sweeney-Novig partnership that just came out a few weeks ago. I personally have never bought a product just because a celebrity is involved. But I was wondering, you know, is this effective?

Celebrity endorsements actually go all the way back to the 1700s. There we go. When fine China producer Wedgwood used kids. King George III and Queen Charlotte to give their products some royal clout. And they really haven't stopped since. But according to a Wharton survey, I'm wrong. It actually is effective. People are more likely to choose products that are endorsed by a celebrity rather than a non-celebrity.

And they make that choice to buy more quickly. Well, as long as King George disclosed that he was a paid sponsor, I have no problem with it. All right, it's Monday. So here's what you need to know for the week ahead. This week brings a number of high-level meetings that could not have been an email. On Thursday, Chinese President Xi Jinping is set to visit Washington, D.C. for his first in-person summit with President Trump since May. On the agenda, well, what's not on the agenda?

The two leaders will discuss the heated AI race, chip exports, tariffs, rare earths, and lots more. But even before that, over 100 heads of state will arrive in New York for the 81st UN General Assembly, where they'll cause gridlocks and talk about solving global issues together at a time of major upheaval. Well, as a political science major, the UNGA, is kind of my Super Bowl, so I'm very, very excited for it. Yeah, I'm not looking forward to the traffic. All eyes are on energy prices after more attacks over the weekend

threatened to send them even higher. On Sunday morning, Ukraine targeted one of Russia's largest refineries with drones and missiles, while the Houthis in Yemen escalated their campaign against Saudi Arabia, launching missiles and drones at the capital, Riyadh, and on the kingdom's oil infrastructure. Currently in the U.S., gas is at an average of $4,000, and 46 cents per gallon, and diesel is up to $6.49, according to Gas Buddy. Shout out to Gas Buddy. I love that. At the movie theater, Robert Pattinson's generational run

looks to continue with primetime, a drama about to catch a predator journalist Chris Hansen, played by Pattinson. Directed by Lance Oppenheim, the guy who worked with Nathan Fielder on the upcoming Elizabeth Holmes documentary. It currently holds a 92% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I think we are in the Patterson Assants. This guy, has been on fire. I just saw The Odyssey this weekend and he's in that too. He's been in every movie. Shout out to Robert Paddinson. He's on a tear. Tomorrow

finally, we say goodbye to summer with the autumnal equinox, the official beginning of fall. And what a summer it was. Personally, I'm going to look forward to some cooler weather, but I'm also going to miss drinking apparel spritz as well looking at bodies of water.

You can still do that. Don't let the season tell you what you can drink and what you can look at. I am absolutely stoked for fall. Fall in New York City is the ultimate combination of season and city that I think there exists in the world. So I'm ready for it. Love that Central Park Leaf Change. Exactly. And that's a wrap for today's show.

Neil and Toby are back tomorrow. And if you want to follow our show, visit us at Her My Last Email Show on Instagram and wherever you find your podcasts. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our supervising producer. Raymond Lou is our senior producer. Olivia Graham is our producer. Our associate producer is Olivia Lake, technical direction by Nina Miller, hair and makeup is not ready for summer to end,

Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. See you tomorrow, everybody.