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

Kaila Lopez (0:02)

Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Kaila Lopez.

Kyle Hegge (0:05)

And I'm Kyle Hegge.

Kaila Lopez (0:06)

Today, why you may never have to be on hold again.

Kyle Hegge (0:09)

And why California creators might get fined for undisclosed political posting. It's Monday, September 21st. Let's ride.

Kaila Lopez (0:22)

Good Morning. It's a per my last email takeover.

Toby Howell (0:25)

Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.

Kyle Hegge (0:26)

Takeover.

Kaila Lopez (0:27)

Crazy, Kyle. Neal and Toby are out today. So Kyle and I are filling in.

Kyle Hegge (0:32)

That's right. Very excited to do the show with you, Kaila. A different show today. We might as well start off with a hard hitting topic. That is toilet talk.

Kaila Lopez (0:40)

Let's do it.

Kyle Hegge (0:40)

New York City is deploying robo toilets 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 robo toilets, will get an alert to go check things out in person, which sounds like a very fun job. And then obviously could escalate it and call the police from there if someone is holed up in the robo toilet. Kayla, I have a question I never thought I'd ask you.

What do you think about robo toilets?

Kaila Lopez (1:20)

You know what, I gotta be honest, I think 10 minutes is plenty of time. I don't know what's all the hullabaloo about here.

And I'm super pro this, because I think New York City has only 1,000 public bathrooms across five boroughs. So like, 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.

Kyle Hegge (1:40)

I like it. I do need this robo toilet at home, but it stops rolling Twitter in 10 minutes, so we'll have to look into that.

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Kaila Lopez (1:54)

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Kyle Hegge (2:00)

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Kaila Lopez (2:06)

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Kyle Hegge (2:17)

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Kaila Lopez (2:33)

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 US 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 is 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.

Kyle Hegge (3:57)

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 that I, 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 that they settled that they thought, people outside said, these lawsuits are actually pretty weak.