Big Technology Podcast - Disney's Ten Year Low, Google's AI Attends Meetings For You, Metaverse Gets Legs

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Disney stock hitting a ten year low 2) The rise of white noise podcasts 3) Google's new Duet AI that attends meetings for you 4) Everyone returns to office 5) Commercial real estate bust looms? 6) Ranjan's report from San Francisco 7) An excerpt from Walter Isaacson's new Elon Musk book 8) Fidelity marks up Twitter 9) Meta promotes Threads in Instagram 10) The Metaverse gets legs! --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [e-mail]

Disney hits a 10-year low. Google's new AI will go to meetings with you, and the social media wars hit up just a bit more. All that coming up right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition when we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We are here ahead of the Labor Day weekend. It's September.

I can't believe summer's over. Ron John Roy is here with us, as always. Welcome, Ron John. summer's over but lots of news still even in this last week lots of news and i'll say this even though it was the summer even though things were slower big technology podcast hit an all time high in terms of listenership in august which is astonishing because that's typically a slower time and i just wanted to say everybody to all of our loyal listeners and to all of our new listeners thank you so much uh it's it's great to hit these new records and and i got it

I'm really stoked for the next few months because we have a lot of great stuff coming towards you and the fact that we were able to hit an all-time listenership high in August is it just blows my mind and I'm extremely grateful to everybody who listens. So thank you for that. Everyone on the beach listening to Big Technology Podcasts.

Yeah, the number one beach listen of people around the world. I wanted to ask if you haven't done a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, usually I wait till the end of the show to ask, but I'll ask in the beginning this time in honor of our new milestone. Five stars goes a long way. So I would appreciate if you could do that. Okay, housekeeping is out of the way. Let's talk about our first big story, which is that Disney just hit a 10-year low. This is sort of astonishing to me. I mean, obviously, I've been tracking the stock.

It's been a tough go of it for companies in that category. But today, on Friday, it hit a 10-year low. And Josh Brown, CNBC contributor and CEO of Ridholt's wealth management, wrote about it a little bit on LinkedIn. And he says you're going to hear frequently that people refer Disney as a great company. And without it out, it's a great company. It's entertained and delighted billions of people around the world and employed millions of men and women for the last hundred years. But great company is not the same thing as good investment. And Disney operates in some of the most difficult businesses imaginable, theme parks, box office, streaming video, cruises, apparel, network television and toys. None of it is a walk in the park. The great company has a stock.

that's underperformed the S&P 500 over the last 30 years. It's so fascinating because Disney does seem like this mainstay of so many people's stock portfolios and yet to see it hit a 10-year load today, basically dead money for the last decade and underperformed the S&P 500 over the last three. To me, it's just a jaw-dropping statistic, especially now that Iger's back.

What do you think about this low light? I was going to call it a milestone, but this low-light for Disney. opposite of milestone i think having a four and a six year old being the parent of them Disney at least culturally in my life is is ubiquitous as i still see the power of the brand and what they do but when you start to look at the numbers it is shocking and i think streaming is and we've talked about streamflation and the difficulties of the streaming business streamflation being which i'm sure most listeners are familiar with the price of every service

quietly going up 10, 20, 30%. Right now, I believe Disney Plus is, yeah, it's 1399 for the standalone service. So companies are trying to charge more, but the losses are staggering. Last quarter, Disney lost $512 million in their streaming business. Since 2019, they've lost more than $11 billion. What's more interesting to me even this week, so there was a lawsuit from investors, where they detailed a scheme that Disney would be cost shifting, but basically taking costs from one part of the business and moving them to the other to hide the losses, the true nature of the losses in streaming.

And again, when you're losing $11 million, $11 billion in four years, you think you're probably not hiding anything. But apparently there's even more. There's with certain shows, what would happen is, even if the show is primarily meant for Disney Plus, all the marketing around it, all the production costs around it would be shifted to the Disney Channel or some other part of the business to try to minimize the cost. So on top of all the other pressure they're facing,

now they're having investors saying, you did not give us proper warning about the nature of the business. You're giving rosy projections and you are hiding losses. It is interesting because all those business lines that Josh mentions, whether it's theme park, whether it's entertainment, apparel, you know, box office. Yes, those are all really difficult businesses, but you would think that Disney has enough going for it. I mean, you think about just the theme park business, right? The summer, you'd imagine, these parks are just packed with people,

and Disney is the place that people dream about. So it's like, yes, tough businesses, but Disney should have an advantage. So what does it mean that Disney itself is struggling to make this a go? Yeah, I think, and again, And we're at yet another part of the world where, especially with theme parks, the prices are astronomical, yet they still have a difficult time actually making the numbers work. In every single one of these places, it's like, no, even you have the strongest brand in the last century, you have complete pricing power to any parent, they know well that you are not going to say no to Disney, yet you are the stock. is underperforming and you're not making it work. And I think it's a sign that like a lot of these

businesses, and again, streaming is the perfect example of this where over the last three or four years, there was this vision and idea of what the business would look like. And it would be, you know, scale on subscribers, lose money up front, you know, and then, but overall, the marginal cost of every additional subscriber on a digital service is, you know, negligible. And then you're going to become profitable. It's like kind of the story of every venture funded business. over the last decade, it was just done competitively at an insane scale with billions and tens of billions of dollars being invested by all these media giants. And I think it's a reminder that the strongest brand in the world, when you are just taking kind of a illogical approach to a new

type of business, it's not going to work. So then usually when a company has these troubles in the stock market, it does something drastic. So you can think about meta and its year of efficiency. I think Disney's already restructured enough over the past few years. Do we see something like maybe it sells an ESPN? Does it get out of a surprising business? I mean, obviously it's not going to shut the theme parks, but like does it just shudder some of its legacy entertainment businesses completely? I mean, what do you think happens here? Yeah, I think focus with Facebook was a year of efficiency. Maybe Bob Iger is going to come up with some cute moniker around whatever next year. is in focus because I think it is a reminder they have all they're in all these different businesses

but what is the core business of Disney other than the brand at a certain point you could have seen the vision painted where all of these magically work together well again Disney plus watching the streaming service leads your family to the theme park which is a higher margin business which leads to more apparel purchasing which leads to whatever else does ESPN really fit into that world. I'm not sure. And when you also see, like, ESPN, for those unfamiliar, is making a move into sports betting, which is easily the most lucrative part of that entire world. They delayed entering this market for years because of the kind of weight of the Disney brand and the family-friendly nature of it, and they didn't want to get into sports betting. So they potentially missed a huge,

huge opportunity there. So you see how all of these businesses kind of living under the same conglomerate umbrella don't necessarily work. It's kind of like remember GE in through the 80s, 90s and NBC and all these things you don't even know who owns who and what businesses they own or what exactly they do. Exactly. I mean, maybe what Disney does need to do is get into the white noise market because the thing that seems to have been doing so well on streaming, and this is kind of astonishing to me. It's a recent report in Bloomberg that white noise podcasts are like the most profitable thing going in media right now. So these podcasts basically play shows that have crashing waves or bird sounds on repeat. And they could make,

some make at least $18,000 a month through advertising on Spotify. And Spotify did a study and found out that if they decided to eliminate just the white noise podcasts, they would lose $38 million. I mean, $38 million worth of programming, that's astonishing. What are we doing here? Why are we not making a white noise podcast right now, I think is the fair question. But yeah, I love this story because this is such an absurd corner of the media business, but it's not tiny. It's $35, $38 million. And it's a reminder that, like, it has a Disney when we're asking, you know, why is it so hard for them with that kind of strong brand? It's a reminder that there's all these weird arbitrages and hacks and workarounds

siphoning off money from the larger pie of media dollars that probably, you know, when you're trying to make a great TV show and they're just sitting there like, where did all that money go? It's in the white noise podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, for the next 30 minutes, please stand by as Ron John and I make bird noises. Actually, oh, you want to know, this is probably foreign to you, but as a parent again, as we're sticking on this theme, another weird part of this is there are songs that have the word poop. BuzzFeed News actually covered this last year in the title because more and more

kids, and I've caught my kids doing this and you see it happen. Kids ask Alexa to play songs about poop. And then there's artists that profit and like actually compete and try to hack their way into being the top answer to that query from Alexa and get that streaming penny. So so in terms of other ridiculous places, people are making money and taking it away from logical and rational markets, sorry Disney. You can get into the the poop song market on Alexa as well. It must drive Bob Eiger nuts to realize that his margin is going to Poop songs on the Echo and waves crashing into the beach podcasts on Spotify. Sorry,

Hey, look, if you can make that work, it's a good business. It's also kind of interesting. Like, there are all these debates that are like, does tech drive the culture or does the culture drive tech? And clearly there's a little bit of each. I mean, it is when you have these platforms that give access to such amazing distribution, they will, of course, influence the distribution. What is the, I mean, the cliche line is the medium is the message. There you go. I mean, sort of like a case and point example. So, Ronan, I want to switch gears and talk a little bit about Google Cloud Next, which you were at this past week.

One of the most interesting things that came out of it for me, and of course, like it was an opportunity for Google to be like, you know, we have all these generative AI products for the workplace. But one of the things that was most interesting to me was this Google duet AI, which is going to take notes in real time when you're on meetings. And so it does all these, like, amazing things. So if you're late to a meeting, it will show you a mid-meeting summary so you can catch up on what happened. During the call, you can even speak privately with a Google chat bot and go over details you might have missed. When the meeting's over, you can save that summary to docs and come back to it after the fact. And it can also attach those to video clips of important moments. And this is all from The Verge, by the way.

But here is the crazy one. The headline is Google meets new AI will be able to go to meetings. for you. Another new meet feature, let's do it, attend a meeting on your behalf. On a meeting invite, you can click and attend for me button. And Google can auto generate some text about what you might want to discuss. Those notes will be viewable to attendees during the meeting so that they can discuss them. So you were there. I'm going to ask you a question. I'm sure, I wonder if you know the answer to this. Does the AI guess what you were going to ask during the meeting and then show it to people? Oh, I got this one.

I got you here. I got you here. If somebody shows up to a meeting with me and it's Google duet, like asking questions based off of some prompt that they put on AI, I would lose my freaking mind. Like people have, I mean, I may, we don't know if this is going to be used or not, but there's just a basic modicum of respect that you have to pay to people. When you schedule a meeting with them, you just, I mean, I'm sure executives will try this, but don't send your AI there to ask questions. That's ridiculous. All right. So on this, I was spent the last week at Google Cloud Next, and I was at the presentation where the product manager debuted this feature. And poor guy went through like 45 minutes of all these different features and really cool, exciting things about lighting and sound and whatever else.

And every question after was about this one feature. And you can see it kind of got the crowd riled up. and triggered and what does it mean? But I actually thought it was pretty interesting around the future of work because anyone who's work in a hybrid or distributed environment knows the opportunity cost of attending a meeting now is essentially zero.

People join meetings, they kind of do their own work to the side, they're not as engaged, they're not necessarily, like they don't all necessarily need to be there, but clicking accept is the easiest thing in the world, whereas in the past, sitting in a meeting with no computer and having to actually be engaged in physically, there's a huge opportunity cost. So making some way to make it easier for people to be updated about the meeting and feel like they're going to be taking away some of the key points but not have to actually

triple, double book their calendar and be there, I actually think it's kind of interesting. I think it's a good idea. And anyone again, generative AI transcription is one of the things it's done well for a long time. And now summarization was always kind of the bottleneck. But now anyone who's used any kind of a large language model summarization feature knows it's pretty good to start getting items. You could also see where people in the meeting start saying the next action item is our takeaways are and almost kind of like training the transcript as well

as what's going to be taken away. So I'm pretty excited about this. And I actually think this is kind of cool. One last clarification, the product manager did say in the end, this will not be enabled for one-to-one meetings. It has to be at least some number, I think he was like a minimum of four, because you can see again, if it's a one-to-one, and you show up in the other person sent their duet AI, that I would take a little personally. Exactly. So first of all, I think some of the features are cool, right? Like the first handful that I listed off actually makes sense.

If you show up to a meeting late, getting that summary, good. If you are trying to review what happened in the meeting, being able to like click on the hot links and then figuring out what happened, you know, and being able to watch that video clip, excellent. The thing that gives me pause is sending the Google, Google duet as an emissary for yourself as a meeting. Either show up to the meeting or don't show up to the meeting. I think it's ridiculous to send an AI to participate in your behalf. Oh, so what they said was, and this actually came up, it was to ask questions, what it actually does is you preset the questions that you want asked on your behalf. So it's not like the AI is determining, and this actually came up as a question, because the capabilities should be there as well where the AI understands is your question being answered or not. And imagine it actually prompted. It's like, hey, guys, five minutes left. Can you please answer these questions? But they said, so making sure your questions are asked, that's just more like a thing that's up there that says, here, the three questions from Ron John, who is not at this meeting. But it's more about the transcription element and taking away parts of the meeting.

I just believe that if you're going to ask a question in the meeting, you have to earn it. You have to earn that ability. You have to show up. And actually, you know, ask that question yourself. You can't just send an AI bot to go ask you. I don't know, man. If you're in a meeting, then you got to also pay attention for the entire meeting. And there's plenty of meetings where some percentage of the people are not at 100% capacity. I think you're calling for meeting reform, which I'm calling for meeting reform. I agree with you on meeting reform. I think this is maybe a band-aid over like the bigger questions organizations need to have. Here's a great comment. We're also live on LinkedIn, folks. We have Maggie Harta, who says it's also great for people with learning disabilities like dyslexia to have a better

contribution to these meetings. And there's really no doubt about that. Like if you're, you know, have some sort of disability can definitely help. So I want to shout that out. I mean, we're going to see this stuff in practice. The thing is one of the things I find interesting about these Google events is that they're one of like the few tech events where like you actually see the product vision. And then that just kind of shows up and what billions of people are doing like in the next coming months and we're going to see that it is interesting it seems like these are all meant for hybrid work like they're building in some way for a future where people are still going to be on google meets was that sort of the vibe at the conference that like

we need a new set of workplace software for a workplace that's going to live both in person but also in the digital world yeah i think what was interesting to me is and again i went in expecting to be thinking more about generative AI and what are the capabilities and what are the cool new features that are happening. And I actually left thinking more about what is the future of work look like. Because all of these, Google Meet was just one of them across all docs, slides, sheets, entire Google workspace, all the new features that they're releasing, it really can change how you work. And anyone who already works with any of these features or even just uses chat GPT I've talked about code interpreter on here from open AI.

There's so many of these tools that are already there. And I think, I mean, that's the stuff that I really left feeling excited is that so many more mundane tasks, taking notes in a meeting is the most miserable thing possible. And usually the person who is assigned with taking notes becomes less engaged than other people because they're more focused on taking notes. Like there's so many of these things that I think will change

how people engage with work and how they feel, But one tension I did keep thinking is Google is definitely going back to the office. Right. Yet selling this vision of, and is it hybrid, is it distributed? Is it like whatever it is it? It's clear that we all are being reminded that going back to the office is important. I don't know if you, did you see the Zoom news? Yes, I have seen what they've been saying.

Okay. So Zoom said back to the office. I think a month ago that it's going to be mandated. I think it was like two or three days a week. But then there's leaked audio to Business Insider where the CEO of Zoom was saying that remote work doesn't allow people to build trust and be innovative. Now,

Wait, Zoom is saying this? The CEO of Zoom and leaked audio is saying remote work doesn't allow people to build trust and be innovative. And here's the thing. I kind of agree with that. I think like, and always up for this debate, But I think some level of in-person interaction is very important, especially on the trust-building side. But it's so fascinating to me the tension between these companies where you're selling the future of remote work, yet internally you're still trying to get people back to the office.

Well, I'm going to agree with you. I think we definitely need a level of in-person interaction. And you can't just do it completely alone digitally. there was such a so let's talk there's a little bit of commercial real estate news that's just constantly bubbling over the under the surface and it just seems like we're about to hit a bad moment because even though there's all this big talk among corporates like google and even within zoom which is ironic but interesting about going back to the office so much office space lays vacant and there's a story in the new york times this week about the commercial real estate the decline of commercial real estate and the forthcoming vacant space lays vacant and that are going to really cause, potentially cause, what some people might call an urban doom loop, which is like a total collapse of like, you know, the developers and then, of course, hitting the banks. But there's a great quote in there where it says, somebody who's in favor of the office, obviously,

says the only two great things that weren't made in the office were fire and the wheel. I mean, what do you think about that? Yeah, I think, again, as a resident of New York who is in an office, at least three or four days a week, I think you see it that it's changed the entire kind of like fabric, especially of Midtown Manhattan. Like you see the amount of places selling lunch and whatever other kind of services were built around that economy. It's definitely changing. And I think it's important that again, I don't think we're ever going back to work five days a week in office from nine to five. I think that goes away. And I think it should because

I was always a bit artificially constructed, but I think a city like New York, other cities definitely need to start thinking about what else do you do if it's not just, especially in office districts, I don't know, I'm sure this ends up with some kind of experiential retail or whatever. What about housing? I mean, housing could definitely be something that you could build in those spaces. Yeah, so that, but then it gets tough. But if it's three days a week, if like, if you're seeing.

traffic up through only some percentage of the week, how do you start balancing commercial and residential? But I agree, I think. And I believe already some moves are being made in this. But yeah, in terms of like bringing more housing supply into cities, that should be the first place people start. Okay. So this is from the story. The value of New York's office buildings could fall by nearly $50 billion in the coming years, which actually seems kind of low to me. but the vacancy rate has surged more than 70% since 2019, which seems spot on. And there's some 96 million square feet of office real estate available for lease in the city. Delinquency rates for office loans across the United States are a pandemic era peak of nearly 5%.

And this is from the Wall Street Journal also writing about this. More than $1.5 trillion in commercial property loans come due by the end of 2025 and refinancing that. debt will be a drain on profits for many property owners while a possible bankruptcy trigger for some others. I mean, that seems to be a big warning sign for the economy in terms of where we're heading, don't you think? Yeah, and again, as a resident of New York, I've thought about this a lot or it does worry me, but I don't know. I still think this is one of those moments that for a city, it's the idea that everything is going to always work exactly as it did before. I mean, I remember, like, and again, it's not the exact same thing, but like under Mike Bloomberg,

there was this huge effort to bring tech to New York City. And I remember I even took, actually, you might have as well. Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, but it was not, it did not come out of nowhere. Like there was a strong governmental policy oriented effort. I moderated panels about how New York is going to be, you know, the future of tech and all this stuff. like it was there was a really strong effort to re after the financial crisis to make sure that

New York did not solely depend on financial services revenue to fund everything in the city and it worked so I think it's just it's an opportunity again to rethink and reinvent what it's great to live here and how things are going to work but and if we don't then we're going to be screwed but yeah and part of that was building this STEM campus with Cornell and the technical on out on Roosevelt Island. And we just took a field trip out there this week. It was very cool, very cool to see that in action. By the way, speaking of, you know,

speaking of the future of tech and in real estate, you were just in San Francisco. What did the city feel like to you? And did you get a chance to hop into self-driving car? I did not get a chance. And I wanted to. So, okay, one thing you didn't tell me, is that new? It was only available from like 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.

So for Cruz, that's, that's the, I think it's 9 p.m. now. Cruz has that time bound. I think that will eventually go away. But Waymo, Waymo is all day long, except for the fact that it's extremely limited. Yeah. So for both of them, I tried to get, none were available whenever I tried. And I was like, had a bunch of conference things and dinners and stuff like that. But like, I tried a few times again and I just couldn't get it.

But I saw them around. And yeah, I, on that side, I was very. hopeful to try to join the self-driving revolution there but was not able to um you saw the cars uh i saw one car yeah and it was kind of it was very weird to me because it really still there's a whole dystopian vibe to me like and again i'm there for a google cloud conference it's like walking away from the moscone center a couple of blocks in different directions Things definitely were getting a little depressing, but then right alongside that seeing self-driving cars and stuff. Like, yeah, I feel it, I went in trying to be optimistic, but did not necessarily leave as such.

We're here on Big Technology Podcasts joined by Ron John Roy of Margins. You can find margins on substack at remargins.com. On the other side of this break, we're going to talk about a new excerpt from the 4.4. forthcoming Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk, book, and plenty of other social media stories, including, yes, the Metaverse. There's finally Legs and the Metaverse back right after this. Hey, everyone, let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show,

where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, breaking down the week's news with Ron John Roy. So we finally got a first taste of what Walter Isaacson's Elon Musk book is going to look like. he published an excerpt in the Wall Street Journal all about the Twitter takeover.

I thought it was interesting. I mean, there was an interesting admission from Elon there talking basically about how he regretted making this move. For Twitter, I mean, we know he did because he tried to get out of the deal. But he tells why Walter Isaacson straight out. I've got a bad habit of biting off more that I can chew. He also talked about, like, how he enjoys living in chaos and can't just. sustained success, which I think everybody knows intuitively, but here he is saying it. And he says, I just need to think about Twitter less. Even this conversation is not time well spent. I thought

that was quite interesting. Ranjan, what was your perspective on the excerpt that we just saw? Yeah, we had spoken about this previously around. What does this biography do in terms of Walter Isaacson's legacy? And this excerpt did not leave me optimistic on that front as well. Because It really reads like the kind of, you know, like he's trying so hard to paint this picture of Musk as the like slayer of demons and the person, you know, willing to take on the challenges no one else can and with this manic energy that's just so consuming, but that's how we progress and all these things. Whereas some of the things, like the way the Twitter thing plays out, it's a reminder. it's like he flew to Larry Ellison's Hawaiian Island with one of the women he's occasionally dating the Australian actress Natasha Bassett like anytime you start with you're flying to Larry Ellison's island with one of your girlfriends this whole picture that you're just so

obsessive about making things perfectly work and changing the future of humanity doesn't quite land as much for me and that that's the part that kept I kept thinking about is like all these things he talks about how Musk is up at 4 a.m. 5 a.m., 7 a.m. sending these texts and doing these things when I'm like, I don't know, on one hand, one could argue that yes, maybe pulling an all-nighter at times is how dedicated you are to making your vision of the future a reality. But on the other, good things don't happen at 3am, 4,m, and 5am. I think that's like the universal truth that everyone has learned over the years, over the older you get, the more you understand that, that, I don't know,

that that really made it clear to me just how not responsibly thought through or just even rationally thought through these things were. Okay, so there's a, there's a point in the story that I think we might argue about, I can't quite tell where you're going to stand on this, but I'll, and I think my perspective here is a little bit controversial, but I'm just going to say it anyway. So they're talking about the office culture of Twitter, right? And this is straight from the story. Musk let loose a bitter laugh when he heard the phrase psychological safety. It made him recoil. He considered it to be the enemy of urgency, progress, orbital velocity. His preferred buzzword was hardcore. Discomfort he believed was a good thing. It was a weapon against the

scrooge of complacency. Vacations, work-life balance, and days of mental rest were not his thing. look, I just took a lot of time off this summer. For readers of the newsletter, we'll know that if I haven't sent in a couple weeks, have been doing this show. And we had that record August. So I can't say it was like a full vacation. But I think vacations and rest are extremely important, especially to do anything hard.

The mind and the body must reset. However, I think that this idea of psychological safety that there was inside Twitter is a few things. First of all, it was largely a lie. And, you know, there was a lot of talk from the top about everybody has a place here. But I don't really think there was psychological safety in that company. I mean, people were, like, worked hard and manipulated just like they were in any other company. And I know this from like firsthand accounts that I've heard from employees there. Like, there was not a safe place psychologically.

You could still have, you know, bosses that would come down on people and, you know, really try to, I don't know, mess their shit up. And then on the other side is that they did have a culture of complacency. And despite everything they were doing, they try to have it both ways, right? We're like they, you know, they try to push people in their own sort of, you know, quote unquote, non-threatening way, which was mostly a lie. And then they also still didn't get anything done. And I think that what Musk is saying, that like, you know, being hardcore and, you know, having urgency and progress and trying to get out into orbit like there's something to be said for that i

don't think musk has a healthy philosophy either but i just thought that this whole idea of that you know twitter as like the beacon for psychological safety was both a l i and b counterproductive yeah i don't think that's controversial because one i agree with you but two i think that's more just you know like reflective of a lot of kind of silicon valley culture of saying one thing in trying to present things in one way when in reality it's more just a function of I'll take it to ZERP or general kind of like monopolistic power but a lot of these companies where you can say these kind of things because you have enough money to pay a lot of people plenty and try to make things beyond just work but in reality like as you said many of these

companies that say this kind of thing they're like rough places to work the kind of political nature and backstabbing and kind of overall approach from people I talked to, that occupied so much of their day that, yeah, I think the idea that it ever was actually psychologically safe was not real. I totally agree with you there. But I feel the other is like so many times it's easy to pick on these kind of things. Like, you know, they found the stay woke t-shirts in the office and laughed about it and wore it around. But that has nothing to do. It's like, like, send in some activist investors, some like private equity fund to gut the place if that's really what this is about. You don't need to make this some like massive thing that it's become, this reality show of an event.

It's like these things have happened in every large company and corporation ever. And there's like ways that things move forward or get fixed. But I just don't think this is it. So I think that's like an easy thing for Isaacson to focus on. And then even using terms like he loves orbital velocity. That was the most ridiculous phrase to me ever. Like, come on. Orbital velocity.

I don't know, Ron John, you send some things into space and then tell us what we can say or not about it. No, I'm just playing. I wanted to know, but actually what I was curious because orbital velocity was not in quotes. So is that like a thing he said? Or is it almost, because I've never actually heard him say that. I feel like that almost is a thing like Isaacson is attributing to him. And it sounds good. It's like the enemy of urgency, progress, orbital velocity. That's the kind of stuff that you. The guy's a writer. You can't penalize him for writing. I know, I know. He likes to write. It's good writing. It's good

writing. I just think it's going to, it's not going to be a good look for him after the fact. Well, arguing against you is the fact that Fidelity just marked Twitter up another 11% in June. So they help finance the $44 billion Twitter takeover, and they still value the shares at 61% of, oh, at a 61% discount. Okay, it's pretty bad. All right. No, no, it's pretty bad. Okay, so on this, Dan Premack had reported Fidelity marked the investment up, and it

was funny, like a whole Mars catalog, which is an account that follows Elon Musk closely and interacts with him a good amount, had tweeted like, oh, this is the same. sign that, you know, Twitter is going to IPO above that $44 billion evaluation. Elon Musk responded, like, I think something affirming that, yes, that this is kind of how I see it. It's down 61%. Let's remember how fidelity does this is on comps. Every social media stock in the month of June was flying. Like, Meadow was up 17%. There was a overall, I think the entire category was up. I know, Snap was up 18%. Meadow is up 8%. So these are the companies that Fidelity is marking it again. So 11% it's like right in the middle. So there's nothing, nothing about Twitter's performance that they

have internal views on or insider information on that are actually influencing that. That's purely on comp. So I think the idea that they're marking it up and then it's leading to tweets about they're going to IPO above $44 billion is a bit premature. But hey, I don't know. Maybe it'll be the super app. No, I don't think it will be the super app and I agree with you. I don't think there's any chance they're going to IPO over 44 billion or anything close to that, especially given the threads incursion. Okay, maybe threads isn't as big of a threat, but something interesting has happened. So threads has started to notify people back in their Instagram apps of threads they might have missed. And we had kind of an interesting thing happened to us this week where you do follow me on threads.

You don't follow me on Instagram. And still, my threads ended up in your Instagram feed. Yes, I do not follow Alex on Instagram. Do follow him on threads. And I received a notification push on my phone that comes down. Alex Cantorwitz has just posted on threads. So, and again, when I clicked on it, it went to the Instagram app, which was the weirdest thing. and then you see the notification in Instagram

in your actual notifications feed. So they are used, they're starting to leverage and it's happening, but of course, this is a thing. This is why I'm not counting threads out. I, and to me the biggest mistake they made was coming out so strong, 100, and we've talked about this a number of times, 100 million users in like 10 minutes or whatever it was.

You know, I think they came out so strong when in reality to me they should have taken this approach is just get some critical mass of people on there, but then just you always knew this is where it was going to go, starting to leverage Facebook, Blue, Instagram, to start to route people back to threads without them even really realizing it. But it's starting.

So now we're going to see the real, I feel like, weight of the meta machine in action right now. All right, should we just skip to Metaverse legs and cover some of the regulation stuff next week? I think that's the move. It's Labor Day weekend. We'll come to the more media. stuff next week. But let's end with a fun story. Okay. So legs are finally coming to the

metaverse. This is from upload VR. Meta avatars are finally having legs in the Quest Home with the version 57 update on the public test channel. The company's virtual avatars have faced widespread ridicule on social media and in tech media for their upper body only appearance. But that's ending. Started working on legs in September. last year. And in October, it announced they are coming soon. And I've seen the mockups. Legs are coming to the metaverse. This is what the metaverse needed to revive its long, languishing, troubled run ever since Facebook changed its name to meta. Would you not agree, Ron John? I think the metaverse is back Q3, 2023. It's all going to be about the meta. Forget about

gena i it's about the metaverse again so let's put our web three in as well legs are legs are here metaverse is back like that legs are the new nfts is what i've been saying all along and there have been doubters that have been in my mentions talking about how legs are not even nfts and they've been wrong and so i'm going to hold and they what are they going to walk on in the metaverse if they don't believe that legs are going to be the thing that brings us back i don't know know i'd like to see them try i'm excited i'm saying hey i i was not optimistic earlier about the state of san francisco or some of the other stories that we covered today but this makes me very optimistic about the state of the world today legs in the metaverse yeah i mean i think that

we should really it should be a celebration you know there should be you could really this labor day just call it leg day i mean call it leg day look to the people inside meta who've been working hard on these legs thing uh this legs thing you know i got to say the public has given you a tough time and your hard work uh will not be forgotten so thank you for bringing we recognize you we see you think to market you know we have a comment here on lincoln you can't stand without legs but you also can't you can stand without legs in the metaverse but uh i just i think that that's part of the nuance that's been left out of this conversation. Are we ready for a holiday weekend? I think we are. I think we are. John,

great speaking with you as always. All right. See you next week. I think it's time for the weekend right now. Let's go out. Everybody who's observing Labor Day weekend, have a great weekend. For those around the world that are listening to us, we hope you have some good R&R. We're going to come back next weekend or next, yeah, next Friday. You know, back, reach, charge, ready as ever. We're going talk about regulation then and uh we have sridar ramaswami coming on to talk about um google's generative ai initiatives he used to run ads there and then he built a competing uh search engine neva which he then sold to snowflake that's coming up next wednesday and uh you know we will we will be walking on over to the recording studio with our fresh new metaverse legs and we hope to

meet you there thanks again for listening thank you uh to everyone who's helped with the show and we'll See you next time on Big Technology Podcasts.