Morning Brew Daily - The Billion $$$ NCAA Shakeup & Zoom Says Remote Work is Dead

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

Episode 119: Neal and Toby are back from the weekend and are breaking down the college conference realignment that is costing millions in television deals. Plus, remote work is officially dead as Zoom wants workers to return to office. 'X' is once again making headlines commandeering account handles and Mark Zuckerberg has his doubts on whether the platform can handle the stream of a cage match against Elon Musk. Also, the winners of the weekend and why Hank Green says we have been Geoengineering on purpose. And finally the guys share what we are watching for this week. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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pwc.com slash U.S. slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brewaI. Good morning Brew Daily show. I'm Neil Freyman. And I'm Toby Howell. On today's pod, why the St. Your Daddy's Big Ten or Big 12 or SEC or

PAC 12 or really any college football conference. And Simone Biles returned to gymnastics competition after two years off. We'll let you know whether the uneven bars are like riding a bike. Then everyone pour one out for remote work because Zoom has officially recalled its employees back

to the office. Plus, has humanity accidentally been geoengineering Atlantic sea temperatures for decades? Stay tuned to find out. It's Monday, August 7th. Let's ride. All right, Toby, two major news events from the weekend. One is the U.S. Women's National Team got booted from the World Cup by Sweeted on penalties. Just a heartbreaker. I had to throw out all my IKEA furniture. It was brutal. We lost by a literal millimeter. Big win for goal line technology, I guess, because that penalty was so close to the line. On the other side of the coin, though, your sister got engaged. My sister did get engaged and it went super smoothly. So congrats to Hannah and Jordan. Super smoothly, except for one thing, location data from Find My iPhone almost spoiled it because the whole premise was

he got her out to a hike to meet our cousins. My sister checked the location of my cousins. They were not at the hike and she's like, what's going on here? So location data, man. It makes surprises in the era of having everyone's location a lot harder. I know, that's why everyone needs just an Android. Get rid of fun on my iPhone. I know they have a... I cannot believe you turn my sister's engagement into an Android plug. It has to stop at some point, but congrats, Hannah and Jordan.

All right, congrats. Let's move on to our first story. So over the past few days, it has become crystal clear that college football is going to be split into a handful of super conferences comprised of essentially minor league NFL teams and then everyone else. So on Friday, Oregon and Washington, two founding members of the PAC-12 conference accepted an invitation to join the Big Ten. Hours later, three other Pac-12 teams defected to the Big 12, leaving the 108-year-old Pac-12 on its deathbed with just four remaining teams. So after all these changes take place by next season, the once Midwestern-focused Big Ten will have 18 teams spanning coast to coast.

Geography just is not a thing anymore in college football. So college football fans, I don't have to tell you why you should care about this. You might have just had your favorite backyard rivalry blown up by conference realignment. Your teams away games might now require a five-hour flight instead of a two-hour road trip you've taken for decades with people in your freshman year dorm. Non-college football fans, you're probably wondering why this is a big deal. Well, I'd argue it shows how money, specifically TV money, is causing seismic transformations in this supposedly amateur sport. The reason Oregon left its West Coast Conference to play games in New Jersey isn't because it was tired of beating up on Cal. It's because the Big Ten has a multi-billion dollar TV deal that pays its members far more than the PAC 12 will.

So in the end, money trumps everything else. We can get into the details of all this. But Toby, what are your initial thoughts? I just think that the consequences of this go way beyond football because football is a revenue-generating sport for most athletic programs. and that money trickles down to fund the rest of the athletic teams. And so take Stanford, for instance, who has won the Directors Cup, which is given to the school that does the best across all of college athletics. They won it 26 times since 1994.

But if the Pack 12 blows up, then maybe that money stops filtering down. Stanford, which funds a bunch of sports, over 32D1 sports, they might lose that. And so those repercussions on especially West Coast colleges, Maybe we just won't have those secondary non-revenue generating sports anymore. Stuff like soccer, like water polo, across the country, just any other sport, basically. So I do think that the TV money shakes down and it might just like totally change how athletics are approached on the youth level all the way up to college. Right.

And Stanford has a big history of sending athletes to the Olympics. Right. Yeah. It truly, once you start looking, it influences so many parts of athletics in the world right now. And Stanford is one of the four remaining teams in this dying Pact 12. But I want to talk about the TV money. So the Big Ten and the SEC, which are considered these two super conferences that are growing. I mean, the Big Ten is 18 teams now.

The SEC has 16 teams after Texlitz and Oklahoma are coming over. They all have multi-billion dollar TV deals that they just inked, like in the past few years. The SEC signed a $3 billion deal with Disney starting next year for 10 years. And then the Big Ten went ballistic and signed a $7.5 billion deal with NBC, CBS, and Fox worth up to $7.5 billion over seven years. And they distribute this money to all of their member schools. So if I'm in the PAC 12 or in a minor conference and I'm looking at what's happening in the Big Ten, I see that $7.5 billion deal.

And I'm like, well, I got to get on the action because I want to build a new facility for my football players. But then you also put yourself in the seats of an executive at Fox or ESPN. You're looking at declining cable viewership numbers. You're looking at declining interest, basically, in live sports. And you sign these giant, giant TV deals. So you're like, how can we make the product better? You get all the best teams to just come to your conference. Then you don't have to shout out money to distribute, like, the PAC 12, for instance.

You just bring all the PAC 12 teams under your existing umbrella. It was a great, great win for the podcast. because you have been, I mean, this has been happening across the sports industry is people have been trying to create these super leagues that kind of obliterate geography. I mean, college football has been regional and geographic based forever. And that's what's kind of led to its magic. You know, you have a Michigan person, a Michigan fan living next to an Ohio state fan. And, you know, that leads to that rivalry because of just the proximity. But, you know, we saw this happen in the Super League in soccer. where they're just like, all right, you're from, let's pluck the two best teams from Spain, the two best teams from Italy, the two best teams from England, and we'll just have them all compete in a league and forget about the fact that where they're from, that blew up. But you kind of under the radar were like, I think people would like this to see the best teams

competing against each other. It is a good, you do lose the regional aspect, which I think is the soul of just like a lot of athletics. But yeah, I mean, it would be pretty sweet to just have the best teams playing the best teams at all point at every game of the season. So we'll see. I don't know. It's definitely a sad time for college football, but also excited. Money just trumps everything. And this happened when I was at Maryland. We were in the ACC. We had this amazing rivalry with Duke. I mean, Duke would not say it was a rivalry because they would just beat up on us the whole time. But we went to the Big Ten and started playing like Nebraska and Indiana people in Penn State, like people we had no real reason to play against. And it's just the way the world works, unfortunately. Truly. All right, Neil, let's move on. There's two stories that came out this week.

that I want to talk to you about. The first one is that Zoom, the company that became synonymous with work from home during the pandemic just asked its employees to return to the office. So anyone who lives within 50 miles of a Zoom office must now work there at least two days a week with leadership saying that a structured hybrid approach is the best way forward for the company. The second story is that Google, who already began bringing most employees back to the office three times a week last year, is offering an on-campus hotel with super-cheap rates to lure more remote workers back to the office. So employees can now book a room at an on-campus hotel for $99 a night, which Google hopes will make it easier for Googlers to transition to the hybrid workplace.

Neil, the pros and cons of work from home have been debated ad nauseam. But, boy, hearing that Zoom is calling people back to the office, that's a tough look for a record. And end of an error for sure. Most articles were like, RIP remote work 20, 20 to 20, 23. when Zoom, which has a video conferencing technology, doesn't believe fully in full remote work, then you kind of just can see the writing on the wall a little bit. Yeah, and I mean, the writing on the wall is all over Zoom as a company

and its stock performance. It's shed $100 billion in market cap since it's 6x during the pandemic. That might have been a little bit of a speculative 6x during the pandemic. But, yeah, I mean, even Zoom is saying that hybrid flexibility is still super, important though to workers. Forty-three percent of workers said that they believe flexible work is not a perk but a basic expectation. So this is coming from a Zoom survey that Zoom did. So it looks like they're kind of trying to switch their marketing over to hybrid is still the way forward. That seems like what most big tech companies are opting to a couple days of week and a couple

days of week at work, a couple days of week a week in remotely because you're not going to get your the workforce you want if you go fully in person. You're just not going to get the best candidates because people now expect that they're going to be able to spend two or three days at home, which is crazy, but that is the expectation now. So if you're trying to recruit talent, you have to offer at least a few days a week at home. Yeah. Okay, wait. So I want to talk about the $99 hotel a little bit. So it comes out to around $3,000 a month, which is expensive, but also it's in California, so it's not that expensive. What are your thoughts? I'm doing it.

You would do it. Of course. I mean, it's not just $3,000 a month. It's all of the things that come with a hotel. Exactly. You got a gym. You got someone making your bed in the morning. Opportunity for room service.

Also, I think, you know, I didn't confirm this, but I think you get all of your meals, too. So it seems like just in a luxurious existence. Yes, it is at the behest of your employer. And you're kind of selling your soul to Google a little bit. But when you just look at your suite of options, I mean, have you looked at Zillow in Silicon Valley? Like, you get a little box for, you have to pay a million. for a little box. So I am doing this. Yeah, I'm glad you factored. And yeah, the making of the bed, also the utilities are all paid for. Right. So $3,000 all in, not a bad deal whatsoever. So let's go do

it. Let's go move out there. All right, Neil, let's move on. We have a little X rated roundup from the weekend. Well, it's a PG rated roundup about X. Elon's social media company. Sorry, I read that wrong. Up first is that Elon posted over the weekend that his cage fight with Mark Zucker is still on and will be live streamed for charity on X. But then Zuck fired back saying that they should use a more reliable platform and that he's not holding his breath that the fight will happen because Elon won't confirm a date. That little barb from Zuck was posted on Threads, which has been trying to clean its act up in recent weeks,

trying to graduate from a flash-in-the-pan success to a more fully fleshed-out social app. On that note, Zuck announced that threads will soon have searched and web functions in the next few weeks, but no talk around DMs just yet. So, Neil, of course, we had to talk about the cage match update, but let's reopen the discussion around the trajectories of these two rival apps. X is trying to become the Everything app, Threads is trying to beef itself up. Who do you think is in a better spot right now? Well, can I just talk about, can we talk about the fight?

Yeah, absolutely. Let's do it. We talk about the fight. I think that Musk is digging himself a deep hole here by continuing to post about it. This is Zuckerberg's turf. Zuck is an MMA fighter. is Elon doing? Just like you are 30, this is game two, you're down

zero, you know, you're down one zero, you're on the road, it's a seven game series, and you're down 30. Put in your bench, just give up and go back home to your to your home turf where you feel more comfortable because Elon's now, he's going to back out of this. There's no way he's doing this

because there's this report that we read just before we started recording this podcast is that he, Elon said he's getting an MRI because he got injured himself sumo wrestling. So he's just finding every single excuse to weasel out of this. This is all bluster. I think he should focus, like, okay, back to the business stuff.

He should focus on just beefing up X or Twitter, whatever it is, and demolishing Zuck in that arena because I think it's possible he can because I don't know if Threads has a staying power. I mean, it lost 82% of its users as only 8 million monthly active users at the end of July. And I don't know if Zuck's rolling out features enough to get people to go over from Twitter. I mean, specifically me, I went on threads for the first two to three days, and I barely go on since. There's very strong network effects on X and Twitter, and I think Elon should just maybe focus on that and building out X. Yeah.

And I also, yeah. I want to talk, though, about like the live streaming component, too, because Twitter, when it was Twitter, tried live streaming so many times. Like, it bought Periscope. Well, it bought Miracat, which turned into Periscope. But then they shut that down in 2021 because it was just hard to maintain. but it's always made sense to me conceptually. Like, Twitter is where you go to talk about breaking news, to talk about it's the global town hall.

So why shouldn't there also be live stream video of whenever breaking news is happening? But it's been just very hard to make work. So I wonder if this is like Elon teasing that live streaming is about to become a part of X again and their plans to be like this everything app. Video is tough. I mean, have you heard about Tucker Carlson show

since it went to Twitter? Yeah, that's true. I mean, there was that first step. episode, a couple episodes where he, you know, kind of blew up, but it hasn't made Twitter or X, I don't even know what to call it. Yeah. It hasn't made itself sort of a video destination, uh, despite many attempts at it. Yeah. And then just one final thing about X's path to becoming everything app. Elon stole someone's handle again. This time is the handle for at music. You know how remember he stole the, the handle of the user who had at X. Yeah. And so they, they stole the handle of

at music. And then they also posted a picture of Ed Shearer. holding his X, which was his album title, it goes by multiply, but it looks like the shape X. So I do wonder if this is also him kind of teasing that music is going to become a bigger portion of the Everything app. So I feel like this guy thinks like so far more ahead than he does. But I do think, again, he wants to become an everything app. So I think these are his two ways of maybe teasing that these are two directions that they're going to start reinvesting in again.

I could be reading way too far into it. Yeah, that was, oh my God, you're like, all right, now they're going to live streaming, they're doing music. I think he just wants to be an asshole and take the music handle away from a guy who built it up for 16 years. I know. And I had accumulated almost a half a million followers. But they interviewed the guy, and he was like, yeah, I'm pissed, but I'm still like an Elon fanboy. I'm investor in Tesla. Like, I put down a deposit for the cyber truck.

And he's like, I think this is emblematic, though, of why threads is going to have such a lot of trouble. Hang on. because the guy who freaking got his handles stolen by Musk says he's a software developer. He's like the software developer community is active on Twitter to this day. So for that reason alone, it's still the most interesting social that I have. Yeah, even the guy who got kind of messed up by Elon and says, I'm staying. So I hope Elon doesn't want the at Toby Doey Howell handle anytime soon. All right, Neil, before we jump in the next story, we're going to take a quick break.

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so I get to go first. And my winner is Simone Biles, because who doesn't love a good comeback story? Rewind to the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, and Biles, the most decorated U.S. gymnasts ever, shocked the world when she stopped competing over a mental block known as the Twisties. Well, Biles took off competing for two years, but she came back. this weekend at the U.S. Classic outside of Chicago, and it was electric. The crowd was going nuts. Biles said she was extremely nervous, but she ended up winning the all-around by a mile. After the competition, Biles said it just made my heart melt that the crowd still believes in me, and I got back out there and I did what I was training, so I'm very happy with the result.

It was a great result, and with her score, she qualified for the next tournament, the big U.S. championships in San Jose later this month. It was really cool to see her back in action, and you're just amazed every time whenever I see Simone Bile highlights. I'm like, that is not we're not the same species because she's doing crazy stuff. I also love that one of the notes from the competition when she pulled off at least one of the skills

that bears her name. She has four. Yeah, she pulled off just one of them in the competition. And I think that is just the ultimate flex in anything in life where like this is so difficult truly only you can do this. So like you get the the accolades of having it being named after

you. I went that caught my eye too. I went to deep dive around the Yerchenko double vault, which apparently only men do and Biles did and landed in this particular competition really well. So it's, it will be named after her once she makes it, once she completes the, uh, whatever it's called the, uh, the vault or the vault. Yeah. When she does the vault, when she does this particular move in the world championships or the Olympics, you have to do it at a major global competition. Oh, I see. So once you land it in, in a big competition, then they name it after you. So the Yerchenko Double Vault will soon be named after Biles if she does that at the World Championship.

Oh, is this like an unwritten rule or is this like a written rule? It's an unwritten rule. I was looking it up. There was nothing super formal about it and no one could say exactly why they name something after you. But basically, if you nail something at a big competition, they'll name it after you. Okay, cool. So I want the let's ride to be named after me. That's my-O-Bet's ride.

That's my big competition. All right, Neil, my winner of the weekend is someone who made a little history. and that is Greta Gerwig, who just broke the record for the biggest box office hall for a female director ever passing Wonder Woman's Patty Jenkins. Of course, Greta Gerwig

is the director of Barbie. In just three weeks, the Barbie movie has brought in over $1 billion in global ticket sales. That's a faster pace than any movie in Warner Bros. History, including any of the Harry Potter movies.

Interestingly enough, well, interestingly enough, Neil, there are actually three movies co-directed by female directors who have a bigger box office tally, and I want to do a little quiz here. Can you name them? No. Wait. So these are co-directed by female directors. Two of them are animated, which I don't think you will get.

I have no clue. I have no clue. The first one is Frozen, $1.3 billion, and Frozen 2, which brought in $1.45 billion, both co-directed by Jennifer Lee. And then Captain Marvel actually brought in $1.1.1 billion, which is co-directed by Anna Bowden. So kind of crazy, though, that Barbie's already reached this stage. Over $1 million. People are seeing it twice.

Yeah. People are, a lot of people are seeing it twice. But I'll tell you what the $1 billion means. We're getting a sequel. Oh, my gosh. It's the MCU, right? They're getting a sequel. You don't just make a $1 billion movie and the studio is like, all right, well, I think we'll move on from that.

Yeah. You have to do a sequel with $1 billion. Yeah. at least I hope we're not getting an Oppenheimer sequel either. That's done 500 million, so I guess it's... I don't think there's another nuclear bomb to talk about. Luckily. All right, Neil, for our next story, I read this crazy thing over the weekend and went into

a bit of a rabbit hole, so I want to share it with you and Morning Brew Daily listeners. So there's been this viral graph going around for most of the summer, showing Atlantic ocean surface temperatures, shattering records, and spiking way above historical norms. Well, Hank Green, the famous YouTube educator, TikToker, and brother to John Green, posted this thread over the weekend with a potential explanation for the high temperatures. This thread posits that we have been accidentally geoengineering our oceans via the shipping industry. Ships have historically used really dirty fuels like oil with a bunch of sulfur in it to keep the gears of capitalism turning across the globe. In doing so, the ships produce a bunch of sulfur dioxide, which, um, unlike carbon dioxide is actually really good at cooling down a small portion of the planet for a short

period of time by creating these big fluffy white clouds that help reflect the sun's rays. But recently, the UN passed regulations that cut down on those dirty fuels in the shipping industry. And as a result, sulfur dioxide emissions have also dropped. Yay, cleaner air, right? But also less clouds and hotter oceans. So this is one of those crazy connected dots moments for me, but it also opened up the geoengineering debate again, which kind of scares me and some scientists a little bit. The geoengineering

debate is let's make clouds, let's fire salt or other aerosols into the air and create clouds to reflect the sunlight back into the atmosphere so it cools the earth very similar to what a volcano does. Right. And so the

shipping industry has been kind of doing that for decades until 2020, and there was this natural experiment where they took away the sulfur, and it led to some dramatic warming of the ocean that still has to be kind of verified by science, but there's a strong hypothesis that this is the case. Yeah, I mean, according to a study that was published in Science Magazine, they also found that shipping tracks, which are the tracks left by ships going through the ocean, they fell by more than 50% in main shipping corridors after these regulations were passed.

So it's been like really effective these regulations. And I also thought this was an interesting angle of the study is that they've been using AI to determine just how many ship tracks we've been creating over history. And they found that we've been producing 10 times more ship tracks and previously identified. Great use case for AI, by the way, because these ship tracks are super linear and you can very easy to track. So I guess a big shout out to AI in this study as well. Yeah. So geoengineering has been super controversial. There's a lot of folks who say we shouldn't even touch it because of so many potential side effects,

and we don't know what it's going to do, just to like make clouds and stuff. And it's going to distract. It's not going to take away any carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So it's going to distract from the real problem. Then there's the other camp who's a minority, but growing vocally, especially after this, is saying, like, look, we're going to end up doing this because it's getting really hot. And governments are going to say, we have to do something really quick. So we might as well study whatever.

it is now and learn more about it. So when we have to do it because inevitably we will because we don't want to die. And China's been at it for years though. They've been a huge proponent of cloud seeding technology. They've done it ahead of major events to make sure it doesn't rain or it does rain or to like help with pollution. So people are experimenting with it mostly in China and I guess we're going to see more of it. If you want a sci-fi depiction, read Neil Stevenson's book Termination Shock. Yes. Or Snowpiercer. Snowpiercer, the movie, Bong Joon, Incredible movie. Go watch that. All right, we have to go to our week ahead.

It's a pretty busy week on the economic calendar, given that it's also the dog days of summer. Disney earnings will be appointment viewing for anyone interested in its plans for ESPN. It's fight with Ron DeSantis, its thoughts on its, you know, empty-ish amusement parks this summer. So that is the top earnings report that you should watch out for this week. We also have Lyft, UPS, Lucid, Roblox, and AMC reporting. I'm excited to see AMC, see a

Barbenheimer, it affected the bottom line, and then also Lyft, too. Like, is it even going to be a company anymore? Uber's just been eating its lunch. Right. Uber posted its first profitable quarter, last quarter, for the first time ever. There's also inflation data. The consumer price index drops on

Thursday. It's expected to show that inflation further cooled in July, which is great news for interest rate hikes. If you don't want to see more interest rate hikes, that's exactly what you want. We also have the mega millions jackpot on tomorrow night? Yeah, tomorrow. And it's $1.55 billion after no one's won it for, you know, more than a dozen drawings.

Oh, man. It's the third largest lottery prize in U.S. history. Give us the numbers. I've never bought a ticket more, but, and definitely I'm going lump sum, by the way. Okay, fair. We also have Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is flying its first private customers to space on Thursday. So there's a new entrant into this space tourism industry. Haven't heard much out of Blue Origin.

Yeah, I know. I think they had a bad, they had like a little bit of a mishap. No one was on board, but they messed up. He's just mad. He didn't get invited to any billionaire cage fights recently. Bezos is like, I've been training. I've been training for years. Bezos seems to me a lot more compelling than must suck.

So I hope must get like taps, like just does a little tap in her Bezos. And then finally, the Women's World Cup continues. It wraps up the knockout round and begins the quarterfinals on Friday, obviously without Team USA. Who's your sleeper pick going in? I kind of want Nigeria to do well. They're super fun to watch. They're playing England.

So it might be a tough ass, but Nigeria is my sleep. You know who's killing it is Japan? Yeah. Oh, they're scoring so many goals. Yeah, they're great. I mean, always been a powerhouse. Really? Yeah.

Yeah. They beat us. All right, we have to wrap it up there. Hope everyone has a great Monday. If you want to write in and let us know your thoughts and whether we should make clouds to reflect sunlight, our email is Morningbrewdaily at Morningbrew.com. And I expect some extremely well-thought-out essays here.

Emily Milliron is our editor and producer. Samantha Vellis and Raymond Lou are associate producers. Euchenawa Ogu is our technical director. Billy Minino is on audio. Hair and makeup left for the Big Ten. They are really approaching everyone. Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of Morning Brew.

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