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

0:00Disney 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. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge, and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. advanced intuitive and deployed that's how they stack that's technology at capital one the truth is ai security is identity security an ai agent isn't just a piece of code it's a first-class citizen in your digital ecosystem and it needs to be treated like one that's why okta is taking the lead to secure these ai agents the key to unlocking this new layer of protection and identity security fabric organizations need a unified comprehensive approach that protects every identity, human or machine, with consistent policies and oversight.

1:08Don't wait for a security incident to realize your AI agents are a massive blind spot. Learn how Okta's identity security fabric can help you secure the next generation of identities, including your AI agents. Visit Okta.com. That's O-K-T-A dot com. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We are here ahead of a Labor Day weekend. We're in September. I can't believe summer's over. Ranjan Roy is here with us as always. Welcome, Ranjan. Summer's over, but lots of news still, even in this last week. Lots of news.

1:45And 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 I'm really stoked for the next few months because we have a lot of great stuff coming towards you and uh 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 podcast.

2:26I love it. The number one beach lesson of people around the world. If you, 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.

2:56But today, on Friday, it hit a 10-year low. And Josh Brown, CNBC contributor and CEO of Ritoh'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 a doubt, it is a great company. It's entertained and delighted billions of people around the world and employed millions of men and women for the last 100 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.

3:32None 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 low today, basically dead money for the last decade, and underperformed the S &P 500 over the last three, to me is 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 ubiquitous.

4:14I 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$13.99 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.

4:55dollars. 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 bucks, it's$11 billion in four years, you think you're probably not hiding anything, but apparently there's even more. With certain shows, what would happen is even if the show was 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.

5:39So, 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, 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.

6:15So 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 ago. Yeah, I think, and again, 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, 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 the stock is underperforming and you're not making it work.

6:57And I think it's a sign that 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 scale on subscribers, lose money upfront, but overall, the marginal cost of every additional subscriber on a digital service is 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.

7:34And 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 gonna 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 it? 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 does it just shutter some of its legacy entertainment businesses completely?

8:09I mean, what do you think happens here? Yeah, I think focus. If 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'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.

8:49Does 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 through the 80s, 90s and NBC and all these things.

9:29You 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 quite 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.

10:17I 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 as a Disney, when we're asking, 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 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 ronjan 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 uh 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.

11:56Sorry, Disney. You can get into the poop song market on Alexa as well. It must drive Bob Iger nuts to realize that his margin is going to poop songs on the Echo and waves crashing into the beach podcasts on Spotify. Sorry, Bob. Hey, look, if you can make that work, it's a good business. It's also kind of interesting. There are all these debates of 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 is the message.

12:37And there you go. I mean, sort of like a case in point example. So, Ranjan, 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.

13:14During the call, you can even speak privately with a Google chatbot 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 an 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 if 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 i got this one this is 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.

14:16Like people, 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 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.

14:56And every question after was about this one feature. And you could 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 worked in a hybrid or distributed environment knows that 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 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.

15:39So 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 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.

16:27So 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 and the other person sent their duet AI that I would take a little personally. Exactly so first of all I think some of these 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 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 on your behalf oh so so but what they said was and the this what this actually came up it was to ask questions what it actually does is you at you preset the questions that you want asked on your behalf.

17:39So 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 prompts, 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 are 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.

18:18You have to earn that ability. You have to show up and actually ask that question yourself. You can't just send an AI bot to go ask you questions. 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 can agree with you. I'm calling for meeting reform. I agree with you on meeting reform. I think this is maybe a band-aid over the bigger questions organizations need to have. Here's a great comment. We're also live on LinkedIn, folks.

18:51We 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, 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 in what billions of people are doing like in the next coming months.

19:22And 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?

19:59Because 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 ChatGPT, or I've talked about Code Interpreter on here from OpenAI, like there's so many of these tools 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's assigned with taking notes becomes less engaged than other people because they're more focused on taking notes.

20:40Like 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, yet selling this vision of, is it hybrid? Is it distributed? Whatever it is, 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.

21:31Now, 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 and 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.

22:08And 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 vacancies that are going to really cause a 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.

22:55But 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.

23:39I 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. I don't know what it's. I mean, housing could definitely be something that you could build in those spaces yeah so that but then it gets tough it's 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 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.

24:37But 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 75%. 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?

25:20Yeah. 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, but actually, you might as well. Yeah, we were both part of that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. No, but it was not, it did not come out of nowhere. Like there was a strong governmental policy oriented effort.

25:57I 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, 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 Technion out on Roosevelt Island.

26:36And we just took a field trip out there this week. It was very cool. Very cool to see that in action. And by the way, speaking of, you know, speaking of, you know, the future of tech and real estate, you were just in San Francisco. What did the city feel like to you? And did you did you get a chance to hop in a self-driving car? I did not get a chance and I wanted to. So, OK, 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 Cruise, that's that's the I think it's 9 p.m. now. Cruise has that time bound. I think that will eventually go away. but Waymo is all day long except for the fact that it's extremely limited.

27:14Yeah, so for both of them, I tried to get – none were available whenever I tried. I had a bunch of conference things and dinners and stuff like that, but I tried a few times again and I just couldn't get it. But I saw them around and, yeah, on that side, I was very hopeful to try to join the self-driving revolution there but uh was not able to um you saw the cars over 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 part like walking away from the moscow center a couple of blocks in different directions things definitely were getting a little depressing.

28:06But 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 Podcast, joined by Ranjan 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 forthcoming Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk book, and plenty of other social media stories, including, yes, the metaverse. There's finally legs in the metaverse. Back right after this. These days, it feels like every dollar should be working a little harder, but figuring out where to put your cash can be confusing.

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