The Billion $$$ NCAA Shakeup & Zoom Says Remote Work is Dead

0:28The best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong people. dot com slash mbd terms and conditions apply only on linkedin ads good morning brew daily show i'm neil freiman and i'm toby howell on today's pod why this ain't your daddy's big 10 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?

1:05Stay tuned to find out. It's Monday, August 7th. Let's ride.

1:14All 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.

1:54They 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. I know they have a, I cannot believe you turned my sister's engagement into an Android plug. It has to stop at some point, but congrats Hannah and Jordan. All right. Congrats. Um, 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.

2:29So 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 10 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.

3:06Your team's 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.

3:39So 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 director's cup which is given to the school that does the best across all of college athletics they've 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 32 d1 sports um they might lose that and so those repercussions on especially west coast uh colleges maybe we we just like won't have those secondary non-revenue generating sports anymore.

4:27Stuff like soccer, like water polo, lacrosse 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 Pac-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.

5:04I mean, the Big Ten has 18 teams now. The SEC has 16 teams after Texel and Oklahoma are coming over. They all have multibillion-dollar TV deals that they just inked 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 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.

5:50But then you're 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. Sure. 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.

6:30I 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 yeah but you kind of under the radar were like i think people would like this to see the best teams compete it is 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 it's just also exciting 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 yeah but we went to the big 10 and started playing like Nebraska and Indiana people and Penn State like people we had no real reason to play against.

7:42And 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 weekend 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.

8:23So employees can now book a room at an on-campus hotel for 99 bucks 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 remote work. End of an era, for sure. Most articles were like, RIP remote work 2020 to 2023. 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.

9:01It shed$100 billion in market cap since it 6X'd 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. 43 % 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 a week at work, a couple days a week in remotely because you're not going to get the workforce you want if you go fully in person.

9:48You'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.

10:20Exactly. 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 dollars for a little box. So I am doing this. Yeah. I'm glad you factored in. Yeah. The making of the bed.

10:50Also, the utilities are all paid for, too. 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 Zuckerberg 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.

11:27That 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 search 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?

11:58Well, can I just 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. What is Elon doing? Just like you are. 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 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 just 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.

12:42So he's just finding every single excuse to weasel out of this. This is all bluster. I think he should focus like, OK, back to the business stuff. He should focus on just beefing up X or Twitter or 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. It has 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.

13:17there'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 uh well it bought meerkat 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?

13:52But 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's show since it went to Twitter? Yeah, it's true. I mean, there was that first episode, a couple episodes where he kind of blew up, but it hasn't made Twitter or X, I don't even know what to call it. It hasn't made itself sort of a video destination despite many attempts at it. Yeah. And then just one final thing about X's path to becoming the Everything app.

14:26Elon stole someone's handle again. This time is the handle for AtMusic. You know how, remember, he stole the handle of the user who had AtX. Yeah. And so they stole the handle of At Music. And then they also posted a picture of Ed Sheeran 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.

15:05I could be reading way too far into it. Yeah. 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 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 an 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.

15:43He'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. I hope Elon doesn't want the at TobyDoy howl handle anytime soon. All right, Neil, before we jump into the next story, we're going to take a quick break.

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17:07All right, let's head to our winner of the weekend segment where we pick two people who treated the weekend like Alabama treats Middle Tennessee State. Okay, I won the pre-show ping pong match, 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. gymnast 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.

17:42The 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 US 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.

18:15I also love that one of the notes from the competition was she pulled off at least one of the skills that bears her name, which I guess for, 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, you get the, uh, the accolades of having it being named after you. I went that caught my eye too. I went to a deep dive around the Yurchenko 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.

18:49once she makes it, once she completes the, whatever it's called, 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 a big competition, then they name it after you. So the Yurchenko double vault will soon be named after Biles if she does that at the world championship. Oh, is it, is this like an unwritten rule or is this like a, like a written rule? It's an unwritten rule. I was looking it up. There was nothing, super formal about it and no one can say exactly why they named 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 obi let's ride that's my big competition all right now 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.

19:45Of 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 two so these are co-directed by female directors two of them are animated which i don't think you'll get i have no clue i honestly have no clue the first one is frozen 1.3 billion and frozen 2 which brought in 1.45 billion uh billion dollars both co-directed by jennifer lee and then captain marvel actually brought in 1.1 billion which is co-directed by anna boden so kind of crazy though that barbie's already reached this this uh stage over people are seeing it twice yeah people are a lot of people are seeing it twice but i'll tell you what the one billion dollars means we're getting a sequel oh my god it's the mcu right they're getting a sequel you don't just make a one billion dollar 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 one 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.

21:15All 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.

21:50Ships 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 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.

22:28So 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 uh magazine they also found that shipping uh shipping tracks which are the tracks left by ships going through the ocean they fell by more than 50 percent in main shipping corridors after these regulations were passed.

23:28So 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 than 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.

24:03And we don't know what it's going to do just 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 what it is now and learn more about it. So when we have to do it, because inevitably we will, because we all don't, we don't want to die.

24:34And 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 Neal Stephenson's book Termination Shock or Snowpiercer. Snowpiercer, the movie Bong Joon-ho. 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.

25:07Disney earnings will be appointment viewing for anyone interested in its plans for ESPN, its fight with Ron DeSantis, its thoughts on its 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 if Barbenheimer 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.

25:39The 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 night. 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 before. 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.

26:16So 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-Zuck seems to me a lot more compelling than Musk-Zuck. So I hope Musk does a little tap into 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.