The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► I will say, and I mean this with genuine sincerity, one of the ways that I have

00:00:05 ◼   ► grown as a person from early adulthood to where I am now is I'm more open minded

00:00:10 ◼   ► about everybody and anything, you know? And if you,

00:00:13 ◼   ► if you like dressing up in a Chewbacca costume,

00:00:16 ◼   ► Oh yeah, no, like I have friends who are Disney fans, like to be clear,

00:00:19 ◼   ► like I, I'm not, I'm being somewhat pejorative,

00:00:22 ◼   ► but I'm actually like, I don't really judge it that much. Right?

00:00:24 ◼   ► Like I think everybody could go too far on things, but I live in live and let live.

00:00:29 ◼   ► Right? Like, yeah, I have fun. We only live once. And exactly, exactly.

00:00:33 ◼   ► I'm just, I'm just saying I'm a fan, but I'm not like that hardcore level,

00:00:36 ◼   ► but I know people who are and I appreciate them and I consider many of them like

00:00:41 ◼   ► my friends. But yes, I'm a Disney fan.

00:00:43 ◼   ► I also think like many things in life being any measure of fan of Disney,

00:00:48 ◼   ► it's one of those things where crazy Disney fans is the definition is anybody

00:00:54 ◼   ► who's into it more than you. That's, that's true.

00:00:58 ◼   ► So there's lots of people out there who've never,

00:01:00 ◼   ► who don't like going to Disney parks at all.

00:01:02 ◼   ► Oh, right. And they would consider us crazy Disney fans.

00:01:06 ◼   ► 100%. I just, you know, like I, I've, because I've covered, I, you know,

00:01:10 ◼   ► I've covered them professionally and I've done stuff like personally,

00:01:13 ◼   ► and I know people who are really into it and I'm like, wow, that's incredible.

00:01:17 ◼   ► Like I do not have that. Like I'm, I may be, and we'll talk about this,

00:01:21 ◼   ► I think we're going to talk about it more later. Like Taylor Swift,

00:01:23 ◼   ► I'm borderline right. But like, but Disney not really there,

00:01:27 ◼   ► but I do appreciate the company. And then this is such a nerdy thing about me,

00:01:32 ◼   ► but I love like business dynasties and,

00:01:36 ◼   ► and reading like the rise and fall and rise again of those things.

00:01:40 ◼   ► And Disney as a company other than Apple, I think is,

00:01:44 ◼   ► is one of the few companies that has had like a,

00:01:48 ◼   ► a genuine kind of resurgence after the founder who was so

00:01:53 ◼   ► emblematic of the company, you know, left or passed on.

00:01:57 ◼   ► And that to me as like a business story, like, so I'm a fan of the,

00:02:01 ◼   ► the products, I'm a fan of the brands, I'm a fan of the franchises,

00:02:04 ◼   ► but I'm also a fan of just like the history,

00:02:07 ◼   ► the history of the company is just fascinating.

00:02:09 ◼   ► I think I don't write about Disney much just because I've got others, you know,

00:02:13 ◼   ► I've got so much else to write about, but yeah. And I guess my intro,

00:02:18 ◼   ► yeah, it's not like my,

00:02:20 ◼   ► I've I've often told the story where when I started writing Daring Fireball,

00:02:23 ◼   ► I was like, I knew I had to have a blog and I knew I needed,

00:02:25 ◼   ► you need some kind of main beat. And it was tough for me to choose between

00:02:30 ◼   ► Apple slash tech and politics. And I, you know, I think,

00:02:33 ◼   ► I think the last 20 years have shown I probably made the right choice.

00:02:36 ◼   ► I think so, but Disney wasn't on the list. I don't like them that much,

00:02:40 ◼   ► but I do as an Apple fan, obsessive and a Disney fan,

00:02:45 ◼   ► the parallels between the companies are fascinating to me.

00:02:48 ◼   ► I wrote to a friend the other day that effectively to me,

00:02:51 ◼   ► they're in the same business.

00:02:52 ◼   ► They're both in the business of what I would call making the best things

00:02:57 ◼   ► in areas where best is always subjective,

00:03:02 ◼   ► but best is maybe pricey,

00:03:06 ◼   ► but it is attainable. Yes. That's, and to me,

00:03:10 ◼   ► anything Disney or Apple does should fit that definition. So for example,

00:03:14 ◼   ► what is the best car in the world? Well, right now,

00:03:18 ◼   ► I would say it's something probably something like a Maybach or a Rolls

00:03:22 ◼   ► Royce or, or if you're going for speed, you know,

00:03:26 ◼   ► like some kind of crazy Lamborghini or, you know,

00:03:29 ◼   ► $300,000 Porsche or something like that.

00:03:32 ◼   ► There's lots of areas where the best is, is super unattainable. Right. It is,

00:03:37 ◼   ► it is a crazy, but what is the best phone you can buy today?

00:03:41 ◼   ► It is iPhone four, iPhone 14 pro, right? That's it. And, and you, you know,

00:03:46 ◼   ► anybody with a thousand dollars can, can get one it's, you know,

00:03:50 ◼   ► they're all over the place and what's the best vacation that a family can

00:03:54 ◼   ► take. Absolutely.

00:03:56 ◼   ► And it's Disney and you can spend a ridiculous amount of money there,

00:04:00 ◼   ► but you can also be,

00:04:02 ◼   ► have a very similar experience and not spend that much. Right? Like,

00:04:07 ◼   ► I grew up going to Disney. So my father,

00:04:09 ◼   ► my grandfather used to do a lot of work in Orlando.

00:04:13 ◼   ► And so I spent a lot of the summers because my dad would be there a lot.

00:04:17 ◼   ► So we spent a lot of the summers in Orlando and would go to the parks a lot.

00:04:22 ◼   ► And I didn't realize, you know,

00:04:24 ◼   ► how lucky I was and how unique that was to be that way.

00:04:28 ◼   ► Like as a little kid until I was much older. Right. And, but,

00:04:33 ◼   ► but it is, you know, I've been to all the parks and in the old days,

00:04:36 ◼   ► I do think like in the nineties,

00:04:38 ◼   ► I think that universal studios Florida was a fantastic park and it had some

00:04:43 ◼   ► great rides. And for people like me who are really into movies,

00:04:46 ◼   ► it had some really, really unique and cool things,

00:04:49 ◼   ► but the overall best experience, how they treat you, how, you know, what,

00:04:53 ◼   ► what the, what the whole end to end experience is like,

00:04:56 ◼   ► like Disney has it nailed, you know,

00:04:58 ◼   ► whether you're doing it in California or Florida or Paris,

00:05:02 ◼   ► I haven't been to the ones in Asia, you know, but like that's it going on.

00:05:06 ◼   ► Their cruises, you know,

00:05:08 ◼   ► I've never been on their cruises because I don't want to go on a family cruise

00:05:12 ◼   ► with kids. I'm not, I'm not a parent. If they had an adults only,

00:05:16 ◼   ► if they had an adults only Disney cruise,

00:05:17 ◼   ► which would cost significantly more than other cruises, I would be so into that.

00:05:21 ◼   ► We have,

00:05:23 ◼   ► we have done the Disney cruises multiple times ranging from when Jonas was

00:05:27 ◼   ► younger to older. And we had the,

00:05:31 ◼   ► Amy and I had the same thought where it's like, man,

00:05:34 ◼   ► and we've done Royal Caribbean cruises with like my extended family,

00:05:37 ◼   ► my parents and my sister and her kid, you know, it's,

00:05:40 ◼   ► it has a fine cruise line too, but way less kids friendly.

00:05:43 ◼   ► Although I think all the show, I think Disney success is leading all of the other

00:05:47 ◼   ► cruise lines to put more. I think that 20 years ago,

00:05:51 ◼   ► the cruise lines typically, not that they discouraged kids,

00:05:56 ◼   ► but they didn't. It was an afterthought. It was an afterthought.

00:05:59 ◼   ► It wasn't part of it wasn't, they didn't realize that, Oh,

00:06:02 ◼   ► we can actually make this as part of the selling point.

00:06:05 ◼   ► You know,

00:06:05 ◼   ► there's a pool up on the top deck and there's always kids screaming in the pool.

00:06:10 ◼   ► And other than that, they're like, I don't know.

00:06:12 ◼   ► And now it's like, you, you gotta have game.

00:06:14 ◼   ► But Amy and I had the same thought about the Disney cruise where it's like,

00:06:17 ◼   ► man, we would, I would do this after, you know,

00:06:19 ◼   ► Jonas is out of the house except only if, you know,

00:06:23 ◼   ► there was a version without the kids it's, you know, but that's what it's for.

00:06:25 ◼   ► It's, you know, they know, they know, they know exactly what it's for.

00:06:28 ◼   ► I just, but the idea, and you mentioned the similarities to having a,

00:06:33 ◼   ► defining founder, right? Iconic, iconic,

00:06:38 ◼   ► iconic founder. And it's interesting to me to observe Disney,

00:06:43 ◼   ► but now we, here we are 10 or I guess 11 years after Steve Jobs is, is dead.

00:06:48 ◼   ► It is interesting to compare.

00:06:52 ◼   ► And that's the other thing that to me is fascinating about Disney as a company is

00:06:56 ◼   ► there's the initial,

00:06:57 ◼   ► how do they survive the passing of this iconic founder who sort of was the

00:07:01 ◼   ► guiding,

00:07:01 ◼   ► the guiding force, the chief product officer, that everything came from him,

00:07:05 ◼   ► right? Like, right. And they were all,

00:07:07 ◼   ► it was all Walt even, even in the company was named after him. Right.

00:07:11 ◼   ► Like even more than Apple in some ways.

00:07:13 ◼   ► I can't think of a company that up to that point was, I mean, the low pay,

00:07:18 ◼   ► maybe Ford, but like.

00:07:19 ◼   ► The logo is in his handwriting.

00:07:21 ◼   ► I mean, exactly. You know, like every bit of the company,

00:07:24 ◼   ► everything they did was, was his.

00:07:27 ◼   ► Yeah. Ford's a good example too, though. But, but the interesting thing is,

00:07:31 ◼   ► is fascinating is to see a company maintain its core

00:07:35 ◼   ► character over decades. Yes. And

00:07:39 ◼   ► I guess we should get to the news eventually, but it is interesting though,

00:07:43 ◼   ► to me in broad strokes,

00:07:45 ◼   ► Disney post Walt coasted for a while. Yeah.

00:07:50 ◼   ► It's struggled. It struggled hardcore.

00:07:53 ◼   ► James B. Stewart wrote the definitive book, I think on it, Disney war, which,

00:07:58 ◼   ► which is mostly about kind of the, the, you know,

00:08:02 ◼   ► rise and fall of Michael Eisner and the succession of Bob Iger,

00:08:06 ◼   ► who we'll talk about,

00:08:07 ◼   ► but it also goes into just that this was a company that was on the ropes that

00:08:12 ◼   ► very nearly in the seventies,

00:08:13 ◼   ► like if you look up until Jeffrey Katzenberg who Michael Eisner then kicked out

00:08:17 ◼   ► of the company, you know, like saved it with, with the animation studios.

00:08:21 ◼   ► If you look up into that point, like their core things,

00:08:24 ◼   ► they were really struggling and a lot of levels. Yeah. And that's my childhood,

00:08:29 ◼   ► right? My childhood is the seventies and the early eighties.

00:08:32 ◼   ► And in hindsight, looking at it, it's, it just,

00:08:37 ◼   ► you just Disney was Disney when I was a kid, they were just, it's, you know,

00:08:41 ◼   ► like the federal government and, you know, the shape of the globe and the,

00:08:46 ◼   ► you know, the,

00:08:47 ◼   ► it's just a thing that was there and it was never going to go anywhere.

00:08:51 ◼   ► But in hindsight, clearly, I mean, it's like the,

00:08:53 ◼   ► the conventional wisdom that Disney's movie quality went in a tank

00:08:58 ◼   ► after Walt died. It's absolutely true. It's 100% true. Right.

00:09:02 ◼   ► You look at it in hindsight where you really look at like, which,

00:09:05 ◼   ► which movies from the Disney's vaunted vault do kids today still want to

00:09:10 ◼   ► watch? None, none of them were from like the seventies.

00:09:14 ◼   ► And the animation quality was even bad. Right. It was,

00:09:19 ◼   ► they were cutting costs cause they, you know, they, they were struggling,

00:09:21 ◼   ► you know, the, the the Orlando project is what they call Disney world

00:09:26 ◼   ► was an enormous expense and, and, and Walt died before it was finished.

00:09:31 ◼   ► But that was a big gamble and obviously it's, it's paid off and then some,

00:09:35 ◼   ► but that was an enormous expense. And Roy Disney,

00:09:37 ◼   ► I think that he died not that long after Walt and, and it was,

00:09:42 ◼   ► it was a struggle, you know, but, but that's the interesting thing.

00:09:45 ◼   ► The brand,

00:09:46 ◼   ► I think probably for people probably didn't dissipate that much,

00:09:50 ◼   ► even if the quality dipped and even if the profits weren't there, you know,

00:09:53 ◼   ► as a kid, you're saying like, you still knew Disney was Disney.

00:09:56 ◼   ► And partially because of those iconic early years, right.

00:10:00 ◼   ► Then that, that stuff never went away.

00:10:02 ◼   ► And then I grew up like little mermaid like that. So, you know, when,

00:10:07 ◼   ► when the Renaissance happened, and so it,

00:10:10 ◼   ► it was interesting for me kind of realizing, Oh,

00:10:13 ◼   ► just a decade earlier, things were completely different. But yeah,

00:10:18 ◼   ► I just looked it up. Walt Disney world opened October, 1971,

00:10:22 ◼   ► Roy Disney died December 20, 1971.

00:10:26 ◼   ► So he barely made it to see the end of it, but you're right.

00:10:29 ◼   ► I think it's extremely, I think, you know, I mean, again, I mean, and again,

00:10:34 ◼   ► much, I know Walt was, I think he was in his sixties when he died, but you know,

00:10:38 ◼   ► he was certainly too young. Right. And he was going to keep going.

00:10:42 ◼   ► And so there's another similarity to Steve jobs,

00:10:45 ◼   ► not quite as tragically young, but it really is incorrect to me,

00:10:48 ◼   ► incredibly fortunate to Disney that he was there to spearhead the Walt Disney

00:10:53 ◼   ► world project, which is insane. I mean, and there's another, and,

00:10:57 ◼   ► and they only had, I think there really only was one shot at it, you know,

00:11:00 ◼   ► yeah, there really was. And we're gonna, we're gonna buy thousands,

00:11:05 ◼   ► our millions, I don't know, millions of acres of swamp,

00:11:08 ◼   ► swamp land in Florida. And in a part that nobody was there,

00:11:13 ◼   ► like nobody was doing anything there. Part of the reason my, my,

00:11:16 ◼   ► my grandfather, my dad were there in,

00:11:18 ◼   ► in the late eighties was doing some sort of, you know,

00:11:22 ◼   ► real estate development stuff. Even then, even, you know, at that point,

00:11:26 ◼   ► 20 years post, you know, the opening, it was not a soup. Like there was,

00:11:31 ◼   ► there was still a lot of room to do more types of development,

00:11:35 ◼   ► but the,

00:11:36 ◼   ► the amount of money that that unleashed into that area by buying land in

00:11:42 ◼   ► one of what on paper would be one of the worst investments you could make.

00:11:46 ◼   ► You know, I read Neil,

00:11:50 ◼   ► I'll put this in the show notes, Neil Gabler's, Walt Disney,

00:11:53 ◼   ► the triumph of the American imagination.

00:11:56 ◼   ► It's a biography from 2007 and it's one of my favorite

00:12:00 ◼   ► biographies I've ever read because it, it, it was thick,

00:12:04 ◼   ► it seemed comprehensive,

00:12:06 ◼   ► but it kept moving and it didn't dwell on the stuff that I wasn't as interested

00:12:10 ◼   ► in. But it, the, the coverage of the, the,

00:12:13 ◼   ► the Walt Disney world in Orlando project was just, it's just,

00:12:18 ◼   ► it really made it seem how crazy it was and how half of the people were like,

00:12:22 ◼   ► yeah, this is a great idea because the whole,

00:12:24 ◼   ► the big problem with Disneyland is we don't have anywhere near enough land and

00:12:28 ◼   ► right across the street, there's like a Denny's and you know, uh,

00:12:31 ◼   ► now people are putting up holiday inns and stuff right across the street and we

00:12:34 ◼   ► don't have any control over this. Where else can we,

00:12:37 ◼   ► what can we do that would be different?

00:12:39 ◼   ► And instead of getting like a little more land, it was like,

00:12:41 ◼   ► why don't we buy a County, you know, size area.

00:12:44 ◼   ► Essentially why don't we do it? And, and, and that,

00:12:48 ◼   ► that is almost exactly like what they've.

00:12:49 ◼   ► They almost put it in New Jersey or I don't know about almost,

00:12:54 ◼   ► but they were seriously thinking about New Jersey.

00:12:56 ◼   ► Cause they were thinking about getting, you know, that,

00:12:57 ◼   ► that if Disneyland is for West coasters and let's do something on the

00:13:02 ◼   ► East coast, where are the people? Well, they're in the Northeast,

00:13:06 ◼   ► so we'll put it in New Jersey and then they're like, yeah,

00:13:08 ◼   ► but then we kind of have to close for, I don't know,

00:13:10 ◼   ► at least four months a year, maybe more in, you know,

00:13:13 ◼   ► for winter and what do you do? And then when this Florida thing came up,

00:13:17 ◼   ► they're like, well, but it's, it,

00:13:19 ◼   ► they just kept not being able to get past, but it's a frigging swamp.

00:13:23 ◼   ► It is just a swamp land. And it, again,

00:13:26 ◼   ► this is where Disney is very similar to Apple. It's a technology company,

00:13:31 ◼   ► you know, they call them imagineers and I know it's a cutesy name,

00:13:34 ◼   ► but they are frigging genius level engineers.

00:13:38 ◼   ► 100%. The robotics work that they, that they did, that they've done, right.

00:13:42 ◼   ► And continue to.

00:13:43 ◼   ► And still do is, is absolutely mind blowing, you know,

00:13:46 ◼   ► and imagineers would be borrowed by all the studios for all kinds of different

00:13:51 ◼   ► projects. You know, I think George Lucas, you know, used them, Ridley Scott,

00:13:55 ◼   ► you know, Steven Spielberg for their, you know, projects,

00:13:58 ◼   ► even though if you look to the animation stuff, that's technology too,

00:14:01 ◼   ► even before they got it, you know, digitized, just the,

00:14:05 ◼   ► the way of creating like the assembly line and being able to get like

00:14:10 ◼   ► the, the way of, of, of doing what they did at scale in the thirties,

00:14:15 ◼   ► you know, and in the forties and fifties is stunning.

00:14:19 ◼   ► Every aspect of the parks is incredibly engineered, like not just the,

00:14:24 ◼   ► the imagineers who are doing all of the rides and the things like that,

00:14:28 ◼   ► but even like the layout and the architecture and, and figuring out, you know,

00:14:33 ◼   ► the logistics of, of handling the crowds. And I mean, it's, it's stunning.

00:14:38 ◼   ► The basic story that, as I recall from the book, I don't remember his name.

00:14:41 ◼   ► I don't need to look it up, but I, I swear I recommend the book tremendously,

00:14:44 ◼   ► but basically they, they found a guy who had been in the Navy, I believe.

00:14:48 ◼   ► He was like, he might've been even an admiral,

00:14:50 ◼   ► but he had been a major force in post world war two,

00:14:54 ◼   ► like reconstruction of Europe and Japan, you know,

00:14:58 ◼   ► like the Marshall plan and all this like mass, mass scale, uh,

00:15:03 ◼   ► civil engineering and brought him in and hired him. And he was like,

00:15:07 ◼   ► we could, you know, we could do this. We can,

00:15:09 ◼   ► we can fill in this land and redirect the water and, you know, and, uh,

00:15:14 ◼   ► obviously he was right. You know, it's, it's just an amazing act of civil engineering,

00:15:18 ◼   ► but, you know,

00:15:21 ◼   ► basically Disney went through a,

00:15:24 ◼   ► a furtive period, is furtive the right word? I don't know,

00:15:27 ◼   ► but a bad period after Walt, where they lost sight of quality, you know,

00:15:31 ◼   ► like I said,

00:15:32 ◼   ► their job is to make the best and their stuff wasn't the best anymore.

00:15:35 ◼   ► And they were coasting on reputation and that's the, that's,

00:15:38 ◼   ► it's exactly like the Hemingway quote about going bankrupt, where you, you're,

00:15:42 ◼   ► you're, you go slowly at first and then all at once and then all at once.

00:15:46 ◼   ► And it's like Disney was losing cache amongst kids and

00:15:51 ◼   ► pop culture mind share slowly.

00:15:54 ◼   ► And then it was eventually it would happen all at once. And then like you said,

00:15:58 ◼   ► Katzenberg came in and Eisner, I guess, you know, helped, you know,

00:16:03 ◼   ► at least gave him the authority and they started making movies that were,

00:16:07 ◼   ► you know, like Academy award-nominated beauty and the beast was not, you know,

00:16:12 ◼   ► very first animated film ever nominated for an Oscar only one actually,

00:16:16 ◼   ► because in 2001, they introduced the animated Oscar.

00:16:19 ◼   ► Don't even get me started on that. Right. What a, what a disgrace,

00:16:25 ◼   ► what a, what a terrible way to, a movie is a movie. You know what I mean?

00:16:29 ◼   ► I agree. I agree. I agree. And, and it is, it's one of those things, like,

00:16:33 ◼   ► they've, they've talked about introducing like, like almost like the populist

00:16:36 ◼   ► Oscar, you know, to try to like raise awareness.

00:16:39 ◼   ► And I feel the same way about that. It's like, no, a movie is a movie.

00:16:43 ◼   ► It's either the best and sometimes the best films of the year as judged by the

00:16:47 ◼   ► Academy and other people does align with box office. Sometimes it doesn't.

00:16:52 ◼   ► But yeah, I totally agree with that. Although I do, I do have to say,

00:16:56 ◼   ► I do love that the first winner of that Oscar was Shrek,

00:17:00 ◼   ► which a was a better film than monsters, Inc. And B.

00:17:03 ◼   ► I'm going to have to disagree on that.

00:17:05 ◼   ► I think it's better. I love monsters, Inc. I think monsters, Inc. Has more heart.

00:17:09 ◼   ► I think Shrek is both from its animation that it used.

00:17:13 ◼   ► And I think for me, I love the, I love the fuck you-ness of it.

00:17:18 ◼   ► I love the fact that, that, you know, I love the Katzenberg made it as such a,

00:17:24 ◼   ► a, a, a rebuke meant on, on, on Disney. And I do,

00:17:28 ◼   ► I do love that bit, you know, I, I, you know,

00:17:31 ◼   ► it's like a Larry Bird and magic Johnson coming into the NBA at the same

00:17:36 ◼   ► time type thing, where here the first year there are two,

00:17:40 ◼   ► two movies that clearly hold up decades later and

00:17:43 ◼   ► 100%. And I actually, it's interesting. I think that if I watching it now,

00:17:47 ◼   ► in some ways I think I maybe have more fondness for monsters, Inc.

00:17:51 ◼   ► But at the time I distinctly liked Shrek better. Right. So,

00:17:56 ◼   ► you know, it's a, it's a good argument, but, but anyway,

00:17:59 ◼   ► the quality was back and they re, you know,

00:18:01 ◼   ► got back into building parks and, and doing it right.

00:18:06 ◼   ► And, and anyway,

00:18:07 ◼   ► it's interesting to me because Disney has obviously been around much longer.

00:18:11 ◼   ► They lost their founder decades longer, but they're,

00:18:13 ◼   ► they are a guiding light for Apple going forward in the decades to come,

00:18:17 ◼   ► like in the post, you know,

00:18:19 ◼   ► we'll eventually get to the post Tim Cook era where how can a company,

00:18:22 ◼   ► can a company maintain that its soul or,

00:18:26 ◼   ► or is it inevitable that it's going to,

00:18:28 ◼   ► they're going to decline to mediocrity and, you know, it's an example.

00:18:31 ◼   ► I think it is. I mean, I think, and I think that comes to, to, to Bob Iger,

00:18:35 ◼   ► who who's now coming back, right. Because he, he, you know, it went, it went,

00:18:39 ◼   ► you know, Walt Roy, there were a couple of other people.

00:18:42 ◼   ► Then Michael Eisner really did save the company. He also lost his way,

00:18:47 ◼   ► but he really did make some incredibly important decisions.

00:18:51 ◼   ► And then I think that other than, than Tim Cook,

00:18:56 ◼   ► I don't know if, if there's anybody else on the list,

00:18:58 ◼   ► at least in like a recent history who you could look at and say in terms of a,

00:19:03 ◼   ► of a CEO who really transformed an already iconic company into taking it to

00:19:08 ◼   ► another level. I don't know if you could say that about anybody except for Bob.

00:19:12 ◼   ► All right. Before we go to the Eiger and the two Bob's, let's,

00:19:15 ◼   ► let's take a break. I'll thank our first sponsor of the show.

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00:21:45 ◼   ► So drama real, real life succession style drama,

00:21:50 ◼   ► Sunday night, 11 o'clock the news breaks at 11 o'clock.

00:21:56 ◼   ► It was so late. I was, I was so excited. I was like, Oh my God.

00:21:59 ◼   ► Bob Chapek, who was,

00:22:02 ◼   ► who was Bob Iker's hand selected successor and was just

00:22:07 ◼   ► given a three year extension four months ago from the Disney board is

00:22:12 ◼   ► out and effective immediately.

00:22:14 ◼   ► And it's like one of my friends who texted me about it right off the thing.

00:22:17 ◼   ► It was like,

00:22:17 ◼   ► you know it's bad when the phrase effective immediately is in the press release.

00:22:21 ◼   ► Yeah. Effective immediately. And then, and then in like the thing,

00:22:25 ◼   ► we thank him for his service and that's the only comment. And that's like,

00:22:28 ◼   ► that's the, you know,

00:22:29 ◼   ► it's bad too when like the only comment about the per about the person that they

00:22:33 ◼   ► kicked out is we thank them for their service.

00:22:35 ◼   ► When you're in corporate comms and the phrase effective immediately,

00:22:39 ◼   ► you know, you're in crisis mode and this is why you're,

00:22:42 ◼   ► you're earning the salary. You are exactly when you're writing the press release

00:22:47 ◼   ► for a planned announcement,

00:22:51 ◼   ► a movie or a set of headphones or whatever it is your company does and you're

00:22:55 ◼   ► writing it. Sure. You know, you want to do a good job writing it,

00:22:58 ◼   ► but when, when effective immediately comes out,

00:23:00 ◼   ► you're earning your keep Chapek's out Iger, who,

00:23:04 ◼   ► when he stepped down as CEO and handed the reins to his hand picked selector or

00:23:08 ◼   ► successor took the job as chairman of the board, but was I guess out, you know,

00:23:13 ◼   ► and I just re-watched his interview with Kara Swisher at the code conference a

00:23:18 ◼   ► couple of weeks ago.

00:23:19 ◼   ► That was the same conference where Kara interviewed Johnny Ive and Tim Cook and

00:23:23 ◼   ► Loreen Powell jobs. And it was really, it's really interesting in hindsight,

00:23:27 ◼   ► really, really in her. I also, I had never seen,

00:23:31 ◼   ► I've seen Iger in interviews before,

00:23:32 ◼   ► but I'd never seen him so relaxed before as he was with Kara.

00:23:35 ◼   ► And I think it speaks to her inordinate talent as an,

00:23:38 ◼   ► as an on-stage interviewer,

00:23:40 ◼   ► Iger's talks like an Apple executive by which I mean

00:23:45 ◼   ► in plain language. It it's,

00:23:48 ◼   ► it's not corporate speak. He,

00:23:50 ◼   ► he just talks and,

00:23:52 ◼   ► and he clearly understands what he's talking about. And if he,

00:23:56 ◼   ► if he doesn't understand something, he'll just say, I don't,

00:23:58 ◼   ► I don't understand that. Or if he doesn't want to say anything,

00:24:01 ◼   ► he just won't say anything. I forget the example.

00:24:04 ◼   ► It was like a question from the audience, but he, he didn't want to,

00:24:07 ◼   ► it was like, he didn't want to speak ill of Netflix. And so he's just like,

00:24:11 ◼   ► I don't want to talk about that.

00:24:12 ◼   ► No. And I've really reminded me of the way Apple executives speak.

00:24:18 ◼   ► Jay Peck does not speak like that.

00:24:19 ◼   ► No, no. Jay Peck. And again, like you keep mentioning like hand and pick successor,

00:24:25 ◼   ► which is an important thing to note for sure,

00:24:27 ◼   ► because I think Iger realized and some of the reporting and,

00:24:31 ◼   ► and puck news and the Ankler both had really, really good reporting on this.

00:24:35 ◼   ► I love both of those publications, but, uh, you know, I think you,

00:24:38 ◼   ► but I think it was Matthew Belloni at a, uh,

00:24:41 ◼   ► pug news who said basically realized like the second he picked him,

00:24:44 ◼   ► that it was the wrong choice, but yeah, the, the dichotomy between

00:24:49 ◼   ► how Bob shape back responds and would say things.

00:24:53 ◼   ► If anybody listened to that earnings call from a couple of weeks ago versus how

00:24:58 ◼   ► Iger does just so stark.

00:25:01 ◼   ► It's, you know, and you think about this, I know everybody out there. I,

00:25:05 ◼   ► I think most people who are listening to the show are like me. I don't, I,

00:25:08 ◼   ► you know, we're not, this is not an audience of investors,

00:25:13 ◼   ► but you know, every three months,

00:25:15 ◼   ► all the companies we follow have their annual quarterly reports.

00:25:18 ◼   ► And for the most part, they're pretty dry, you know,

00:25:22 ◼   ► and most of the companies that I'm most interested in,

00:25:26 ◼   ► in recent years, haven't had much drama quarter to quarter. Now,

00:25:31 ◼   ► now 20 years ago, Apple had lots of quarter to quarter drama,

00:25:34 ◼   ► and I pay much closer attention because small swings in

00:25:39 ◼   ► max sales in the, you know, around the turn of the century could

00:25:42 ◼   ► genuinely, you know, could occasionally drop Apple to a loss. You know,

00:25:48 ◼   ► it's hard to remember, but sometimes Apple didn't have a profit each quarter.

00:25:52 ◼   ► Apple's quarterly reports have been like clockwork in certainly throughout the

00:25:57 ◼   ► Tim Cook era. And in terms of just pure,

00:26:02 ◼   ► is this person a good CEO?

00:26:05 ◼   ► You could look at the consistency of the growth and the lack of

00:26:10 ◼   ► surprises in quarterly reports and without knowing anything about what business

00:26:14 ◼   ► Apple is in, anyone would say, well,

00:26:16 ◼   ► whoever is running this company is an excellent CEO. That's the thing.

00:26:20 ◼   ► Investors do not want surprises. It is like top,

00:26:24 ◼   ► you know, and I guess in the theory that they might be happy if the surprise

00:26:30 ◼   ► were, you know, twice as profitable as you thought, or twice the revenue,

00:26:35 ◼   ► but when the news is going to be like that, nobody tries to hide it.

00:26:40 ◼   ► So it doesn't,

00:26:41 ◼   ► it never comes out as a surprise because they're,

00:26:45 ◼   ► they're crowing about it.

00:26:46 ◼   ► Whereas the big thing with the quarterly report that Disney just had,

00:26:50 ◼   ► which clearly in hindsight, you don't have to know the inside gossip,

00:26:55 ◼   ► sunk JPEG was,

00:26:57 ◼   ► I think there was growing descent over throughout the summer within Disney's

00:27:00 ◼   ► ranks. I'm with you.

00:27:02 ◼   ► I've recently subscribed to puck news and really am enjoying it.

00:27:06 ◼   ► I am really enjoying the quality to quantity ratio at puck

00:27:10 ◼   ► news. There's, you know, it's,

00:27:13 ◼   ► it's really high degree of stuff that I'm interested in.

00:27:16 ◼   ► Matthew baloney stuff is great. Did I pronounce his name right?

00:27:19 ◼   ► I think so. I think it's baloney. Yeah. I think I said it wrong,

00:27:22 ◼   ► but it doesn't b-e-l-l-o-n-i.

00:27:25 ◼   ► So it sounds like the lunch meat, but it's, it's right.

00:27:29 ◼   ► But he's absolutely well-sourced terrifically sourced. But the,

00:27:32 ◼   ► the big thing that sunk him was the streaming thing,

00:27:34 ◼   ► which is that Disney lost what? One, one,

00:27:39 ◼   ► 1.5 billion. Yeah. Streaming on the quarter.

00:27:44 ◼   ► Yeah. And now they,

00:27:45 ◼   ► everybody knows that they've been losing money on streaming for years. Sure.

00:27:49 ◼   ► But JPEG had told investors that they were on pace to be profitable

00:27:54 ◼   ► by 2024, which isn't that far away.

00:27:58 ◼   ► No, it's not. No, it's not at all. And, and then to be,

00:28:02 ◼   ► to have the loss that great on,

00:28:05 ◼   ► on top of everything else and he sort of buried it,

00:28:09 ◼   ► like he was kind of talking about almost how great other things were and super

00:28:13 ◼   ► excited and like just the way that he, you know,

00:28:17 ◼   ► dropped that bomb was just completely incongruous with like what the tone should

00:28:22 ◼   ► be. Meanwhile, it's to your point,

00:28:25 ◼   ► investors don't like to be surprised. This is the sort of thing that traditionally,

00:28:30 ◼   ► if you know that this is not what people are expecting,

00:28:33 ◼   ► then you issue some sort of warning ahead of time,

00:28:36 ◼   ► similar to what Apple has been doing around iPhone sales because of some of the

00:28:40 ◼   ► various situations happening in China. You know, you,

00:28:44 ◼   ► you will issue a warning or, or kind of, you know,

00:28:46 ◼   ► maybe a correction on what, what your expectations for your earnings will be.

00:28:51 ◼   ► You typically don't just have this, this bomb thrown and then

00:28:55 ◼   ► have it like just be very laissez faire about it.

00:28:58 ◼   ► It's churn, you know,

00:29:01 ◼   ► is obviously a key concern in the streaming world.

00:29:04 ◼   ► That churn is the industry lingo for how many subscribers are you

00:29:09 ◼   ► losing and gaining and the way that, you know,

00:29:11 ◼   ► I'm sure almost everybody here listening has unsubscribed from

00:29:17 ◼   ► service A and subscribe to service B and,

00:29:21 ◼   ► Oh, no, it's a very common thing. I mean,

00:29:22 ◼   ► the cable business has been dealing with it for, for, for decades streaming,

00:29:27 ◼   ► especially Netflix had seemed to be somewhat immune because the amount of people

00:29:31 ◼   ► leaving was offset by the amount of people joining. Right. But,

00:29:35 ◼   ► but as we've seen, you know, with the,

00:29:37 ◼   ► with what Netflix has been going through for the last, you know, 10,

00:29:40 ◼   ► 11 months,

00:29:41 ◼   ► churn is, is a big concern in the streaming market. And it, you know, yeah,

00:29:47 ◼   ► I remember the, one of the first ones I, I,

00:29:49 ◼   ► I deliberately churned was paramount plus a couple of years ago when the first

00:29:54 ◼   ► season of Picard came out, I was a huge, I'm not a huge star Trek fan.

00:29:58 ◼   ► And I would say actually I've sort of gotten away from it over the decades,

00:30:02 ◼   ► but in the nineties, I was an enormous star Trek, the next generation fan,

00:30:05 ◼   ► surprise, you know,

00:30:07 ◼   ► I'm gen X and I'm I was into star Trek the next generation,

00:30:10 ◼   ► but it was a great show. It holds up it. It's, you know,

00:30:17 ◼   ► at arguably to me as iconic as the original series and the original cast,

00:30:21 ◼   ► that's how, I mean, and that's a tough thing to follow.

00:30:23 ◼   ► So I knew I wanted to watch the Picard. I had friends who had watched it,

00:30:27 ◼   ► but I waited until the whole series was out and I had friends whose opinions I

00:30:32 ◼   ► trusted, you got to watch it.

00:30:33 ◼   ► So I signed up knowing I was going to watch all 10 episodes of Picard and then

00:30:38 ◼   ► immediately unsubscribed. So it was sort of like,

00:30:40 ◼   ► I treated it like buying it on, on iTunes, you know,

00:30:45 ◼   ► like when you bought when the only way to stream quote unquote stream,

00:30:49 ◼   ► a TV show through Apple TV was to just buy the episodes, you know, and I did,

00:30:52 ◼   ► I got it.

00:30:53 ◼   ► And I looked around Paramount plus at the time and I was like,

00:30:56 ◼   ► there is literally nothing else here that I want to watch or that I don't get.

00:30:59 ◼   ► What, you didn't want to watch the real world homecoming and, and, and,

00:31:03 ◼   ► and the challenge all stars?

00:31:05 ◼   ► Well, we got my Amy watches some stuff like that, but we have,

00:31:09 ◼   ► we still have cable TV and we have TiVo. And so there was nothing, you know,

00:31:13 ◼   ► I could see the appeal of keeping it if you cut the cord,

00:31:16 ◼   ► but as a non cord cutter,

00:31:18 ◼   ► I'm, I'm, you know,

00:31:20 ◼   ► I'm making fun of myself here because of those are some of the things that I

00:31:23 ◼   ► watch in paramount plus that I pay for,

00:31:25 ◼   ► even though I should probably just cut it.

00:31:27 ◼   ► I pay for it now again because I feel like it's gotten better.

00:31:30 ◼   ► Although I was just looking around the other day and I was like, you know what,

00:31:33 ◼   ► I don't really see anything left here, but they've, they've had some movies.

00:31:36 ◼   ► I liked the offer, the gut, the, the story of the Godfather they've,

00:31:39 ◼   ► that was really good. That was really good. But back in the day,

00:31:42 ◼   ► I just remembered, I remember totally, I signed up for it just for Picard,

00:31:45 ◼   ► paid $10 for the month and then immediately when I was done.

00:31:49 ◼   ► Well, so it was back then. I think the first thing it was,

00:31:51 ◼   ► it wasn't a still like CBS insider or something.

00:31:53 ◼   ► Yeah, it was, it had a weird name.

00:31:55 ◼   ► It had a weird name. And at that point I refused on principle.

00:31:58 ◼   ► I did wind up subscribing when it became paramount plus cause they had some deal

00:32:02 ◼   ► where it was like $50 for the year or something. And then I've stayed with it.

00:32:05 ◼   ► But what I did,

00:32:07 ◼   ► which was dumber slash maybe better was that I, you know,

00:32:11 ◼   ► like used a VPN to try to log into my Amazon account to make it seem like I was

00:32:15 ◼   ► in the UK. And, and, and then by doing that, I,

00:32:20 ◼   ► I ended up messing some stuff up on my account. I fixed it, but it,

00:32:23 ◼   ► but it wound up being more trouble than it was worth.

00:32:25 ◼   ► One of those things that seemed really clever at first and then the longterm

00:32:29 ◼   ► implications of it were like, Oh God, it's like, it's like when you had,

00:32:33 ◼   ► we did this with Jonas with a few things when he was growing up,

00:32:35 ◼   ► like sign him up with a fake age so that he could do something that had a

00:32:40 ◼   ► higher, but then all of a sudden he's screwed up and he's got some account,

00:32:43 ◼   ► at some service that says he's much older than he is and there's no way to

00:32:46 ◼   ► change it. And it's like, ah, that was dumb. But anyway,

00:32:49 ◼   ► I bring up churn because that's obviously the,

00:32:52 ◼   ► it's the whole ball game in terms of revenue coming in, you know,

00:32:58 ◼   ► subscribers times the subscriber, whatever they pay equals your revenue.

00:33:02 ◼   ► That's predictable, right? It's like, so that to me,

00:33:06 ◼   ► it's inexcusable to have a surprise loss like this for streaming. Now,

00:33:10 ◼   ► how can this possibly be Ben Thompson explained this to me is that the way,

00:33:13 ◼   ► at least the way Disney does it, I don't know if the way everybody does it,

00:33:16 ◼   ► but the way they account for the money they spend producing

00:33:21 ◼   ► content is they only account for it when it hits the

00:33:26 ◼   ► service. And of course, all, all,

00:33:30 ◼   ► all this stuff, you know, the star Wars shows and, Oh, I mean,

00:33:33 ◼   ► everything but reality TV and even reality TV is produced months in advance.

00:33:38 ◼   ► You know, it's always surprises me when my wife's watching something and it's a

00:33:41 ◼   ► new episode, but they're, you know,

00:33:43 ◼   ► it's the middle of summer and they're wearing winter coats or vice versa,

00:33:46 ◼   ► but obviously movies, major movies,

00:33:48 ◼   ► the stuff that costs the most money takes the longest to produce.

00:33:51 ◼   ► And Chapex explanation was something, something COVID.

00:33:54 ◼   ► And would they wound up with a glut of content that all had to come out and be

00:33:59 ◼   ► accounted for this quarter. But they,

00:34:00 ◼   ► how in the world did they not know it three months ago?

00:34:03 ◼   ► I was going to say they did like, you, you know, when you're,

00:34:06 ◼   ► you know, your scheduling, your scheduling, you,

00:34:08 ◼   ► you usually are going to know that three months in advance and you're going to

00:34:10 ◼   ► know, especially, and that is interesting about the accounting.

00:34:13 ◼   ► I don't think most other streamers do that,

00:34:16 ◼   ► but that does make sense from an accounting perspective that Disney,

00:34:19 ◼   ► that that's why this would impact things so much that,

00:34:23 ◼   ► but you know, three months in advance, you know, you have a,

00:34:26 ◼   ► maybe not every aspect of your programming schedule,

00:34:28 ◼   ► but you have a decent enough understanding of what's going to be coming out.

00:34:32 ◼   ► So it's, it's not like all of a sudden,

00:34:36 ◼   ► 12 weeks ago, Lucasfilm sends an intern down the hallway,

00:34:40 ◼   ► Hey boss, Hey boss, and doors ready.

00:34:43 ◼   ► Right. You know, so, so, so to me, the only explanation would be, okay,

00:34:48 ◼   ► so you know, that you're going to be taking this hit for production,

00:34:52 ◼   ► that all those checks you wrote are finally going to be hitting your balance

00:34:55 ◼   ► sheet. So it's like, okay,

00:34:57 ◼   ► are you just hoping against hope that in this climate where,

00:35:01 ◼   ► you know,

00:35:02 ◼   ► the with inflation and everything else going on and people feeling uncertain

00:35:06 ◼   ► about 2020 and you know,

00:35:07 ◼   ► the continued competition amongst streamers that you're just going to have a

00:35:11 ◼   ► glut of even more signups.

00:35:13 ◼   ► Is that what you're just hoping against hope for that you're going to have so

00:35:16 ◼   ► many new signups that's just going to offset the content costs because

00:35:20 ◼   ► that's the only rationale I could see of not, you know,

00:35:24 ◼   ► noting that three months ago,

00:35:26 ◼   ► number one, there's no way it should have been a surprise. I it's inexplicable,

00:35:31 ◼   ► right? It had, it's like I said, it's not like,

00:35:32 ◼   ► it's not like Lucasfilm surprised them, Hey, Andor's ready or whatever else,

00:35:36 ◼   ► you know, was part of the quote unquote glut, but part B,

00:35:39 ◼   ► and I would say B is even more important.

00:35:42 ◼   ► This is the job of the CEO and the executive

00:35:47 ◼   ► suite where Bob cha, you know, what, you know, what does the CEO at Disney do?

00:35:51 ◼   ► He doesn't draw the cartoons. He doesn't engineer the,

00:35:55 ◼   ► the theme park attraction rides. He doesn't act, you know, you know,

00:36:00 ◼   ► we can make the exception that Walt Disney, you know,

00:36:02 ◼   ► another similarity between Apple and Disney was that Walt Disney hosted their

00:36:06 ◼   ► weekly TV show and Steve jobs famously hosted their keynotes and they did a good

00:36:11 ◼   ► job, but for the most part, they're not, you know, performers.

00:36:13 ◼   ► They're there to manage this stuff,

00:36:18 ◼   ► right? So like, Hey, and

00:36:19 ◼   ► something like COVID hits and it's a major unknown.

00:36:26 ◼   ► It is it every, you know, it,

00:36:28 ◼   ► one of the strange,

00:36:31 ◼   ► unique aspects of COVID is it affected every,

00:36:35 ◼   ► every industry. There's nothing. Yeah.

00:36:37 ◼   ► It's almost unimaginable to think of something that, that,

00:36:42 ◼   ► that is an industry that wasn't radically screeching

00:36:46 ◼   ► tires brought to a halt by COVID.

00:36:48 ◼   ► And so of course the production of live action dramas

00:36:53 ◼   ► was, you know, all halted.

00:36:55 ◼   ► And then after it began again,

00:36:59 ◼   ► had all of these other restrictions, you know, with masking and,

00:37:04 ◼   ► and not, I mean, masking is the least of it,

00:37:06 ◼   ► but all sorts of restrictions to keep people safe, you know, before, you know,

00:37:10 ◼   ► especially before the vaccinations were available, but you know,

00:37:13 ◼   ► even animated stuff because people, you know,

00:37:16 ◼   ► we're working in offices and now they have to work at home,

00:37:19 ◼   ► but they don't have the workstations that, you know,

00:37:21 ◼   ► they don't have the internet connections, right?

00:37:24 ◼   ► Like, you know, yeah.

00:37:27 ◼   ► Story meetings over zoom or WebEx or whatever the hell you're using

00:37:32 ◼   ► are not like a writer's room, you know,

00:37:35 ◼   ► they're you just can't create that dynamic and it's going to slow things down,

00:37:38 ◼   ► but that's the job that, you know, and the companies that have navigated,

00:37:44 ◼   ► you know, and there is no hall of fame for CEOs, but you know,

00:37:48 ◼   ► the ones who navigated COVID well, if there were like Tim Cook,

00:37:52 ◼   ► I think would be headed towards the, if there were a hall of fame,

00:37:55 ◼   ► he'd be headed there. And I think that the three things,

00:38:00 ◼   ► you know, who knows he's not done, so maybe there'd be something else,

00:38:03 ◼   ► but I would say the three things that he did was he probably in order,

00:38:07 ◼   ► kept the company going and the spirits and morale high after the passing of Steve

00:38:11 ◼   ► Jobs, without a hitch, he grew the company tremendously.

00:38:16 ◼   ► And three, he managed the company through COVID

00:38:22 ◼   ► seemingly without a hitch. I think that, you know,

00:38:25 ◼   ► we don't have time to get into it, but I think a lot of this,

00:38:29 ◼   ► I mentioned this a few episodes ago,

00:38:31 ◼   ► I sort of suspect the boring iPad pro updates this year are possibly a COVID

00:38:36 ◼   ► side effect that if not for COVID,

00:38:38 ◼   ► we might've had like a more significant redesign of that,

00:38:41 ◼   ► but still there are new, I, you know, but that's the management, right?

00:38:44 ◼   ► At some point like 18 months ago, or probably early in COVID,

00:38:48 ◼   ► they might've looked at the schedule and said, okay, first priority,

00:38:52 ◼   ► we got to keep the iPhones going. We're going to hit,

00:38:54 ◼   ► we want to hit these September or at least October dates with iPhone 12

00:38:59 ◼   ► and 13 and 14 going forward. What do we have to do to make that happen?

00:39:04 ◼   ► And then after that, we want to move the max to Apple Silicon.

00:39:07 ◼   ► What do we do? Which max in which order with which chips,

00:39:11 ◼   ► what do we need to do to do that? What do we need to do for iPad, you know,

00:39:15 ◼   ► and put these things in a priority and some of the things lower in the price,

00:39:19 ◼   ► but overall Apple has had a relatively normal,

00:39:24 ◼   ► you know, product update schedule, you know, maybe I really do suspect,

00:39:29 ◼   ► and they're not to type, you know,

00:39:30 ◼   ► that's part of Apple's culture is they're not going to leak behind the press and

00:39:33 ◼   ► say, oh yeah, we have, you know,

00:39:34 ◼   ► we were really hoping to do this whiz bang new design with iPad,

00:39:38 ◼   ► but we couldn't cause of COVID. They don't make excuses, but you know,

00:39:41 ◼   ► you look at it from the outside and it looks like they just sailed without a

00:39:44 ◼   ► hitch. But in the meantime, everything they make is made,

00:39:48 ◼   ► manufactured over in China or Vietnam or India or these

00:39:53 ◼   ► other places where you,

00:39:54 ◼   ► when you couldn't travel and famously a few years ago it was leaked by,

00:39:59 ◼   ► was it United Airlines?

00:40:00 ◼   ► It was United. United leaked it that they were their number one,

00:40:03 ◼   ► like a huge percentage of their business class flights to China from San

00:40:06 ◼   ► Francisco.

00:40:07 ◼   ► Yeah. They just had like a stint or probably still do now,

00:40:10 ◼   ► but they have like a standing order for 150 or 50 business class

00:40:15 ◼   ► seats every day from SFO to China every day.

00:40:19 ◼   ► Just think about that. It's just unbelievable.

00:40:22 ◼   ► It's a stunning amount of travel between Apple's California

00:40:27 ◼   ► employees in China for their normal. And obviously that all got shut down,

00:40:31 ◼   ► but they still kept coming out with products. That's the job of the CEO.

00:40:34 ◼   ► That's where you earn your keep. It's not like when everything,

00:40:37 ◼   ► when everything's going well,

00:40:39 ◼   ► your job as CEO is easy.

00:40:40 ◼   ► So Bob Chapek's job during COVID was to make sure they don't wind up with a

00:40:45 ◼   ► glut of content all in a one, three month period or something like that,

00:40:49 ◼   ► you know, to keep every,

00:40:50 ◼   ► to keep tabs on everything to reschedule things, to push things,

00:40:53 ◼   ► to pull things, to cut things, to cancel things.

00:40:55 ◼   ► It's that's his job. And so, yeah. And I think what you said about the way,

00:41:01 ◼   ► even the way it was presented in the call where it was just sort of an

00:41:06 ◼   ► afterthought really, really rubbed people the wrong way.

00:41:08 ◼   ► And then the other thing that's just bananas for a company as large

00:41:13 ◼   ► and ostensibly well run as Disney is then after the earnings call

00:41:18 ◼   ► the next week, they start talking about layoffs.

00:41:21 ◼   ► Yes. And he just puts it in a memo the way that he did it.

00:41:25 ◼   ► Like the HR people reportedly were, were not a made aware,

00:41:29 ◼   ► like they didn't know what was coming, you know.

00:41:32 ◼   ► The way that you would put in a memo that we're going to, you know, switch,

00:41:37 ◼   ► switch the key cards to NFC sensors.

00:41:39 ◼   ► So everybody's going to get a new key card next week to get the badge into the

00:41:43 ◼   ► buildings, you know, talk to your, if you don't get one by next Friday,

00:41:47 ◼   ► talk to your manager. And instead it's about layoffs. And it's like, well,

00:41:50 ◼   ► why in the world, if he knew it during earnings,

00:41:54 ◼   ► why wasn't it brought up before and discussed during earnings? Right.

00:41:57 ◼   ► Exactly. If you knew it and instead like it seems reactive,

00:42:02 ◼   ► whether it was or wasn't,

00:42:03 ◼   ► it seems reactive to the fact that the stock dropped precipitously after that

00:42:07 ◼   ► earnings report, both because, and again, this was things that, that, uh,

00:42:10 ◼   ► the Puck reported. And I think Ben Thompson made comments about this too,

00:42:13 ◼   ► you know, it was that it was, it wasn't the, it wasn't the earnings,

00:42:16 ◼   ► it was the way that was done and that the really made, I think the,

00:42:21 ◼   ► the drop that much more significant.

00:42:23 ◼   ► And then that made the layoffs seem reactive rather than something

00:42:28 ◼   ► that was actually thought out.

00:42:30 ◼   ► So they, you know, and I think as again,

00:42:35 ◼   ► it's outside my area of expertise,

00:42:38 ◼   ► but as somebody who somewhat follows the company closely and I think kind of

00:42:41 ◼   ► gets what they should be doing, I kind of think the board did the right thing.

00:42:44 ◼   ► And I think they completely did the right thing.

00:42:46 ◼   ► Yeah. And I think they're lucky that I,

00:42:48 ◼   ► I think they're lucky that Iger was willing to come back.

00:42:51 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah. I, I think they're lucky that he was willing to come back.

00:42:54 ◼   ► I also got the sense, you know, he delayed his retirement.

00:42:58 ◼   ► I think it was three times, it might've been four, but he kept putting it off.

00:43:01 ◼   ► He didn't want to leave. It was clear he never wanted to leave. Yes.

00:43:05 ◼   ► Chapek was his hand-picked successor. And yes,

00:43:08 ◼   ► it does appear that he kind of figured out from the minute he made that pick,

00:43:11 ◼   ► I made the wrong one. And, and yes, he'd done some fairly,

00:43:15 ◼   ► not great things to some of his other successors by kind of stringing them

00:43:18 ◼   ► along and whatnot,

00:43:19 ◼   ► which is not uncommon for people in these sorts of roles. Succession is hard.

00:43:24 ◼   ► That's why it makes such a great topic for such a great TV show.

00:43:28 ◼   ► But you know, he didn't want to leave. And,

00:43:31 ◼   ► and he had wanted to kind of step back in, you know,

00:43:35 ◼   ► because he left in February literally right as COVID was happening. And,

00:43:40 ◼   ► and he saw what was going to happen and was like, Oh, well,

00:43:43 ◼   ► we need all hands on deck. So I'm going to have a much stronger day-to-day role.

00:43:46 ◼   ► And Chapek understandably, wasn't really thrilled with that,

00:43:50 ◼   ► but then politically played that completely the wrong way. Right. And, and, and,

00:43:55 ◼   ► and, you know, I don't want to fault him too much for his response to that.

00:43:58 ◼   ► I will say, I don't think he was a good leader.

00:44:00 ◼   ► I don't think that he had a good understanding of the whole business.

00:44:03 ◼   ► He was the Parks guy is that had been his previous role.

00:44:06 ◼   ► He'd run consumer product before that.

00:44:08 ◼   ► I think he'd run home video or been a VP in home video before that.

00:44:12 ◼   ► But so he'd had a lot of experience at the company,

00:44:15 ◼   ► but he just never seemed like the guy certainly didn't have the

00:44:19 ◼   ► respect of people the way that Eiger did. And, and even though like Eiger was also,

00:44:24 ◼   ► uh, you know,

00:44:25 ◼   ► lifer just didn't seem to rally the troops the same way,

00:44:29 ◼   ► but you know,

00:44:31 ◼   ► Eiger wanted to come in and really kind of take back over as soon as COVID

00:44:35 ◼   ► hit and, and was sort of sidelined a little bit, which, you know,

00:44:39 ◼   ► I understand that you need to make those decisions.

00:44:41 ◼   ► You've just given somebody else the job,

00:44:42 ◼   ► but we probably would have been better for Disney if, if, and,

00:44:46 ◼   ► and the market, if you let the person that everyone knows, you know,

00:44:49 ◼   ► steer the ship out of the crisis, but he'd never wanted to leave.

00:44:53 ◼   ► And so I think that, uh, there were reports again in Puck that Matthew Baloney,

00:44:57 ◼   ► wrote last week. So this was three or four days before the,

00:45:02 ◼   ► the surprise Sunday call where Eiger had been kind of talking to

00:45:07 ◼   ► analysts kind of on the side and, and sort of, you know,

00:45:10 ◼   ► not publicly criticizing Chapek, but privately being like,

00:45:13 ◼   ► this is not the right way. Right. And, and so, you know,

00:45:18 ◼   ► I think he'd taken some jobs, he made it clear, he didn't really want to retire.

00:45:22 ◼   ► They're lucky that he never wanted to leave and he's willing to come back.

00:45:25 ◼   ► But I do wonder in my, in my mind,

00:45:28 ◼   ► I kind of wonder like how much of this was him seeing this as his opening and

00:45:32 ◼   ► reaching out and being like, look, I love this company.

00:45:36 ◼   ► This is going to be my legacy too. I will come back.

00:45:39 ◼   ► I think in a way that most people,

00:45:42 ◼   ► I think there are very few people who are truly great at their jobs.

00:45:45 ◼   ► If they don't love their jobs,

00:45:47 ◼   ► you kind of need to love it to be great at it. In my opinion. I mean, I'm,

00:45:51 ◼   ► there's always exceptions, but, and in a way that like the,

00:45:54 ◼   ► the truly greatest athletes want the ball at the end of the

00:45:59 ◼   ► game, you know,

00:46:00 ◼   ► Tom Brady would rather be down three with the ball than up three watching the

00:46:05 ◼   ► other team at the ball. He's like, ah, then I'll win it. You know,

00:46:08 ◼   ► LeBron James would rather be down one with the ball and have the shot ball in

00:46:12 ◼   ► his hands than to have his team up one and try to defend it. That's, and so,

00:46:18 ◼   ► a crisis like COVID is where someone who loves being the CEO and loves doing it.

00:46:22 ◼   ► It's like, oh my God, you could see it, you know, from the outside.

00:46:24 ◼   ► Iger was like, oh my God, this is, you know, I thought everything was.

00:46:28 ◼   ► I was built for this. I've seen this other stuff I've, I've already helped,

00:46:32 ◼   ► you know, sear the company through so many different things. Yeah. This,

00:46:36 ◼   ► this is my moment. Yeah. So, so we, you know,

00:46:38 ◼   ► we're a family that vacations at Disney and often, and you know,

00:46:42 ◼   ► obviously didn't during COVID and then we went back this year and in hindsight,

00:46:46 ◼   ► there are a couple of red flags and it's especially a red flag,

00:46:51 ◼   ► given that JPEG came from parks. So should know better,

00:46:56 ◼   ► but the whole idea of the parks should be that this is a great place to have a

00:47:01 ◼   ► vacation and you will have a great time and want to come back.

00:47:05 ◼   ► You know, it's, it's a repeat business business.

00:47:09 ◼   ► And in just about every way,

00:47:14 ◼   ► I mean, it was cool that the only parts that were better was the fact that they

00:47:18 ◼   ► had all sorts of new attractions that finished construction, you know,

00:47:22 ◼   ► like a lot of the star Wars stuff down in Florida,

00:47:24 ◼   ► like rise of the resistance wasn't there the last time.

00:47:26 ◼   ► I don't even think the millennium. Yeah.

00:47:28 ◼   ► I think the millennium Falcon thing was post COVID too. So that,

00:47:32 ◼   ► that was all fun for us and that's great, but that's,

00:47:35 ◼   ► that was all stuff that was set in motion.

00:47:36 ◼   ► But the experiential changes that they made were all for the

00:47:41 ◼   ► worse. I brought up on dithering in the episode that came out today, the,

00:47:45 ◼   ► the fast pass thing,

00:47:47 ◼   ► where it used to be relatively simple and everybody got the same thing where it

00:47:52 ◼   ► didn't matter. You know,

00:47:53 ◼   ► you just everybody paid for a regular admission and then you'd get a number of

00:47:56 ◼   ► things where you can go and,

00:47:57 ◼   ► and instead of waiting in line for two hours to ride it,

00:48:00 ◼   ► you'd get a pass to say,

00:48:02 ◼   ► come back at one and one 15 in the afternoon,

00:48:05 ◼   ► and then you'll go in a special line. That's real short.

00:48:08 ◼   ► And in the meantime, you can't get other fast passes,

00:48:12 ◼   ► but then you can do whatever else you want to do at the park.

00:48:15 ◼   ► You can go meet characters or go do other things or get in line for something

00:48:18 ◼   ► with a shorter queue and then come back at a time and go on this thing.

00:48:22 ◼   ► And it was supposed to make it. So you spend less time of your day in line and

00:48:26 ◼   ► the system, but then they don't have it anymore.

00:48:29 ◼   ► And now they have this new thing and it's got some crazy name and you have to

00:48:32 ◼   ► sign up for it and you have to pay more now the pay more part in and of itself.

00:48:37 ◼   ► I know that's what lots of people are complaining about. It's, but it's,

00:48:41 ◼   ► it's not, it's, it's inequality brought to life, right?

00:48:46 ◼   ► And that's the, that's the thing.

00:48:48 ◼   ► It's not Disney parks have always raised their prices. It's famously, you know,

00:48:53 ◼   ► it's very expensive to take a big family vacation there,

00:48:56 ◼   ► but once you're in everybody's the same, you know,

00:48:59 ◼   ► everybody is a park attendee and they switched to this system where you,

00:49:04 ◼   ► you can, you can't quite buy your way to the front of the line,

00:49:07 ◼   ► but you can buy your way to, to get to a shorter line more often.

00:49:10 ◼   ► But it involves this crazy system where you have to be on the,

00:49:14 ◼   ► on the phone app or get on the website at like seven in the

00:49:19 ◼   ► morning each day.

00:49:20 ◼   ► So, so it's, it was adding these tiers,

00:49:23 ◼   ► which is getting rid of kind of the everybody in the park is,

00:49:26 ◼   ► is the same mentality and then adding this other level of friction to

00:49:31 ◼   ► it. So even if you have the money and you're willing to do that,

00:49:34 ◼   ► you also have to jump through these other hoops, which just to me,

00:49:37 ◼   ► just makes a terrible experience. I've,

00:49:39 ◼   ► I'm planning a big trip to Disney with some of my girlfriends for February,

00:49:43 ◼   ► and they've never been to Orlando before.

00:49:47 ◼   ► One of the people going is from Los Angeles.

00:49:50 ◼   ► And so she's been to the Disneyland, you know, probably hundreds of times,

00:49:54 ◼   ► but she's never been to Disney world.

00:49:56 ◼   ► And I've been dreading this new process because it's going

00:50:02 ◼   ► to require so much additional work that frankly,

00:50:04 ◼   ► like I'm willing to pay as, as gross as I kind of find those things,

00:50:09 ◼   ► like I'll, I'll pay more,

00:50:11 ◼   ► but I don't want to also then have to be online at a certain

00:50:15 ◼   ► time in an app,

00:50:17 ◼   ► it sounds happening things.

00:50:19 ◼   ► It is as miserable as, as it sounds.

00:50:22 ◼   ► And it does that sound like part of a fun vacation where every day,

00:50:26 ◼   ► every day you go for,

00:50:27 ◼   ► let's say you go for six days and every morning at seven AM,

00:50:30 ◼   ► you have to do that. Well, if you sleep in or,

00:50:34 ◼   ► or forget and it's 15 minutes late,

00:50:37 ◼   ► you might miss the best rides and it could throw your whole day's plans into a,

00:50:41 ◼   ► into disarray because, Oh my God,

00:50:44 ◼   ► the whole point of today was we wanted to go on the star Wars ride, you know,

00:50:47 ◼   ► and, and even worse, you've now paid for this, right? Like that to me, like,

00:50:51 ◼   ► again, I don't have a massive problem with the paying thing. I think that

00:50:55 ◼   ► I don't like for, for things like this may be introducing to your systems and

00:51:00 ◼   ► whatnot, but this is the reality. Like you can actually,

00:51:03 ◼   ► they have a limited number of these things. When we take my nephew,

00:51:06 ◼   ► I will almost certainly be doing this because I'll be going with some older

00:51:10 ◼   ► people and a toddler and I will pay to get like the,

00:51:14 ◼   ► like you can pay a certain amount of money and have guides who will take you

00:51:19 ◼   ► through and you essentially get fast pass, or at least you did. I'm not sure.

00:51:22 ◼   ► Who knows? He might've changed that whole system, but it would be, you know,

00:51:25 ◼   ► a few thousand dollars and you have somebody who will for eight hours basically,

00:51:29 ◼   ► you know, take you like on an insider's tour basically and,

00:51:33 ◼   ► and get you through like, you know, you know,

00:51:35 ◼   ► basically kind of first in line and that kind of stuff and, and like, okay.

00:51:39 ◼   ► And those systems have existed for a long time and you know,

00:51:43 ◼   ► that's how celebrities and other like well off people do it. And again, like I,

00:51:47 ◼   ► if I'm going with a two year old and if I'm going with, you know,

00:51:50 ◼   ► some people in their seventies, I'm doing that. I'm just, I,

00:51:53 ◼   ► I don't have the personal patience to go through it the normal

00:51:58 ◼   ► way. But if you're paying more for these fast pass things now,

00:52:03 ◼   ► because they've got these tiers and you're having to then go through the

00:52:07 ◼   ► ridiculousness of being online at 7.00 AM, like that's then what it makes me

00:52:11 ◼   ► angry. I'm like, okay, it's, if you make me pay, that's one thing.

00:52:13 ◼   ► Or if you make me go through these hoops, that's another thing,

00:52:16 ◼   ► but you're making me pay and jump through the hoops.

00:52:18 ◼   ► And like this is supposed to be Disney.

00:52:20 ◼   ► It's supposed to be a better experience than that.

00:52:22 ◼   ► And there's other aspects of this whole thing that, yeah,

00:52:25 ◼   ► in addition to the 7.00 AM thing to get on the blockbuster tier one

00:52:29 ◼   ► attractions, there's other things that you can do throughout the day,

00:52:33 ◼   ► but it's like, you gotta dig out your phone, go to the app and do this stuff.

00:52:37 ◼   ► And my wife is certainly more so than me and my son, you know, is

00:52:42 ◼   ► not really, you know,

00:52:43 ◼   ► likes the idea of going on vacation and then not being on your phone. Right.

00:52:47 ◼   ► But I think I honestly, I think that should be the point of a Disney vacation.

00:52:51 ◼   ► If you're going to have so much fun that your, your whole family won't want to be

00:52:55 ◼   ► on their phones. And I can imagine that maybe it even is,

00:52:59 ◼   ► but I can imagine that that's the premise of a commercial, right? Like, Hey,

00:53:03 ◼   ► here's this family and everybody's on their phones all the time and they're not

00:53:06 ◼   ► talking to each other.

00:53:07 ◼   ► Come to Disney world and everybody will be having such a good time and

00:53:12 ◼   ► enjoying each other's company that nobody's even going to want to be on their

00:53:16 ◼   ► phones. But meanwhile, they've designed this system.

00:53:18 ◼   ► They designed the system so that you have to be,

00:53:20 ◼   ► and so that you have to be connected to it. And,

00:53:23 ◼   ► and so you're giving your attention away.

00:53:24 ◼   ► To me it's such a weird thing that the parks guy would do this because it feels

00:53:28 ◼   ► like the sort of thing that somebody who worked on the app would do because

00:53:32 ◼   ► they're trying to build engagement so they can show their numbers of, Oh,

00:53:35 ◼   ► look how many people use our app. You know, so we're going to,

00:53:37 ◼   ► we're going to engineer the experience so that you're forced to use the app.

00:53:40 ◼   ► But like that's, that's not the case.

00:53:42 ◼   ► It looks like,

00:53:43 ◼   ► it looks like something that came from looking at a spreadsheet that said,

00:53:46 ◼   ► look at all the money we'll make by charging people for this. And yes,

00:53:49 ◼   ► that looks so good as opposed to putting the experience first. Now here's the,

00:53:54 ◼   ► here's an example.

00:53:55 ◼   ► I brought this up with Amy last night after recording dithering and she had an

00:53:58 ◼   ► even better example. It's much more clear there.

00:54:01 ◼   ► There used to be a thing it was for years, all the years that we went to Disney.

00:54:05 ◼   ► So I don't know, it's at least,

00:54:06 ◼   ► it was at least 20 years ago when they started it or 15,

00:54:09 ◼   ► but they had a thing called magical express. And what it was was if you,

00:54:14 ◼   ► if you were staying in Orlando at one of the Disney resorts, any,

00:54:18 ◼   ► any of them, any of their resorts, not high end resorts, any of them,

00:54:22 ◼   ► you could give Disney your flight info.

00:54:26 ◼   ► And when you land at the Orlando airport,

00:54:30 ◼   ► you go downstairs and you, you know,

00:54:34 ◼   ► like to wear like the car rentals are and stuff like that. And at the end,

00:54:37 ◼   ► there was a whole section clearly labeled Disney magical express and Disney,

00:54:41 ◼   ► Disney employees. So you got like the, you know, very friendly, great, you know,

00:54:46 ◼   ► really welcoming sort of people. And you'd say, you know,

00:54:51 ◼   ► this is the groupers and they say, Oh, okay, you're going to this resort,

00:54:55 ◼   ► go over there, wait in line. And then, you know, within 10 minutes,

00:54:59 ◼   ► you're on a bus on the way to your resort from the airport.

00:55:03 ◼   ► And you don't have to wait for your luggage. You just go,

00:55:07 ◼   ► you get to the resort and you check in and then you can like just,

00:55:11 ◼   ► you know, bring a change of clothes in your carry on. You know,

00:55:15 ◼   ► if you're going from cold weather to warm weather and then off you are to the

00:55:19 ◼   ► magic kingdom or Epcot or wherever you want to go,

00:55:21 ◼   ► and you come back in the afternoon and all your suitcases are there in your

00:55:25 ◼   ► room. And when, yeah. And when you leave, you could do the, you know,

00:55:30 ◼   ► you do the vice versa and it was free. It was just, it's just part of you.

00:55:33 ◼   ► Not, you don't pay extra for it. It's just part of being a guest.

00:55:36 ◼   ► So obviously that shut down during COVID right. And they looked,

00:55:41 ◼   ► I guess somebody looked at the numbers and said,

00:55:43 ◼   ► look at how much money we're saving by not running this service between the

00:55:46 ◼   ► airport and the resorts. And so they never brought it back. It's just gone.

00:55:49 ◼   ► And it's such a shame. It's it's the, it was so great.

00:55:53 ◼   ► And now it's like what you have to, you know, I don't know,

00:55:56 ◼   ► either rent a car or get an Uber. Right. And wait for your bags. I mean,

00:56:01 ◼   ► And wait for your bags. And it truly, and again, this,

00:56:05 ◼   ► it's just a Disney's magical express is a great name for it. It's just magic.

00:56:09 ◼   ► Not waiting for your bags at the stupid carousel is the,

00:56:13 ◼   ► it was, it really, and I remember the first time we did it, I was like,

00:56:17 ◼   ► I don't know if this is going to work. I felt very uncomfortable,

00:56:19 ◼   ► but of course it was great. It was bulletproof. They, you know,

00:56:23 ◼   ► and they've had, you know, and, and it's the way that Disney is this massive,

00:56:26 ◼   ► it's the whole reason Orlando is a major city. So yeah,

00:56:30 ◼   ► they have a lot of sway at the Orlando airport. You know, famous is,

00:56:34 ◼   ► here's an interesting fact.

00:56:36 ◼   ► Everybody knows you can't buy bubble gum at Disney parks because they don't

00:56:40 ◼   ► want people to speak to gum. You can't buy gum at the Orlando airport.

00:56:44 ◼   ► There's no, there's no bubble gum. And some people, you know, it's, it,

00:56:49 ◼   ► it's worth noting.

00:56:50 ◼   ► Cause I know some people like to chew gum on a plane to keep their ears from

00:56:53 ◼   ► popping, but they got to the Orlando airport to stop selling gum.

00:56:57 ◼   ► I mean, you know, again,

00:56:59 ◼   ► you're going to have a lot of sway when you are the quintessential reason that

00:57:02 ◼   ► people fly through. Right. And the biggest employer,

00:57:05 ◼   ► the biggest employer, all kinds of other things, but no, but that's a shame,

00:57:09 ◼   ► you know, but like, and again, like to me, like the magic express thing,

00:57:12 ◼   ► and I didn't know that that existed and I've stayed at resource there while I've

00:57:15 ◼   ► gone to the park. I just probably was one of those things probably was like,

00:57:18 ◼   ► offer to me. And I probably looked at them and was like, oh,

00:57:21 ◼   ► that's too good to be true. I'm not doing that.

00:57:23 ◼   ► It was as good as it sounds. It was, it was truly an amazing, you know,

00:57:27 ◼   ► in you again, I mean, you are paying a lot of money to stay.

00:57:30 ◼   ► This is my point. This is what I'm saying. And they're like,

00:57:32 ◼   ► that's the thing that to me sort of underscores. It's like, okay,

00:57:35 ◼   ► if you need to like, to me, the move there is don't get rid of this,

00:57:39 ◼   ► raise your prices some if you have to,

00:57:41 ◼   ► but keep it because that's part of why you pay what you pay.

00:57:46 ◼   ► It's a similar thing to Apple products.

00:57:49 ◼   ► Part of the reason you pay what you pay is a, you know,

00:57:52 ◼   ► the products generally are quite good and B at least for me,

00:57:56 ◼   ► and this is certainly the case with my family.

00:57:59 ◼   ► If something goes wrong and look over the years,

00:58:02 ◼   ► I do think that Genius Bar quality has, has dropped some,

00:58:05 ◼   ► and it's not as good as it used to be and whatnot,

00:58:07 ◼   ► but it is still far and away better than what you can get from almost any

00:58:12 ◼   ► other company.

00:58:13 ◼   ► And you know that you can go someplace and talk to someone and that they will

00:58:16 ◼   ► treat you well. And for a lot of us that is worth, you know,

00:58:21 ◼   ► that's part of the, that's part of why you pay what you pay,

00:58:23 ◼   ► which for me is why I'm super critical.

00:58:27 ◼   ► If I have a bad customer service experience with Apple,

00:58:30 ◼   ► because part of the reason I pay what I pay and go through what I go through and

00:58:34 ◼   ► get the Apple care and all that is because I'm paying for like a promise that

00:58:39 ◼   ► I'm going to have this better experience. You know,

00:58:41 ◼   ► that it's not going to be like if I buy an HP laptop and I'm stuck,

00:58:46 ◼   ► you know, in, in, you know, hell with various call centers.

00:58:50 ◼   ► It's the Genius Bar is the Apple's equivalent to this magical express, right?

00:58:55 ◼   ► They never had to do it in the first place. They could have just,

00:58:57 ◼   ► I think the stores would have been successful without it, you know,

00:59:00 ◼   ► from the iPod onward. And again, how do you account for it? Right? Like,

00:59:04 ◼   ► it's one of those ways where not having these divisional profit and losses,

00:59:08 ◼   ► really, it is part of what makes Apple, Apple,

00:59:12 ◼   ► where somebody could look at what it costs to staff,

00:59:14 ◼   ► all these Genius Bars and say, this is just an enormous cost sync.

00:59:19 ◼   ► Why don't we get rid of it and just have everybody go to the website and one

00:59:23 ◼   ► 800 Apple help?

00:59:24 ◼   ► Yeah. I mean, I mean, I mean, I think the guy from,

00:59:26 ◼   ► from the UK that lasted like four months,

00:59:28 ◼   ► I think that that was sort of what he wanted to do. Right.

00:59:31 ◼   ► John Broward, right? Yeah. Brown it Brown, Brown, it something like that.

00:59:34 ◼   ► I think that Broward, yeah. The guy that, you know, they,

00:59:37 ◼   ► they kept for a hot second before they brought in Angela, Angela, aren't too,

00:59:41 ◼   ► you know, had fantastic customer service and, and was in detail at Burberry.

00:59:46 ◼   ► But yeah, I mean, I remember his like brief tenure

00:59:48 ◼   ► and they were smart enough to step in real fast and be like, Nope, this,

00:59:54 ◼   ► this is a negative. Cause I remember even those like four months or however long

00:59:57 ◼   ► he was there, you could see the changes them trying to implement.

01:00:01 ◼   ► It was very clear that he came from the sort of retail background where it was

01:00:06 ◼   ► all about, well, how much money can we make?

01:00:08 ◼   ► How much money can we save versus what's the best experience we can offer?

01:00:12 ◼   ► Right. And you know, it's, you know,

01:00:14 ◼   ► the bus ride from the airport to the resort is not a feature

01:00:18 ◼   ► attraction, but it's, you know, but they were also, they were,

01:00:22 ◼   ► they were Disney buses. They, they had,

01:00:24 ◼   ► they showed Disney cartoons on TVs above the seats for the, you know,

01:00:28 ◼   ► 45 minute ride or whoever line it took. And when Jonas was younger,

01:00:33 ◼   ► he actually was enthralled. He was already excited to be there.

01:00:36 ◼   ► It was certainly more exciting than being in the backseat of a rental car would

01:00:39 ◼   ► have been, or, you know, there wasn't an Uber back then.

01:00:43 ◼   ► No. I mean, and I think you could make the argument that, that by doing that,

01:00:47 ◼   ► even though there's a real cost to it, you're going to get,

01:00:50 ◼   ► most people are going to then be able to go immediately to the park, right?

01:00:54 ◼   ► They might drop some things off, but they'll immediately go to the park,

01:00:56 ◼   ► which means they're immediately going to be spending money.

01:00:58 ◼   ► Yeah. And if they're not renting a car,

01:01:01 ◼   ► that means they don't have a rental car that they could take to Universal or to

01:01:05 ◼   ► SeaWorld. Right. Now it's,

01:01:08 ◼   ► it's just so Pennywise pound foolish. And it's such a great example. Now,

01:01:13 ◼   ► I'm not saying that because Iger's back that this Disney magical express is

01:01:16 ◼   ► going to come back, but I wouldn't be surprised if it does. But to me,

01:01:19 ◼   ► it's emblematic of JPEG being in over his head and losing sight

01:01:24 ◼   ► that the first thing does the first and first priority has to be being the

01:01:29 ◼   ► best at blank and,

01:01:31 ◼   ► and finding those places where Disney can do things that only Disney can do.

01:01:36 ◼   ► And literally only Disney can do that.

01:01:38 ◼   ► Like universal does not have the size to have a whole wing of

01:01:43 ◼   ► the airport. They don't have the influence. They don't have,

01:01:46 ◼   ► they don't have the economies of scale, right? I mean, you know,

01:01:48 ◼   ► similar to the way that like Tim Cook has so precisely engineered the supply

01:01:52 ◼   ► chain and has such a giant leap ahead of so many other

01:01:57 ◼   ► companies. That's what Disney is like in Florida. You know, they,

01:02:01 ◼   ► they own Orlando, which like,

01:02:06 ◼   ► which to me also made JPEGs handling of, of this stuff, you know,

01:02:10 ◼   ► the political stuff over the summer that much like dumb too.

01:02:14 ◼   ► It's like never people's opinions of that stuff are it's like you

01:02:19 ◼   ► are literally the largest employer in the state, I think.

01:02:23 ◼   ► And, uh, you have an enormous impact on,

01:02:28 ◼   ► on tourism in the entire state, not just in Orlando.

01:02:31 ◼   ► It's like use that leverage. Don't let's don't,

01:02:35 ◼   ► don't let any politician, no matter what political position they represent,

01:02:39 ◼   ► if it, if it's not in, in your company's best interest, like what's the,

01:02:43 ◼   ► what's the use of having that sort of power if you're not, you know what I mean?

01:02:46 ◼   ► Like it just seems like, do you not understand what position you're in?

01:02:49 ◼   ► You shouldn't be trying to suck up to anybody like you're,

01:02:54 ◼   ► you're freaking Disney.

01:02:55 ◼   ► All right, let me take a break here and thank our next sponsor.

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01:04:31 ◼   ► monetize your audience with memberships. So here's the thing with Eiger.

01:04:34 ◼   ► I'm let's switch to what do you think he's going to do?

01:04:37 ◼   ► What's going to be different under Eiger and Eiger has, again,

01:04:40 ◼   ► I referenced that interview did it code with Kara Swisher where he was perhaps,

01:04:45 ◼   ► I think when he recorded it, I don't think this was already in the works.

01:04:48 ◼   ► No, I don't think so. I don't think so.

01:04:50 ◼   ► Because I think if it were, he wouldn't have been as forthright as he was.

01:04:53 ◼   ► And yes, he was the chairman of the board. But you know, he, you know,

01:04:56 ◼   ► I don't think he would have been as forthright in his pessimism about being a TV channel.

01:05:03 ◼   ► No, no. And he left, I think, as chairman of the board in December.

01:05:07 ◼   ► Oh, he did. So he's not, he's not even

01:05:09 ◼   ► so he's, he had met at all. Yeah.

01:05:10 ◼   ► And actually that's the one interesting thing with him coming back as he's at

01:05:14 ◼   ► least not for now, he's not retaking that spot. Right.

01:05:17 ◼   ► The chairman will remain. Yeah.

01:05:19 ◼   ► Well, that makes even more sense why he was so forthright.

01:05:22 ◼   ► And there's already whispers that he might do things like maybe sell ESPN,

01:05:27 ◼   ► you know,

01:05:27 ◼   ► and start detaching Disney from cable TV as the source for watching their stuff on video.

01:05:36 ◼   ► Right. You know, in very broad strokes,

01:05:39 ◼   ► the future is internet streaming and the past is cable TV channels.

01:05:45 ◼   ► I don't know. I mean, ESPN is a weird one because yes,

01:05:49 ◼   ► there's so much money involved in that. Like ESPN,

01:05:52 ◼   ► even with how much it's fallen makes so much money that if you sell it,

01:05:57 ◼   ► it's like, I don't, it's like longterm. I think, you know,

01:06:01 ◼   ► de-emphasizing it short term makes sense and longterm, obviously it's going to go away.

01:06:05 ◼   ► But you know, even with all the trouble that, that CNN is having,

01:06:08 ◼   ► they're still going to have like, you know,

01:06:11 ◼   ► a ridiculous amount of profit for the year.

01:06:14 ◼   ► And that profit comes from the, the carriage fees. The same thing is true for ESPN.

01:06:19 ◼   ► Sorry, go on.

01:06:20 ◼   ► Well, I'm just curious where you,

01:06:21 ◼   ► where you think they're going and what do you do? What do the,

01:06:26 ◼   ► what's, what, what's going to change about streaming for Disney going forward?

01:06:31 ◼   ► Yeah. I mean, I think that's the interesting question, right? Is that,

01:06:37 ◼   ► so to my knowledge, Disney doesn't own one of like the,

01:06:41 ◼   ► the zoomies or two B's or the other like ad supported streaming services.

01:06:46 ◼   ► Those, I mean, if I were them, I would start looking at maybe,

01:06:50 ◼   ► it's been interesting. Some people have been talking about like,

01:06:52 ◼   ► could Disney acquire Netflix, which look,

01:06:56 ◼   ► that would have seemed crazy even a year ago. Now it,

01:07:00 ◼   ► it doesn't whether that would regulatory, you know,

01:07:03 ◼   ► be allowed to happen under those rules or not is a different question.

01:07:07 ◼   ► But you know, I do wonder like, could Disney buy Roku,

01:07:11 ◼   ► could Disney buy something else to maybe get into some of these other

01:07:15 ◼   ► spaces because they're going to lose the,

01:07:20 ◼   ► the hard part about moving away from being a, you know, a cable business,

01:07:24 ◼   ► a television business is that the money that came from that has not been

01:07:28 ◼   ► replaced and will not be replaced.

01:07:30 ◼   ► So you have to look at what are other,

01:07:33 ◼   ► either other areas you can get into or can you try to maybe optimize some of

01:07:38 ◼   ► those other services in some ways, which is why obviously, you know,

01:07:41 ◼   ► Disney is adding an ad tier and why, you know,

01:07:45 ◼   ► Netflix is doing that and why some of those, you know, free ad supported,

01:07:49 ◼   ► you know, streaming services have a tremendous amount of viewership,

01:07:54 ◼   ► which in some cases, if I'm Disney,

01:07:57 ◼   ► I'm thinking I've got all of this content that sure we can put it all,

01:08:02 ◼   ► you know, in a, in a big bundle and call it Disney plus or whatever.

01:08:05 ◼   ► But there's a lot of it that from a discovery standpoint and other aspects,

01:08:09 ◼   ► you know,

01:08:10 ◼   ► it was probably not going to get seen or used the right way.

01:08:12 ◼   ► Like could we package that in some ways and put some ad supported things on it

01:08:17 ◼   ► that could get a large amount of views and then also, you know,

01:08:21 ◼   ► hopefully get advertising dollars. I don't know.

01:08:22 ◼   ► Advertising. Everybody's always, you know,

01:08:26 ◼   ► somewhat annoyed by advertising ever since the dawn of advertising.

01:08:31 ◼   ► I don't know what anybody could pin as the first one, but you know,

01:08:35 ◼   ► too many ads on TV. You go back in time, too many,

01:08:40 ◼   ► everybody, it doesn't seem like I don't read as many paper magazines by far as I

01:08:44 ◼   ► used to, but people used to complain about all the inserts that would fall out.

01:08:47 ◼   ► You'd pick up a magazine and all of these inserts that,

01:08:50 ◼   ► that advertisers paid extra for would start falling out of the pages.

01:08:54 ◼   ► And I remember, you know, and in the flush times,

01:08:56 ◼   ► I remember like when wired magazine was new and it was like the shiznit,

01:09:01 ◼   ► you know, it was, it was like,

01:09:02 ◼   ► holy hell this magazine is even printed on better paper and the graphic design.

01:09:06 ◼   ► And it's like, Oh my God, look at how many ads there are, you know, but you know,

01:09:10 ◼   ► magazine ads are kind of awesome because you just flip, right?

01:09:13 ◼   ► You just turn the page if you don't like it, you know, just keep turning.

01:09:16 ◼   ► You're not stuck. Right.

01:09:18 ◼   ► And internet ads or computer powered ads

01:09:23 ◼   ► are different than anything. I've brought this up before,

01:09:28 ◼   ► where I remember the first time I saw Tivo, it was my friend,

01:09:32 ◼   ► Rich Segal's house when I took a job at bare bones software in 1999 or

01:09:36 ◼   ► 2000 and he kindly invited me and Amy over for dinner at his

01:09:41 ◼   ► house and he had a Tivo and it, the,

01:09:44 ◼   ► there was a baseball playoff game on and after dinner he was like, you want to,

01:09:47 ◼   ► you know, before you guys head off, you want to watch some baseball.

01:09:50 ◼   ► And we watched it on his Tivo and I was like, Oh,

01:09:54 ◼   ► I mean it took like five minutes and Amy and like, Oh, I know what we're doing.

01:09:57 ◼   ► It was like a Friday and we're like, we're going,

01:09:59 ◼   ► we're going to go buy a Tivo tomorrow morning.

01:10:01 ◼   ► It was like within five minutes cause like, Oh, I see.

01:10:04 ◼   ► You just instantly pause and then you can fast forward these things.

01:10:06 ◼   ► So the original computerization of TV to me was the DVR

01:10:11 ◼   ► and Tivo was in my opinion, the best.

01:10:13 ◼   ► And the idea is filter your TV through this computer and then

01:10:18 ◼   ► you're in charge of the ads and you can just fall behind.

01:10:22 ◼   ► You could just watch stuff live. You go watch live sports,

01:10:24 ◼   ► but if you're willing to be five minutes behind,

01:10:26 ◼   ► you could just zip through the ads and for safe, you know,

01:10:30 ◼   ► watching the shows that you subscribe to and say,

01:10:33 ◼   ► I want to watch every episode of whatever the show was at the time survivor.

01:10:36 ◼   ► I remember it was a big show, but I mean, I know it's still a big show,

01:10:39 ◼   ► but we liked survivor.

01:10:40 ◼   ► But that was the show then. Yes.

01:10:41 ◼   ► And it's like, Oh, we're going to, we don't have to remember to tape it.

01:10:45 ◼   ► We don't have to program it.

01:10:46 ◼   ► You just said I like survivor and just tell the Tivo to tape it every time.

01:10:49 ◼   ► And then when we watch survivor,

01:10:51 ◼   ► we just blip blip blip right through the ads and we're in charge.

01:10:54 ◼   ► And now computers, if it's shifted all the way around where computers are,

01:10:59 ◼   ► and software are being used to make ads that can't be skipped.

01:11:04 ◼   ► And there's nothing you can do to skip them.

01:11:08 ◼   ► And they're every bit as unskippable as TV ads were.

01:11:12 ◼   ► Yeah. Except they're lower quality.

01:11:14 ◼   ► Except they're lower quality. They're worse.

01:11:17 ◼   ► Right. And they're so repetitive.

01:11:19 ◼   ► The ones because the inventory is so much lower.

01:11:23 ◼   ► The inventory is so much lower.

01:11:25 ◼   ► And so when you watch stuff with ad ad supported stuff on

01:11:29 ◼   ► streaming, it, it makes my mind explode.

01:11:32 ◼   ► I have a higher tolerance for way higher tolerance for television ads than Amy

01:11:37 ◼   ► way. Yeah. She has none. I mean, just none.

01:11:41 ◼   ► And the it's for part of it for me is cause I watched so much,

01:11:46 ◼   ► so much of my TV watching is sports and I like to watch live and therefore I

01:11:49 ◼   ► watch the commercials and I watch it.

01:11:51 ◼   ► But when I watch the streaming stuff and it's the same frigging

01:11:55 ◼   ► ad every single time and you can't skip it.

01:11:59 ◼   ► And it's like, this is maddening. And it's so,

01:12:02 ◼   ► at least there's a psychological element where at least before TiVo,

01:12:07 ◼   ► when TV was all real live, you know,

01:12:10 ◼   ► just over the air live or over the cable live,

01:12:13 ◼   ► you could at least justify the fact that the ads were there. Well,

01:12:17 ◼   ► that the ads pay for the content and what are you going to do? Right.

01:12:20 ◼   ► There's nothing that can be done. Whereas now, you know, that they've, they've,

01:12:25 ◼   ► there's some team of programmers who's working to make it unskippable and not

01:12:30 ◼   ► fast.

01:12:31 ◼   ► No. And, and I totally agree with you.

01:12:33 ◼   ► The only way where I'm kind of okay with it and like I will always pay for the

01:12:37 ◼   ► ad free version. And I think I've kind of become like Amy.

01:12:40 ◼   ► I'm somebody who used to have a relatively high tolerance for advertisements.

01:12:45 ◼   ► And I, I had a TiVo super,

01:12:47 ◼   ► super early because I worked at Best Buy in high school and college and was a

01:12:52 ◼   ► huge gadget fan. And like you, my first time I experienced it, I was like, Oh,

01:12:57 ◼   ► okay, this is, this is it. Like, this is fantastic. But you know,

01:13:01 ◼   ► for certain life things and whatnot, you would have to deal with commercials.

01:13:04 ◼   ► And I had like a, an okay tolerance, but over the years now I'm at the point,

01:13:09 ◼   ► like I see an ad on something I'm just like, no.

01:13:12 ◼   ► And I pay for ad free on most services where I will have an exception though.

01:13:17 ◼   ► Is if like the service is completely free and it's just sort of on,

01:13:21 ◼   ► on the background, then you know, I don't care as much. So something like,

01:13:26 ◼   ► like, like, like to be in there's Zumo and there's some other ones.

01:13:29 ◼   ► What bothers me and anybody who cared about the experience could fix this so

01:13:34 ◼   ► easily is that the, where they do the night,

01:13:37 ◼   ► the dynamic ad insertion has never at the actual designated ad breaks in this

01:13:42 ◼   ► content that was created for television.

01:13:47 ◼   ► And then oftentimes re edited for syndication for even more ads. Like there,

01:13:52 ◼   ► there are natural ad breaks in this content.

01:13:54 ◼   ► Like just use those points and then put your dynamic ad break in.

01:13:58 ◼   ► But instead they'll do it at like really weird times. And I'm like, okay, well,

01:14:02 ◼   ► this just takes me out of the entire experience. Let me, you know,

01:14:05 ◼   ► boot up my plex and, and, and watch this instead. But you know,

01:14:10 ◼   ► in terms, but, but I,

01:14:11 ◼   ► you can't argue with the results as much as people hate ads.

01:14:14 ◼   ► The number of viewers on these types of services is ridiculous.

01:14:19 ◼   ► So I don't know,

01:14:22 ◼   ► I don't think that it is going to recoup the money, but I do wonder like, again,

01:14:27 ◼   ► maybe Disney buys Roku or something like that who has a, uh, you know,

01:14:32 ◼   ► strong play in that, in that place.

01:14:35 ◼   ► And maybe that gets them something mixes some mix of subscription revenue and ad

01:14:42 ◼   ► revenue and a way to have a tier where you can buy your way out of the ads and

01:14:47 ◼   ► let people find their comfort level. And you know,

01:14:49 ◼   ► there's a lot of people with smaller budgets or just a higher tolerance for the

01:14:54 ◼   ► ads who would rather spend whatever they're,

01:14:56 ◼   ► they're comfortable as their monthly spend on subscription services would rather

01:15:00 ◼   ► have more services,

01:15:01 ◼   ► but have some of them or all of them with some number of ads than use the same

01:15:06 ◼   ► amount of money for fewer services with no ads. HBO, you know, I,

01:15:10 ◼   ► I think, you know, should never have an ad tier, but I also,

01:15:14 ◼   ► but HBO max isn't really HBO, right? It's,

01:15:18 ◼   ► and that's a whole side discussion that I've had before where they took this

01:15:22 ◼   ► unbelievably pristine brand and just, I mean,

01:15:26 ◼   ► they even added a color to it that it shouldn't have. There's no,

01:15:29 ◼   ► it shouldn't be purple.

01:15:30 ◼   ► No, no. Although I do have to say the one thing I will,

01:15:34 ◼   ► and I don't know if you saw the article that James B.

01:15:36 ◼   ► Stewart did in the times where he interviewed like 24 people who

01:15:41 ◼   ► had been part of the NT Time Warner merger.

01:15:44 ◼   ► Oh, you know what? I have it open in a tab. I still haven't read it. I,

01:15:49 ◼   ► I heard it's fantastic.

01:15:50 ◼   ► It's absolutely fantastic.

01:15:51 ◼   ► I'm really hoping that he's going to write some sort of book about like the last

01:15:55 ◼   ► five or six years happening, you know,

01:15:57 ◼   ► things happening at Paramount and Viacom and things happening at a Time Warner

01:16:01 ◼   ► and an AT&T and things happening at Disney because very few people

01:16:05 ◼   ► understand it and get to the nuances as well as he does.

01:16:08 ◼   ► But the one thing I do have to give, and this is all credit,

01:16:13 ◼   ► this is zero credit to Jason Keeler. This is zero credit to Unstanky.

01:16:16 ◼   ► This is zero credit to anybody involved in that side of the business and complete

01:16:21 ◼   ► credit to everyone who was in programming at HBO.

01:16:24 ◼   ► Many of the HBO max programs,

01:16:27 ◼   ► they might not have been like top tier HBO level,

01:16:30 ◼   ► but we're quite good.

01:16:34 ◼   ► Like I have to actually kind of give it to them on that. Like I was,

01:16:38 ◼   ► my big fear had been that that would be a complete, you know, just like,

01:16:43 ◼   ► uh, abomination of, of what HBO was and not all the content,

01:16:48 ◼   ► but quite a lot of it really, really good.

01:16:51 ◼   ► It's, you know, and I, I think they've straightened the ship a little bit.

01:16:56 ◼   ► And since launch, you know,

01:16:57 ◼   ► I feel like they've gotten HBO max more towards being HBO as HBO,

01:17:02 ◼   ► but it's, you know, that's the brand though. And that was the thing.

01:17:06 ◼   ► I remember when HBO was new as a kid, I've told this story too,

01:17:08 ◼   ► and it dates me, but I'd say when HBO was new, this idea that a,

01:17:12 ◼   ► they had like kind of newish movies, you know,

01:17:15 ◼   ► that like were out like a year ago or so,

01:17:18 ◼   ► which never came to TV back then. Right. And they had no commercials.

01:17:23 ◼   ► And it sounded like commercials. I remember, and it was like, uh, my,

01:17:26 ◼   ► I never went to Disney world when I was a kid. We used to, you know,

01:17:29 ◼   ► just my parents aren't really flyers. We didn't think big for vacations.

01:17:34 ◼   ► I kind of wanted to, but I wasn't, I also wasn't one of those kids.

01:17:38 ◼   ► It also just seemed like something we were, I don't know. It was just, yeah, I,

01:17:42 ◼   ► if my parents said we were going, I would have been yay, but I wasn't like, Oh,

01:17:45 ◼   ► I wasn't begging them to go. But I had friends who went,

01:17:48 ◼   ► I remember one friend, my friend, Dave went,

01:17:50 ◼   ► and he was telling me about space mountain and it just sounded like this can't be

01:17:54 ◼   ► true. It's a crazy,

01:17:56 ◼   ► wild, exciting rollercoaster and it's in the dark inside. What,

01:18:00 ◼   ► how is that possible? How can you put an entire, he's like,

01:18:03 ◼   ► you can't believe it. It's the fastest rollercoaster. I mean,

01:18:05 ◼   ► it's not the fastest, but as a little kid, he thought it was.

01:18:08 ◼   ► And you don't know, cause you only got on it like once or twice.

01:18:10 ◼   ► Cause you had to wait in line back then, but it's in the dark inside.

01:18:13 ◼   ► It was like, that can't be true. That's what I remember thinking about HBO.

01:18:15 ◼   ► They're, they're showing new movies or recent movies.

01:18:18 ◼   ► And there are no commercials. You just,

01:18:20 ◼   ► the movie starts and it just plays right through like a real movie that that

01:18:24 ◼   ► can't be. And it's like, yeah, that's the brand. So they,

01:18:28 ◼   ► but that's different, right? HBO was never, you know, they're,

01:18:31 ◼   ► they're sort of Apple-ish that way where they're not for everybody. You know,

01:18:34 ◼   ► there's, you know, there's no way that ABC, NBC, and CBS,

01:18:38 ◼   ► we're ever going to go ad free. It does it. It's unfeasible. It literally,

01:18:42 ◼   ► you know, there's no way to make the economics work. It's the balance, right?

01:18:46 ◼   ► You want the right balance. But the thing is, and you mentioned it,

01:18:50 ◼   ► if you're going to have ads, the ads are part of the experience, right?

01:18:55 ◼   ► I've made an entire career out of this. This is my,

01:18:58 ◼   ► my entire career is based on having an ad,

01:19:02 ◼   ► a free website,

01:19:03 ◼   ► Daring Fireball that is supported through ads and

01:19:09 ◼   ► doing the ads in a way that is win, win, win for everybody,

01:19:13 ◼   ► where the sponsors get a good,

01:19:15 ◼   ► hopefully get a good amount of attention and I curate them so that they're

01:19:20 ◼   ► of interest to the audience.

01:19:22 ◼   ► And so the audience is not annoyed by them and hopefully actually throughout the

01:19:27 ◼   ► weeks, every couple of weeks finds a sponsor that's like, Hey,

01:19:29 ◼   ► that actually is interesting to me. I would like to check it out.

01:19:31 ◼   ► And I earn an income and a podcast, right? I do these sponsorships.

01:19:37 ◼   ► I'll break for one again soon, but make it, I make it part of the show, right?

01:19:41 ◼   ► And I hope you listen, you know, and if you want to skip, you can skip.

01:19:44 ◼   ► And I'm never going to do anything programmatically and put the talk show on an

01:19:49 ◼   ► app so that you can't skip the frigging ads or something like that.

01:19:52 ◼   ► Never going to try it. I hope you listen,

01:19:54 ◼   ► but if you don't,

01:19:55 ◼   ► or if you've heard the sponsor before and you want to fast forward, fast forward,

01:19:58 ◼   ► you know, it's my job to try to make them interesting,

01:20:00 ◼   ► but then they come at natural points in the show. I don't listen to many,

01:20:05 ◼   ► I listen to Keith Olbermann show, which I really love. It's,

01:20:08 ◼   ► it's a podcast he started a couple months ago.

01:20:10 ◼   ► It's just his countdown show from MSNBC and podcast form. And he,

01:20:14 ◼   ► I love him. I love his show. It is a daily listen for me,

01:20:18 ◼   ► but the ads are pro programmatically inserted and they're terrible.

01:20:22 ◼   ► They are absolutely terrible at one point because they're programmatically

01:20:25 ◼   ► inserted. We, we were on vacation a couple of weeks ago and I started getting,

01:20:30 ◼   ► I think they guess, you know, they don't know much about me.

01:20:32 ◼   ► There's not much tracking, but they can guess that Olbermann's audience,

01:20:35 ◼   ► even though he's talking about politics and national news might be sports fans.

01:20:38 ◼   ► And so they had lots of ads for buying NFL tickets.

01:20:42 ◼   ► And the first time I got them,

01:20:43 ◼   ► they were trying to sell me Philadelphia Eagles tickets. And it's like, ah,

01:20:46 ◼   ► you know, somehow they geo located me. Right.

01:20:48 ◼   ► And then we went on vacation to Vegas for a week and I started,

01:20:52 ◼   ► then the next week I was catching up on his podcast and I was getting ads for

01:20:56 ◼   ► buying Los Angeles Rams tickets. And I'm like, what the hell? And it's like, Oh,

01:21:01 ◼   ► cause we were in Vegas and that's when I downloaded my phone,

01:21:04 ◼   ► downloaded the shows, but I wasn't listening cause we were on vacation and

01:21:09 ◼   ► a and, and,

01:21:10 ◼   ► and with the Apple's hydro geo location vaguely,

01:21:14 ◼   ► instead of telling me to buy Las Vegas Raiders tickets,

01:21:18 ◼   ► they somehow guessed I was closer to Los Angeles. Oh, okay.

01:21:21 ◼   ► But then the next week I started getting in programmatically inserted ads on

01:21:26 ◼   ► Keith Olbermann show in Spanish, Spanish. I don't speak Spanish.

01:21:31 ◼   ► I don't know what made them think that. I mean, it's crazy.

01:21:34 ◼   ► I don't know who paid for these ads on an English language news and politics

01:21:39 ◼   ► podcast that were in Spanish, but I got Spanish language ads. It's, it's crazy.

01:21:43 ◼   ► And occasionally the ads are misinserted.

01:21:47 ◼   ► They don't come at his breaks.

01:21:48 ◼   ► He has very natural breaks in the show where they're clearly supposed to be.

01:21:52 ◼   ► And every once in a while they're like mid sentence.

01:21:55 ◼   ► And then he comes back and says, you know,

01:21:57 ◼   ► then the segment ends and then he comes right back with the other segment and

01:22:01 ◼   ► it's like, Hey, that's the spot where the ad was supposed to be. You know,

01:22:04 ◼   ► like if a human being put the ads in there and they read the podcast editor,

01:22:08 ◼   ► you'd have to fire them or at least, you know, have a, you know,

01:22:11 ◼   ► have a talk with him first. It's,

01:22:14 ◼   ► it's crazy that you don't think of it as part of the experience.

01:22:16 ◼   ► And I feel like that's something that Disney really has to get right because

01:22:20 ◼   ► they can't, they're not Hulu. They can't just have shit ads. They, they,

01:22:23 ◼   ► and they have the added pressure that a huge part of their audience is

01:22:29 ◼   ► kids and family programming and advertising to kids is

01:22:33 ◼   ► fraught, right? You know,

01:22:36 ◼   ► I grew up in an era where they just bombarded us with ads for nothing but

01:22:40 ◼   ► sugared cereal and toys.

01:22:42 ◼   ► Yeah. And then, and then, and then they made, you know,

01:22:45 ◼   ► TV shows out of the, out of the ads that were within just one long

01:22:49 ◼   ► advertisement.

01:22:51 ◼   ► There was a, you know, around fourth grade for me, I watched GI Joe every day.

01:22:55 ◼   ► I probably saw 20,

01:22:59 ◼   ► 20 to 30,000 laser rifle shots a week and not one person ever get hit,

01:23:04 ◼   ► but I saw a half hour commercial for GI Joe toys every day. But yeah, but did,

01:23:08 ◼   ► you know, obviously we as a society are way more attuned to,

01:23:12 ◼   ► to that sort of stuff. Disney should be at the forefront.

01:23:16 ◼   ► They should make an ad supported tier. That is the best ads,

01:23:19 ◼   ► best experience for ads that anybody's ever had and curate the ads and sell them

01:23:24 ◼   ► at a premium.

01:23:25 ◼   ► There's so much potential there that has been just lately overlooked

01:23:30 ◼   ► by the way the ad tech industry has just rotted out the brains of anything

01:23:35 ◼   ► that, that intersects with tech and entertainment or news.

01:23:39 ◼   ► I totally agree with you.

01:23:40 ◼   ► And I think that if anybody would have the power to have like to really exert

01:23:44 ◼   ► pressure and force a good product and also raise rates and get

01:23:49 ◼   ► good advertisers on board, I think it would be Disney. Like I honestly do.

01:23:54 ◼   ► I do too. All right, let me take that break.

01:23:56 ◼   ► I was telling you about what better segue could I think of to an ad break and

01:24:01 ◼   ► tell you about our good friends at Linode headquartered right here in

01:24:05 ◼   ► Philadelphia in a building that used to be the real world Philadelphia

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01:24:18 ◼   ► L I N O D E, Linode.com/the-talk-show and see

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01:25:21 ◼   ► manage them, have high availability when you need it, disaster recovery,

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01:25:50 ◼   ► including GPUs, as well as block storage, Kubernetes. It's just terrific.

01:25:54 ◼   ► I have been hosting Daring Fireball there for years.

01:25:57 ◼   ► I cannot imagine moving them away.

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01:26:04 ◼   ► privilege to being a customer, a customer for. They're just terrific.

01:26:08 ◼   ► It is, you know,

01:26:09 ◼   ► if you ever think Daring Fireball is fast and responsive and never seems to go

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01:26:15 ◼   ► They make cloud computing fast, simple, and affordable.

01:26:17 ◼   ► Go to linode.com/talkshow,

01:26:21 ◼   ► linode.com/talkshow. And this is the best part. This is amazing.

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01:26:38 ◼   ► So let's segue from that to do a little,

01:26:41 ◼   ► I want to do a little on Twitter and Elon Musk.

01:26:43 ◼   ► I'm hoping to get the show out tomorrow.

01:26:46 ◼   ► I worry that it's already going to be out of date,

01:26:49 ◼   ► even if we turn it around at 24 hours.

01:26:53 ◼   ► My last episode with Anil Dash, I think it took 48 hours. And there was,

01:26:56 ◼   ► there was a part of that 48 hour turnaround was the night when

01:27:01 ◼   ► everybody thought Twitter was going to go under.

01:27:03 ◼   ► Yes. Yes.

01:27:05 ◼   ► I honestly thought, Oh my God, I spent, I had Anil on,

01:27:10 ◼   ► and we had what I thought was a great show. And it's all going to be moot.

01:27:13 ◼   ► If this thing goes down tomorrow.

01:27:16 ◼   ► Recent news in the Elon Musk steady as she goes steady hand at

01:27:21 ◼   ► the helm leadership of Twitter involves, let's see,

01:27:25 ◼   ► let's do it like a show previously on Elon Musk's

01:27:30 ◼   ► ownership of Twitter.

01:27:31 ◼   ► He laid off over about half the company and then issued

01:27:36 ◼   ► a mandate that the field team demand to sign this or,

01:27:41 ◼   ► or you're fired, right? It was like first prize, first prize, you keep your jobs.

01:27:45 ◼   ► You don't sign it. You're fired.

01:27:48 ◼   ► It's some sort of Elon Musk style of Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross.

01:27:51 ◼   ► Lots of people didn't sign it.

01:27:53 ◼   ► I think lots of people didn't sign it for good reason. I, you know,

01:27:57 ◼   ► people who did, because, you know, I know, and you know,

01:28:00 ◼   ► I don't want to easily sidetracked into the whole discussion of the H1B visas

01:28:04 ◼   ► and that people who are in the country with a job at Twitter and who need to keep

01:28:09 ◼   ► a job to stay in the United States. And, you know,

01:28:13 ◼   ► we're in a period of time where the economy seems to be heading South and lots of

01:28:17 ◼   ► big companies are laying people off or at least instituting hiring freezes.

01:28:20 ◼   ► So it's not a good time to be hunting for a job,

01:28:24 ◼   ► especially if you need it to stay here.

01:28:26 ◼   ► And so anybody who's staying at Twitter,

01:28:28 ◼   ► even though they kind of are sick about the whole thing, I don't blame them.

01:28:31 ◼   ► And I'm, you know, I don't blame anybody for, for, for keeping a job at Twitter.

01:28:35 ◼   ► There's some speculation that maybe the Twitter or Elon Musk and his

01:28:40 ◼   ► crackerjack team of idiot advisors perhaps even went through employees

01:28:45 ◼   ► and targeted, you know, thought we should keep these people because they can't

01:28:49 ◼   ► leave or are less likely to leave. So I don't blame people for staying.

01:28:52 ◼   ► But the fact that apparently a majority of the remaining employees refused to

01:28:57 ◼   ► click the stupid Google doc that says I agreed to be extremely hardcore,

01:29:02 ◼   ► no surprise, doesn't seem like they all got fired. Although, like,

01:29:05 ◼   ► I don't know. It's unclear what happened there. I,

01:29:09 ◼   ► it seems as though they did not do what he said he would do in the email.

01:29:13 ◼   ► Shocker.

01:29:14 ◼   ► Shocker.

01:29:15 ◼   ► But anyway, the latest updates in the recent days,

01:29:18 ◼   ► at least this week is that he said, Twitter's ready to hire again.

01:29:21 ◼   ► Come work. Who wants to come, come work here.

01:29:25 ◼   ► He's also cut all the perks, but, but they're ready to hire. So yeah,

01:29:29 ◼   ► that's great.

01:29:30 ◼   ► And the new thing is that all software engineers are going to need to send him

01:29:35 ◼   ► the CEO,

01:29:36 ◼   ► a weekly status report of everything they're working on that is formatted a

01:29:41 ◼   ► certain way that also includes code samples to him.

01:29:44 ◼   ► It's well, I think it's, I will say this,

01:29:48 ◼   ► I'll just cover my ass here and say,

01:29:50 ◼   ► I think it's a little bit unclear from the reporting on this,

01:29:54 ◼   ► whether they're going to is the two address for this weekly email

01:29:59 ◼   ► Elon@Twitter.com or is it, is it to your manager and then the manager?

01:30:03 ◼   ► No, no, no. These have an alias. They set up an alias.

01:30:06 ◼   ► But it's one address. It's not just send it to your manager.

01:30:09 ◼   ► No, it's one address. And, and then I believe the implication was like, he,

01:30:13 ◼   ► Elon is going to be, you know, because he loves to micromanage and,

01:30:17 ◼   ► and this has become very clear and I'm like, dude,

01:30:20 ◼   ► you do not have time to go through these reports.

01:30:23 ◼   ► Like his poor chief of staff, you know, like God,

01:30:27 ◼   ► it does sound, I know there's,

01:30:31 ◼   ► lots of people have described it as boomer mentality and Elon Musk is

01:30:36 ◼   ► not boomer. He's Gen X. And you know, and it's funny,

01:30:39 ◼   ► I think everybody out there who's seen this news is on a Slack and has

01:30:44 ◼   ► programmer friends, you know, it's and people, you know, I,

01:30:48 ◼   ► I've, I've been a Slack with a bunch of friends and a bunch of them said,

01:30:51 ◼   ► you know, I used to have to, you know,

01:30:53 ◼   ► everybody has a story where that's how you used to do stuff that is emailing,

01:30:57 ◼   ► but you like Apple used to have something.

01:30:59 ◼   ► I have a friend who worked at Apple like 20 some years ago and,

01:31:01 ◼   ► and Apple used to have something similar to this,

01:31:04 ◼   ► but it wasn't email Bertrand Cerlet, your code for the week.

01:31:08 ◼   ► It was once a week,

01:31:10 ◼   ► you'd email your manager with what you'd done and what you're doing next week.

01:31:14 ◼   ► And then it was your manager's job to sort of coalesce that into a smaller

01:31:18 ◼   ► report.

01:31:18 ◼   ► Here's what my team did this week and what they're doing next week.

01:31:22 ◼   ► And then that goes forward and it's, you know, it's a way to, to you want,

01:31:25 ◼   ► management should be keeping tabs on what's going on,

01:31:28 ◼   ► but it needs to go in some sort of hierarchy.

01:31:30 ◼   ► Yes. That's the thing I like. Okay. I do status reports at GitHub. You know,

01:31:35 ◼   ► I'm supposed to do them every week. Now I'm bad at status reports,

01:31:38 ◼   ► but you know, we do have,

01:31:39 ◼   ► like we have an issue where we kind of fill things out and whatnot,

01:31:42 ◼   ► but it doesn't go to Thomas Demke, our CEO. Right.

01:31:46 ◼   ► And it doesn't even go to like the head of product or engineering.

01:31:49 ◼   ► Like this is, that's the thing to me that is,

01:31:52 ◼   ► is completely unhinged about this.

01:31:54 ◼   ► It's not so much that should you be having weekly status reports for your teams?

01:31:58 ◼   ► Yeah. Should you be having,

01:31:59 ◼   ► maybe they should be part of like your scrum meetings. I don't know. That's,

01:32:02 ◼   ► that's fine. The CEO shouldn't be in my mind,

01:32:06 ◼   ► like concerning himself with this sort of thing.

01:32:08 ◼   ► Even if you only have 1200 people left at the company or however many are left

01:32:13 ◼   ► now, that's still way too many people.

01:32:15 ◼   ► There are,

01:32:16 ◼   ► but the funny part and I'm out of touch with the way that a lot of this stuff

01:32:20 ◼   ► works, cause I haven't worked on a team in a while.

01:32:22 ◼   ► And the last time I was on a team, it was for Vesper.

01:32:24 ◼   ► And it was just three of us and we'd, our, our tool was, you know, well we had,

01:32:27 ◼   ► but we had get, you know, you know, we did have source control, but

01:32:33 ◼   ► there are, I am aware of the fact that there are better, better tools for

01:32:37 ◼   ► status reports and, and,

01:32:40 ◼   ► and reviewing source code. Right. Then in the email,

01:32:44 ◼   ► I mean, honestly, like with screenshots of code, the screenshots of code,

01:32:49 ◼   ► screenshots of code is the dumbest thing. I'm like, it keeps coming up, right?

01:32:53 ◼   ► That's the thing. And the thing is, this is like, and I realize I'm biased because I,

01:32:57 ◼   ► I work at, you know, a place that our whole focus is developer tools, but yeah,

01:33:02 ◼   ► just send like the, just send, just send the git commit or if you know what I

01:33:06 ◼   ► mean? Well, that would be the thing. If you really do want to be,

01:33:10 ◼   ► be reviewing code,

01:33:11 ◼   ► the way to do it would be to send a link to like a, a commit, right?

01:33:16 ◼   ► And you're, you know, presumably, you know, the engineer obviously has,

01:33:20 ◼   ► has commit access to the, to the source controlled database.

01:33:23 ◼   ► And presumably Elon could get, you know, could get access to it,

01:33:29 ◼   ► but it would be links to the code, not screenshots.

01:33:34 ◼   ► Exactly. Exactly. It would be linked and say, okay, these are the candidates I made,

01:33:39 ◼   ► or these are the issues that I dealt with, or these are.

01:33:41 ◼   ► The screenshots of code thing is,

01:33:45 ◼   ► is really only just a hair more ridiculous

01:33:49 ◼   ► than the report from last week's episode of the crazy show where it was

01:33:54 ◼   ► everybody was supposed to print out.

01:33:56 ◼   ► Right. There's supposed to print out their source code. And then they're like,

01:33:59 ◼   ► Oh no, no, no, no, no. That could be a problem. Don't print it, shred it,

01:34:02 ◼   ► be prepared to show it on his laptop. And then I think after that,

01:34:06 ◼   ► they were like fly out here. If you're not here, it would be great.

01:34:10 ◼   ► If you could be here though, fly out to HQ and be ready to present code with me.

01:34:15 ◼   ► In, in these meetings,

01:34:16 ◼   ► because you're now the top of the top engineers who I feel like I have to

01:34:19 ◼   ► retain. And I'm going to reward you with that knowledge by,

01:34:22 ◼   ► by asking you to get on an airplane with no notice the week before Thanksgiving.

01:34:27 ◼   ► Yeah. The week before Thanksgiving on a Friday,

01:34:29 ◼   ► just come in and be prepared to show your code to me,

01:34:33 ◼   ► presumably so we can do some whiteboarding exercises.

01:34:37 ◼   ► The week before Thanksgiving. And apparently because of COVID,

01:34:41 ◼   ► and I think this makes very intuitive sense by all expectations,

01:34:45 ◼   ► it is supposedly going to be the most traveled week of

01:34:50 ◼   ► Thanksgiving ever in history. Cause a, the population keeps growing.

01:34:54 ◼   ► The world population just hit 8 billion this, this week, you know, by, you know,

01:34:58 ◼   ► not like anybody has a real head count, but the population keeps growing.

01:35:01 ◼   ► But because of pent up demand, right.

01:35:04 ◼   ► From Thanksgiving's missed over the last few years. And, and, you know,

01:35:08 ◼   ► we're out of the, you know, I personally,

01:35:11 ◼   ► I don't want to get an argument over the word pandemic, but COVID is not over.

01:35:14 ◼   ► COVID still serious, but the pandemic is to me clearly over look up the word,

01:35:18 ◼   ► pandemic and a dictionary. That's not what we're experiencing.

01:35:21 ◼   ► And so all the people who missed Thanksgiving's in recent years or who have

01:35:25 ◼   ► families all over, you know, sometimes I go here, sometimes I go there and,

01:35:29 ◼   ► you know, anyway, lots of travel. And he just expected people to get, I mean,

01:35:34 ◼   ► I don't even know if you could, I don't even know if you,

01:35:36 ◼   ► how could you book an airplane the Friday before this Thanksgiving on a whim?

01:35:40 ◼   ► It doesn't make any sense.

01:35:42 ◼   ► And I know it's people sometimes think that as soon as

01:35:47 ◼   ► somebody levels up in the stratosphere of being super

01:35:52 ◼   ► rich, that you lose all touch with the regular people, but it's, you know,

01:35:57 ◼   ► and of course,

01:35:57 ◼   ► Elon Musk famously flies around on a private jet because part of the drama with

01:36:01 ◼   ► him in Twitter is some kid.

01:36:03 ◼   ► Somebody, you know, takes the public data.

01:36:05 ◼   ► I think the bot is gross to be completely honest.

01:36:08 ◼   ► A lot of celebrities do it too. And people got mad at me. They're like, Oh,

01:36:11 ◼   ► you know, it's, it's public data. I'm like, you're right. It is.

01:36:13 ◼   ► I also think it's gross when, you know,

01:36:15 ◼   ► like Taylor Swift fans for years have been tracking her jets and,

01:36:19 ◼   ► and I've always been like, okay, you're creeps now.

01:36:22 ◼   ► Like you're actually like stalkers, but, but, but it is public data,

01:36:27 ◼   ► which is the hilarious thing, right? Like,

01:36:29 ◼   ► But I really do think I, and I mean this sincerely and I'm, I,

01:36:34 ◼   ► I'm as susceptible to getting spoiled by privilege as anyone,

01:36:38 ◼   ► I think anybody reasonable, but no matter how rich I suddenly became,

01:36:42 ◼   ► if I hit a power ball and became mega rich, you know,

01:36:45 ◼   ► $50 billion and I start, I buy a private jet.

01:36:49 ◼   ► I probably would buy a private jet if I had $50 billion. Why the hell not?

01:36:53 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:36:54 ◼   ► I really don't think I would forget that most people don't have a private jet

01:36:59 ◼   ► and that air travel commercial air travel is a pain in the ass.

01:37:02 ◼   ► I really don't think I would forget that.

01:37:05 ◼   ► Well, that's the thing. I mean, with all of this,

01:37:07 ◼   ► it's just like the complete out of touchness with reality. And then for me,

01:37:11 ◼   ► it's just the casual cruelty of every aspect of this, right?

01:37:14 ◼   ► Because you can do, you can do layoffs and,

01:37:18 ◼   ► and that is never, there's never a good way to do it.

01:37:21 ◼   ► And it's always going to be painful and you can,

01:37:24 ◼   ► you can have to make decisions to make them,

01:37:25 ◼   ► but just the casual cruelty of every aspect that he's taken to this

01:37:30 ◼   ► is, is beyond me. And then to see people like Marc Andreessen,

01:37:34 ◼   ► who he used to follow me on Twitter and then he blocked me on Twitter and I not

01:37:38 ◼   ► really sure what that was about, but that's fine. Tweeting that like if he,

01:37:41 ◼   ► if you know that, that if he were getting started today,

01:37:44 ◼   ► he knows exactly where he would work.

01:37:46 ◼   ► You have the implication being that he would be working at Twitter right now.

01:37:48 ◼   ► And I'm thinking you are so full of it.

01:37:51 ◼   ► Yep. There's no.

01:37:52 ◼   ► Absolute pathological liar.

01:37:54 ◼   ► There is no way in hell that if you're Marc Andreessen and you're coming out of

01:37:58 ◼   ► the University of Illinois, Champaign, whatever,

01:37:59 ◼   ► if you are on the precipice of creating one of the probably like three most like

01:38:06 ◼   ► important software applications of all time, right?

01:38:11 ◼   ► Arguably the most important, right?

01:38:13 ◼   ► Transformative transformative on, on, on another level, right?

01:38:16 ◼   ► Like doing all this stuff that you're going to say, yeah,

01:38:19 ◼   ► I'm going to go work for the guy that is going to micromanage me,

01:38:23 ◼   ► asked me to get on a plane the Friday before Thanksgiving with no notice to

01:38:28 ◼   ► print out my code or show screenshots of it, send him weekly status updates. Oh,

01:38:33 ◼   ► and he's going to cut all the perks. Yeah.

01:38:35 ◼   ► That's where I'm going to work. Oh, and,

01:38:38 ◼   ► and he's going to probably low ball me on the pay. Yeah.

01:38:40 ◼   ► That's where I'm going to work cause I'm going to learn so much.

01:38:43 ◼   ► Are you kidding me?

01:38:44 ◼   ► This is what I wrote about it and I still, I stand by it.

01:38:47 ◼   ► This is the part that to me, I just,

01:38:49 ◼   ► it boggles my mind except that I really think that the part of Elon Musk's mind

01:38:54 ◼   ► that should, and I think lots of people do, I don't think, for example,

01:38:58 ◼   ► I don't know Jeff Bezos. I've never met him. I, I, I've met Tim Cook,

01:39:03 ◼   ► you know, I, I met Steve Jobs.

01:39:05 ◼   ► I have met very successful billionaires or billionaire-esque type people.

01:39:11 ◼   ► I don't think any of those people, Bezos who I never met,

01:39:14 ◼   ► but Cook or Jobs or Satya Nadella,

01:39:16 ◼   ► would ever forget that normal people don't fly on private jets

01:39:22 ◼   ► and that air travel is a pain in the ass and that Thanksgiving is a major

01:39:28 ◼   ► holiday for travel. You know, I,

01:39:31 ◼   ► I think it boggles my mind how he's mismanaging the human resources and I don't

01:39:36 ◼   ► know what else to call it.

01:39:37 ◼   ► I know human resources has sort of become a generic term,

01:39:41 ◼   ► but people just mismanaging people and I guess that's what Apple calls it,

01:39:46 ◼   ► right? Like, uh, you know,

01:39:47 ◼   ► They call it like people management I think or something. Yeah, no,

01:39:50 ◼   ► but I totally agree with you and it's, and you know,

01:39:52 ◼   ► I've used to have a lot of friends who worked at Twitter and I've had a lot of

01:39:56 ◼   ► people over the years and many of them left before all this and then some of

01:40:00 ◼   ► them were laid off and then some of them quit.

01:40:03 ◼   ► I now don't have any friends to my knowledge who still work at Twitter,

01:40:06 ◼   ► but just seeing this, I'm just thinking, you know,

01:40:09 ◼   ► it just didn't have to be done this way.

01:40:12 ◼   ► It didn't. I, but I do think though, the explanation is that the,

01:40:17 ◼   ► as you alluded to that, the cruelty is the point. It's not, it's not a by-product.

01:40:21 ◼   ► It's not, no, I think it is the point. I think you're right.

01:40:23 ◼   ► It's an assertion of,

01:40:25 ◼   ► of dominance of the Musk and the

01:40:30 ◼   ► people he considers his peers or his lackeys over the, again,

01:40:34 ◼   ► I'm sounding like a left-wing zealot, but the proletariat,

01:40:40 ◼   ► right? The working, the working class of the company. And again,

01:40:43 ◼   ► the working class in a company like Twitter is very,

01:40:46 ◼   ► very privileged and has very good high paying jobs, right? It's, you know,

01:40:50 ◼   ► compared to the public at large, this is a great place to work, you know,

01:40:53 ◼   ► a great industry to be in. Right. It's, I, you know,

01:40:57 ◼   ► my grandfather was a coal miner who I, I bring this up all the time.

01:41:01 ◼   ► I always remind myself of it. My grand,

01:41:02 ◼   ► my mom's father was a coal miner who went to work after the eighth grade in a

01:41:07 ◼   ► coal mine and then died at 71 of black lung disease. That's a hard fricking job,

01:41:11 ◼   ► you know, you know,

01:41:12 ◼   ► sitting there and designing interfaces or coding them up is, you know,

01:41:17 ◼   ► a lot better than being in a dirty, dangerous coal mine. It's a good job, but

01:41:23 ◼   ► the whole point of this though, I just can't believe I really did.

01:41:28 ◼   ► I would just emphasize, I know I'm repeating myself from the previous show.

01:41:30 ◼   ► We'll move on. But I just, I really,

01:41:32 ◼   ► my optimism over him spearheading Twitter was all about the fact that I've,

01:41:37 ◼   ► surely he's going to make terrible mistakes in product designs and content

01:41:41 ◼   ► management decisions. But when he sees that they're terrible,

01:41:45 ◼   ► he can correct them. Those types of decisions can be fixed.

01:41:50 ◼   ► And you know, Tim Cook hiring John Browett to hire retail, guess what?

01:41:54 ◼   ► The guys doesn't get it and is taking it to the wrong company.

01:41:57 ◼   ► You can fire them after four months and hire somebody totally different.

01:42:00 ◼   ► Spoiling, polluting, whatever you want to call it,

01:42:05 ◼   ► the internal company culture and morale in the company cannot be fixed

01:42:10 ◼   ► easily. It, it, it takes, you know, it's like cleaning up a lake, you know,

01:42:14 ◼   ► or a polluted river. You can't just like de-pollute it. You know,

01:42:18 ◼   ► you don't just shut down the factory that had been spewing the chemicals in.

01:42:21 ◼   ► And then all of a sudden the water's clean. That's not how it works.

01:42:24 ◼   ► And that's what culture is like. And like you said, to me,

01:42:28 ◼   ► a company layoff is like human surgery. There, it's never good to have surgery.

01:42:33 ◼   ► You don't want to have major surgery. There's, it's never for a good reason.

01:42:36 ◼   ► And if you do though, they, they, they,

01:42:40 ◼   ► they want to make you as, as comfortable as possible. Right. I mean, you know,

01:42:45 ◼   ► I've had surgeries on eye surgery a couple of times,

01:42:50 ◼   ► you know, I've alluded to over the years before they, you know,

01:42:53 ◼   ► give you the anesthesia, they give you like a Valium or, or something like that,

01:42:57 ◼   ► you know, to just cause they know you're a fucking nervous wreck, right? You're,

01:43:00 ◼   ► you're, Oh my God, this is awful. I'm going to have eye surgery. And they,

01:43:03 ◼   ► you know, they start off with a Valium to just chill you out a little bit.

01:43:06 ◼   ► And say, Hey, this is, I do feel a little better.

01:43:08 ◼   ► And then they give you good anesthesia, really,

01:43:10 ◼   ► really good anesthesia with specialists who are just,

01:43:13 ◼   ► and they're like the nicest people in the hospital, the anesthesiologists,

01:43:16 ◼   ► like people who are going into the vague realm of being a doctor type person and

01:43:21 ◼   ► are very, very good with chemistry and, and,

01:43:24 ◼   ► and experts and very smart, but also are super, super empathetic.

01:43:28 ◼   ► They go into anesthesia because it's, it's, it's a human job. Right.

01:43:32 ◼   ► And a good company for layoffs has the equivalent of anesthesia.

01:43:37 ◼   ► This is sucks. You're having surgery. This is not good news. This is awful,

01:43:41 ◼   ► but we're going to make it as easy as possible.

01:43:44 ◼   ► Elon Musk did this like, like, like in the,

01:43:47 ◼   ► they're in the military and it's just, you know, sorry, you know,

01:43:50 ◼   ► I'm just going to have to, I'm going to have to, you know,

01:43:52 ◼   ► take out this bullet with pliers and stitch you up without any anesthesia here.

01:43:57 ◼   ► I'll pour some water on your wound. You know, it's just insane to me.

01:44:01 ◼   ► And now that he's already saying like, Hey, we're going to start hiring,

01:44:05 ◼   ► come to work here. It's bananas.

01:44:06 ◼   ► And I just knew that you would be amused given that you work at GitHub,

01:44:11 ◼   ► that the state of the art, his opinion of the state of the art for keeping tabs on

01:44:15 ◼   ► what your engineers is doing is please, please send me a screenshot of your

01:44:18 ◼   ► source code.

01:44:19 ◼   ► All right. I've got one more sponsor break and I,

01:44:23 ◼   ► I've saved them for last because, well, I'm not going to say they're my favorite.

01:44:27 ◼   ► That would be unfair to the other sponsors, but I do love this company.

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01:44:51 ◼   ► Oh, well, I have a lot. I've got like terabytes of it. No, no,

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01:45:10 ◼   ► And backblaze is software on your Mac that you just never notice.

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01:45:28 ◼   ► you should be number one. And number two,

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01:45:35 ◼   ► how can you get it? Well, they have apps.

01:45:37 ◼   ► You can get, get it from your phone or your tablet or something like that.

01:45:41 ◼   ► If you just want to access one file while you're out,

01:45:43 ◼   ► you could just go to the backblaze app and find that one document that you want

01:45:48 ◼   ► to get, send it to somebody you can restore over the internet.

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01:46:04 ◼   ► You're just totally locked out and you need your stuff.

01:46:06 ◼   ► You can get a drive like a USB flash key or a hard drive

01:46:11 ◼   ► overnighted to your door and you, yeah, you pay for that drive,

01:46:16 ◼   ► but then you can just send it back to them and then you get your money back for

01:46:18 ◼   ► it. So it just send them to the drive back. You get your money back.

01:46:21 ◼   ► You can get all of your data tomorrow, all of it for free, effectively,

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01:47:06 ◼   ► Other than back your stuff up at back blaze.com/the talk show. Let's all right.

01:47:10 ◼   ► Before we, before we forget,

01:47:12 ◼   ► explain to me the whole Taylor Swift ticket masters situation.

01:47:17 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I,

01:47:20 ◼   ► I don't know how much this I should admit cause I got tickets to two shows.

01:47:23 ◼   ► That's okay. I've, I've spent, I look, you and I are lucky.

01:47:28 ◼   ► I've spent a fortune on some concert tickets. Luckily,

01:47:32 ◼   ► last tour, my wife and I are my wife especially,

01:47:35 ◼   ► but my wife and I are huge Tom Petty fans. And, and we got,

01:47:38 ◼   ► we spent a fortune to get like second row seats.

01:47:41 ◼   ► The last time he came through Philadelphia center stage, you know,

01:47:44 ◼   ► it was a fortune. I mean, probably not a Taylor Swift.

01:47:46 ◼   ► No, but it was great. No, but, but, but I also,

01:47:49 ◼   ► I got them like without having to pick, go through scalpers.

01:47:51 ◼   ► So I feel a little guilty that like, I mean, I still,

01:47:53 ◼   ► it took six hours for the first tickets for that process to happen.

01:47:57 ◼   ► But explain this to me,

01:47:58 ◼   ► like I'm a middle-aged guy who doesn't really pay attention to Taylor Swift and

01:48:01 ◼   ► is confused by how this could be so controversial because that's actually what's

01:48:05 ◼   ► going on.

01:48:06 ◼   ► No, absolutely. So, so Ticketmaster has done this thing and actually,

01:48:10 ◼   ► ironically, they piloted it,

01:48:11 ◼   ► piloted it with Taylor Swift for her reputation tour, which was in 2018,

01:48:16 ◼   ► where basically they had this thing called verified fans.

01:48:19 ◼   ► And it was supposed to be a way to ensure that actual fans got tickets and not

01:48:23 ◼   ► bots and scalpers. And the idea would be at least how it was run in the past.

01:48:28 ◼   ► This was not how it was run this time is that you would earn points by doing

01:48:32 ◼   ► things like watching her music video multiple times,

01:48:35 ◼   ► which people like me wrote scripts to do in the background while they worked.

01:48:38 ◼   ► And if you bought merch, uh, that also gave you lots of points. And so I,

01:48:43 ◼   ► you know, bought a lot of merch and so I was able to get really good seats.

01:48:47 ◼   ► So, so then they had this verified fan program where basically, you know,

01:48:50 ◼   ► you would get a text message, you put in like what shows were your priority.

01:48:54 ◼   ► They would basically, I guess, you know, kind of rank people based on,

01:48:57 ◼   ► you know,

01:48:58 ◼   ► the points and maybe there was some sort of random element and then you would

01:49:01 ◼   ► get a text message saying, okay, you're in, this is a link,

01:49:04 ◼   ► this is a code you have to put in to actually be able to buy tickets.

01:49:07 ◼   ► If you don't have this code,

01:49:08 ◼   ► you can't buy the tickets and it's supposed to be a way to try to cut down on,

01:49:13 ◼   ► on how many people would scalp tickets. Well,

01:49:16 ◼   ► and she also used that same program for Loverfest, which was like, she only did,

01:49:20 ◼   ► she was only going to do six shows period,

01:49:22 ◼   ► two on each coast and then two internationally.

01:49:25 ◼   ► But that show was supposed to be in July of 2020. And so that was canceled.

01:49:30 ◼   ► I also got tickets for that this time,

01:49:33 ◼   ► although they said they would give some priority to people who had tickets for

01:49:38 ◼   ► Loverfest from as far as we can tell that that didn't actually happen. They,

01:49:41 ◼   ► all you basically needed to get into the verified fan program was a ticket master

01:49:46 ◼   ► account. That was it.

01:49:48 ◼   ► And so millions and millions and millions of people signed up and ticket master

01:49:53 ◼   ► sent out more codes or more access where if every person bought the maximum

01:49:58 ◼   ► number of tickets, then apparently there were even tickets available to buy. Um,

01:50:03 ◼   ► so that was mistake number one, which was that, you know, this,

01:50:06 ◼   ► this program, which when Taylor had run it,

01:50:08 ◼   ► I think was actually fairly well run, like there's no perfect way to do it,

01:50:11 ◼   ► but it actually, you know, was,

01:50:13 ◼   ► was largely going to be giving credence to people who went through the process of

01:50:18 ◼   ► either spending money on her merch or, you know,

01:50:20 ◼   ► watching videos over and over again,

01:50:22 ◼   ► which doesn't mean that you're not going to scalp them,

01:50:25 ◼   ► but does I think make it less likely that you're going to be buying tickets to

01:50:29 ◼   ► just immediately resell. In this case, first, what happened,

01:50:32 ◼   ► there were a couple of different things.

01:50:34 ◼   ► First on the first day that tickets went up for sale and they did the East Coast

01:50:38 ◼   ► first. So I'm up at seven o'clock in the morning, Pacific time.

01:50:42 ◼   ► I was up really at six 30 and I was in the queue at 7am to get tickets.

01:50:47 ◼   ► And then there was,

01:50:49 ◼   ► and even though Ticketmaster has had problems with scaling before for Adele and

01:50:53 ◼   ► and other shows, the servers broke basically like,

01:50:57 ◼   ► like the line didn't move for hours.

01:50:59 ◼   ► And I think what eventually happened is they stopped selling tickets and had to

01:51:02 ◼   ► reboot things and they have a partnership with AWS,

01:51:05 ◼   ► so they should be better at this. But the system broke.

01:51:08 ◼   ► There were so many people who were online. Ticketmaster published a blog,

01:51:11 ◼   ► which they've now removed that I think apparently 15 million people showed up

01:51:16 ◼   ► and, and they just could not deal with the demand.

01:51:19 ◼   ► It was so bad that they had to push back the start of the West

01:51:24 ◼   ► Coast sales, which were originally supposed to start,

01:51:27 ◼   ► I think at like 11am Pacific and they had to push them back to like 3pm

01:51:31 ◼   ► Pacific and they had to move the Capital One presale.

01:51:35 ◼   ► So if you had a Capital One card, you could also order tickets.

01:51:38 ◼   ► They had to push that to the next day.

01:51:40 ◼   ► Originally it was all supposed to be the same day.

01:51:41 ◼   ► They had to move things around because of the influx.

01:51:45 ◼   ► So the first, so I was in line for,

01:51:48 ◼   ► it was four hours before I finally got my tickets for the show that I'd been

01:51:52 ◼   ► chosen to be able to buy seats for the first day.

01:51:55 ◼   ► Do you have to be there in front of it to make sure you're there?

01:51:58 ◼   ► Like you have to pay attention to it.

01:52:00 ◼   ► Yes. And that, that's the thing. Like if,

01:52:02 ◼   ► I knew a number of people who like were like, well, I've got to go,

01:52:06 ◼   ► I've got to try to transfer this to my phone.

01:52:07 ◼   ► If you transferred it to your phone,

01:52:09 ◼   ► like there was no guarantee that you would still be able to be in line. Right.

01:52:12 ◼   ► Like it was, you know, and, and, and it was also very clear,

01:52:15 ◼   ► like one device per person thing. Like if you tried to log in on another device,

01:52:19 ◼   ► they'd be like, Hey, you're already logged in on one device.

01:52:21 ◼   ► If you joined here,

01:52:22 ◼   ► we're going to kick you out of line on the other one and you're going to start

01:52:25 ◼   ► all over again. So I was lucky that I, you know,

01:52:30 ◼   ► work from home and had blocked my calendar, frankly,

01:52:34 ◼   ► that morning for tickets for that reason.

01:52:37 ◼   ► But it was one of those things where, yeah,

01:52:40 ◼   ► like you were kind of held hostage to the whole system.

01:52:45 ◼   ► So that was day one. Then there was the capital one presale,

01:52:49 ◼   ► which was also a disaster. And in that,

01:52:53 ◼   ► you just needed the first six digits of a capital one card to get in.

01:52:57 ◼   ► But then you actually had to use a capital one card to buy the tickets.

01:53:02 ◼   ► And then tragically for me, when I was getting Atlanta seats, my dad,

01:53:06 ◼   ► whose capital one card I was using,

01:53:08 ◼   ► his phone was off and he did not get the second factor texts that I needed from

01:53:12 ◼   ► him. And so my mom and I, if we go to the concert together in Atlanta,

01:53:17 ◼   ► I will probably be paying four or five times what I, what I paid,

01:53:21 ◼   ► what I would have paid. So that was tragic. Exactly. I was, I,

01:53:26 ◼   ► I knew better by the time the Seattle tickets went on sale a few hours later and

01:53:30 ◼   ► used a friend's card,

01:53:32 ◼   ► who I should have probably used from the beginning and she was on alert to get

01:53:36 ◼   ► me tickets, but that was another two hours.

01:53:39 ◼   ► Then the next day is when or two days later they're supposed to do the general

01:53:43 ◼   ► sale. So just to be clear,

01:53:46 ◼   ► that's two hours that you spent and wound up with no tickets because you

01:53:50 ◼   ► couldn't get the two factor code because you didn't anticipate that just

01:53:53 ◼   ► breaking in, you thought the card number and the expiration in this,

01:53:56 ◼   ► I thought that,

01:53:57 ◼   ► I thought the fact the card number was attached to my ticket master account and

01:54:00 ◼   ► all that. Yeah, I thought that would be enough and it wasn't. All right.

01:54:03 ◼   ► So that's two hours for nothing.

01:54:05 ◼   ► And then it was another hour and a half later that afternoon for Seattle tickets.

01:54:09 ◼   ► So now we're up to eight and a half hours to get tickets.

01:54:12 ◼   ► If I put all my time in cumulatively.

01:54:14 ◼   ► Then they said that there's supposed to be the general pre-sale or general sale,

01:54:20 ◼   ► I guess you could say it was supposed to be, so this was on a Wednesday.

01:54:23 ◼   ► This is the general pre-sale or general sale was supposed to be happening on

01:54:25 ◼   ► Friday.

01:54:26 ◼   ► And then ticket master announces that they are not going to be having the

01:54:31 ◼   ► general sale.

01:54:32 ◼   ► That apparently they've sold too many and they don't know how many are left or

01:54:36 ◼   ► something, which seems weird to me.

01:54:38 ◼   ► It's like you should know exactly how many tickets you have and they are

01:54:41 ◼   ► canceling the general sale. Meanwhile,

01:54:45 ◼   ► meanwhile, while you're in line for these tickets,

01:54:47 ◼   ► and this is what was so galling while you're in line for four hours or two and

01:54:51 ◼   ► a half hours or two hours for these tickets,

01:54:53 ◼   ► you can go to SeatGeek and you can go to SubHub and you can go to VividSeats and

01:54:59 ◼   ► you can go to other resale sites and people are selling the seats that they've

01:55:04 ◼   ► been able to receive for just ridiculous amounts of money.

01:55:10 ◼   ► Like just truly insulting amounts of money.

01:55:12 ◼   ► I heard Syracuse say on ATP last week that they were like $12,000.

01:55:17 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:55:19 ◼   ► And those are the prices before the SubHub fees because I went through something

01:55:23 ◼   ► similar where I did pay.

01:55:25 ◼   ► So my mom and I are taking my mom to see Adele in Las Vegas.

01:55:29 ◼   ► It'll now be at the end of January.

01:55:30 ◼   ► It was originally supposed to be in March and then Adele postponed and that was