Pod Insights Big Technology Podcast Disney's Ten Year Low, Google's AI Attends Meetings For You, Metaverse Gets Legs About this episode Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Disney stock hitting a ten year low 2) The rise of white noise podcasts 3) Google's new Duet AI that attends meetings for you 4) Everyone returns to office 5) Commercial real estate bust looms? 6) Ranjan's report from San Francisco 7) An excerpt from Walter Isaacson's new Elon Musk book 8) Fidelity marks up Twitter 9) Meta promotes Threads in Instagram 10) The Metaverse gets legs!
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0:00 Alex Kantrowitz? Disney hits a 10-year low. Google's new AI will go to meetings with you. And the social media wars hit up just a bit more. All that coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way.
0:44 Alex Kantrowitz? You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razor were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our traditional, cool-headed and nuanced format. We are here ahead of a Labor Day weekend. It's September. I can't believe summer's over. Ron John Roy is here with us as always.
1:29 Alex Kantrowitz? Welcome, Ron John.
1:31 Speaker 01 Summer's over, but lots of news still, even in this last week.
1:36 Alex Kantrowitz? Lots of news. And I'll say this, even though it was the summer, even though things were slower, Big Technology Podcast hit an all-time high in terms of listenership in August, which is astonishing, because that's typically a slower time. And I just wanted to say, everybody, to all of our loyal listeners and to all of our new listeners, thank you so much. It's great to hit these new records and I got, I'm really stoked for the next few months, because we have a lot of great stuff coming towards you. And the fact that we were able to hit an all-time listenership high in August, it just blows my mind, and I'm extremely grateful to everybody who listens. So, thank you for that.
2:14 Speaker 01 Everyone on the beach, listening to Big Technology Podcast.
2:17 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, the number one beach listen of people around the world. If you, I wanted to ask, if you haven't done a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, usually I wait till the end of the show to ask, but I'll ask in the beginning this time in honor of our new milestone. Five stars goes a long way. So I would appreciate if you could do that. Okay, housekeeping is out of the way. Let's talk about our first big story, which is that Disney just hit a 10-year low. This is sort of astonishing to me. I mean, obviously been tracking the stock. It's been a tough go of it for, for companies in that category, but today on Friday, it hit a 10-year low. And Josh Brown, CNBC contributor and CEO of Rithos Wealth Management, wrote about it a little bit on LinkedIn. And he says, you're going to hear frequently that people refer
3:01 Alex Kantrowitz? Disney as a great company. And without a doubt, it is a great company. It's entertained and delighted billions of people around the world and employed millions of men and women for the last 100 years. But great company is not the same thing as good investment. And Disney operates in some of the most difficult businesses imaginable, theme parks, box office, streaming video, cruises, apparel, network television and toys. None of it is a walk in the park. The great company has a stock that's underperformed the S and P 500 over the last 30 years. It's so fascinating because Disney does seem like this mainstay of so many people's stock portfolios. And yet to see it hit a 10-year low today, basically dead money for the last decade and underperform the S and P 500 over the last three, to me is just a jaw dropping statistic, especially now
3:46 Alex Kantrowitz? that Iger's back. What do you think about, about this, this low, low, low light? I was going to call it a milestone, but this low light for Disney.
3:55 Speaker 01 Opposite of milestone. I think having a four and a six-year-old, being the parent to them, Disney, at least culturally in my life, is, is ubiquitous, is I still see the power of the brand and what they do. But when you start to look at the numbers, it is shocking. And I think streaming is, and we've talked about streamflation and the difficulties of the streaming business, streamflation being, which I'm sure most listeners are familiar with, the price of every service quietly going up 10, 20, 30%. Right now, I believe Disney Plus is, it's $13.99 for the standalone service. So companies are trying to charge more, but the losses are staggering.
4:38 Speaker 01 Last quarter, Disney lost $512 million in their streaming business. Since 2019, they've lost more than $11 billion. What's more interesting to me even this week. So there was a lawsuit from investors where they detailed a scheme that Disney would be cost shifting, but basically taking costs from one part of the business and moving them to the other to hide the losses, the true nature of the losses in streaming. And again, when you're losing 11 million bucks, it's $11 billion in four years, you think you're probably not hiding anything, but apparently there's even more. There's with certain shows, what would happen is even if the show was primarily meant for
5:20 Speaker 01 Disney Plus, all the marketing around it, all the production costs around it would be shifted to the Disney Channel or some other part of the business to try to minimize the costs. So, so on top of all the other pressure they're facing, now they're having investors saying, you did not give us proper warning about the nature of the business. You're giving rosy projections and you are hiding losses.
5:42 Alex Kantrowitz? It is interesting because all those business lines that Josh mentions, whether it's theme park, whether it's entertainment apparel, you know, box office. Yes, those are all really difficult businesses, but you would think that Disney has enough going for it. I mean, you think about just the theme park business, right? The summer, you'd imagine these parks are just packed with people and Disney is the place that people dream about. So it's like, yes, tough businesses, but Disney should have an advantage. So what does it mean that Disney itself is struggling to make this a go?
6:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think, and again, it's, it's we were, we are at yet another part of the world where, especially with theme parks, the prices are astronomical, yet they still have a difficulty, have a difficult time actually making the numbers work. In every single one of these places, it's like. Not even you have the strongest brand in the last century. You have complete pricing power to any parent. They know well that you are not going to say no to Disney. Yet you are the stock is underperforming and you're not making it work. And I think it's a sign that like a lot of these businesses, and again, streaming is the perfect example of this, where over the last three or four years, there was this vision and idea of what the business would look like.
7:00 Speaker 01 And it would be, you know, scale on subscribers, lose money upfront, you know, and then, but overall, the marginal cost of every additional subscriber on a digital service is, you know, negligible and then you're going to become profitable. It's like kind of the story of every venture funded business over the last decade. It was just done competitively at an insane scale with billions and tens of billions of dollars being invested by all these media giants. And I think it's a reminder that the strongest brand in the world, when you are just taking kind of a illogical approach to a new type of business, it's not going to work.
7:37 Alex Kantrowitz? So then usually when a company has these troubles in the stock market, it does something drastic. So you can think about Meta and its year of efficiency. I think Disney's already restructured enough over the past few years. Do we see something like it, maybe it sells in ESPN? Does it get out of a surprising business? I mean, obviously it's not going to shut the theme parks, but like, does it just shutter some of its legacy entertainment businesses completely? I mean, what do you think happens here?
8:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think focus, if Facebook was a year of efficiency, maybe Bob Iger is going to come up with some cute moniker around whatever next year is in focus, because I think it is a reminder. They have all, they're in all these different businesses, but what is the core business of Disney other than the brand? At a certain point, you could have seen the vision painted where all of these magically work together. Well, again, Disney plus watching the streaming service leads your family to the theme park, which is a higher margin business, which leads to more apparel purchasing, which leads to whatever else. Does ESPN really fit into that world? I'm not sure.
8:45 Speaker 01 They and when you also see like ESPN, for those unfamiliar, is making a move into sports betting, which is easily the most lucrative part of that entire world. They delayed entering this market for years because of the kind of weight of the Disney brand and the family friendly nature of it, and they didn't want to get into sports betting. So they potentially missed a huge, huge opportunity there. So you see how all of these businesses kind of living under the same conglomerate umbrella don't necessarily work. It's kind of like, remember GE in through the what 80s, 90s and NBC and all these things. You don't even know who owns who and what businesses they own or what exactly they do.
9:26 Alex Kantrowitz? Exactly. I mean, maybe what Disney does need to do is get into the white noise market. Because the thing that seems to have been doing so well on streaming, and this is quite astonishing to me. It's a recent report in Bloomberg that white noise podcasts are like the most profitable thing going in, in media right now. So these podcasts basically play shows that have crashing waves or bird sounds on repeat. And they could make, some make at least $18,000 a month through advertising on Spotify. And Spotify did a study and said, and found out that if they decided to eliminate just the white noise podcasts, they would lose $38 million. I mean, $38 million worth of programming.
10:11 Alex Kantrowitz? That's astonishing.
10:15 Speaker 01 What are we doing here? Why are we not making a white noise podcast right now? I think is a, is the fair question. But yeah, I love this story because this is such an absurd corner of the media business, but it's not tiny. It's 35, 38 million dollars. And it's a reminder that like as a Disney, when we're asking, you know, why is it so hard for them with that kind of strong brand? It's a reminder that there's all these weird arbitrages and hacks and workarounds, siphoning off money from the larger pie of media dollars that probably, you know, when you're trying to make a great TV show and they're just sitting there like, where did all that money go? It's in the white noise podcast.
10:59 Alex Kantrowitz? Ladies and gentlemen, for the next 30 minutes, please stand by as Raja and I make bird noises.
11:05 Speaker 01 Actually, oh, you want to know, this is probably foreign to you, but as a parent again, as we're sticking on this theme, another weird part of this is there are songs that have the word poop. BuzzFeed News actually covered this last year in the title because more and more kids, and I've caught my kids doing this and you see it happen, kids ask Alexa to play songs about poop. And then there's artists that profit and like actually compete and try to hack their way into being the top answer to that query from Alexa and get that streaming penny. So, so in terms of other ridiculous places, people are making money and taking it away
11:46 Speaker 01 from logical and rational markets, sorry Disney, you can get into the poop song market on Alexa as well.
11:53 Alex Kantrowitz? It must drive Bob Iger nuts to realize that his margin is going to poop songs on the Echo and Waves Crashing Into The Beach podcasts on Spotify.
12:05 Speaker 01 So, hey, look, if you can make that work, it's a good business.
12:08 Alex Kantrowitz? Also kind of interesting, like there are all these debates of like, does tech drive the culture? Or does the culture drive tech? And clearly there's a little bit of each. I mean, it is when you have these platforms that give access to such amazing distribution, they will of course influence the distribution. What is the, I mean, the cliche line is the medium is the, is the message. And there you go. I mean, it's sort of like a case in point example. So Rajan, I want to switch gears and talk a little bit about Google Cloud Next, which you were at this past week. One of the most interesting things that came out of it for me, and of course, like it was an opportunity for Google to be like, you know, we have all these generative AI products for the workplace. But one of the things that was most interesting to me was this Google Duet AI,
12:52 Alex Kantrowitz? which is going to take notes in real time when you're on meetings. And so it does all these like amazing things. So if you're late to a meeting, it will show you a mid-meeting summary. So you can catch up on what happened during the call. You can even speak privately with a Google chatbot and go over details you might've missed. When the meeting's over, you can save that summary to docs. Come back to it after the fact and it can also attach those to video clips of important moments. And this is all from the verge, by the way, but here is the crazy one. The headline is Google meets new AI will be able to go to meetings for you. Another new meet feature, let's do it attend a meeting on your behalf. On a meeting invite, you can click and attend for me button.
13:35 Alex Kantrowitz? And Google can auto generate some text about what you might want to discuss. Those notes will be viewable to attendees during the meeting so that they can discuss them. So you were there, I'm going to ask you a question if I'm sure I wonder if you know the answer to this. Does the AI guess what you were going to ask during the meeting and then show it to people?
13:54 Speaker 01 I got this one.
13:56 Alex Kantrowitz? This is
13:56 Speaker 01 I got you here. I got you here.
13:58 Alex Kantrowitz? If somebody shows up to a meeting with me and it's Google Duet like asking questions based off of some prompt that they put on AI. I would lose my freaking mind like people, people have, I mean, I may, we don't know if this is going to be used or not, but there's just a basic modicum of respect that you have to pay to people when you schedule a meeting with them, you just, I mean, I'm sure executives will try this, but don't send your AI there to ask questions. That's ridiculous.
14:24 Speaker 01 All right. So on this, I spent the last week at Google Cloud Next and I was at the presentation where the product manager debuted this feature. And poor guy went through like 45 minutes of all these different features and really cool, exciting things in like about lighting and sound and whatever else. And every question after was about this one feature. And you could see it kind of got the crowd riled up and triggered and what does it mean? But I actually thought it was pretty interesting around the future of work because anyone who's work in a hybrid or distributed environment knows
15:05 Speaker 01 the, the opportunity cost of attending a meeting now is essentially zero. People join meetings, they kind of do their own work to the side. They're not as engaged, they're not necessarily like, they don't all necessarily need to be there. But clicking accept is the easiest thing in the world, whereas in the past, sitting in a meeting with no computer and having to actually be engaged and physically there's a huge opportunity cost. So Making some way to make it easier for people to be updated about the meeting and feel like they're going to be taking away some of the key points, but not have to actually, you know, triple, double book their calendar and be there. I actually think it's kind of interesting. I think it's a good idea.
15:47 Speaker 01 And anyone, again, generative AI transcription is one of the things it's done well for a long time. And now summarization was always kind of the bottleneck. But now anyone who's used any kind of large language model summarization feature knows it's pretty good to start getting items. You could also see where people in the meeting start saying, "The next action item is, our takeaways are," and almost kind of like training the transcript as well as what's going to be taken away. So I'm pretty excited about this and I actually think this is kind of cool. One last clarification, the product manager did say in the end, "This will not be enabled for one-to-one meetings.
16:30 Speaker 01 It has to be at least some number," I think he was like a minimum of four. Because you can see again, if it's a one-to-one and you show up and the other person sent their duet AI, that I would take a little personally.
16:44 Alex Kantrowitz? Exactly. So first of all, I think some of these, some of the features are cool, right? Like the first handful that I listed off actually makes sense. If you show up to a meeting late, getting that summary, good. If you are trying to review what happened in the meeting, being able to like click on the hot links and then figuring out what happened, you know, and being able to watch that video clip, excellent. The thing that gives me pause is sending the Google, Google duet as an emissary for yourself as a meeting. Either show up to the meeting or don't show up to the meeting. I think it's ridiculous to send an AI to participate on your behalf.
17:17 Speaker 01 Oh, so, but what they said was, and this, this actually came up, it was to ask questions. What it actually does is you, you preset the questions that you want asked on your behalf. So it's not like the AI is determining, and this actually came up as a question. Because the capabilities should be there as well, where the AI understands is your question being answered or not. And imagine it actually prompts, it's like, hey, guys, five minutes left. Can you please answer these questions? But they said, so that making sure your questions are asked, that's just more like a thing that's up there that says, here are the three questions
17:58 Speaker 01 from Ron John, who is not at this meeting. But it's more about the transcription element and taking away parts of the meeting.
18:05 Alex Kantrowitz? I just believe that if you're gonna ask a question in the meeting, you have to earn it. You have to earn that ability. You have to show up and actually, you know, ask that question yourself. You can't just send an AI bot to go ask.
18:17 Speaker 01 I don't know, man. If you're in a meeting, then you got to also pay attention for the entire meeting. And there's plenty of meetings where some percentage of the people are not at 100% capacity.
18:29 Alex Kantrowitz? I think you're calling for meeting reform, which I can.
18:33 Speaker 01 I'm calling for meeting reform.
18:34 Alex Kantrowitz? I agree with you on meeting reform. I think this is maybe a Band-Aid over like the bigger questions organizations need to have. Here's a great comment. We're also live on LinkedIn, folks. We have Maggie Hart, who says, it's also great for people with learning disabilities like dyslexia to have a better contribution to these meetings. And there's really no doubt about that. Like, if you're, if you're, you know, have some sort of disability can definitely help. So, want to shout that out. I mean, we're gonna see this stuff in practice. The thing is, one of the things I find interesting about these Google events is that they're one of like the few tech events where like you actually see the product vision. And then that just kind of shows up in what billions of people are doing, like in the next coming months. And we're gonna see that. It is interesting.
19:15 Alex Kantrowitz? It seems like these are all meant for hybrid work, like they're building in some way for a future where people are still gonna be on Google meets. Was that sort of the vibe at the conference that like, we need a new set of workplace software for a workplace that's going to live both in person, but also in the digital world?
19:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think what was interesting to me is, and again, I went in expecting to be thinking more about generative AI and what are the capabilities and what are the cool new features that are happening. And I actually left thinking more about what is the future of work look like? Because all of these, Google Meet was just one of them, across all docs, slides, sheets, entire Google Workspace, all the new features that they're releasing, it really can change how you work. And anyone who already works with any of these features, or even just uses ChatGPT, or I've talked about Code Interpreter on here from OpenAI, like, there's so many of these tools that are already there. And I think, I mean,
20:14 Speaker 01 that's the stuff that I really left feeling excited, is that so many more mundane tasks, taking notes in a meeting is the most miserable thing possible. And usually, the person who's assigned with taking notes becomes less engaged than other people because they're more focused on taking notes. Like, there's so many of these things that I think will change how people engage with work and how they feel. But, but one tension I did keep thinking is, Google is definitely going back to the office.
20:43 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
20:44 Speaker 01 Yet, selling this vision of, and is it hybrid, is it distributed, is it, like, whatever it is, it's like, it's clear that we all are being reminded that going back to the office is important. And I don't know if you, did you see the Zoom news?
20:59 Alex Kantrowitz? Yes, I have seen what they've, what they've been saying.
21:03 Speaker 01 Okay, so Zoom said, back to the office, I think a month ago, that it's going to be mandated. I think it was like two or three days a week. But then there's leaked audio to Business Insider, where the CEO of Zoom was saying that remote work doesn't allow people to build trust and be innovative. Now.
21:23 Alex Kantrowitz? Wait, Zoom is saying this?
21:25 Speaker 01 The CEO of Zoom in leaked audio is saying remote work doesn't allow people to build trust and be innovative. And here's the thing, I kind of agree with that. I think like, and always up for this debate, but I think some level of in-person interaction is very important, especially on the trust-building side. But it's so fascinating to me, the tension between these companies where you're selling the future of. Remote work, yet internally, you're still trying to get people back to the office.
21:55 Alex Kantrowitz? Well, I'm going to agree with you. I think we definitely need a level of of in person interaction and you can't just do it completely alone digitally. There was such a so let's talk. There's a little bit of commercial real estate news that's just constantly bubbling over the under the surface and it just seems like we're about to hit a bad moment because even though there's all this big talk among corporates like Google and even within Zoom, which is ironic, but interesting about going back to the office. So much office space lays vacant and there's a story in the New York Times this week about the commercial real estate, the decline of commercial real estate and the forthcoming vacancies that are going to really cause a
22:36 Alex Kantrowitz? potentially cause what some people might cause call an urban doom loop, which is like a total collapse of like, you know, the developers and then of course hitting the banks. But there's a great quote in there where it says, somebody who's in favor of the office obviously says, "The only two great things that weren't made in the office were fire and the wheel." I mean, what do you think about that?
23:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think again, as a resident of New York who is in an office at least three or four days a week, I think you see it that it's changed the entire kind of like fabric, especially of Midtown Manhattan. Like you see it, the amount of places selling lunch and whatever other kind of services were built around that economy. It's definitely changing. And I think it's important that, again, I don't think we're ever going back to work five days a week in the office from nine to five. I think that goes away and I think it should because that was always a bit artificially constructed. But I think a city like New York, other cities definitely need to start thinking about what else do
23:42 Speaker 01 you do if it's not just especially in office districts. I don't know. I'm sure this ends up with some kind of experiential retail or whatever.
23:51 Alex Kantrowitz? What about housing? I mean, housing could definitely be something that you could build in those spaces.
23:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, so that, but then it gets tough. It's but if it's three days a week, if like if you're seeing traffic up through only some percentage of the week, how do you start balancing commercial and residential? But I agree, I think. And I believe already some moves are being made in this. But yeah, in terms of like, bringing more housing supply into cities, that should be the the first place people start.
24:20 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, so this is from the story, the value of New York's office buildings could fall by nearly $50 billion in the coming years, which actually seems kind of low to me. But the vacancy rate rate has surged more than 70% since 2019, which seems spot on. And there's some 96 million square feet of office real estate available for lease in the city. Delinquency rates for office loans across the United States are a pandemic era peak of nearly 5%. And this is from the Wall Street Journal also writing about this. More than 1.5 trillion in commercial property loans come due by the end of 2025, and refinancing that debt will be a drain on profits for many property owners, while a possibly well,
25:03 Alex Kantrowitz? a possible bankruptcy trigger for some others. I mean, that seems to be a big warning sign for the economy in terms of where we're heading, don't you think?
25:12 Speaker 01 Yeah. And again, as a resident of New York, I've thought about this a lot, or it does. It does worry me. But I don't know, I still think this is one of those moments that for a city, it's it's the idea that everything is going to always work exactly as it did before. I mean, I remember, like, and again, it's not the exact same thing. But like, under Mike Bloomberg, there was this huge effort to bring tech to New York City. And I remember I even took, actually, you might as well.
25:40 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah.
25:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. No, but it was not. It did not come out of nowhere. Like, there was a strong governmental policy oriented effort.
25:49 Speaker 01 I moderated panels about how New York is going to be, you know, the future of tech and all this stuff like it was it. There was a really strong effort to re after the financial crisis to make sure that New York did not solely depend on financial services revenue to fund everything in the city and it worked. So I think it's just it's an opportunity again to rethink and reinvent what it's great to live here and how things are going to work. But and if we don't, then we're going to be screwed. But
26:20 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, and part of that was building this STEM campus with Cornell and the Technion out on Roosevelt Island. And we just took a field trip out there this week. It was very cool, very cool to see that in action. By the way, speaking of, you know, speaking of, you know, the future of tech and and real estate, you were just in San Francisco. What did the city feel like to you? And did you? Did you get a chance to hop in a self driving car?
26:43 Speaker 01 I did not get a chance and I wanted to. So, okay, one thing you didn't tell me is that new? It was only available from like 10pm to 5am.
26:53 Alex Kantrowitz? So for Cruise, that's, that's the, I think it's 9pm now. Cruise has that time bound. I think that will eventually go away. But Waymo, Waymo is all day long, except for the fact that it's extremely limited.
27:05 Speaker 01 Yeah. So for both of them, I tried to get, none were available whenever I tried. And I was like, had a bunch of conference things and dinners and stuff like that. But like, I tried a few times again, and I just couldn't get it. But I saw them around. And yeah, I, on that side, I was very hopeful to try to join the self driving revolution there, but was not able to.
27:31 Alex Kantrowitz? You saw the cars?
27:33 Speaker 01 I saw one car. Yeah. And it was kind of, it was very weird to me because it really still, there's a whole dystopian vibe to me. Like, and again, I'm there for a Google Cloud Conference.
27:48 Speaker 01 It's like walking away from the Moscone Center, a couple of blocks in different directions. Things definitely were getting a little depressing. But then, right alongside that, seeing self driving cars and stuff like, yeah, I feel it. I went in trying to be optimistic, but did not necessarily leave as such.
28:12 Alex Kantrowitz? We're here on Big Technology Podcast, joined by Ron John Roy of Margins. You can find Margins on Substack at remargins.com. On the other side of this break, we're going to talk about a new excerpt from the forthcoming Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk book, and plenty of other social media stories, including, yes, the metaverse. There's finally legs in the metaverse. Back right after this. This episode is brought to you by AppPoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data, and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what AppPoint does. For 25 years,
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30:35 Alex Kantrowitz? And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, breaking down the week's news with Ron John Roy. So we finally got a first taste of what Walter Isaacson's Elon Musk book is going to look like. He published an excerpt in the Wall Street Journal all about the Twitter takeover. I thought it was interesting. I mean, there was an interesting admission from Elon there talking basically about how he regretted making this move for Twitter. I mean, we know he did because he tried to get out of the deal, but he tells Walter Isaacson straight out, "I've got a bad habit of biting off more than I can chew." He'd also talked about like how he enjoys living in chaos and can't just sustain success,
31:20 Alex Kantrowitz? which I think everybody knows intuitively, but here he is saying it. And he says, "I just need to think about Twitter less. Even this conversation is not time well spent." I thought that was quite interesting. Ron John, what was your perspective on the excerpt that we just saw?
31:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, we had spoken about this previously around what does this biography do in terms of Walter Isaacson's legacy? And this excerpt did not leave me optimistic on that front as well, because it really reads like the kind of, you know, like, he's trying so hard to paint this picture of Musk as the like slayer of demons and the person, you know, willing to take on the challenges no one else can. And with this manic energy that's just so consuming, but that's how we progress and all these things. Whereas some of the things, like the way the Twitter thing plays out, it's a reminder, it's like he flew to
32:18 Speaker 01 Larry Ellison's Hawaiian island with one of the women he's occasionally dating, the Australian actress Natasha Basset. Like anytime you start with, you're flying to Larry Ellison's island with one of your girlfriends, this whole picture that you're just so obsessive about making things perfectly work and changing the future of humanity, doesn't quite land as much for me. And that's the part that kept. I kept thinking about is like all these things he talks about how Musk is up at 4am, 5am, 7am, sending these texts and doing these things when I'm like, I don't know. On one hand, one could argue that yes, maybe pulling an all nighter at times is how dedicated
33:00 Speaker 01 you are to making your vision of the future a reality. But on the other, good things don't happen at 3am, 4am, 5am. I think that's like the universal truth that everyone has learned over the years, over the older you get, the more you understand that, that, I don't know, that that really made it clear to me just how not responsibly thought through, or just even rationally thought through these things were.
33:29 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, so there's a, there's a point in the story that I think we're, we might argue about, I can't quite tell where you're going to stand on this, but I'll, and I think my perspective here is a little bit controversial, but I'll, I'm just going to say it anyway. So they're talking about the office culture of Twitter, right? And this is straight from the story. Musk let loose a bitter laugh when he heard the phrase psychological safety. It made him recoil. He considered it to be the enemy of urgency, progress, orbital velocity. His preferred buzzword was hardcore. Discomfort, he believed, was a good thing. It was a weapon against the Scrooge of complacency. Vacations, work-life balance, and days of mental rest were not his thing. Now, look, I just took a lot of time off this summer.
34:13 Alex Kantrowitz? Readers of the newsletter will know that, I haven't sent in a couple of weeks, have been doing this show, and we had that record August. So can't say it was like a full vacation, but I think vacations and rest are extremely important, especially do anything hard, the mind and the body must reset. However, I think that this idea of psychological safety that there was inside Twitter is, is a few things. First of all, it was largely a lie. You know, there was a lot of talk from the top about everybody has a place here, but I don't really think there was psychological safety in that company. I mean, people were A, like, Worked hard and manipulated just like they were in any other company. And I know this from like firsthand accounts that I've heard from employees there.
34:58 Alex Kantrowitz? Like it was not a safe place psychologically. You could still have, you know, bosses that would come down on people and, you know, really try to, I don't know, mess their shit up. And then on the other, and on the other side is that they, they did have a culture of complacency. And despite everything they were doing, they tried to have it both ways. Right. Where like they, they, you know, they try to push people in their own sort of, you know, quote unquote, non-threatening way, which was mostly a lie. And then they also still didn't get anything done. And I think that what Musk is saying, that like, you know, being hardcore and, you know, having urgency and progress and trying to get out into orbit. Like there's something to be said for that.
35:41 Alex Kantrowitz? I don't think Musk has a healthy philosophy either. But I just thought that this whole idea of that, you know, Twitter as like the beacon for psychological safety was both A, a lie and B, counterproductive.
35:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't think that's controversial because one, I agree with you. But two, I think that's more just, you know, like reflective of a lot of kind of Silicon Valley culture of saying one thing and trying to present things in one way. When in reality, it's more just a function of, I will take it to Zerp or general kind of like monopolistic power. But a lot of these companies where you can say these kinds of things because you have enough money to pay a lot of people plenty and try to make things beyond just work. But in reality, like as you said, many of these companies that say this kind of thing, they're like rough places to work.
36:34 Speaker 01 The kind of political nature and backstabbing and kind of overall approach from people I talked to, that occupied so much of their day that, yeah, I think the idea that it ever was actually psychologically safe was not real. I totally agree with you there, but I feel the other is like so many times it's easy to pick on these kinds of things. Like, you know, they found the stay woke T-shirts in the office and laughed about it and wore it around, but that has nothing to do with like, like send in some activist investors, some like private equity fund to gut the place if that's really what this is about. You don't need to make this some like. Massive thing that it's become this reality show of a of an event.
37:20 Speaker 01 It's like these things have happened in every large company and corporation ever. And there's like ways that things move forward or get fixed, but I just don't think this is it. So I think that's like an easy thing for Isaacson to focus on. And then even using terms like he loves orbital velocity. That was the most ridiculous phrase to me ever. Like, come on, orbital velocity.
37:48 Alex Kantrowitz? I don't know, Ron, John, you send some things into space and then tell us what we can say or not about it. No, I'm just playing.
37:56 Speaker 01 I wanted to know, but actually what I was curious, because orbital velocity was not in quotes. So is that like a thing he said or is it almost? Because I've never actually heard him say that. I feel like that almost is a thing like Isaacson is attributing to him. And it sounds good. It's like, like the enemy of urgency progress orbital velocity. That's the kind of stuff that
38:17 Alex Kantrowitz? The guy's a writer. You can't penalize him for writing.
38:19 Speaker 01 I know, I know. I'm not penalizing him for writing. It's good writing. It's good writing. I just think it's gonna, it's not going to be a good look for him after the fact.
38:28 Alex Kantrowitz? Well, arguing against you is the fact that fidelity just marked Twitter up another 11% in June. So they, they helped finance the $44 billion Twitter takeover. And they still value the shares at 61% of, oh, at a 61% discount. Okay, it's pretty bad. All right.
38:50 Speaker 01 Okay, so, so on this, Dan Primack had reported fidelity marked the investment up. And it was funny, like a whole Mars catalog, which is an account that, you know, follows Elon Musk closely and interacts with him a good amount, had tweeted like, oh, this is the sign that, you know, Twitter is going to IPO above that $44 billion valuation. Elon Musk responded like, I think something affirming that, yes, that this is kind of how I see it. It's down 61%. Let's remember how fidelity does this is on comps. Every social media stock in the month of June was flying, like Meta was up 17%. There was a, overall, I think the entire category was up.
39:32 Speaker 01 Oh no, Snap was up 18%, Meta was up 8%. So, these are the companies that Fidelity is marking again, so 11%. It's like right in the middle. So, there was nothing, nothing about Twitter's performance that they have internal views on or insider information on that are actually influencing that. That's purely on comp. So, so I think the idea that they're marking it up and then it's leading to tweets about they're gonna IPO above $44 billion is a bit premature, but hey.
40:01 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah.
40:02 Speaker 01 I don't know.
40:02 Alex Kantrowitz? Well, look.
40:02 Speaker 01 Maybe it'll be the super app.
40:04 Alex Kantrowitz? No, I don't think it will be the super app and I agree with you. I don't think there's any chance they're gonna IPO over $44 billion or anything close to that, especially given the Threads incursion. Okay, maybe Threads isn't as big of a threat, but something interesting's happened. So, Threads has started to notify people and back in their Instagram apps of threads they might have missed. And we had kind of an interesting thing happen to us this week where you do follow me on Threads, you don't follow me on Instagram, and still my threads ended up in your Instagram feed.
40:40 Speaker 01 Yes, I do not follow Alex on Instagram. Do follow him on Threads and I received a notification push on my phone that comes down, Alex Kantrowitz has just posted on Threads. So, and again, when I clicked on it, it went to the Instagram app, which was the weirdest thing. And then you see the notification in Instagram in your actual notifications feed. So, they are used, they're starting to leverage and it's happening. But of course, this is the thing, this is why I'm not counting Threads out. I, and to me, the biggest mistake they made was coming out so strong, 100, and we've talked about this a number of times, 100 million users in like 10 minutes or whatever, whatever it was.
41:22 Speaker 01 You know, I think they came out so strong when in reality, to me, they should have taken this approach is just get some critical mass of people on there, but then just, you always knew this is where it was gonna go, starting to leverage Facebook, Blue, Instagram to start to route people back to Threads without them even really realizing it. But it's starting, so now we're gonna see the real, I feel like, weight of the Meta machine in action right now.
41:49 Alex Kantrowitz? All right. Should we just skip to metaverse legs and cover some of the regulation stuff next week? I think that's the move. It's Labor Day weekend. We'll come to the more meaty stuff next week, but let's end with a fun story. Okay. So legs are finally coming to the metaverse.
42:07 Alex Kantrowitz? There in this is from upload VR meta avatars are finally having legs in the quest home with the version 57 update on the public test channel. The company's virtual virtual avatars have faced widespread ridicule ridicule on social media and in tech media for their upper body only appearance, but that's ending. Started working on legs in September last year and in October, it announced they are coming soon. And I've seen the mockups. Legs are coming to the metaverse. This is what the metaverse needed to revive its long languishing troubled run ever since Meta, Facebook changed its name to Meta. Would you not agree, Ron John?
42:49 Speaker 01 I think I think the metaverse is back. Q3 2023. It's all going to be about the meta. Forget about Gen AI. It's about the metaverse again. So let's put our web three in as well. Legs are legs are here. Metaverse is back.
43:04 Alex Kantrowitz? Legs are the new NFTs. It's what I've been saying all along. And there have been doubters that have been in my mentions talking about how legs are not even NFTs. And they've been wrong. And so I'm gonna hold. And they what are they gonna walk on in the metaverse if they don't believe that legs are gonna be the thing that brings us back? I don't know. I'd like to see them try.
43:26 Speaker 01 I'm excited. I'm saying, hey, I was not optimistic earlier about the state of San Francisco or some of the other stories that we covered today, but this makes me very optimistic about the state of the world today. Legs in the metaverse.
43:42 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, I mean, I think that we should really it should be a celebration. You know, there should be. You could really.
43:49 Speaker 01 This Labor Day.
43:50 Alex Kantrowitz? Just call it like, call it leg day. I mean, call it leg day. Look, to the people inside Meta who've been working hard on these legs thing, this legs thing, you know, I gotta say, the public has given you a tough time and your hard work will not be forgotten. So thank you for bringing.
44:08 Speaker 01 We recognize you. We see you.
44:10 Alex Kantrowitz? Think to market. You know, we have a comment here on LinkedIn. You can't stand without legs, but you also can't, you can stand without legs in the metaverse. But I just, I think that that's part of the nuance that's been left out of this conversation. Are we ready for a holiday weekend? I think we are.
44:25 Speaker 01 I think we are.
44:27 Alex Kantrowitz? John, great speaking with you as always.
44:29 Speaker 01 All right. See you next week. I think it's time for the weekend right now.
44:33 Alex Kantrowitz? Let's go out. Everybody who's observing Labor Day weekend, have a great weekend. For those around the world that are listening to us, we hope you have some good R and R. We're going to come back next weekend or next, yeah, next Friday. You know, back reads charged, ready as ever. We're going to talk about regulation then. And we have Sridhar Ramaswamy coming on to talk about Google's generative AI initiatives. He used to run ads there and then he built a competing search engine, Neva, which he then sold to Snowflake. That's coming up next Wednesday. And, you know, we will, we will be walking on over to the recording studio with our fresh new metaverse legs and we hope to meet you there. Thanks again for listening. Thank you
45:15 Alex Kantrowitz? to everyone who's helped with the show. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.
45:33 Speaker 02 Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid and risked 350,000 Virginians healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
Previous The Path Toward AGI, According to Google's DeepMind — With Colin Murdoch Next Google’s Weird Year + Neeva Goes to Snowflake — With Sridhar Ramaswamy Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
