Who is Josh D'Amaro and Why is He Disney's New CEO?

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From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also Chief Correspondent at Business Insider. Today we are coming to you a little earlier than normal because we have news to discuss. Disney has a new CEO and Bob Iger says this time he means it. Really, he swears. So, who is Josh DeMarrow, who is Disney's new CEO, and why will this time be different than the last time Bob Iger appointed a new CEO and then came back shortly after?

We have an excellent person to walk us through it. That's Puck's Julia Alexander. She has covered Disney for years. And as we discuss, she worked there for a little bit on strategy stuff. Julia is smart and informed, you will like listening to her. So here's me talking to Julia Alexander. I'm here with Julia Alexander from Puck. Welcome back, Julia. Thank you so much for having me. How are you? Um everything's great.

The world is fantastic. Um and I know that you are fantastic as well. So now that we've skipped that part, there is news today. Very delighted that you're on to talk about this news. There is a new CEO of Disney.

Who is Josh DeMarrow and why is he the new CEO of Disney, Julia Alexander? Josh DeMarrow is another Parks guy for Disney watchers. This is the second Parks guy in less than half a decade who's coming into Disney to run Disney. We have Bob Chapek did yeah, six years ago. almost to this date was was announced as the new Disney CEO. That did not work out. It did not work out. And I think that's why you have plenty of Disney watchers, both on the analyst side as well as just the fan side.

questioning whether Josh is the right guy over Dana Walden, who's the head of TV, head of streaming, has now been promoted to kind of this chief content officer role that Bella Bajaria holds at Netflix, kind of her contemporary Um and why is Josh Tomorrow the now the new CEO of Disney? Because Disney is go going forward. Disney will be more of an experiences company than it already has been and less of a media first company.

So slow that down. So people on who listen to this podcast, we spend a ton of time talking about Disney and streaming and sometimes Disney and movies and sometimes ESPN. Um I think we never talk about the parks business on this podcast, so that's my fault. But but What does that mean that Disney is becoming a parks slash experience company more than a TV streaming movies company? Is that because the parks business is really growing?

And that's the future, or is it because the other business is shrinking? So that makes parks a bigger deal in comparison? It's a ten thousand foot question, so I'm gonna try to answer it as succinctly and entertaining as possible. Here's the thing. Disney's always been up up in experiences business, right? Disneyland has existed for many, many, many years. Disney World has been around. And there's parks all over the world.

Cruises video games, right? We're t also talking about that. Disney invested in Epic Game, which has Fortnite and are building out a digital theme park that is also under Josh Tomorrow. I think if you look at the numbers, Peter, like tomorrow's unit, which ex which is all these different experiences, contribute roughly sixty percent of Disney's profit in the last year. They invested or they planned to invest$60 billion back in 2023 into the parks division. Um, if you look at the

growth in the experiences segment. Um it grew six percent in fiscal twenty twenty five compared to the prior year, finishing at just over thirty-six billion dollars. we're talking about the first quarter ever that experiences saw ten billion plus in revenue. These are the basic data points that explain why DeMaro is there. But the fandom reason is that.

It's really difficult to pr try and predict what entertainment will look like a decade from now, let alone what Disney's role in entertainment will look like a decade from now. with YouTube coming in, obviously on the T V sets, with Instagram, with TikTok, with anything that we d haven't even seen yet. Open AI Sora, whatever it might be, we don't know. it's really easy to look at other

supplementary data points and say that people are spending more than ever on experiences and tangible experiences that they have intimate memories of with their friends and family. And I think Disney goes if the big question at the Mouse House is how do we monetize love? And it is the big question. The answer is no longer necessarily in content first.

it's pa it's it's experiences first. That's real it's so that's really interesting, right? I uh we don't know what the future of movies and television, et cetera, is is going to be like. If you're Disney, you're hopeful you're a big player in that, but you don't really know, right? What if we're in a world where everyone is just watching uh six second, you know, not Vines, uh TikToks.

whatever and maybe they're involving Disney, maybe they're not. The presumption is then people will continue to go to parks and go on cruises and spend money there. Are uh just talk about the the a little bit more about the parks business just in general. Is is that Is it growing because more people are going to parks every year? Is it growing because Disney has figured out how to extract more money from the people who are going to parks and and going on cruises?

It's definitely the latter. It's this idea that people are willing to spend more on luxury experiences. And this isn't central to Disney. Disney just

smartly, the executives at Disney smartly looked around at what was happening and said, We can play in this game too. I mean, if you look at the amount of pure dollars that people spend on going to concerts, that people spend on going to sporting events, that people spend on these kind of experiences like Meowwolf, which is this kind of interactive experience out in Las Vegas and and um and other parts of of the country.

This idea that Disney realized they could just raise prices and to Bob Chapex credit, this was something that he realized back in the day too. And people will continue to spend because it is an experience that they are not gonna get elsewhere. means that they can monetize per customer at a higher rate than they're going to get in the content business. So while people are saying, I will go to the parks more often, I will go on the cruises, we're seeing Disney launch a lot of new vessels.

in different parts of the of the world too. We're seeing them kinda go out to the Middle East. We're seeing them go out and buy more islands to kind of have these experiences on the cruise front as well, to to kind of supplement the parks. I think you're seeing more and more that If anyone who's listening to this has been to a park they know that they can just get more dollars per customer. I went recently um with a few friends who work at Disney.

And the amount of money that you spend just to ensure that you can get on a ride within the allotted time that you're at the park. You buy your ticket to get in But essentially, unless you're buying the upgrades to help you get through the lines faster, you can't really go to the park. Like you can technically go to the park, but you'll go to like two rides and you'll kind of have a shitty experience.

Right. And this is why I think that New York Times op ed from a few months ago, I'm sure you remember it, Peter, which kind of looked at the state of Arguably the kind of state of w wealth inequality in this country through the lens of Disney and Americana nostalgia, I like really hit

at the core of what a lot of Disney executives get worried about. They're worried about the idea that Disney is no longer this affordable place. Not that it ever really was, but to to bring your family and go and have this incredible experience that then redefines the love that you have for the IP and the content and kind of creates this flywheel. And at the same time they also realize that they can serve the top ten percent, twenty percent of customers.

and not have to worry about any meaningful isolation from their customer base and they're still gonna increase profits. And so if the idea again, the the sentence is how do you monetize the love that people have for these worlds, Star Wars, Avatar, uh Mickey Mouse, whatever it might be.

it's less clear that you're gonna be able to monetize at the way you want on the T V front and on the film front, but you can absolutely continue to kind of price gouge at the parks and it will continue to increase year over year.

So so beyond the fact that Domorrow runs parks, parks are the key engine to Disney, uh according to this line of thought. What has he done during his tenure there? that suggests that he's really good at that business in particular. Before we get to the rest of of what he has to do now that he's gonna be CEO of Disney. This is a guy who was essentially a Disney lifer. I think he worked at Gillette for a few years, but he spent

a couple decades at Disney, almost all of it in parks. What has he what are his wins? The big ones are really overseeing and helping uh in the launch of parks in China. It's you got Hong Kong, you got Shanghai. Um, he's also the one who led the deal on investing in epic games and kind of looking at what the digital theme park component may look like. This was at the height of the metaverse.

We can d we can def we can debate on whether or not that that plays out long term. I think Mark Zuckerberg over at Meta is having those same debates uh with his team. Um but he's also just there's an A quality to him, someone at Disney said this to me, an executive the other day when we were talking about the succession. And he said there's a Walt-like quality to him, as in a Walt Disney that Bob Iger has.

The CEO of Disney, unlike even the CEO of Apple or the CEO of Nike or any of these other big American brands. Um the CEO of Disney really means something to Disney fans as much as they do analysts.

He's a public figure. He walks the parks and people wanna come up to him. They wanna take photos with him. This is something that Bob Chaybeck never had. He didn't appre he didn't want to hang out with the people who were creating his business, who were who were paying to thousands of dollars in order to kind of hang out in these parks.

And whenever I talk to people at Disney, the two people or the two executives who were in this front running race originally to be CEO, right? When we look at the Ford, it was it was Dana Walden and Alan Bergman from the the content side.

It was Josh Namarrell from the Park side and Jimmy Pitaro from the ESPN side. The only two executives that I hear over and over and over again from people inside Disney that really had that quality that the board was also looking for, that they couldn't put a number to, but that was so important for the Disney CEO was Jimmy Pitaro and Josh DeMaro. And I think the other part that Josh Tomorrow has that is so important twenty.

And that is a big part of the job. And he kind of looks like a guy in the Bob Iger mold. He also is one of the only guys with experience dealing with the government in Florida. Right. Disney at its core is a real estate company at this point and dealing with Ron DeSantis and whoever might come next in Florida, dealing with the Trump administration over the next few years.

Is a very important quality. We know that Dana Walden's best friend is Kamala Harris. We know that Dana is extremely LA. Alan is extremely LA. Jimmy's extremely Connecticut. The idea that Josh DeMaro has experience with global policy with Republican policy in Florida, the idea that he has this affable quality of being like Walt.

that also goes a long way when you are in the midst of trying to figure out what potential MA activity as well as what potential uh uh investment activity in general, you're gonna have to do on the entertainment side to get through this kind of weird transition period.

So we've talked about Dana Walden a bunch now. Um in theory, like you said, this was supposed to be a four person internal bake off. Practically it was seen as Dana Walden versus DeMarrow. In theory, they were also gonna look at outside candidates, no names have ever leaked out of anyone they looked at seriously. So maybe they did, maybe they didn't. Um, and one of the ar the main argument for Dana Walden was Uh separate from the Kamala Hara stuff was

Disney's an entertainment company. She runs entertainment. She knows she knows how television and movies work. She has relationships with all those people. Um, they've gone ahead and promoted DeMaro to CEO. They are keeping Walden on. They've given her a new title as chief creative officer. Is that chief content officer? Um, essentially sort of his number two Is that a move that is meant to um

Placate people in the creative community, agents, directors, talent, et cetera. Hey, you can still work with us, Dana's still on board. Um, do they expect her to stick around, do you think? Or is this sort of you paper over a uh this is a constellation prize, but you don't expect her to to take it.

You know what's funny, Peter, and I'm gonna throw this back at you because I'm curious on your a for your thoughts on it. If you if this was twenty nineteen, if this was twenty eighteen, if this was the height of streaming subscribers and everyone investing in original content. I think the question of does this placate Dana Walden is much more interesting. Since twenty twenty six streaming

at best is a manageable operations business. It is equivalent to having the the the tech the tech the the futurist component of it is gone away. Now it's just how do we get to ten percent profit margins. Where's the we know how we know how it works and and it's just a matter of you your lovers are what kind of shows can you create and acquire? Um, how much can you charge for them? Um, how do you manage your churn? There's no sort of mystery to running it. There's

skill but there's no mystery. That's right. Where does Dana go? Where is she gonna go? Is she gonna go to Netflix? They're trying to buy Warner Brothers Discovery. Is she gonna go to Apple or Amazon? They're invested in sports and who knows what Eddie Q or or whoever the next Future CEO of Apple wants to do with that division. Genuinely in 2026.

Even if they didn't want to play Kate Dana, I don't know where she would go. She's got the best job outside of Donald Langley over at uh NBC Universal. There are very few of these jobs. True. But do you think that that They think they really need her because again, we're we're talking if this is a replay of six years ago where Bob Iger Very suddenly.

right before COVID and says, you know what, I'm done being the CEO of Disney. Um here's the new CEO. He's the parks guy. He has no content um background either, but don't worry, I Bob Iger, I'm gonna stick around and be sort of a creative helper. And that didn't work for a bunch of different reasons. Um, but they they needed to say, look, we know the parks guy doesn't have any entertainment experience, um, but we're gonna figure it out.

Do they think they need Dana Walden to help Josh DeMarrow figure out entertainment, or do you think they think they can succeed one way or the other?

I think if you ask Josh that question, he would say he also needs Dana Walden. Um if you c if you to to compare it to another company's organizational structure, I think if you ask Greg Peters, does he need Ted Sarandos and Bella Bajari over at Netflix? He would say absolutely. He can run five hundred A B tests over the course of a year, but he doesn't know what great

content is entertainment, what what is culturally zeitgeisty and and what to invest in and who to invest in. And Dana has that. I don't think Josh is as interested in taking lunches in West Hollywood with Ryan Murphy the way that Dana Walden is. Now, is the parks chief role different today than it was twenty years ago, a hundred percent. Think about how they launch IP from the parks, how they bring IP into the parks. When they're launching a new galaxy's edge in some country.

Josh is talking to George Lucas. He's talking to JJ Abrams, right? He's talking to the people who are developing this IP. So he has the relationships with talent, but he doesn't have the expertise and the gut to say this is the type of content that we should invest in. And I and I think that's important to point out here, Peter. Just because Disney picked another Parks guy, and just because Parks is clearly the profit center of this company over the next ten years, especially as entertainment.

throughout theatrical and and television and streaming goes through this transition period does not mean that Disney works as a non media company. The media is so important to it. And so they do need So you need an important you need a person who understands media.

Doesn't necessarily have to be Dana Walden, right? There are a lot of people in Hollywood who have relationships with talent and are fancy themselves good at picking movies and TV shows, right? There are other people available for that work. If she doesn't stick around.

Um and I will point out, and I always love pointing this out, that when Bob Iger initially was Disney CEO The savvy take was he is not going to be Disney CEO for long because he doesn't have any creative capacity, because he is a suit.

Yes, he in theory came up through talent because he was a weatherman, but really he's a subsuit. He'll never have the creative capacity that that Michael Eisner, who he was replacing, was. And so he's a short term guy. He's not gonna be having this job. Obviously, and now he's considered this great. Great uh talent whisperer. So it is possible that Josh DeMarrow has that capacity andor can grow into that capacity. Absolutely. And I mean, if you look at Bob Iger, he strikes this

very strong friendship that he loves to talk about with Steve Jobs circa two thousand and six, right? That leads to a lot of the Pixar stuff and kind of the early distribution deals on iTunes puts Disney ahead of the game. But if you also if you look at what he did, you know, he buys

Lucas Sillman brings in Kathleen Kennedy, he buys Marvel and there's Kevin Feige. Like he has this team of directors or that he that he works with who he says, you go and figure out what this IP's gonna look like, and I'm still the operator.

Um, I think if you also again going back to that comparison of what what we see happening at Netflix, which I think is a structure Disney is likely to copy, down to the point that up until today, when we're recording this and the news was announced that Josh is coming in, there was still conversation about whether it would be a co-CEO between J uh Josh and Dana.

I think if you look at who Dana relies on, she also has someone like John Langraff, who's the head of FX. And that's akin to Bella Bajaria having a d a Casey Blois coming in if they get Warner Brothers discovery.

This idea that one person is going to be the talent whisperer or the operational guru doesn't make sense in 2026 and certainly doesn't make sense for a company like Disney. And so I think that Josh tomorrow will continue to focus on turning this very untangible adoration for IP into tangible money at the parks level and the experiences level, but still rely on Dana

And John Langraff and others to make sure that the content is still keeping that attention long term. We'll be right back with Julia Alexander, but first a word from a sponsor. Everyone's heard of a midlife crisis, but what about a mid-career crisis? Turns out countless people are going through one right now. For some, they're starting to feel they've hit a wall, that there's no room for growth, no new opportunities, promotions pass them by, raises are few and far between.

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And we're back. I want to go back to how this keep going back to how this is a a a repeat again. Six years ago that Bob Iger said. I I don't wanna be a CEO of Disney anymore. I've always said I'm gonna leave. I know I I never left, but I've decided randomly uh weeks before the pandemic comes to America that I no longer wanna run this this company.

Um, like we said, Bob Chapeck did not work out for a bunch of reasons. One is he just may never have been the right person to run that company. Another is that Bob Iger stuck around not very far in the background and kept telling everyone what a terrible job. Chaypeck was doing, which doesn't help. But uh uh the other problem was that Bob Iger created a bunch of problems for Bob Chaypeck. He had He had done this um big pivot to streaming, laid out of ton of expenditures, um

did a bunch of things to ramp up production. You know, we're gonna churn out a ton of of Marvel stuff. We're gonna churn out a ton of star we're gonna have a Star Wars show on every week, et cetera. Um Balager comes back after pushing Chaypeck out.

And goes back to immediately sort of fix he's describing it as fixing the problems Bob Chapik created, but they're really Bob Iger's problems that he created that Bob Iger has then had to go to sort of unwind for the most part. Long winded way of saying. Has Bob Iger left Josh DeMarrow a bunch of problems to solve, or does he has he put Disney sort of at least on solid footing? Because the stock has not performed under Bob Iger. So how is the company itself doing?

Yeah, the stock is an interesting question'cause if you go back the last twenty years the stock hasn't moved. uh just as someone who is the Disney stockholder for a long time. Like it's not a a great stock to necessarily have. Uh that's not financial advice. Um I think what Bob Iger has left Josh Tomorrow in twenty twenty six versus what he's left Bob ChayPak in twenty twenty is a stark reality versus a optimistic hope.

When we talk about when we talked about streaming, you remember this Peter, you covered this. You you still cover it. Streaming was like this this reinvention of a of a business and of a behavior. You remember this? It was this idea that like. All of a sudden you weren't just gonna have

a transition of customers. You're gonna have a new customer. You were gonna have a new type of content, a a new type of mo of monetization. And I think very quickly within the first few years after the pandemic, once we saw all the the the pull forward activity kind of cease. when people could start going back outside and not just sit in front of their television sets.

What we started to see was that it was a business. Yeah, you could bring sports over to an extent. It would bring some people over. You could, you know, create content that might juice. some of the engagement that you were seeing. But overall, like it wasn't creating new behaviors. It was just establishing old behaviors works in a different format. That's really hard.

to square with analysts on Wall Street when you've spent the last f four or five years telling them that streaming is the future of your business. Which is why, by the way, we've seen uh Bob Iger and Jimmy Pitaro and people like Brian Roberts at NBC Universal really go back to saying, Well, we still love the paid T V business. We still love the bundle. We still wanna be in here because it's not just gonna be streaming.

Bob Chapek had this moment that The end of twenty twenty going to twenty twenty one, where he told investors and analysts during a very hyped up investor day that Disney was gonna quadruple its streaming subscribers over the next three years. And I remember talking to a bunch of Disney executives and they went, Why the hell would he say that?

Like subscriber numbers don't mean anything. You can get subscribers, uh low quality, cheap subscribers pretty easily if you go back to the code. That's right. When companies are being w rewarded or the theory was they would be rewarded for doing what Netflix did, which is uh add as many subscribers as possible. That was a big thing again when Iger kicked off Disney streaming thing was how many subscribers do they have? What what what does the number come from? It was very subscriber focused.

That was the metric you needed to give Wall Street. Now it has moved on to actual profit and no one cares about subscribers. In fact, uh Netflix and everyone else no longer gives out subscriber numbers on the regular. Yes, this was the first quarter that Disney did not report uh subscribers. But to your point exactly, there was this idea that

streaming was gonna be d defined by how many subscribers you had. You could spend whatever you want. It didn't really matter. There's a lot of, I would argue, similarities to what's happening in the AI. industry right now and kind of this idea of just grow, grow, grow, grow, and we'll figure out revenue later. And then it all came crashing down.

It all came crashing down after the great Netflix correction and all of a sudden Wall Street said, Okay, well, are you making money on this? And are you making, by the way, not just money, but twenty percent profit margin, like cable money? Are you making cable money on this product? And so that was a period of time where Bob Chapak had to navigate truly outlandish expectations that he also set for himself. That Bob Iger left him with, but he set for himself.

He was trying to transition the company organizationally into something that looked more like Google than it did an entertainment company. Something that I think David Ellison at Paramount, by the way, is going to also struggle with because you it's really hard to turn an entertainment and media company into a tech company.

But also this idea that we're not going to be able to If we just keep saying that it's a tech company and you keep saying that uh Steve Jobs was your mentor and that you let other people understand that Larry Ellison's your father and so you're a tech genius and obviously

You're gonna transform Paramount into a tech company. That's easy to do. But this idea that that's what Chaybeck had. There was a an uh an optimism. There was a hope that this was going to revolutionize everything. Now streaming's a manageable business to your point. Oh, we're not going to compete with YouTube. We're not going to compete with Instagram as they come to TV sets. We're not going to compete with TikTok.

We're going to invest in open AI. Hopefully, some of these Sora edits that we're bringing into Disney Plus are gonna engage people. We're gonna hope that. some kind of of theatrical strategy. We just lean on the avatars and the marbles makes sense. We're gonna hope that some of this China activity from the theatrical side comes back. But we don't have

the optimism that we once said that streaming is gonna solve all of our woes and the cable business declining and and wiping out billions of dollars in profit. What we do have is a fundamental reality about what we can do. with the parks business and what people are willing to spend on. So I think there's a perfect time for Iger to step back because he comes in and says, I'm gonna course correct my last successor.

I'm gonna pick a new guy, but also I'm leaving at a time when there's not this optimism that whoever comes in is going to solve the entertainment and media business.

It's an expectation that the guy who comes in is gonna get us through this transitional period. We'll be right back with Julia Alexander, but first a word from a sponsor. And we're back. Let's talk about the the the the timing of Iger's departure. Long running joke,'cause it really wasn't a joke that Iger kept uh not leaving Disney for it seems like decades. He would say, Oh, my new contract has been extended, but that's the last time I'm doing it.

um and trust me I'm gonna leave. And then he never left, and even when he did leave he still came back and now he supposedly is leaving for good. Um and even that was still news last week when the journal basically said they're picking someone next week and also Bob I Gorilla is gonna leave and he's not even gonna stick around basically until the end of the year. He's gonna get out of here.

Um two great lines in that journal article. Uh one is that uh Bob Auger has told multiple associates he would like to spend more of his time and energy on other things, such as sailing his new and larger super yacht, the Aquarius. So that's just a great line when you say, What are you gonna do instead of being CEO? Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna spend more time, not with my family, with my super yacht. Which is great. Um

I don't really need a comment from you on that, I just think it's interesting. Uh the other I think more interesting thing to me was Iger has told people close to him he's ready to move on from the grind of being CEO and was frustrated by conflicts at ABC. What do you think that means? Do you think that means he didn't like dealing with the Trump administration and Brendan Carr and all of the BS associated with that?

Um do you think that means there's some internal fight about how Kimmel was handled that that frustrated him? I mean, he is the CEO, so I'm a little confused about why he'd be frustrated uh by conflicts at the network. I think it's twofold. I I genuinely think There the the the photo I keep thinking about, Peter, to describe how I'm looking at media and tech and kind of the state of business across the board in twenty twenty six.

is the photo of all the tech CEOs at Trump's inauguration. It was like the capitulation photo before capitulation even happened. And it was that idea of they know that in this moment of AI disruption of of ma major M and A activity that they need to bend the knee in a way they didn't have to before or they didn't feel like they had to before. And I think if you're Bob Iger, you've done this for fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years.

You're tired. You're like, I don't wanna do this. I don't wanna have to pretend like I wanna go to the Melania premiere because I want to get this next deal through. I don't want to pretend that I like Ron DeSantis and have to get this thing done so we can keep our tax break in Florida or whatever it might be. So I think that that is a big part of it. I think he's over it.

The uh the amount of jokes I hear from Disney executives about Bob Iger basically waiting out the repairs on his super yacht until he was ready to retire and once they were done he was just gonna go and do that and that that's all he really wanted is real is is is quite funny and quite true. Mas eu só tenho... I was talking to to an executive yesterday about ABC and we were talking about the pros and cons of tomorrow and others and I said, you know There's this question about A B C

Like what is it? Like like i there y the ESPN spin-off conversation happens all the time and we kinda know what's happening with Marvel and Lucasfilm, we kinda know what's happening with Disney Plus and Hulu and Fubo. What's going on with ABC if And they made a really interesting point which was one, they had no insight. But two

this idea that Josh DeMarrow does not have the rose tinted glasses of ABC and ABC News that Bob Iger did. He did not come up as a weather boy on the channel. He did not come up from being president of ABC And this question of when do you unload a major asset to invest in an asset of the future, whether that is a video game publisher, which people have speculated about, something like a EA before that went private of course or another another asset entirely.

Josh tomorrow's gonna have less attachments to saying, okay, let's get rid of it. Let's let's change this. Let's figure this out. And I think that's also important. This moment, even more so than ChayPag. is this transitional reality of streaming's not going to save us. Parks is gonna get us through, but what do we do with our entertainment and media business?

And so I think when Bob Iger says, like, I don't wanna deal with this It is a component of I do not want to deal with the Trump administration uh in the slightest, but also I don't wanna be the person that has to figure out layoffs and MA and go through all this again like I'm tired and I wanna go sit on my yacht. Julia, this is great. You are you're such an expert on this in general, but you're also an expert on Disney.

because of all the media reporters I talk to all the time and many of them on this show, I don't think any of them have worked at Disney recently. And you did. You worked you did strategy for them. Um just briefly, tell me about Well don't tell me about the experience working there. What did you learn working at Disney um that helps you think about the company today that someone else might not understand?

Hmm. What can I say that will not violate an NDA? Uh I th the the main thing Um, to use a really bad analogy, I didn't realize how hard it was to turn a company that's like a naval sized battleship. around in a tiny little harbor. Right? This idea of if if if Netflix, you know, five, ten years ago

wanted to change something, wanted to pivot, they could pretty easily. You know, they're getting much bigger. They're clearly by trying to buy Warner Brothers Discovery or that they're they are buying it. Um, but it's easier for them as like a tugboat to turn around in a harbor and say, Okay, we're gonna pivot. We're gonna go and do this. For a company like Disney to do any type of pivot, whether it is streaming, whatever it might be, AI, you know, user generated content.

It's such a r effort because they're just such a large enterprise. And I don't think I appreciated. how complicated that is. And and the way to your question, Peter, about how it r informs my thinking about and my analysis of other companies. To your point about David Ellison saying, Look, oh, we're a tech company now and my father's Larry Ellison and we're a tech company.

way easier to say, way easier to go in and say we're gonna be an engineer first, you know, innovative company when you're dealing with thousands, tens of thousands of employees who come from kind of this antiquated media business. And so I think that's the thing I I think about with Disney, which is this idea of

They know they need to change. They know they need to change faster than they're changing. And they also know that they every minute that they're not changing their strategy, someone like Netflix or Instagram or TikTok is. Um, and I don't think I appreciate How Almost impossible it is for a company that size to do so in the time needed to ensure that that change reflects. the immediacy of what needs to get done.

Well I'm glad that you left Disney so you can speak to me on my podcast. Now Julia Alexander, you're awesome. Um you guys can read her over at Puck. She publishes all the time. Thanks, Julia. Thanks again to Julia Alexander. She's excellent. Go read her stuff. Thanks again to Charlotte Silver for helping us get this one out to you quickly. Thanks to our sponsors and thanks to you guys. We have a fun episode next week. See ya then.