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Disney Invests $1B in OpenAI & Time’s Person, or Architects, of the Year
12 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Good morning for Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Time's 2025 Person of the Year is... And Disney and OpenAI are in their enemies to lovers art.
It's Friday, December 12th. Let's ride.
Good morning and happy Friday. Swiss yodeling is finally getting the international recognition it deserves. This week, yodeling was among the 67 customs to be included on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage List, which recognizes country-specific traditions worth preserving.
Also being honored this year, Italian cooking, Iceland's swimming pool culture, and the Zafa wedding procession in countries like Djibouti, where the family breaks an egg on the groom's head. So if you're looking for some culturally inspired travel ideas, this list is a great place to start.
Nations, though, do have a love-hate relationship with UNESCO because getting recognized can obviously bring a lot of tourists, but also the term UNESCO side has been coined by an Italian journalist because of the throngs of tourists that it brings to certain places and how maybe it destroys the culture you're there to preserve.
Sorry, yodeling, your days are numbered because throngs of Midwesterners are about to descend upon your country and ruin it all. And now a word from our sponsor, LinkedIn ads.
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Chapter 2: What does Disney's $1 billion investment in OpenAI mean for its characters?
While you'll be allowed to generate a video of Woody riding a bull, for instance, you won't get access to Tom Hanks' voice saying, yee-haw. Human faces and voices within Disney's stable of IP are not up for use, nor will any of the franchise's music. Neil, many view this as a crossing the Rubicon moment for the industry, joining forces with the AI Death Star rather than rebelling against it.
But AI is both a threat and a growth opportunity. Iger and Disney are hoping the latter outweighs the former.
Yeah, a lot of ways to look at this deal. I think the first one is that it's a signal to the marketplace that Disney is on the cutting edge of technology. technology. Yes, it may be a company that's over 100 years old, but it's constantly looking to the future. And it has done that with its partnerships with Apple.
And then recently, a couple of years ago, invested $1.5 billion into Epic Games to get its characters into that company's game of Fortnite. Now it does $1 billion into OpenAI and it gets its characters into Sora. And Bob Iger said this was a play for the youth. We know that
America's kids, international kids are increasingly looking to YouTube and user-generated content instead of maybe Disney's longtime characters. This is a way that whatever technology the youths are using, that Disney's characters will be front of mind.
It might be an admission, too, that Bob Iger realized that you can't really control what people are going to do with your characters on the Internet today.
OpenAI was already under heat for allowing people to generate very close to their characters in the app already, so he's like, might as well get ahead of it, might as well participate in the upside by this equity investment if people were gonna do it anyways. And also,
I think that they were looking ahead to the fact that maybe their characters could be used in some not-so-kid-friendly mannerisms. And so by having open AI on your side, you can crack down on some of those edge use cases that were probably happening, but now you have some guardrails in place to prevent that.
So what does it mean for OpenAI? Well, many analysts were looking at this as perhaps OpenAI coming from this from a defensive posture wasn't that advantageous of a deal for OpenAI because if you look at Sora, a few months ago, Sora came to the App Store and it was being downloaded Crazy, like it was the number one app and all those videos were going viral on other social media platforms.
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Chapter 3: How is Disney planning to use its characters in AI video content?
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Disney's deal with OpenAI for the entertainment industry?
You always go back to whatever is already in your fridge. I think that's what's happening here when people go on to any music streaming service. In music alone, an average of 99,000 new tracks are delivered to streaming platforms each day. And when I talk to people about what music they listen to, they often just say, oh, I just go to whatever Spotify tells me to listen to.
And often, Spotify is going to those top lists from... the past couple of years. And those are the things that are generating all of these streams, which is why we see music from 2024 and 2023 back on the top of the list because people are just turning to Spotify algorithms and playlists. And that's what's on there.
I do think too, 2024 was full of bangers. I mean, it was a breakout year for Sabrina Carpenter, Charlie XCX, Chapel Roan, Benson Boone, Teddy Swim, Shabuzy. Like it was a really good year for music. And I was kind of poking through some, Sue through some Reddit threads reacting to this. And they really were just saying like, sorry, that there was just a lot of good music.
Like I'm going to keep listening to good songs. Like the calendar doesn't actually matter. So why are we getting so wrapped up? Some are just poking holes in billboards and methodology as well. saying that they stopped measuring at September, tried to get away from Christmas songs populating too much of the list.
Anyway, they were basically saying that let's not sleep on the fact that we just came off a really good year of music, which is why that music is still on these top lists. Now let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Lulu is getting a new new CEO and it's making shareholders go goo goo.
Current Lulu Lemon CEO Calvin McDonald announced yesterday that he will step down in January, causing shares to jump 10% in after hours trading. The announcement comes after reports that estranged founder Chip Wilson, who has been rallying support in a proxy battle behind the scenes, looking to regain influence over the board in the direction of the company.
Wilson, who was ousted for a series of inappropriate comments, has been frustrated with McDonald telling people that he can speak Wall Street but kills innovation. Wilson has a point. Even though Lulu's sales have tripled under McDonald, American revenue is falling and shares are down over 51% this year, as analysts and customers alike question the brand's creative direction.
Yeah, Lulu is having a bit of an identity crisis as its controversial founder is lurking in the shadows. Spicy stuff.
So awkward when the founder of the company and the former CEO is just posting mean things about the company on LinkedIn. He even took out a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal, saying the company was in a, quote, nosedive and it needed to stop chasing Wall Street at the expense of customers.
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