Host Kara Swisher of The New York Times podcast, Sway, recently was able to sit with Former Disney CEO Bob Iger in front of a live audience at the Richmond Forum to give him the exit interview she asked for.
What’s Happening:
- Kara Swisher, host of the Sway podcast for The New York Times recently sat down with former Disney CEO and Executive Chairman Bob Iger, giving him an exit interview where Iger himself at one point proclaims “I’m in an enviable position right now, just because I’m not working for Disney. I’m kind of liberated. I can say anything about anybody.” Though, he chose not to.
- What Iger did share were comments on the creation of the Disney+ streaming service, saying that by licensing movies for distribution on Netflix, “they were using some of the circulation that we helped them create and the subscription growth to fund their own television and movie production, directly competitive with us for talent and stories. And I woke up one day and thought, we’re basically selling nuclear weapons technology to a Third World country, and now they’re using it against us…So we decided at the time that we would stop licensing to Netflix and do it ourselves.”
- Streaming isn’t the only online business he mentioned, as the pair dove into the topic of NFTs. Of the topic, Iger said “I do think— NFTs, I think, are real. I was a big trading card fan as a kid— baseball cards. I think the ability to collect things, even if they’re digital— we forget, in our generation, that things don’t have to be physical.
- They can be digital, and they have meaning to people. And as long as that meaning can be essentially substantiated in a blockchain, I think you’re going to see an explosion of things being created, traded, collected in NFTs…and the NFT possibilities, they’re extraordinary.”
- The pair even discussed a presidential run that was once considered by Iger, with him saying that his wife wasn’t thrilled with the idea, and it was timed around the Fox acquisition. “It was not something the family was happy about, at all,” Iger said, “but as I got into it more and I studied the political environment in the United States, this is in— well, I actually started talking about it before the 2016 race. But then, 2020— and I’m a registered Democrat, but I consider myself a centrist— it became more and more clear to me that getting the nomination in today’s world— which maybe says a lot about politics, too— would be really hard, if not impossible. And then, when I was thinking about it, which was 2017— I had, again, conversations with Rupert Murdoch about buying those assets. Initially, it was a $70 billion purchase. I knew I was not going to be able to go to the Disney board and say, hey, I’d like to buy these assets for $70 billion, and by the way, I’m leaving.”
- If Iger became president? “The trains would have run on time,” he said, “the streets would have been clean. I want to turn the country into— it would have been the happiest place on earth.”
- He also responded to comments he made about creativity vs. data in the entertainment industry. While he steered clear of comments made by current Disney CEO Bob Chapek about the entertainment giant now being a “data-driven company,” Iger did leave us with fun anecdote on the topic, saying “Having spent almost 50 years on the creative side of our business, it became more and more clear to me that while data was already playing a very important role, that it should not be used to determine what stories are told. If we had tried to mine all the data that we had at the time to determine whether we should make a superhero movie that was essentially about an Afrofuturistic world with a Black cast, the data probably would have said, don’t do that… And Black Panther never would have been made. There are a number of examples of that, where someone’s instinct or a group of people’s instinct on whether a story is worthy of being told and is in the hands of people who will tell it really well— I don’t think a machine or data, no matter how much technology enables, essentially, input of massive amounts of information to be processed— I don’t think you get the right answers to that.”
- While the conversation was mostly light and fun regarding his tenure as CEO of The Walt Disney Company, there were moments that also were sentimental. When asked about criticisms of his performance leading the iconic media company, Iger said that the one criticism that hit him very hard were critiques of how the over 80,000 employees were treated. Iger said “Well, I take any criticism about how we’ve treated our people very— I took it very personally. That would be it….the main one is wages. But I’ve defended that before, because we were one of the first companies to go to $10 an hour. We went to $15 an hour, minimum wage. In both cases, they were higher than state and federal minimums at the time. You know, when you manage these companies, you’re balancing multiple forces when it comes to finances. And this is not an excuse, but you need to grow your profits for your shareholders. And maybe I’m talking to some government officials right now about— this is for them. You need to do that. You need to keep your pricing reasonable for consumers in mind, which in an inflationary environment, just gets even more critical. And you’d like to pay your people whatever it takes to make them happy and to keep them motivated, but they all kind of have to fit in with one another in some very careful balance. Because if— I don’t know anybody who wouldn’t want to pay their people more, but then you got to figure out, well, if we do that, and you have to grow your bottom line, can you raise prices? And then, you alienate your consumers. And so it’s a delicate balance.”
- Host Kara Swisher took the opportunity to say something every listener at home and in the live audience was thinking, which Iger even openly said he saw coming and walked right into it. “Just saying, maybe you could pay C.E.O.s less. OK? I’m teasing.”
- You can listen to the full conversation between Kara Swisher and Bob Iger on the Sway podcast here, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.