SPEAKER_01: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Thursday.

SPEAKER_00: Huge show for you today. Huge show for you today. You know, we had to do it. We actually got formal charges against scam bank run frauds, top lieutenants. They have apparently flipped on him and pled guilty.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. Massive drop from the sec today. We're going to break it down. SDNY is not for play. And, uh, we're going to break down three very important hot takes, uh, spoiler alert.

SPEAKER_05: Hmm. I'm number two and number three on the hot takes. Molly wins. Oh, you did it.

SPEAKER_06: Uh, and then Lon Harris is on the show to talk about streaming.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. We got YouTube securing the rights to NFL Sunday ticket for two billy a year. And we're going to talk about, uh, who this is the important loss leader for in the streaming world and who might just say like, you know what?

SPEAKER_12: You can have it at that price.

SPEAKER_11: Yup.

SPEAKER_13: And then back to AO Scott gate is top 10 list. We picked another film. Uh, it's a film called tar. It's incredibly topical. It has a lot to do with the online, uh, brigading communities, but it actually turns out to be an absolutely fantastic film. We're going to go into detail about it for about 20 minutes and then, uh, we'll stop there.

SPEAKER_05: And we have a special announcement at the end of the program of what we did with the additional 40 minutes of our tar debate discussion. It's going to be a great show.

SPEAKER_21: Great show. Stick with us.

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SPEAKER_13: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Thursday. Molly. We thought, Hey, you know, we'll just go right into Christmas. The mountains behind me. I should jump out and do a little slopes. We chill. And then what happens?

SPEAKER_28: We're not chilling.

SPEAKER_27: Remember I said it, the Southern district of New York. Yes. Read. Never.

SPEAKER_28: Bahara's.

SPEAKER_27: Never mess. Giuliani's. Never mess.

SPEAKER_00: Never mess with SDNY. SDNY has, uh, not only do we have news that apparently SBF himself, Sam Bankman-Fried is in FBI custody on his way to the United States being extradited. Charges were dropped, uh, today, I believe Thursday.

SPEAKER_33: Not dropped. Against. Wait, let's do it again.

SPEAKER_32: Could drop, announced. Oh, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_35: Not like, I meant like the album. Yeah. Right. Okay. Charges were announced. Announced. Thank you.

SPEAKER_12: They didn't drop the charges. They're building the charges. Leave this in. Man, American language has gotten so confusing, hasn't it?

SPEAKER_42: Well, you know, they're on legal terms of art. It's a legal term of art.

SPEAKER_43: You know how like out of pocket used to just mean I'm not available right now? And now it means you've lost your damn mind. Like you can't keep up.

SPEAKER_44: I think the Stanford list, did you see the Stanford list of words to just try to change that everybody's having like a conniption over? No, but I'm going to have to look because that's one of them. The Stanford created a, this is, leave this in the show. It's hilarious. Stanford made a list, the college of like, they created a, they just let anybody think of, cause it's so fantastical. It sounds like an SNL satire.

SPEAKER_13: They put a committee together to say, Hey, what are problematic words or things we could

SPEAKER_50: do better with? Now, obviously you don't want to say certain words. Like, you know, we understand like, there's something we're leaving out now that you don't have to give examples. Right.

SPEAKER_56: Like there's a baseball team called, uh, the Redskins. And then we changed the name out of respect is the right thing to do. So they're coming up with names like that.

SPEAKER_06: Right. But like, they're literally giving guidance, like, uh, losing your mind, um, having a hard time understanding. And they, they literally give you the words for people who've gotten into

SPEAKER_56: Harvard, Harvard to Stanford, of how to use words that maybe don't make people with mental illness feel bad about themselves.

SPEAKER_61: And I'm just, I mean, the internet is going insane over it. Of course it is. Ugh. It's only because it's so comprehensive.

SPEAKER_64: It's like a very comprehensive.

SPEAKER_63: Well, and it's so, oh dear.

SPEAKER_66: Yes. It, it's a raw shock test of like, yeah. Oh, so walk-in versus drop-in.

SPEAKER_67: Walk-in trivializes people with disabilities.

SPEAKER_66: Yeah. So this is where we're at. I just, let's keep going.

SPEAKER_69: I don't know why this has to drop. Let's just stop. Let's just stop. We have to stop.

SPEAKER_71: I don't want to get into language policing. Oh no.

SPEAKER_00: Charges have been announced against Alameda co-CEO, Caroline Ellison, who I think is the most interesting, intriguing, and mysterious figure in this whole thing. And FTX co-founder, Gary Wang, who pled guilty to those charges. They have both flipped and pleading guilty and have pled guilty to federal charges in the Southern District of New York. I believe they are both fraud charges. Simultaneously, the SEC and the CFTC filed a civil, aka non-criminal, complaints in which two of SBF's top lieutenants, I assume this is Ellison and Wang, ratted him out. And here is an 80-second clip from the U.S. Attorney at the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams.

SPEAKER_73: Last week, we announced charges against Samuel Bankman-Fried for a sweeping fraud scheme

SPEAKER_74: that contributed to FTX's collapse and for a campaign finance scheme that sought to influence public policy in Washington. As I said last week, this investigation is very much ongoing, and it's moving very quickly. I also said that last week's announcement would not be our last. And let me be clear once again, neither is today's. I want to make two announcements. First, I'm announcing that the Southern District of New York has filed charges against Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, and Gary Wang, a co-founder of FTX, in connection with their roles and the frauds that contributed to FTX's collapse. Both Ms. Ellison and Mr. Wang have pled guilty to those charges, and they are both cooperating with the Southern District of New York. Let me reiterate a call that I made last week. If you participated in misconduct at FTX or Alameda, now is the time to get ahead of it. We are moving quickly, and our patience is not eternal. Second, I'm announcing that Samuel Bankman-Fried is now in FBI custody and is on his way back to the United States. He will be transported directly to the Southern District of New York, and he will appear in court before a judge in this district as soon as possible. Many individuals in the Bahamas and in the United States contributed to the swiftness of the defendant's return, and I want to thank the Bahamas for its outstanding assistance and excellent coordination with us. We continue to work around the clock, and we are far from done.

SPEAKER_04: This is what you have to know about SDNY, their career prosecutors. When they say your name, you are effed.

SPEAKER_14: I mean, you could, you see the level of seriousness? Yeah. Let me be clear. It's terrifying. I mean, that is some scary stuff.

SPEAKER_82: And we are not done. He says one, by the way, which it probably is. I said Gary Wang, but it probably is Wong. Realistically, it's spelled W-A-N-G, but yes, our patience is not eternal.

SPEAKER_03: Like when he tells people, come flip now, get the best deal.

SPEAKER_06: He's saying right now, best deal, two for one, you know, you want to get out with five years, or do you want to get 25? That's really what I think, um, his co-conspirators are looking at right now. You always flip to the top. This is the strategy of SDNY.

SPEAKER_56: You flip the low-level people, you work your way up to the big fish. The people who flip first get the best deal because they make it easier to wrap

SPEAKER_86: things up and move on to the next prosecution. That's why I'm talking about my girl, Carolyn Ellison.

SPEAKER_00: Say more. While Sam Begman-Fried was on his ill-advised media tour, Carolyn Ellison got her ass to New York and flipped immediately. And Gary Wang seems to have done the same thing. The only mistake that he made that my girl Carolyn did not make is his name is on all of this stuff. He wrote the back door. Is that? He wrote, I think he's the guy who wrote the back door. He was a 10% owner in Alameda where, you know, Sam Begman-Fried owns 90%. Uh, he's just all, I think Carolyn, my prediction is that Carolyn gets the best deal here because she is the mastermind.

SPEAKER_92: She's the brains of this operation.

SPEAKER_94: She's the actual Lex Luthor. She's the actual Lex Luthor. But she flipped early and often. She flipped immediately.

SPEAKER_97: She was like, have fun at deal book.

SPEAKER_98: Beep, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Roadrunner. Exactly. Straight to SDNY.

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SPEAKER_13: Get more done in less time for a fraction of the price with Odoo. Do you remember, though, a couple weeks ago, I think this was when we had Sunny Sandeep, Sunny Sandeep and Vinny on, there was like a picture of her getting a cup of coffee in New York. And everybody's like, well, that's peculiar. Is that really her? No. She's gone to Moscow. She must be in, like, North Korea. She's somewhere with a dictator, Hong Kong, somewhere where she can get not extradited. Nope. Yeah. Nope. She was in Chelsea getting a latte.

SPEAKER_25: Yeah.

SPEAKER_104: She did not listen to her parents. She got a real lawyer.

SPEAKER_25: There she is.

SPEAKER_04: She got a real lawyer and they gave her good advice. Listen, this is going to be extraordinary. There she is getting her coffee.

SPEAKER_13: Um, they, the complaint details a number of things. The SEC complaint does. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: So maybe just a couple of highlights here, because I don't think this is new news. Molly, correct me if I'm wrong. This is just confirmation of the stuff.

SPEAKER_13: Everybody was saying allegedly, allegedly, and letting this kid be on every podcast, every giving keynotes, a deal book, blah, blah, blah, blah. Softball questions from Andrew Ross, Sorkin, all this nonsense.

SPEAKER_03: All of it turns out to be true. Pretty much all turns out to be true.

SPEAKER_109: That's the high level. Well, that's the high level. Yes, exactly. The high level takeaway, uh, from the civil complaint filed by the SEC.

SPEAKER_00: And criminal charges are yet to follow related to all of this, but the high level takeaway is that everything is a direct contradiction to everything that he has said. For example, yes, he did. According to this complaint, uh, Sam Bankman free did indeed divert customer deposits from FTX straight to Alameda through the back door that was built by Gary Wong, SBF's co-founder at FTX.

SPEAKER_82: Is it Wong or Wang, it's spelled W-A-N-G.

SPEAKER_03: It's spelled W-A-N-G, but that, I'm going to go with what the SDNY prosecutor said. He said Wong. Okay. So I'm going to go with that.

SPEAKER_114: Let's make sure we get it right. Okay. Yeah. Let's make sure.

SPEAKER_03: My, my, my, my dyslexia is going crazy. I know. It's, it's, yeah, totally. But I think like, anyway, I'm going, I'm going with. Okay. We've heard both. Okay. We'll go with SDNY.

SPEAKER_117: We've heard both. We've heard both, but I'm going with SDNY because I don't want to get in trouble.

SPEAKER_119: Carolyn Ellison, the co-CEO. Criminal masterminds who stole billions of dollars.

SPEAKER_121: We're trying to be. I know, right? We're like, well, I just want to get his name right. You want to pronounce your name correctly before you go to jail for 10 years.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. No, my radio like brain is pinging like crazy. It's driving me crazy, but I'm going with what he said. So we at least have consistency in the show. The complaint also alleges that Carolyn Ellison, the co-CEO of Alameda, used customer deposits to trade at Alameda. Shaq. That was another thing they were trying to pretend wasn't happening. And that Sam Bankman freed himself used customer deposits to make investments, donate to politicians and buy real estate. So that not only did they commit what the sec is calling securities fraud by commingling these funds, but that he actually used customer deposits to just like live the high life

SPEAKER_03: and buy politicians.

SPEAKER_06: And that's where additional charges about around. Um, I think there are going to be some charges. I don't know if they dropped here, but I was seeing speculation online about doing w when you try to pay off politicians, I don't know if it's bribery, but there is some, some charges

SPEAKER_64: that could relate to that. Oh, my Lord, I do think the sec is going to have some interesting charges here around the FTT token, uh, because it does seem at the, we'll get to that too. Yeah, yeah, please, uh, queue it up then.

SPEAKER_130: Cause that, that to me has always been the issue, um, exactly large.

SPEAKER_00: So first of all, he used the deposits as his personal piggy bank, but second, uh, it says that the SB, that SBF ordered Carolyn Ellison to make automated purchases of FTT across various platforms to increase Alameda's collateral, which then allowed them to borrow more. So just a pure manipulation of this already fit and fictional thing to make it look more valuable so that they could then borrow against it, which is just complete like capital F fraud. If true, if true, FTT, of course was FTX, FTX is platform token and Alameda controlled most of the supply of it and then also used as their collateral. So the more it was worth, the more they could borrow. And then the sec, and this is the biggie declared FTT a security and they are officially alleging

Jason Calacanis: securities fraud. Yes.

SPEAKER_136: Boom. The sec. Okay.

SPEAKER_13: Cause this is gonna get confusing. There's an sec, there are sec charges, and then there are gonna be criminal charges. This is all a moving target right now, but the sec has said it's a token and it's civil complaint

SPEAKER_04: said it's a security now, right now, it's bad, anybody, it's bad, bad, anybody who has a token right now, who use the token in any way to build consensus around the tokens validity. And I'll explain what this means in a moment right now needs to lawyer up.

SPEAKER_06: You may remember, I did an emergency podcast about ripple ripple also released, right? Uh, that company, their token, they then use that token to, they gave it to venture capitalists to start funds. They gave it to donations. They, they were the original splashy cashes, pull up the ripple complaint from the sec. They took a currency and they used it in my mind to build consensus, which is a generous way other people might interpret it. I'm using very clear language here. Molly, you understand?

SPEAKER_132: Um, we're professional allegedly, allegedly, no, but it is in the sec company in this case. Yes.

SPEAKER_56: No, totally in this case, but some people might generously say, oh, you're building consensus around just like we do in venture capital. Everybody invests in a company, right? The more people who invested in Uber, the greater the chance you have more people rooting for Uber. The more people who buy Google stock, the more people were rooting for Google. Okay. Yeah, it's a security. And if you play by the rules, you're building consensus amongst the investment community that this is the best bet to make. Now what happens when you do that, but you break all of the securities laws in the world? Then it's fraud. It's fraud. So if I, and everybody told me, Jake, how, when this stuff was coming out, let's make J coin. You're popular. You've got a podcast. You invest in startups. We'll do J coin. And I was getting pitched left and right. And I would joke about it. I'm going to create J coin and you know, it's gonna be worth a billion dollars. And then they were like, yeah, great J coin. And then give J coin to every company you invest in. So you give them, you know, you invest a million J coins and you give the founders a million J coins and then the LPs and your fund get J coins. And it was like, I was like, um, that seems like illegal to me, for me to print my own currency that has no value and then pretend it has value. And I was like, so I laughed about it. You can look at this podcast transcripts and be joking about J coin for the last 10 years. Yeah.

SPEAKER_13: Ripple also did all of these donations and paying people off, uh, perhaps would be one way to say it to build consensus around the ripple coin, right? That's what you want to do when you have a project, right? All these, uh, crypto projects are about building consensus. Well, how do you build consensus? You get more people to have ownership in it. Guess what? Bored apes. What's the difference between what board apes did by giving celebrities, my understanding, I don't know if this is true, is that many of these, I'll

SPEAKER_05: broaden it here, take bored apes off the table. Mm-hmm many of the NFT projects would give NFTs at discounts for free, anywhere in

SPEAKER_13: between two celebrities to get them to put as their avatars on Twitter or other places to then get civilians to buy it.

SPEAKER_00: Well, and that's a product that's like a, that's a, that's a product marketing thing, right? Anytime you introduce a new product in the world, if I had been the inventor of Swiffer, I would have gone to market with my product in exactly the same way. And you give free stuff to influencers and you do that with your new restaurant. And that's all completely accepted in the world of creating and selling products. And then on the other hand, you have this token that you are financializing, right? You're lending against it. You're getting people to invest in it. You are artificially inflating its value so that you can borrow against it and use it as collateral. You're selling it, right? So that's where we're going to start to see, right? Exactly. Printing more of it and then creating automatic buys so that it looks super valuable because you're creating artificial demand. So like the SEC is basically saying, look, everybody knows that in the world, there are Swiffers and there are securities and a security looks like this. And I think it's so interesting what Gary Gensler did here in the SEC by saying consistently, right? Consistently, they were like, this is what a security is.

Jason Calacanis: Your job creators of securities is to follow the law. Right.

SPEAKER_169: Here's everybody walk right into the trap.

SPEAKER_56: Exactly. He's like, here's our driver's license. You have a car with insurance.

SPEAKER_06: Here are the rules of the road. Good luck. You took your driver's license exam. You got your driver's license. There are a bunch of signs that explain how to drive and you took the test.

SPEAKER_150: Exactly. If you chose to drive on the wrong side of the road, if you choose to, you know, break the

SPEAKER_56: speed limit and you decided to have a couple of pops before you got behind the wheel, that's on you. Whether you're Ripple, whether you're FTX, whoever. And I'm not saying Ripple is a fraud or a giant scam, but the SEC is going after them too. And this is what I'll tell you. Sometimes I'm wrong. You ever been in a relationship, Molly, where you're in love and you have a deep relationship

SPEAKER_13: and you and your partner have a difference of opinion and then you're wrong. Yeah. And then it comes out clearly you were wrong. You know what my partner does to me? She goes, see, so we have a joke. We have a joke. So when I'm wrong about something, she pokes me in my ribs and says, see, now it doesn't happen all the time, but when it does, it's, it particularly in the ribs, it stings a little bit, not so much because I have a finger between two ribs and it's incredibly sensitive as a human, but because the C means I was dead to rights wrong now, and it's just a running joke. This is Gary. That's adorable. See, this is his moment. Exactly. This is a Gary Gensler. He's like, I told you. And I want everybody who hears fans of this week and startups to make it a meme when you're right, Molly's been right about a lot of things.

SPEAKER_180: We're just going to do a quick C C.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Gary Gensler has a C moment and he is, if you gave coins, NFTs, any of this grifty stuff, if you gave it out, splashy, cashy, like FTX, I mean, you got a lawyer up now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: You got to figure out because they're going to, they're going to go right down the line. They start with the $30 billion fraud. Then they go to the 10, then they go to the two. They got many of these coming. Um, and you know what? I'm glad. I, I'm sitting here playing by the rules. Clean it up.

SPEAKER_56: I kind of sit here, play by the rules. It's really infuriating to play the startup investing capital allocator game for the last 10 years. I'll be totally Frank. I've been jealous. Of watching the crypto people run amok with a vision of, Hey, people should be able to do what they want to do with their money. People should be able to make transactions. I wish that I could say I'm investing. You know, from our fund, uh, quarter million dollars in this. Anybody on the planet who wants to join us can put in $1,000. Go here. I wish that was fluid and easy. Like crypto made it. Right. I wish I had that. I am jealous of it.

SPEAKER_06: I that's the vision I have for how the securities should grow. And these idiots, criminals, grifters have ruined it for the people who play by the rules.

SPEAKER_56: It's literally like we have to drive 55 miles an hour. Right. Cars are safer now. We should be able to drive 75. That should be the speed limit. But all you dumb dumbs. But all you dumb dumbs have to be on your goddamn phones or drinking, and you can't stay in the lane and you're eating a slice of pizza, putting on your makeup, you're drinking a beer, smoking a joint, smoking a J, having an edible. And now the speed limit's got to be 55. And in Europe, you want to go on the Autobahn? You decide how fast you go because everybody's got a good car that they maintain, et cetera. The speeding limit is now limited for the rest of us because of you criminals. I hope you go to jail for life. SPF, literally a life sentence is the minimum for me to be satisfied here.

SPEAKER_06: And for these other two knuckleheads, 15 years will be the minimum, even with the plea deals, for me to feel justice was done. If they get under 10, I will absolutely be infuriated. They need to get 10 minimum. And I'm not talking 10 sentence. I'm talking 10 serve.

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SPEAKER_205: What do you think about...

SPEAKER_00: Sonny and Vinny are not here today to talk about this with us, but they did send us a little note earlier, a link to a Twitter thread suggesting that if tokens are securities, I'm just pulling this up now from Compound 248. Quick aside, and this is in a thread that's summarizing these SEC charges. And this person noted, quick aside, unrelated to FTX, if tokens are securities, many, many people broke the law. Entrepreneurs, promoters, and yikes, prominent venture capitalists. I'd watch out here. We may see VCs in handcuffs.

SPEAKER_109: Okay. This is the tricky thing about...

SPEAKER_00: Again, the SEC is not retroactively declaring FTT a security, right? What they're saying is this was a security all along. Here were the rules. You're the one smoking pot in the car while you're driving. Yep. What do I...

Jason Calacanis: Personally, I think I would eat my hat before prominent VCs ended up in handcuffs over this. They will not end up in handcuffs.

SPEAKER_82: But it is an interesting question. Sure. Because a lot has been happening with tokens and some firms.

SPEAKER_13: Um, the people who committed the crimes, obviously they go to jail. Yeah. The people who were involved in the periphery will pay fines because they didn't commit the crimes, but they were on the periphery of the crimes. And in some way that might have enabled it in some way. Yeah. And if there is some connection that committed, there's still, you still have to go to court. You still have to go to trial. So remember when all the banking stuff happened in 2008?

SPEAKER_07: How many people... And nobody went to jail. You covered this marketplace. This is your... You tell me. Educate me, please, Molly. How many of those people wound up doing a perp work in handcuffs?

Jason Calacanis: I think one person went to jail in a financial crisis that encapsulated the entire world. And... Okay. And if you were... Lack of trust in institutions and the overall reputational damage that has been done as a result of that is, like, incalculable.

SPEAKER_06: Okay. And you know what?

SPEAKER_05: There's kids sitting in jail right now who have 10 years for, you know, selling a little bit of weed, maybe slinging some rock, whatever it is. And, you know, we have to really have a deep look at the justice system and make sure that, you know, and I think this is what SDNY does particularly well. I'll give them credit for this. We need to understand the justice system and understand the actual harm to society.

SPEAKER_64: A kid selling crack in the projects or some kid selling weed on campus and they get 10 years. They get five years. And then these people... And what damage did they cause? Yeah. What damage did they actually cause? I'm not saying it's great. I'm not saying it's not a crime. They broke the rules. They get something. But when you compare some of these sentences, you know, we have to make sure that white-collar criminals get the book thrown at them proportional. Theranos made off. Bless you, man. Bless you.

SPEAKER_231: But they never have before.

SPEAKER_234: No, you know, it's infuriating to me. Theranos had the book thrown at him because her own investors who enabled the whole freaking thing. Yes. Suter.

SPEAKER_00: Right? Like, they went down because their investors came for them, but no investors. Like, I mean, I'm not trying to be super cynical here, but like Sam Bankman-Fried is accused of, and, you know, his co-founders, they are accused of very real crimes that they committed and they are not in a vacuum.

SPEAKER_14: Restitution is important in this case. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05: If you were an investor, let's, I'm not going to pick any specific venture firms.

SPEAKER_13: I'm not going to put it on anybody, but let's say you were a venture firm and, uh, you, um, backed a token or an NFT project.

SPEAKER_05: Let's say you got a bunch of NFTs because you were part of it, right? You're like, okay, we're going to put a hundred million into this NFT project and we're getting, we're going to have first shot at these, these NFTs. And let's say the NFTs take off and you sell them, you know, they were securities, you're amongst the most sophisticated. Okay, so what should happen, uh, a sanction is what should happen and what that could be. So this is the equivalent of the perp walk. In this case, you didn't commit like the most heinous crime of all, et cetera. You're not going to go to jail, but you could get banned from being on the board of a publicly traded company. You could get banned from being in the securities industry. You could be banned from being a venture capitalist. Basically, you get banned from raising funds. So it is conceivable here. I don't think it's probable. I think it's possible that we could see a venture capitalist, an investor, an angel investor, whatever, if they were to have flipped securities as part of their plea deal. If this does get to that point, I could see this happening with ripple.

SPEAKER_245: I could see executives at a company like that, that are, you know, in a lawsuit with the sec.

SPEAKER_56: I could see them settling in the way Henry Blodgett did. If you remember the Henry Blodgett case, he was banned from, for life, I believe, uh, somebody can pull it up.

SPEAKER_64: Yeah. My memory. I think he got banned for life for, from being in the securities industry.

SPEAKER_248: I think so. Something like that.

SPEAKER_64: Didn't stop him from building Business Insider into a couple hundred million dollar business. Right. But he was technically banned from being on a publicly traded company as board and doing securities, I believe. So, you know, this is a, this is a possibility, but not a probability. I don't think you can go after VCs for making investments in companies that wind up being frauds. I don't know what crime there actually is there. Right. But you could have sanctions. Unless they got tokens.

SPEAKER_252: Unless they sold. Then it gets a little, right?

SPEAKER_254: Like if they were issued tokens ahead of the public and then they maybe sold them or they were involved in bumping those tokens. That's where if they sold them is where it gets tricky.

SPEAKER_56: I don't think if they got them, that would be a crime. It'd be like, you know, if I joined, if I invested in a video game company and they gave me a bunch of mana in the video game. Right. You know, or digital assets in the game. Am I guilty of anything? I don't think so. No, but those aren't securities. But they do have tradable value.

SPEAKER_64: And then that's where I think a settlement occurs. Right. Totally. It's like, do you want to take this to court? And like 12 people in a jury are like, I'm sorry, you got a mythical sword that you traded. Like that's how a defense might put up their defense. Right. Yeah. And I think it winds up being a hung jury.

SPEAKER_118: And it, you know, like, all you need is one person to be like, well, I believe in crypto and I don't think that's a security. It's just a token and people understood it. So very hard to prosecute that. That's very hard. Prosecute the person who orchestrated it.

SPEAKER_00: One last point for me, at least on this entire Meshuggah is that if I were a central bank or a financial institution that did not want crypto to come and disrupt my entire lifeblood of the global economy, I could not have engineered a better situation than FTX and the downfall of Sam Bankman Freed. Because just like to your point about 55 miles an hour, now all the rules come in. Like if I am a, if I am a Bitcoin purist, if I'm a decentralized missionary and what I want is to overthrow this like fiat control, I have just lost a decade in that fight because of this.

SPEAKER_05: I thought I was going to have the hot take on this. You beat me. You're right. Thanks. You get the, you get the number one hot take for this. My hot take, which is now by default coming in second. You got.

SPEAKER_261: Damn son. I thought I had this one. I feel bad. Man. Shoot. No, I had two hot takes.

SPEAKER_263: Gary Gensler now has the C, but I think you have the better C because now if you are Goldman Sachs, you could be like C.

SPEAKER_13: Yeah. We told you that they should be regulated. So Gary, now my Gary Gensler take automatically moves to number two because they are the beneficiary of this. Nobody can do these. Nobody can compete with them because every time it comes up, they're going to say, oh, you can complain about Goldman Sachs. You can complain about, you know, whatever, you know, financial institutional, all you want chase, whatever bank of America. Oh, we put out too many cars, the fees on the cards.

SPEAKER_00: At least we didn't build a back door to steal everybody's money. Like Wells Fargo is literally out here paying more billion dollar fines, more billion dollar fines for just scamming people, whatever. And now crypto is the one with the black guy, you know, now they have the C.

SPEAKER_50: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. We charge for fees. Okay. We're still better.

SPEAKER_56: Fees were too much, but we didn't steal. We charge fees. See, right. Gensler's got his C. And then here's SPFs. This is what I believe SPFs defense is going to be. I thought this would be the hot take. You can rank our hot takes on Twitter, everybody. Yeah. There you go. Jason me. Here's my hot take. It's not a contest. Well, it is. I mean, they should be the hottest of hot takes. We should rank the hot takes. Well, it is. We should aspire to have the hottest of the hot takes. Right. Okay. Yeah. My hot take is SPFs defense because we're quickly going to be going into that. Yeah. Because what's the defense, you know?

SPEAKER_64: And, uh, Sonny Bonwally and Madoff, everybody, you know, who doesn't take a plea deal has some sort of defense. SPFs defense is going to be drug psychosis. He's wearing that goddamn patch. I was making his brain go whoop, whoop, whoop. And then he was, I guess he admitted to the patch. I don't know if he admitted to Adderall or other stuff, but they were talking

SPEAKER_06: about Adderall, I believe he's going with the drug psychosis defense.

SPEAKER_13: And I believe he's not going to get away with it, but it could be a hung jury or it could be, uh, your result in a settlement because they don't want to go to trial on this. And he says, I'll take 25. I'll take 35. Cause I'll still get out in 18 or something. And I still have, like, I'm still a young man. I'll be out of jail at 50. And we'll be sitting here, you know, in 20 years going, wow, he got out of jail 20 years later, the drug psychosis defense. He was on such a cocktail of crazy drugs that he can say, I lacked inhibition. I lacked inhibition. And I was so hopped up on these on speed, basically, essentially. And also whatever, I don't know what the patch does. And so I'm no expert, but I would love a psychiatric person to explain to me what exactly he was on, what combination, because that's what this is going to be the core of the defense, what combination of drugs he was on, and what are the side effects of those drugs or the combination of those drugs. And then they'll say, do you remember when my attorneys told me to not talk and to build a defense and my co-conspirators went and flipped. But I was so hopped up on those drugs that I did 10 interviews. And I just kept talking. And I don't even remember what I said, because I was on speed. I was on patches. These doctors gave it to me. And it's not my fault. This is so dark.

SPEAKER_280: It's not my fault, Molly. I was hopped up on drugs that my doctor gave me because, you know, are you going to criticize

SPEAKER_07: me for my, you know, that I have psychological problems and I have mental illness. And I just listened to my doctors and they put the patch on me. Baby. And then I snorted a bunch of Adderall. I mean, I didn't, I, I shouldn't have snorted it, but I heard, I read on a Reddit forum that maybe I could be better and I could solve my problems if I took these Addys. And I just, you know, they gave me 40, I was banging 40 milligrams. And I just thought, well, 80 is better than 40.

SPEAKER_62: And that's where this, that was the whole problem. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Have you seen those TikToks? I'm just a baby.

SPEAKER_288: No, really? Oh, it's like, it'll be like a vicious dog or whatever.

SPEAKER_254: And then it's like, you know, it's, it's like being snuggled.

SPEAKER_288: And it's like, that's just a baby.

SPEAKER_64: Anyway, that's like, I literally deleted TikTok two weeks ago. My life is a thousand percent better.

SPEAKER_03: I gained back and out. Yeah, you were using it all wrong. Too much. I'm like once a week, once a week animal. It's off my phone. Off my phone.

SPEAKER_291: All right, everybody, there it is.

SPEAKER_03: All right. Next up, lawn hairs.

SPEAKER_00: Hey, everybody. It's Molly Wood, co-host of This Week in Startups and Managing Director here at Launch. And our mission at Launch is to back builders and help build founders. Founder University is one of the ways that we do that. We've got a 12 week online course to help you build and launch your MVP or idea. It's a hybrid course, meaning there are live presentations virtually twice a week and asynchronous learning at the live sessions. Those include presentations from industry experts, and you'll get a Q&A with these experts and members of the launch team. Plus deep dives every week to cover what you're learning. And then asynchronously, we're going to give you homework, a little extra videos and reading each week. And we'll go step by step with you as you build your MVP. Now I know you're wondering, how much does this cost? Okay, so we want founders to have skin in the game, but we don't want to take money from our bootstrapped builders. So here's what we do. We charge $500 upfront for the Founder University 12 week course. But if you attend the live sessions and you launch an MVP, we'll give it back. In other words, this is our ethos in action. Do the work and we return the entire $500 at the end and it's free. So do you have an excellent idea for a startup, but you don't know where to start? Or are you in the early stages of launching your MVP looking for those first customers? Founder University is a place to guide you through those early stages. Cohort five of our 12 week Founder University will kick off in March 2023. You can learn more and apply at course.founder.university.

SPEAKER_296: Hope to see you there. All right, everybody. It's everybody's favorite reason to exist on a Thursday, right? If you're going to exist on a Thursday, the reason you should breathe oxygen as a human

SPEAKER_300: and continue this brutal life as we know it is for this week in streaming with Alon Harris. He's back, Molly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_303: If you must be perceived, the horrors of being perceived, why not be perceived here on inside streaming or this week in streaming? This week in streaming. Oh, very well done.

SPEAKER_254: This week in streaming. It is, it's the reason, it's the reason to get out of bed every week.

SPEAKER_00: It's actually, uh, we have a lot to talk about today because there is a huge breaking news story. To be fair, we have been following, but in sports and streaming, uh, we now know the answer

SPEAKER_82: to who's getting NFL Sunday ticket.

SPEAKER_307: But before you say it, we're going to talk about another AO Scott top 10 film at the end of this.

SPEAKER_296: Don't worry. You're not going to believe it, but I have very strong feelings and opinions about not only AO Scott, but another famous film critic. And that's going to be at the end here. We're going to talk about tar. We're going to talk about tar.

SPEAKER_313: We are going to talk about tar. But let's get into the news first.

SPEAKER_312: I'm never going to get invited to the national border review. You're literally, you're ruining my chances. It depends on how you defend him.

SPEAKER_315: He's going to be off the screener list. Otherwise it was totally going to happen.

SPEAKER_317: But there's, that's it now.

SPEAKER_315: Go ahead.

SPEAKER_109: All right. Okay. But before that, it's true. We have saved the best for last because we think we could go on a minute about that 159

SPEAKER_00: minute movie tar and previous. Flew by. Um, but let's start with, yes. The answer to who is going to bring us NFL Sunday ticket in 2023. It is YouTube. YouTube has closed a deal for Sunday ticket worth $2 billion per year. Yeah. It's for seven years. For seven years. I have so many thoughts, but let's do the details. It'll be similar. So if you, if you aren't familiar with NFL Sunday ticket, because you never wanted to pay for it before, because it was so freaking expensive. It is the TV sports package that lets you watch all the out of market NFL football games.

SPEAKER_326: So no blackouts, like I think you might get local blackouts.

SPEAKER_327: Maybe I'm curious to see how YouTube is going to handle that. You don't get whatever's on your CBS.

SPEAKER_328: Right. It's right. Whatever your local market, those are on TV. So you don't get them, but you get everything that's out of your market.

SPEAKER_326: Right.

SPEAKER_00: Similar to the NBA league pass. So the deal starts in 2023, it'll run through 2030 and it makes YouTube the third big tech company to pay a crap ton of money for sports streaming. Amazon signed that big deal for Thursday night football last year. And Apple signed that big 10 year deal for major league soccer.

Jason Calacanis: What do we think?

SPEAKER_330: It's, it's fascinating because it's both YouTube TV and YouTube.

SPEAKER_332: They're going to make it available through either. So if you're a YouTube TV subscriber, that's like $65 per month platform. That's sort of like a cable replacement for cord cutters. You can add Sunday ticket through there, but you don't have to. There was some concern that they were going to lock you into having to get YouTube TV in order to access the day ticket. But no, you can get it as a standalone a la carte thing through just YouTube in the same way.

SPEAKER_328: Like you can rent a movie through YouTube.

SPEAKER_00: This to me is the best news of all, actually, because I was afraid they were going to not let you get it. If you had YouTube TV, the way that you now pay for YouTube premium, but not YouTube TV. And those are not the same service. And I was like, how far I was worried that they were going to separate these two things. And I love the fact, like, to me, the best news as a consumer is that you could have it either way. Good job, YouTube.

SPEAKER_296: This is what we call in the business. The paradigm shift. There was a moment in time when the technology known as satellite television was the most extraordinary technology in the world of broadcasting. Now, why? Because there were no bandwidth or few bandwidth constraints. They put up a lot of satellites and you could get HD, right?

SPEAKER_101: Remember, DirecTV was like, whoa, you can get HD. And then they kept putting up more.

SPEAKER_312: Yeah, I had DirecTV because it was the best picture quality by far, like far-seated cable.

SPEAKER_337: It was literally you would go to a TV store to buy a television and they would

SPEAKER_300: either show you a Blu-ray, Molly, or you remember this because you were at Sina at the time. No. Or they would show you DirecTV. Not old enough.

SPEAKER_296: Well, you know, we're going to have a very big celebration here for Molly's 40th in seven years. So we're planning that now, getting out there early. So what this is about is paradigm shifts. The paradigm of DirecTV, which I loved for 20 years. I was a subscriber to DirecTV.

SPEAKER_341: You could get the most number of channels. It had the best interface, a little bit laggy when you change channels, but what combined with the TiVo, it was the most extraordinary experience. But all things come to an end. Nobody believed that the bandwidth of the internet could support the number of users in HD. Mark Cuban, who had started broadcast.com and who was an expert on this and who owned HDTV,

SPEAKER_56: two networks on DirecTV. I think that was his first place where they had them. People would go to that channel because none of the other content was in HD. So if you got an HDTV, you remember the salon? You would go to the HDTV channel just to show your friends, look, look at that. Look at that lizard. Look at the lizard, you know, like in some nature documentary, most stuff was not converted or recorded in HD.

SPEAKER_296: So you just, you couldn't take advantage of it. Okay.

SPEAKER_101: That paradigm, uh, did particularly well because there was no constraint on the number of channels. So when direct TV, when you wanted to do a league pass type product, you know, other people couldn't do it.

SPEAKER_296: There wasn't the bandwidth. How would you simultaneously have 10 channels? And this is why if you had this, you were the most popular person in your group.

SPEAKER_101: Well, things have changed now in your pocket. And just, I want everybody to just think about the paradigm shift that has occurred. Now in your pocket is a device that can stream in HD with a screen resolution. That is for, I mean, it's even more than 4k on a lot of phones with these incredible pixels and densities. And you can do it from anywhere. And everybody's got one. And it has a payment platform built in. So the friction that came with direct TV was you had to have somebody climb on your goddamn roof. Most people couldn't get it. Some people while you remember this Molly would put it in their goddamn windows. Yeah. And they would open their window and hang it out their windows just to get access to this. So this is about the paradigm shifting. The same thing happened with satellite radio.

SPEAKER_56: Those things are dead in the water. They're over. Um, and now it is really just about the internet. This is a play for YouTube to get advertisers onto the YouTube platform.

SPEAKER_341: They can lose a billion dollars a year on this and make it up in the halo effect.

SPEAKER_56: This is why you do not see the ESPNs of the world, the ABCs of the world being able to compete for this because they would have to compete for it and make it break even or profitable or maybe modestly. It doesn't matter to YouTube. If YouTube gets premier advertisers on this and they, you know, make a little, they lose a little, they make a little, who cares? It just solidifies the number of minutes and then penetration of YouTube and makes it the number one ad by Google is the number one ad by in the world beginning and end of the sentence. YouTube slash Google is the most important advertising platform in the world. All this does is cemented. That's it.

SPEAKER_00: It's a really great point because when you look at the numbers, live sports are, it's the crown jewel and all of these streamers have been in these big races for them and they're spending billions and billions of dollars. But the fact is like even the viewership. So far on this experiment, like at Amazon, who has Thursday Night Football, the viewership has not been even what they predicted, right? According to Nielsen, so far this season, the viewership was 9.6 million per game, which is way below the 12 and a half million viewers per game that Amazon predicted. Amazon disputes it and says it's actually 11.4, but that's still less. But like previously live sports were the last leader to keep people buying cable bundles. And it sounds like what you're saying is that they will likely, it will likely stay a loss leader. Yeah, who cares? Which I think is a good thing to keep in mind that like they, they maybe don't care at all what they spend on it, but is the same true for Amazon and Apple, which are not

SPEAKER_03: like Apple isn't an ad platform. Disaster for Amazon and Apple to not get this.

SPEAKER_14: It's a disaster. For them to not get.

SPEAKER_330: Yeah. Well, if you're also looking at the top, I mean, YouTube already is the dominant, the most popular, the most watched streaming platform in the US already.

SPEAKER_332: So now this is just putting them even further ahead, even harder to catch for every other player. It's just advancing their lead to the point that it's going to be essentially in pot, like Netflix is never going to catch them at this rate. Now that they're adding Sunday ticket football on top of what all,

SPEAKER_359: you know, all the YouTube content that's already being viewed.

SPEAKER_354: It's a disaster. It's a disaster. I mean, Amazon and Apple have the money to do this.

SPEAKER_362: They, Amazon is on their heels because of their stock price and they don't have a founder there. No founder, no founder authority.

SPEAKER_364: You know, why would it be if it may, I, it a hundred percent makes sense to me. Why it makes sense for Google stay the number one ad platform in the world. Yes.

SPEAKER_00: Amazon has a budding ad platform, but it's not super built out. Amazon, Apple doesn't really like, why is it a disaster?

SPEAKER_366: What's the business that they would build on top of it?

SPEAKER_369: Is it advertising also for Amazon?

SPEAKER_296: They do have a vibrant, um, click e-commerce space, right? Business. They are seeking to develop a more branded, you know, prestige level of advertising, right? And if they could have that prestige level, then when an advertiser let's pick one, um, Apple as one of the great advertisers in the world, they believe in advertising. Apple loves to put ads that people click on and purchase, right? Those are, uh, performance-based ads. That's Amazon sweet spot.

SPEAKER_101: But additionally, Apple loves to make those beautiful ads for every product that evoke emotion in you. They spend money two ways, right?

SPEAKER_296: And you can only spend money one way on Amazon. It's like performance-based ads. You know, you don't really got the display gorgeous ads, um, like you can do on YouTube or you can do on television.

SPEAKER_101: And then for Apple, how amazing would it be if this was bundled into the Apple bundle? What do they call the Apple bundle?

SPEAKER_344: Apple one or something? Yeah. Apple one.

SPEAKER_86: And I pay, do either of you pay for it? You know, I was, but I, I dropped down because I'm being cheap now for 2023.

SPEAKER_375: I pay for TV plus, but that's it. And cloud and cloud, you know, I cloud. Yeah.

SPEAKER_296: So I pay for this for the entire family and it has the arcade in it, which is great. You have extra storage, which is great.

SPEAKER_362: All five devices get it. All five individuals, I should say in the family, get it. We have music. All five people get it.

SPEAKER_296: I might cancel Spotify. I pay for both right now. A little redundant. Um, and so you start looking at that bundle. You want to just increase the number of people in the bundle.

SPEAKER_362: Once you get on the bundle, you don't come off the bundle. It's kind of how it is. It's very rare, Molly, for people like you to unsubscribe from it. You happen to be highly financially literate.

SPEAKER_348: Cheap as hell. You're cheap. I said financially literate, but okay.

SPEAKER_385: Same thing. It's the platform thing. Like Amazon, they're all competing. They want to be the hub.

SPEAKER_332: Like Verizon even just launched its own version of this. Like everybody wants to do what Roku did a decade ago and become the, the one, the, the hub you go to, to access all your other streaming services. And then they, they get to like, you know, sort of skim a little off the top or whatever. So like, that's definitely what Amazon was thinking is like, this goes in Amazon channels. And then Sunday ticket, you subscribe to that just like you'd get AMC plus through Amazon. And then for Apple, I think it's the same thing. It's the, it would be in Apple TV. You'd have to get, you'd get on your Apple TV platform. And then we've got you into Apple TV in perpetuity. You can't stop using us as your hub because we've got Sunday ticket.

SPEAKER_296: Has anybody here watched YouTube videos on their big screen television? Let me just ask you that all the time. Okay. All the time. When did you first install the YouTube? I use YouTube app via my Apple TV, have it on Apple TVs on every TV. I think in two homes. Yeah. So this is, you know, like seven between the two houses, seven Apple TVs rocking right now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_101: I think it was PlayStation. We are increasingly watching YouTube videos and going to the YouTube app. And so I think this is about getting YouTube on your television.

SPEAKER_395: Yeah, that's what I was. It's right now. Like, yeah, yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_296: And not everybody opens the YouTube app yet. I watch Nick's fan TV on my television set. Sometimes I will watch, you know, other podcasts on my I'll watch sports highlights, whatever.

SPEAKER_101: I'm increasingly when I'm in the gym, instead of going to Amazon or Netflix or Disney plus, I'm going to the YouTube app. Very interesting, right?

SPEAKER_359: Yeah, I use YouTube just like any other streaming app at this point. It's like, you know, you've got the app next to Netflix, HBO Max, and that's just like, you know, shorter form content usually. But not even necessarily YouTube videos in an hour and a half at this point.

SPEAKER_332: There are some. So yeah, I don't, I probably, I think I probably watch more YouTube, like actually sit and watch a full video. What's your behavior, Molly?

SPEAKER_296: What do you watch on your television? Now, it's a very specific question. Television YouTube versus phone and iPad YouTube or desktop YouTube.

SPEAKER_00: I personally use YouTube still on my phone, but I live on my phone to a weird degree. Like I will sit in front of my giant TV watching a YouTube video on my phone, like a weirdo. That's a little weird. Like I literally, sometimes my brother will come over and just shout the word laptop at me because I'm trying to do some really complicated thing like on my phone and there's a laptop right there, a TV right there. So that's a, but my son and I will sit and stream YouTube videos and either stream them from his phone or we'll use the YouTube app. I have Roku TVs, so we'll use the YouTube app that's built in. So, but all of that, like I will say, all of that has 100% answered the question of why Google Alphabet, YouTube, whatever business division we're talking about here would go to the mattress for these rights, right? It also to me answers the question of why Amazon and Apple would set a budget and stay within it. Like it doesn't, the benefit to them is obvious, but not as obvious, especially since this could

SPEAKER_100: end up being a loss leader. Okay. Fair point. It's an exit that said another way.

SPEAKER_276: This is existential for YouTube and Google. Yeah. They can't lose this business line. They have no choice, but to win this auction.

SPEAKER_408: Apple or Amazon, if they lose this, well, they've got AWS on one side. They got the iPhone franchise on the other.

SPEAKER_296: They don't have to win it, but this is showing you a level of discipline. This auction took place in the wrong year. This auction should have taken place in 21, 20, 21, because at that point it would have been 50% more money and Amazon would have taken it. I predict. In a stock market where, you know, these companies have been hit hard. I think this, they could have gotten 3 billion a year and or 2.5 or whatever. Yeah. Right now people are making a very logical decision. There's 1.5 to 2 million subscribers. I think for this, which is a very small number of people pay for this.

SPEAKER_101: You have to be a really wonky, crazy person. I pay for NBA league pass.

SPEAKER_296: I'm one of those also crazy people. There are people who pay for the cricket, right?

SPEAKER_245: If that was one of the big things we talked about previously.

SPEAKER_332: So, um, I do think you're going to see a jump though, because direct TV, you're talking about a platform that's been dwindling. That's been losing enthusiasm and momentum for a long time. It's over. So I think once this is more readily available on a platform, everybody's already on like YouTube, that's so immediate. I think you're going to get a huge influx of people who are going to sign up for the first time. Once this is on YouTube.

SPEAKER_254: I like, I had YouTube TV and then I felt like it got too expensive. And then I went back to cable and now I'm like, this is so stupid. Why do I have cable?

SPEAKER_416: And this news alone will probably make me. Oh yeah. You switch back to YouTube TV.

SPEAKER_300: I'm on Hulu, but I'm about to cancel because I do my yearly ritual where when I move up to the

SPEAKER_296: mountains for the winter, uh, I switched my Hulu and it's like, by the way, you're in a different place and now you have, you have one more switch left and then you can't use it. And my kids are going to go back and they're going to start using a Hulu there and it doesn't respect it. And so just, this is a message to Hulu.

SPEAKER_101: Please respect the fact that a family might want to use Hulu in two different locations. Right. And they, and they, they just have screwed that and YouTube from what I understand doesn't. And then I have to hack it. Like I have to, I was playing Hulu on my phone and air playing to the TV. And that's just, I feel so ghetto to me.

SPEAKER_423: It's janky. It's super, like, I don't understand.

SPEAKER_424: Don't cancel me for using ghetto. They're going to, they're going to make you set up for like a second. There's going to be my tar. I'm going to get canceled for using ghetto instead of using janky.

SPEAKER_429: Not yet. Not yet. We're almost there. We're almost there. We're almost there. I'm so ready. I'm so excited.

SPEAKER_424: Okay, well, like on this note. No, no, don't cut it. Leave it in. I can use the word. I mean, I'm from Brooklyn. When we say ghetto, it's a way of saying janky.

SPEAKER_433: Yeah. In the nineties, this was, it was very, very common. In the nineties, this was, yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_375: It would throw it around. We grew up with that. Yes, ghetto is okay. Yeah. I don't, I don't think it's okay in 2022. I would not. Really? I don't think it is either. No, I've learned something.

SPEAKER_441: It's got an uncomfortable pejorative sort of. Is it problematic for me to say? It's a little problematic. It's problematic. It's problematic.

SPEAKER_332: It's like how people used to say urban to mean a certain demographic of people who lived in cities. And now we're like, yeah, that's uncomfortable now, but it used to be okay.

SPEAKER_449: Well, this is the more, you know, I will take it out of mine.

SPEAKER_448: It's interesting too, because it's a very like, like urban, it's a very old word. I mean, it used to, it's what they used to call, they called the, the Warsaw ghettos, you know? Right.

SPEAKER_450: The ghetto used to be, it used to be my ghost.

SPEAKER_453: I mean, there's ghetto, ghettos just meant the cheapest homes. Yeah. Right. But that's over now. It's over now. It's negative.

SPEAKER_408: So the ghetto doesn't exist anymore. Let's do some. Yeah, we fixed it. We solved it by not getting rid of the word.

SPEAKER_389: It's like how they stopped calling it South Central and just changed it to South LA. It's fine now. Now it's all better. Oh, it solves the problem. Okay. What about Skid Row? What do they call that? S-row?

SPEAKER_463: Is it, uh, is it C-row?

SPEAKER_462: They still call that Skid Row, but it's shrinking.

SPEAKER_464: Every year, it gets a little smaller in another neighborhood and crouches. So at some point, I'll just go away.

SPEAKER_463: If they called it C-row, and then it would be like the Fida, if I die, or it would be like Soho. We could just call it C-row.

SPEAKER_466: We call the Tenderloin, the T-low, if we call it Tenderloin T-low, it would, that would end the

SPEAKER_468: suffering in the Tenderloin. That's actually true. It would end the suffering. You're right. It would immediately be revived. This has been a tar moment.

SPEAKER_364: Okay. Let's do a quick hit on some streaming stories.

SPEAKER_00: Because you may know that Lon writes a weekly newsletter. I do. Inside streaming. And so we were like, hey, every day or every week we have you come on and we talk about these headlines. Let's just make it a segment. What's in the newsletter?

SPEAKER_475: Okay. What is in the newsletter? Give us a little rundown.

SPEAKER_00: Quick hits. A couple of quick hits.

SPEAKER_330: Very quick hits. The, the, the big thing, uh, we're talking about in terms of viewership is Wednesday,

SPEAKER_332: which has been by Nielsen standards and Netflix standards, a smash hit for them. Are the second most popular English language show ever on the platform after stranger things for, uh, Nielsen's, uh, data hit this week for the debut week, 6 billion minutes during its first five days on the platform, according to Nielsen, which they do say is second only to stranger things among English language shows, the entire Nielsen top five, by the way,

SPEAKER_330: for biggest weeks ever, all Netflix, Wednesday, stranger things, tiger King, Ozark, Dahmer. So Netflix totally dominant as far as.

SPEAKER_14: Dang. Also, the kids are on Netflix. Uh, this has made Netflix a kid's destination again.

SPEAKER_296: Uh, the, my kids over this holiday break have watched Wednesday two or three times with their cousins. It's a fun ship. I like it. And this is great for dad jokes because they said, can we watch Wednesday? I said, well, it's Sunday.

SPEAKER_486: So yes, I'll give you one hour of TV on Wednesday. And they're like, no, we want to watch Wednesday today. I'm like, you want to watch Wednesday on a Sunday? You can't watch Wednesday on Sunday. Now, if you want to watch Sunday, we can watch on Sunday, but I, but I don't think you guys

SPEAKER_296: have been out on the mountain enough and that's my dad rule. I have dad rules. And one of my dad rules is when we're in, uh, the mountains, no screens until after dinner. And if you ski every hour of skiing or ice skating, whatever activity, you could earn iPad time.

SPEAKER_354: Uh, so I'm trying to make them not into like a little fentanyl iPad addicts.

SPEAKER_488: Yeah.

SPEAKER_162: We were just noting while you were on your dad rant that, uh, MGM, my dad rants are now. The rights to the Adam's family.

SPEAKER_364: They're amazing.

SPEAKER_494: They're actually, which is Amazon. So Amazon produces Wednesday for Netflix in a weird. Uncomfortable. Right? Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_497: This reminds me of, wait, hold on.

SPEAKER_56: This uncomfortable moment also happened with, yeah, with, um, Yellowstone as well. Wasn't there an uncomfortable thing where somebody sold it to another streamer and they're like banging their hand head against the wall. Like.

SPEAKER_332: Several years ago, sold the streaming rights for the cable show Yellowstone, which airs on the paramount network to NBC universal. So those back catalog of Yellowstead episodes air on Peacock. They didn't know two things. One, it was going to become one of the biggest cable TV shows of all time. And the, the most popular show on cable TV in America right now. The other thing they didn't know is that they were going to have their own bespoke streaming destination, Parabao plus. So that deal has really, that's why we're getting all these Yellowstone prequels. They just had that new one 1923 with Harrison. I want to watch that on my screen. It looks good. And they're giving Taylor Sheridan, who created Yellowstone, so many other shows. He does mayor of Kings. This is great. He's doing Tulsa King. They basically turned over paramount plus to him in entirety. I like it. They gunned it. Because they can't put his big, most popular show.

SPEAKER_505: They James gunned it?

SPEAKER_330: Yeah. Well, Taylor Sheridan is the king of paramount plus. You go to the front page of paramount plus. It's like all his shows. And then the good fight is basically the only one. That's not. How much of the, this sounds like this is like, we're sorry.

SPEAKER_507: We ished the bed here.

SPEAKER_332: Well, they're hoping they're. He's going to lightning in a bottle it again. And right. Yellowstone too. And then they're going to own that one forever.

SPEAKER_509: But, and eventually I think 2024, 2025, they get it back. So eventually the full yellowstone catalog will be on.

David Friedberg: This is interesting. Wait, is this the same thing that happened with Marvel with. Defenders. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean. And, and that reverted back. Well, it hasn't reverted back.

SPEAKER_330: Disney, they didn't have Disney plus yet. So they met Marvel TV, made a deal with Netflix and they produced all of those.

SPEAKER_332: Those, yeah. Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, that generation. Uh, but those rights have since reverted. And so all their shows are now on Disney plus and they're making, they're making a new daredevil show. Like they brought Charlie Cox back from daredevil. Netflix. He was in She-Hulk.

SPEAKER_513: He was in She-Hulk.

SPEAKER_357: They brought him back already.

SPEAKER_514: She-Hulk's got a boyfriend. She-Hulk. That's what I did. The whole of 2023. When I was watching She-Hulk with my daughters.

SPEAKER_328: Uh, he's going to spend all next year making the new revival show for Disney plus court again.

SPEAKER_150: It's a whole, this is all dad wisdom brought to you. I've been giving dad lessons all week when I'm up in Tahoe.

SPEAKER_296: I'm like on the lift, ski lift, and dads are talking dad stuff. And I'm like, here's how you solve that problem. But we watched the She-Hulk.

SPEAKER_518: Did you watch She-Hulk, Molly? No. Oh, it's so good. I know, I heard it was so good. I know, I just, you know. I enjoyed it, yeah.

SPEAKER_501: Daredevil is her boyfriend. And it's so great because I, my daughters were so like into it.

SPEAKER_524: And then I started doing my dad stuff. She-Hulk's got a boyfriend.

SPEAKER_525: And you ruined it. I'm sorry. It's funny to me. You ruined it.

SPEAKER_341: Can I ask you, Molly, just for the audience wants to know. How deep into the Yellowstone verse are you, Molly Wood? Because this seems like this could be your, like, if you were going to have an addiction, this would be at, have you started going deep into this or have you abstained?

SPEAKER_00: I love Yellowstone, the show, but I'm still, exactly. And like, every time I watch it, I'm like, I need to buy that land in Montana. And I call my uncle. I'm like, do you still have that land that you couldn't sell? You know, like every time. Most of my family's all still in Montana. So like, I know I will eventually get back. So Yellowstone. Yes. I'm obsessed with, but my version of obsession is limited by like, I don't watch that much stuff. Yeah. So I've been working my way. I think I'm still on season three of Yellowstone. Like I've been making my way through it for a couple of years now. And that is my version of obsessed, but I love it.

SPEAKER_326: And someday I really hope to watch the other ones. That's the upside in all of this streaming stuff. I'm not a big like period piece person though. I will say like, I don't know if I'm that stoked about the prequel. Good cast. Yeah.

SPEAKER_332: They're doing interesting stuff with it. And I like, I like that it's, you know, it's only like six, eight episodes, and then you're onto the next era. That's cool.

SPEAKER_533: I haven't gone back and watched the Yellowstone prequels, but I'm curious.

SPEAKER_535: May I ask you a question, Lon? Sure. Harrison Ford is in this prequel. He is. Harrison Ford, a true movie star.

SPEAKER_536: He's got an Apple TV plus show coming up next month too. Okay. What is he like 107 years old? Like, how's he doing this?

SPEAKER_537: He's great.

SPEAKER_408: You saw the pic.

SPEAKER_354: You saw the celebrity photos on the internet when I was hanging out with Harrison Ford probably. You saw those, right? When I was hanging out with Harrison Ford.

SPEAKER_539: So anyway, when I was hanging out with Harrison, we saw that time you were hanging out with Harrison and he was all J Cal. He called the name. Let me pick it up here. Remember that time he called you J Cal?

SPEAKER_542: He did. He did. He said, son, I think you know more about this movie. than I do. And I was in it.

SPEAKER_535: I was like, yes, Harrison, that is true. But I want to ask a lot of very pointed question. If Harrison Ford now has secured the streaming bag, is there an award-winning actor? And there are very few on Harrison Ford's level in my mind, a true movie star of our generation?

SPEAKER_341: Is there a white whale? Is there a Moby Dick of movie stars, male, female, otherwise, that has not secured the streaming bag?

SPEAKER_329: We're getting down to it. We're getting close. Meryl Streep was a big one when she did Big Little Lies, that HBO show.

SPEAKER_332: Everybody was like, oh my God, Meryl doing TV. That was a huge, that was a huge job. Kate Winslet now has come. Amy Adams is regularly doing it. I think the only two I can really think of who have yet, like Leonardo DiCaprio, he exclusively does big end of the year prestige films. Do you remember that Christian Bale interview from a few months ago where he basically said, every big movie gets offered first to Leo DiCaprio. So Christian Bale's like, if you saw me in a movie, it's because Leo passed and then they offered it to me. So DiCaprio's yet to, I mean, he's doing those Apple movies with Scorsese. So Flowers of the Killer movie. No, no, that's a movie though.

SPEAKER_547: Those are prestige movies. Those are movies though.

SPEAKER_548: That's a prestige movie. I don't think of that as like a streaming, they're going to put that in theaters.

SPEAKER_550: The other one is TC, Tom Cruise. Exactly. That's what I was thinking of too.

SPEAKER_332: Still riding motorcycles off of cliffs, only on the big screen. He's a big believer in that theatrical big screen experience. Dustin Hoffman?

SPEAKER_553: Huh, interesting. I mean, I don't think of him. He's still an A-list movie star? He's semi-retired.

SPEAKER_556: He's A-list toy.

SPEAKER_557: He's A-list.

SPEAKER_553: Tom Hanks.

SPEAKER_413: But Tom Hanks is currently working. Yeah, he sort of sunset his career at the dawn of the streaming era. Still A-list. I mean, so it was like Richard Drey. He's still A-list.

SPEAKER_568: Those guys are amazing, legendary actors.

SPEAKER_548: Tom Hanks. What about Tom? He's 85.

SPEAKER_417: But Dustin Hoffman has not. Tom Cruise has not. Leonardo DiCaprio has not.

SPEAKER_385: Dustin Hoffman has not, to my knowledge, done a stream. And I don't think so. Tom Hanks has either. Well, Tom Hanks, no. He produces a lot of, like, HBO stuff, and he just did that reprehensible Disney Plus Pinocchio movie.

SPEAKER_577: I'm going to give you another one.

SPEAKER_56: Okay, and then we got to talk about Tar. Okay. One more, and then we got to go. I'll give you two more. You give me your record. Keep it going.

SPEAKER_583: Because I don't know if they have.

SPEAKER_196: RDJ and Brad Pitt, prestige actors A-list. Have they done it? Yeah, I'm really.

SPEAKER_353: Downey Jr. is doing a lot of, like, streaming stuff. Not necessarily that he stars in, but his company team Downey. Only stars.

SPEAKER_385: I'm only counting stars in. He has not starred in a streamer. No, he just, I mean, he has that documentary about his dad, senior, that just popped up. No, it doesn't count. And he's also sort of married. I don't, he hasn't done, like, a show, like, that stars Robert Downey Jr. Okay, and Brad Pitt hasn't.

SPEAKER_586: So, uh, no, Brad Pitt has not. So we have a small list now.

SPEAKER_587: It's a handful. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, that's it.

SPEAKER_349: That's all I'm just trying to make a point here. Like, has ScarJo done any streaming shows? Sandra Bullock?

SPEAKER_458: Again, I feel like, no, Sandra Bullock, no. Like, Sandra Bullock, definitely not.

SPEAKER_593: Scarlett Johansson, I feel like she has, but I can't put my finger on what it was. Natalie Portman, I think.

SPEAKER_594: Yeah, Natalie Portman, I don't think so. That's an A-list. She's A-list, right?

SPEAKER_385: No, she's working on one right now for Apple. Okay. She's got a show that she's doing right this moment. Julia Roberts, A-list. Has she done it? Julia Roberts?

SPEAKER_597: All right. You know, as long as you're, as long as you're in this mood, I feel like it's a good time to hit you with A-O, Scott. Let's talk about Tar.

SPEAKER_254: As long as you're all fired up. Now, we made a promise. After our viral kerfuffle vis-a-vis the A-O, Scott.

SPEAKER_109: A-O, Scott Gate. Top 10 movies of the year list. A-O, Scott Gate.

SPEAKER_00: A-O, Scott Gate. We made a vow that we would watch these 10 films. I'm going to go ahead and predict we're going to watch two, maybe three, but we have all watched the second. I'm going to watch all 10. I'm definitely going to get to all 10.

SPEAKER_607: I'm going to try. I'm going to get to seven. I'm in, I'm in two.

SPEAKER_609: I think I've already seen four.

SPEAKER_12: I need an assistant to watch these movies for me.

SPEAKER_458: I think I'm already four out of 10 down, so I'm doing great. All right, we have time to see Neptune, Frost, Tar, Flux Gourmet, and then, oh, nope.

SPEAKER_593: You must have seen no. And then I think there's even one more.

SPEAKER_296: All right. Well, this is your job and you're 40% through. It's not my job. It's not my job. It is your job. You are one of the great commentators on film. It's true.

SPEAKER_616: It's not a good thing.

SPEAKER_00: It's your calling, if you will. We watched Neptune, Frost. Last week, we talked about Neptune, Frost. We all liked it so much better. Two of you loved it. I liked it. Like we were a solid, we were the literal critic to consumer split. Jason wrote a very eloquent review and surprised us all. Thank God. Bye now.

SPEAKER_619: Much better review than A.L. Scott's just in terms of pros and insights. Bulletage there.

SPEAKER_00: This week, we're back for another review. We all watched number six on the list, which is Todd Fields, Tar. Stalin, starring Cate Blanchett, Naomi Merlant, and Nina Haas. The film got a critic score of 90% on Rotten Tomatoes and an audience score of 72%. It is about a moment in the life of Lydia Tarr, who is a renowned composer at the height of

SPEAKER_117: her career before the tables turn as her past catches up with her and her life begins to spiral.

SPEAKER_326: Okay. That's the setup. And now we'll talk about like, okay, do we want a little like go around the horn? What did we all think?

SPEAKER_622: That sounds wise. Yeah. Sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_624: I'll go last.

SPEAKER_86: Okay.

SPEAKER_624: I'll go. I'll go.

SPEAKER_330: I loved it. I think this is, it is clearly one of the, one of the best movies. One of the most expansive. There is a movie.

SPEAKER_359: It really reminds me of the people, not enough people have seen, uh, let me know if you guys have seen it. Kenneth Lonergan, the guy who did, you can count on me. He's the writer director. It's called Margaret.

SPEAKER_332: Anna Paquin is in it. It's fun. I think from 2011. And it is, it's this very expansive, long movie, like three hour drama. That's just a character study of this young girl played by Anna Paquin. It's stuff like a dramatic thing happens to her during the movie. So it's not like nothing happens, but it's really not about what happens so much as it is about the extremely complex emotions and aftermath that it has and how it impacts her life. And it's almost like this coming of age kind of thing, but it's so universal. It's really about all sorts of just like the, what it is to be alive at this moment in your life and have things happen to you. And that's what Tar kind of reminded me of. Like it is about, there are things happening to Cate Blanchett. And it has a narrative thread, but I think it's, it's, it's about everything. It's really about power and control and influence and regret and guilt and how all of these things sort of interact and play around with each other in, you know, an adult, an adult's life.

SPEAKER_254: It's very much about her. It is all her, like the whole thing. Okay.

SPEAKER_326: So I will say, so you are like, give it a number. Oh, are we doing one, one, hold scores, let's do, let's do our, let's do our, let's do our

SPEAKER_408: qualitative feelings on it. Right. Then we'll go to specific. Let's do this. We'll do our qualitative feelings on it around the horn.

SPEAKER_369: Then we'll go into specific scenes, specific moments. That will be a spoiler territory. Right. Good call. And then we'll give scores at the end to keep the audience engaged. Yeah. That sounds like a good plan here. Okay. So Molly, your general feelings about the film.

SPEAKER_00: Pre-spoiler. I mean, I will say. Pre-spoiler. That an intro, I, movies are too long. Just generally. Especially in the age of streaming. Like if you're sitting, like I was, you know, my son is not home. It was, I was like, okay, I'm just going to sit down and watch this movie. Now you will, knowing me as you do appreciate that this is colored by the fact that all during this one, one hour and 59 minute movie, so it's whatever it is, or no, more than 159 minutes. It's over two hours.

SPEAKER_643: It's a solid. Two hours and 40 minutes. 225, 230. I believe.

SPEAKER_00: 238 is what I kept saying. Cause I kept, and then all throughout this two hours and 40 minutes, my brother was texting me because he got to watch the new John Ryan series or Jack Ryan series. So he's watching that, which is my favorite genre. And I'm watching two hours and 40 minutes of Kate Blanchett. It is like, that is all you're getting by God. You can have some good tertiary characters and she's amazing. But if you are either in or not in on Kate Blanchett and her performance here, I was in and there are things about it. The more I read about it after it ended, the more intrigued I was, I found it to be a bit of a, it was a little too long. It was like a bit of a slog. I didn't hate it. I really like it. And I like what it was doing. And I just don't, I don't have that kind of attention.

SPEAKER_12: I'm adult ADHD over here. No problem. That's honest.

SPEAKER_362: That's honest. Films, uh, you know, different films appeal, appeal to different people. Uh, I have a very, I have a very important announcement to me. Many of you have known that I have told everybody quite clearly. And this whole AO Scott gate, the kerfuffle, the, the Donny brook, this entire, this craziness

SPEAKER_296: has all started with him leaving Maverick, the best film of the year, not even in his top 10. Um, him putting it, I believe as number six on his list, right? It's number six. Can I please confirm?

SPEAKER_653: Yeah, it's number six. Okay.

SPEAKER_101: This proves AO Scott's incompetence. You wouldn't have seen this if not for him.

SPEAKER_56: No, I would have seen it. I heard the buzz. Oh, you would not have. This is clearly, and I haven't seen the other eight films yet, but for him to put Neptune as number two, and this is number six shows the complete absolute incompetence of AO

SPEAKER_196: Scott.

SPEAKER_67: Oh God. Because this is definitely the last time we're doing this segment.

SPEAKER_660: Cause this film, I'm allowed to have my opinion. I'm allowed to have my opinion about it.

SPEAKER_661: He can have his opinion about mine.

SPEAKER_101: What I'm embracing here is what I'm learning through this process is that top 10 lists and

SPEAKER_486: film criticism is the greatest, greatest honeypot in the world. I'm leaning into it.

SPEAKER_664: This is tied with Top Gun Maverick for the best picture of the year.

SPEAKER_486: This film is going to become not only this year's number one film, uh, across the board or tied with Maverick in my mind, not only will this be number one or two on everybody's

SPEAKER_296: list, et cetera, when they make the top 10 films of this decade, this will be on that list and it will be high on that list. This film will age, uh, in it. And it's important at this moment in time will grow. Now let me explain. And we're not doing spoilers right now. The film is about a problematic, uh, Cate Blanchett as a female, lesbian, abusive, horrible, but

SPEAKER_06: brilliant, uh, conductor. Let's leave it at that. That's not going to spoil the film for you. This is all revealed in the first couple of minutes. It's, you know, it's in the trailer. She puts on a performance that will be the best performance of her career. And one of the best performances in the last 20 years in any film, she's extraordinary in the filmmaking is unbelievable.

SPEAKER_101: There are memorable scenes in this.

SPEAKER_56: There are monologues. There are two sentences. There are moments that we will talk about and debate at dinner parties all year long. And that's one of my criteria may not be AO Scott's. I don't understand his criteria. It's obviously flawed, but my criteria is. If you were to watch this film as a group, how long would it stay with you? How many hours after the film would you want to talk about it? Just like the white Lotus season two, which last night at dinner, I had dinner with a bunch of besties, uh, you know, eight people, everybody had seen season two of white Lotus. They couldn't stop talking about it for the first hour of dinner, specific scenes, specific moments. What happened to this film is a hundred X that to white Lotus in terms of its importance and relevance. And it will be dinner party discussions for hours afterwards. And what I love most about this film is that it challenges the viewer.

SPEAKER_101: It is not straightforward. Even the critics, the mighty critics who Lord their lists upon us and tell us who is number one and who is number two, they can't make sense of this film. It's so hilarious to me. It is. So. It is. It proves the point that this film is so important that you have one set of critics saying that this is, this is the absolute pinnacle of the discussion about an artist creating great art versus the behavior and the human being of the artists, whether it's Bach or it's, you know, uh, Kevin Spacey, uh, pick a horrible human being who, who, you know, uh, Harvey Weinstein, the artist versus the art, the social, the power of social media. The generational difference between Gen Z, Gen X, and boomers is all on display here. The power dynamics, identity politics, everything is absolutely meditated on here, but they don't spoon feed it to you. You must take it in and interpret it for yourself. And that is the brilliance of the film tar. And that is why it is number one, tied currently with Maverick. I will need to see both films again to make my ultimate decision. This is the goddamn film of the year. I believe. And Cate Blanchett wins the best actress. And A.O.

SPEAKER_56: Scott is absolutely drunk asleep at the wheel for making it number six behind Neptune Frost. Neptune Frost is number 60.

SPEAKER_669: It's like number one. That's it. I'm done. I'm very excited about this film.

SPEAKER_670: And then we're not fine. And then we're fine again. And then we're not. All over the place with this film.

SPEAKER_408: Anyway, anybody want to react to my feelings and then we'll get it to spoilers. This is for the audience.

SPEAKER_353: I think it's interesting. I think there, obviously everything you're saying is, is present.

SPEAKER_676: I mean, there's, there's a big scene that's become very sort of famous where she's at. She's. Oh, I'm going to spoiler territory. We are. Here we go. Spoiler territory.

SPEAKER_353: Like, I feel like a lot of the discussion of the film does sort of come back to like cancel culture.

SPEAKER_332: And it's about this person who's this very prominent high status person in this scandal. And that all of that is in the film. But to me, it's so much more about the internal psychology. It's, it's really in Lydia Tarr's brain throughout the movie. And we're sort of seeing the impact on her of losing her grip and like realizing what kind of a person she's been and this experience of watching it slip through her fingers and the panic and the fear. And to me, that's what it's, it's more about that than necessarily like a treatise on what to do about this cancel culture. Like, I feel like there's, there's a reductive and I'm not saying you're doing this. I'm saying like in the culture more widely, I feel like there's been kind of a, an attempt to like put this movie in a box and like, oh, that's the problematic cancel culture.

SPEAKER_353: Woke is a movie. It is not that Molly. I know much more than that.

SPEAKER_109: I agree.

SPEAKER_00: I think it's very reductive to put in that. I'm 100%. And I find it sort of disappointing. I mean, it just, it's really interesting because like, as a, by the way, let's move into spoiler

SPEAKER_616: territory because we won't really be able to, you can fast forward to the end.

SPEAKER_00: I think that one of the brilliant things about this movie is to use that narrative device among many as this sort of the most obvious lens to get where we're going with Lydia and her kind of coming apart. And it is kind of delightfully predictable that then the U S media would be like, this is all about cancel culture and social media. When first of all, social media hardly figures, right? It briefly figures as sort of a plot device to keep us moving toward her decompensation. And it is in some ways, the easiest direction to go in when you have someone with this much power, like someone with this much power, no matter who they are, is always going to have probably some abuse. Like they're always going to engage because power corrupts. They're going to engage in some kind of abuse. So it's just like, of course, that's how you get there, which isn't even to take away from that. It's so well set up and it's so taught how you get there. And it is a little bit unexpected. And so that makes it even more impactful. But yeah, like this, I'm all about the, this lady cracking from the way that power not only

SPEAKER_326: corrupts, but destroys.

SPEAKER_330: There's a, there's a moment where towards the end, uh, where she's, she's getting a massage, she's got shoulder pain and she's goes to get a massage and they line up all the masseuses

SPEAKER_413: and they're like, pick the masseuse you want from out of the lineup.

SPEAKER_369: But in some Asian country that is not fully explained. Maybe it's Vietnam. It's unnamed. I couldn't figure it out.

SPEAKER_693: I, yeah, I thought I somewhere Southeast Asia somewhere, but I don't think they put a fine

SPEAKER_332: point on Manila, maybe, or Indonesia, Malaysia, somewhere like that. Uh, so, and she's, she's picking it from this line and, and there's, and it's all subtle. It's all you, you, you kind of read into it. It's not put a fine point on it, but it's all in Blanche's performance where she has this road of recognition of this is what I've been doing to people my whole life. I've been lining them up, picking the one I want. I move the, I move people around like ponds. They're not even really human to me. And it's such a complicated idea to capture visually like that. That's what movies are about. If you can take something abstract that we've all felt through, that we've all thought about and find a purely visual cinematic way with just an actor and a scenario, great point visuals

SPEAKER_384: to bring it together. That's, that's what, that's what movie making is, is sort of all about on the most fundamental level.

SPEAKER_366: And the number five.

SPEAKER_384: Right.

SPEAKER_703: Well, the number five figures in symbolically figures in because that's the movement that

SPEAKER_00: she's like, the whole movie is building up to this performance, this one. And you know, like the foreboding is there from the first scenes with her, the interview where they say, you're going to give this historic performance. You're going to conduct this, you know, Mahler's fifth, the number five in the series in one month. And you pretty much know immediately that it's all going to unravel over the course of that month. Yes. And then there is, there's like this mysticism to that moment where the girl with the number five is the one who like looks up at her, right? I didn't notice that.

SPEAKER_369: Yeah. In the lineup. And let's be clear. This lineup is kind of saying, I believe that this is a house of ill repute.

SPEAKER_353: I don't know. I like, I think it's the visual, like Todd field shoots it and lines it up visually in a way that immediately suggests brothel. That's the image that we have. I don't know if he's necessarily saying it's because again, we're refracting everything through Cate Blanchett's mind.

SPEAKER_359: So that's what she's thinking about. But maybe this is just a massage parlor. I don't think you get any indication.

SPEAKER_353: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

SPEAKER_332: I was going to say as well, if you think about the numerical, like ordering and ranking, that's what she's been doing with the, with the orchestra as well. It's about who's in what chair, who gets what solo, who's in what seat. So that's always been her MO. She's always putting them in order.

SPEAKER_715: And they're even arranged like that. Like they're arranged in a semicircle.

SPEAKER_109: You're the next favorite.

SPEAKER_716: Very good, Miles.

SPEAKER_109: So much was happening. I mean, despite everything I said about how I thought, I personally thought it was too long.

SPEAKER_00: And I personally think if you're not engaged in Cate Blanchett's performance, you're not going to be able to get involved in this movie because it is so her.

SPEAKER_12: Watch it in two sittings is my goal. It's a two sitting movie. If you, I mean, maybe.

SPEAKER_724: I did it in two sittings.

SPEAKER_44: I loved it. You did? Jesus. How much time do you have in your life? No, no. I, I watched it in two sittings because I was watching it with my partner.

SPEAKER_727: Oh, you watched it over the course of, I thought you watched it twice in a row. No, no, I'm going to watch it again.

SPEAKER_729: This, you guys, I think a nice little 10 minute beat in the middle. Okay. Very good.

SPEAKER_731: But I don't like doing separate sittings. Okay. I have a point to make.

SPEAKER_00: The level of like care, every single detail, every single shot, every single self-referential moment, every single like realization that's unspooled is like taught. I mean, it's like a knife, which is crazy because I guess you have to unspool so tightly. And then it ends up at two hours and 40 minutes, which I know I should let go.

SPEAKER_296: Take 10 minutes off that for the, um, trailers, very, uh, for the, uh, credits, very interesting stylistic choice to put the credits at the start. At the start. Film aficionados will have a lot to say about that. It's not super important to most audiences, but I want to point out there was a New Yorker review.

SPEAKER_13: Who wrote the New Yorker review?

SPEAKER_737: It's Richard Brody. Richard Brody. Okay. The New Yorker.

SPEAKER_13: Richard Brody. Okay. Boomer. Time to retire. He reduces this film. Richard Brody. I've now found a critic worse than A.O. Scott. Richard Brody. Please clip this. You cannot mention both of them. He reduces this film to being a, that it's championing in some way, like this right wing

SPEAKER_101: anti, um, me too movement or anti identity politics. Is his point. And what I'll say, this is the okay. Boomer moment for him when he needs to realize he's done as a film critic. He missed the point of the film. This point of the film is about narcissistic personality disorder and the descent into madness

SPEAKER_56: and the enablers of narcissists. I am not a professional film critic and I got this. What's his kid's name again? It's Richard Brody.

SPEAKER_196: How old is Richard Brody? He's gotta be over 65 or 70. It's an okay.

SPEAKER_411: He's a legend in the, in the criticism game. He's been doing it for forever. Please, man. Please. Forever is probably the key word.

SPEAKER_548: I actually, I'm also a huge fan. Did you read his review? I read his review. I'm not a huge Richard Brody fan either. What did you think of that review? I, I, I agree with you. Missed the point. I mean, it's doing, it's doing the thing that I was basically saying before, which is,

SPEAKER_330: I think there is a, it's easy to sort of put this movie in the box of like social commentary

SPEAKER_328: movie about cancel culture. But it's not about that. That's a very limited, narrow view of what I think Todd Field is really doing here. Hold on, hold on.

SPEAKER_362: Let me just finish my point on this and then I'm going to hand it up to you because I have a lot to say.

SPEAKER_13: But this is about narcissistic personality disorder. This is about somebody who has an EGOT, right? They've won everything. They've crafted this person, this image of themselves and they have a blind spot. They don't realize they have narcissistic personality disorder. That's the whole point of that disease.

SPEAKER_101: And you look at everybody around you as objects, as tools to be manipulated like pieces on a chessboard. Now, some of the chess pieces are more important than others to her. Maybe her daughter, maybe her, her partner, uh, maybe the latest fling in her orchestra. All of these different pieces though, are chess pieces in her game to build a brand that

SPEAKER_56: is tar. And this film is more analogous. It is not about cancel culture. It is not about identity topics. It's about what you see in a film like the conversation, taxi driver, Macbeth, full metal jack, falling down, the shining. It's about the descent into madness of a person who is so obsessed with themselves and whatever

SPEAKER_150: they're building in the world. That is what this film is about.

SPEAKER_56: And it is going to go down in the, in the, uh, pantheon of films in descent into madness. When people make a list about characters losing it, taxi driver, full metal jacket. Well, I don't know what else you put in there, Lon, cause you're better at this than I am. Conversation shining. This will be in that 10 list of descents into madness performances.

SPEAKER_64: And that is what the film is ultimately about.

SPEAKER_56: Okay. That's the first part of our tar review. Molly. Yes. This is, uh, this week in startups. It's not about movies. We understand that, but we do this week streaming because streaming is a big part of startups and the technology industry, but we went so crazy, there's another 50 minutes about tar, which all three of us are going to give our ratings for.

SPEAKER_06: And we're going to drop that on Christmas morning, a little, a little stocking stuffer for the audience.

SPEAKER_40: We're like little ups right now. Yeah. We just jumped down your fireplace. We will beep.

SPEAKER_56: We put a little extra and we're going to name it this week in streaming. So look for that in your feed on Christmas morning.

SPEAKER_754: And enjoy. Merry Christmas. Enjoy the show, everybody.

SPEAKER_755: Okay. Merry Christmas, everybody.