SPEAKER_01: All right, everybody. It is Thursday. It's lots of news. It's Thursday, we're gonna make it we're

Jason Calacanis: gonna make it that happened fast. What a delight. We do have a lot of fun stuff to talk about. We're talking about Meta's new text to video tool. You heard that, right? And yes, it makes real videos. AI is here. AI is here. I'm officially scared now before when I watch my Roomba bouncing off of everything and not being able to figure out how to get under the table. I wasn't worried about

SPEAKER_04: AI but now I am. And I think we are now in the final stages of the downturn. I've been saying I thought the summer would be an inch of the fall q3 and q4 would be this bottoming out process bouncing along the bottom. And what were the signs I said it all along. The two signs I'm looking for is like the big companies to do riffs and maybe people to cut salaries. Those are the hardest things to do. And right when we were on air, Meta is talking about a hiring freeze and then a

SPEAKER_06: restructuring aka a gentleman's layoff is coming Apple stock down 6% today after being down yesterday. That was one of the final cathedrals to fall. And then SoftBank the Vision Fund is cutting a third of

SPEAKER_04: their staff. So major riffs, major market downturns. This is the end game. Everybody we're going into the trow of the recession. We're in the eye of the storm. But the good news is there's some really good news I get into for startups.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah, fascinating, fascinating macroeconomic talk. And then I scamper. And J. Cal just has a hell of fun talking about TV with lawn.

SPEAKER_09: Yeah, we talk about House of the Dragon, the 10 year time jump, did it work or not this class action lawsuit with discovery for the HBO Max things, the CCP is obviously, yeah, a little bit of drama for General Zod's love. And the CCP centering a popular Chinese film and then we talk about Nomadland and Amazon and just the great art of filmmaking and what Lon and I love about filmmaking and which actors we'd most like to see do something completely boring like make a French

SPEAKER_17: outlet. It's a great episode. Oh, stick with us. This Week in Startups is brought to you by OpenPhone. As a startup founder, a lot of mistakes are easy to roll back. But using your personal cell phone number as your company number isn't one of them. OpenPhone makes it easy to get business phone numbers for you and your team right on top of your existing devices. Visit openphone.com slash twist to get 20% off your first six months. LinkedIn marketing. To redeem a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to linkedin.com slash this week in startups. And Odoo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. Your first app is free forever. And right now, Odoo is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at odoo.com slash twist. That's odoo.com slash twist. I saw trending

SPEAKER_18: on Twitter. Meta is getting in the open AI dolly game. You can take you can type something and get back

Jason Calacanis: a movie. It's like, what do you even say when that's the headline? Like we have arrived in the future. And it is exactly as banana pants as you thought it was gonna be. Because evidently, you can now auto generate with AI like we knew a art AI art was becoming a thing. And a text text. Exactly. It's been writing like your email sentence. Yeah, for ages. But now, evidently, the software is not yet open to the public meta has not allowed any external media to play with this platform yet. But users can sign up for early access to the make a video dot studio landing page. And you just type in text and it creates a five second video max right now. No audio. I mean, I don't know what I expect.

SPEAKER_28: Oh, there's no audio in this video that a computer made out of the words I typed.

SPEAKER_31: It's bonkers. Well, absolutely bonkers. You can just type like I want a teddy bear painting a teddy bear in an impressionistic style and it will make that so the data sets now are getting so good. The compute power is so good. And its ability to understand text is so good.

SPEAKER_36: That yeah, these things can look like they're CGI ish. So I've always thought like I would be amazing

SPEAKER_06: for storyboarding to have a tool like this. I was always wondering why they didn't have this for

SPEAKER_31: storyboarding. So you're you're working, you're Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, you're doing the Star Wars stuff and you're like, Alright, let me see. Um, give me Ashoka when she's like a young girl. And it's like not too young. Maybe like a teen no preteen like 10 years old. Okay, 10 year old Ashoka. Right now I want her with her mom. And her mom is going to suffer. She has Jedi. She's force sensitive.

SPEAKER_04: And so I want to have her lifting a cookie. Oh, you know, so I just want Ashoka. It's like building your storyboards, but it doesn't look at this fidelity. This fidelity looks closer to

SPEAKER_11: publishable than storyboard, which is really not cartoonish. It doesn't look at it. I mean, it looks really we said we have a couple of videos of you should if you are not watching us

Jason Calacanis: on YouTube, you should be youtube.com slash this weekend. Here's some some video demos from this make a video website because it is bonkers. So this one is a young couple

David Friedberg: walking in a heavy rain. Okay, that's heavy rain. That's heavy rain. I don't know how it decided

SPEAKER_19: a cobblestone street and added aesthetics to it. Cobblestone street just like beautiful,

Jason Calacanis: like kind of light coming through. It's like the only uncanny valley thing about it is how they

SPEAKER_42: are walking in perfect sync. Did you see this? Yeah, that's a little bit of a giveaway. Yeah.

David Friedberg: That's a little bit of a giveaway. Yeah. And that lady's head is like not quite right, but still. Yeah, that's how you know they're next to six. Decker, right? I tell you, you know,

SPEAKER_51: they're replicants, replicants, they look real, but they're walking in sync. They're walking in sync.

SPEAKER_53: No couple's walking in sync. There's always a little bit of like somebody's leading, somebody's dragging the other person's arm. It's yeah.

SPEAKER_03: It's always a little bit of negotiation together. Just, just like that. And then once there was

SPEAKER_11: some ponies on a beach, is that what the next one is? Unicorns running, unicorns running along a beach.

SPEAKER_06: Those are some similar looking horns. And again, they, they look like they're perfectly in sync. So this is something the algorithms got to put a little variability into it. This is the algorithm being too perfect. We never said we wanted them in sync.

SPEAKER_61: Do better algorithm. Come on. Do better. It's ridiculous. The world is not that perfect.

SPEAKER_21: The teddy bear painting a portrait. The AI decided you must mean self portrait. And so then you have this teddy bear that's painting this like 3d version of itself. Yeah. And this video is mind blowing.

SPEAKER_06: Five seconds, just a loop. These are little loops. But we've seen this movie before, you know,

SPEAKER_31: like somebody takes a, you know, remember when drones came out and they were like, look, I made the drone go up and it stayed up for one minute. And then now it's like, yeah, look, I put a drone

SPEAKER_04: up there for 30 minutes. And I put a machine gun on it. And I, you know, killed three mannequins and came back at 70 miles per hour. Oh, and it did it with AI because it did facial recognition and killed only the three people out of the 50 mannequins that we wanted to kill based on AI. You're like, okay. Oh, okay. That's how these things jump. So just if people are wondering about like self driving technology or, um, other AI, like, um, you know, solving chess, remember that one or tic-tac-toe

SPEAKER_78: these things like they kind of meander and then they're just all of a sudden go boop. You get this

SPEAKER_04: like hockey stick and we're in that right now. That's what you're experienced on this week in

SPEAKER_06: startups in 2022. Yeah. And I think that's what you're experiencing with self driving. AI is making the jump. Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's literally making the jump right now. We're right at that inflection point where these things are actually making us go, whoa,

SPEAKER_04: but previously it was like, okay, you know, like, okay. Yeah. You guess the next two words in Gmail.

SPEAKER_87: Got it. Okay. Right. I'd like to invite you to, you know, okay, good. You got two words, but yeah,

Jason Calacanis: there's that famous phrase about, I think bankruptcy, like, how did you go bankrupt? And it's like, gradually, and then suddenly it was Hermes Hemingway. This is, this is what we're seeing with AI. And, and for a long time people were, you know, we were starting to get unimpressed with it. Like, oh, all AI can do is give me real time traffic information and route me around accidents and police. I'm not knocking that. I wouldn't kick it out of bed for eating crackers. That's pretty good technology. But then all of a sudden you're like on the cusp of, wow, I could write a screenplay and have a computer turn it into the movie. I would kick them out of bed for eating crackers. That's

SPEAKER_59: just completely selfish. Crackers in the bed, utterly derailed. He's like, that is awful. The

SPEAKER_93: cracker thing. The cracker thing is unforgivable. Apparently everyone is getting kicked out of bed

SPEAKER_04: for eating crackers in Jason's house. Not cool. Not just not cool. I mean, I have this like battle for like, my wife is like, yeah, of course you could eat in the car. So I get in my car the other day, there's three plates, like kitchen plates are in the backseat of my car with fruit on them. Yeah, no, we don't, you know, the car has been baking in the Northern California heat wave. So I opened the door and it smells like I just, you know, opened the, you know,

SPEAKER_31: the dumpster behind Fuddruckers. I mean, I almost passed out as I took a picture. I said, it's my wife. She was like, oops. I was like, am I going to put a pit? I literally am now at the point. This is how passive aggressive this getting. I was going to put a pin code

SPEAKER_103: on my Tesla so my wife can't drive my car. So the kids ain't in there. You're hilarious.

SPEAKER_107: There's rules in my car. Well, she messes up your speed thing, right? too. Well, I locked all the cars in speed. I'm the other one. I told, she wanted me to, um,

SPEAKER_04: this is like the modern relationship navigation. I put a speed limiter on our cars, 84 miles per hour, which means that 78, 79, it starts telling you like, Hey, it starts slowing you down right about 78, 79.

SPEAKER_112: Why do I put it there? Because that's where you get tickets in California. If you go above 80,

SPEAKER_04: you're going to get a ticket. If you keep it under 80, just general rules. I, in my experience, I'm, this is not investment advice. It's not a J train. I think generally, if you're under 79 or under, they're not pulling you over. If you do pull you over again, warning, because they don't want to

SPEAKER_117: fill out a ticket for 76. So you don't really get pulled over here. We don't really have chaos.

SPEAKER_59: I went to Oakland right now. It's crazy. I went to Oakland and I was like, is this grand theft auto or

SPEAKER_04: fast and the furious? Because all I want to do is take my kids to, I found the greatest ice cream

Jason Calacanis: place in Berkeley. Oh, my God. I've had it open in a tab ever since you mentioned it. Actually, I need that on my agenda for the weekend, right? All right. It's incredible. Um, so anyway,

SPEAKER_06: this, I went down the rabbit hole. It turns out meta, FKA, Facebook, really don't like this, but meta's got some dope stuff going on with regard to AI. And so heavily investing in this. Yeah. And so you go to meta dot AI, you think it's only Google with DeepMind, you think it's only,

SPEAKER_04: you know, the open AI, open AI project, but it seems like meta is hiring a lot of people, a lot of PhDs. So if you follow the meta meta AI Twitter handle, what I do is I go to the replies tab and the likes. And I, you know, some of these tweets that they're doing this like a niche

SPEAKER_06: account, you start looking at the likes, and I found all the PhDs who work or who are fellows for AI at

SPEAKER_04: Facebook or meta or whatever, and I started following them. So this is how I kind of like,

SPEAKER_06: just a little tip from J Cal, like you find these little things, you go check out their likes, you check out their replies, you see who's replying to them. And you start clicking on them, look at

SPEAKER_04: their buyers, you can kind of find the people who are building the future. These people are really building the future over there. It's pretty crazy. They just spun out this thing called PyTorch, which is like a Python framework for artificial intelligence that I think was built inside of meta, but they just gave it to the Linux foundation. And the top individual at the

SPEAKER_132: Facebook AI is leaving to go run this foundation. So it's kind of interesting what's going on over

Jason Calacanis: there. Wow. Yeah, that's fascinating. You know, and again, people have no idea, I think the extent to which this research has been happening at meta and Facebook and partly because everybody was like, well, why are they do and it was like, why is meta building the greatest AI in the world to just what, like optimize for groups, you should sign up for, you know, to show me more and more, it was sort of confusing to think about how it was going to play into the newsfeed, for example, or Instagram, but you have to assume that all of this has been about I mean, certainly, to be clear, it is about optimizing these ads serving products. That's what prints money and the better they can do with that. Yeah, you know, the more money they're going to continue to make. So it's 100% aimed at that. But also, it as we realize it's metaverse ambitions, we got to figure it's about trying to create world building exactly to create, if you can make it that five second video of unicorns running on the beach, that means you could just write that into code, you could write well, world building into code and have it auto generate and you don't have to like,

SPEAKER_120: animate any of that. If I may, put together your two points, please, and build on them.

SPEAKER_140: On the program today is Darina Kouya. She is the founder of open phone. Welcome to the show, Darina. Thank you so much, Jason. Great to be here. Now what mistakes do most founders make with

SPEAKER_143: phone numbers in their startups? Really delegation, right? Because what ends up happening is that as a

SPEAKER_145: founder, when you're starting, you do everything, you're the salesperson, the support person, the

SPEAKER_144: you make the coffee, you do HR, marketing, sales, recruiting, everything. But then eventually,

SPEAKER_145: you you have you have people joining the team. And what ends up happening is if if as a founder, your phone number, let's forget about the privacy, the spam, all that problem, let's say it doesn't exist. But you're not going to want a year into your company two years into your company to have all the support calls or all the questions come to you because now you've just hired your support team. Why did you hire them? Yeah. So that's another reason why having that separate number makes so much sense because you can always delegate those calls to your team as you grow. All right,

SPEAKER_140: everybody, here's your CTA the old call to action twist listeners 20% off any plan for your first six months, just sign up at open phone.com slash twist. And if you've got an existing number, no problem, they'll put it right over open phone.com slash twist o p e n p h o n e.com slash twist

SPEAKER_04: today for 20% off to excellent observations there. They hire these PhDs with the money they make from their network, and then they make a deal with them. Okay, listen, get people to click on more ads, and let's serve people ads that are so creepy, they think that we've got a camera in their house, right? And we're watching them make spaghetti. So we're gonna, you know, offer them this spaghetti sauce, like, you know, that all the discussions, like I was having a conversation at the concert, and then I came home, and it was a Volvo ad. That's what you're experiencing there. So what you see in these cool, you know, you know, teddy bear painting a teddy bear and unicorns on the beach, that's what they're doing with AI. That's why it seems like the AI is reading your mind, because it's got so many signals across so many people in your social graph, we discussed this before. Okay, now they're terraforming. They're going to use AI to terraform. You know, the metaverse. Yeah, this is why Zuckerberg is so drunk on this. And that's what I realized when I saw this. The reason Zuckerberg has so much conviction is because he's put these two things together, or really three, he understands the social graph, and he's mastered how to surface for you things that provoke emotion in you things that have emotional resonance. Okay, so let's just keep that one idea. I'm adding this to your two. He understands the social graph. Okay, great. And he understands how to give you things. Okay, here's a bar mitzvah. Here's a Trump story, you know, here's whatever news that make you come back. So he's an engagement master. Okay, he's the advertising master, he knows how to get you what you want and get those clicks, those advertisers, right? Most powerful ad network. One of the top two most powerful ad networks ever built Google and his. Okay, now we got those two things. Great. Put those two things together, you get social media, you get Instagram, you get all that good stuff. But now you add the virtual reality piece, as you're saying, and terraforming, what if he built for you, a world in which, you know, the rent the runway to do a callback to the rental runway ad that we're doing here,

SPEAKER_132: or whatever rental clothing company competes with rent the one way, just give me a couple names here so

SPEAKER_08: that I can spread the love here. RTR.com slash twist. But yeah, exactly. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, but I have competitors. Stitch fix. Let's say, okay, stitch fix, whatever. So now we have these

SPEAKER_06: other ones in there. And they build for you, Molly, when you're on the way to meet me for our investment team meeting in the metaverse, you walk through a hall, and your hall is a fashion show of all of this incredible world designed for you. Now, my journey to our staff meeting is going to be like Nick's and Mark Knopfler and other bullshit that draws me in to buy like some vinyl version or digital version of a Mark Knopfler concert that they recreated for me in the universe. They're going to combine these things, and they're going to terraform ads in virtual reality with

SPEAKER_107: this technology. Totally. So the it's going to be bonkers, like the ads you see are going to be nuts.

SPEAKER_21: I'm finally going to live my preteen dream. Yeah, as as evidenced in my absolute favorite show of

SPEAKER_11: all time back then gem and the holograms. Basically going to be gem and the holograms.

SPEAKER_21: Literally, it's going to be gem and the holograms in real life. It's going to be truly, truly, truly outrageous, because I would walk into my virtual closet, stand on your pedestal,

SPEAKER_169: stand on my pedestal, and wear whatever outfit I want. And you'll be able to talk to me like,

SPEAKER_06: no, red, no more like burgundy, somewhere between burgundy and a burnt orange. Give me like a

SPEAKER_04: sherbert and uh, let's go accessories now diamonds. No, not diamonds, emeralds. Oh,

SPEAKER_06: boom. And it's just gonna be boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, your outfit. Then it's gonna be like, Okay, based on everything you said, and the last three movies you liked, and the two places you ordered from on DoorDash, here's what we think your outfit should be. And then I'm gonna ride

SPEAKER_48: in on a unicorn. To our staff meeting. With hummingbird winks. To our staff meeting. That is how I'm going to come to the staff meeting. And I'm going to come in

SPEAKER_06: with like a headband, and like a, you know, guitar. And I'm going to just come in playing some Mark Knopfler riff. And if the AI is going to write that Mark Knopfler album, and the Dire Straits album that never came out, it's literally going to make five more Dire Straits albums for me, and have Mark Knopfler perform them. And those five albums are going to be better than the ones I love most. And they're going to be customized to me. So it's going to know I really like Telegraph

SPEAKER_04: wrote, I really like Sultans, I really like Walk of Life. And the AI will make for me a concert of Mark Knopfler. That's better than anything Mark Knopfler ever wrote. This is going to be insane.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah. And this is why he does not care if you make fun of his big doe princess eyes in version one of the metaverse. And, you know, the fact that there aren't legs now, and that the animation is kind of janky, like he and all of these other scientists who are building the thing that you're talking about, which is so is exactly what's going to happen. Yeah, don't care what it looks like. Now that is meaningless to them. It's sort of like, every every like product manager or coder in the world gets so irritated with managers because they present some, you know, they're like, here's the here's the absolutely magical AI that can auto generate a conversation and a video and whatever. And then some manager and ding dong and middle management will be like, it doesn't look that good. And they're like, that is not the point. You have no idea how much genius and human hours and work when integrating this code, it will look fine later. But that's not

SPEAKER_68: the point right now. And I think that's where we are in the metaverse. That's like the manager

SPEAKER_75: who's like, you know, you Christopher Columbus lands in, you know, North America, and he's like,

SPEAKER_06: I've seen better, you know, like, I kind of felt like, it's not much different than Spain, you know, like, and it's like, yeah, we don't even know what's here yet. Can we just get like 10 miles

SPEAKER_112: into this? Like, it's looking pretty dope to me. I will say, Nick made an interesting point,

Jason Calacanis: though, in talking about this, the rollout of this AI tool, which is that there's so much ill will, okay, so much ill will toward meta that the responses are basically just like, no, thank you. Of course. And so you wonder, like, are they going to build this magical universe and no one's

SPEAKER_31: going to come? I just like, I'm trying to think of like, the most horrible person in like another industry, who's the horrible person shows up your party and then like offers you something that nobody

SPEAKER_184: wants? I'm like, yeah, maybe not. Like R Kelly. Yeah, like R Kelly comes to your party. No,

SPEAKER_06: nobody wants you to nobody wants you here. Yeah, nobody wants you to perform. Nobody wants to give

SPEAKER_04: you applause. Nobody wants to give you attention period that that's Zuckerberg's trap right now. Is it just so universally hated that people are just going to be looking at any

SPEAKER_187: product he does and be like, eh, not, and you can literally apple. Right. And they're not going

SPEAKER_08: to make them in the holograms. They're going to make some like weird, you know, sort of sanitized

SPEAKER_03: thing that only some people can play in for 30% cut. Yeah. I don't know. And it's only going to work

SPEAKER_194: on the iPhone. Yeah. It's truly outrageous. Wow. Oh yeah. That's right. I remember that show. And I

SPEAKER_196: was just like, who watches this stuff? Like girls, I remember being 12 years old and be like, girl, so

SPEAKER_200: weird jamming the holograms, like latchkey kid, my little butt home, get like, uh, I want to see the

SPEAKER_203: Legion of doom and be like, I want to watch like the X-Men animated show or something like, yeah,

Jason Calacanis: we have some superheroes in here before we move on to soft bank. There is a little bit of breaking meta news that I grabbed before I popped onto the stream today, which is that meta has announced evidently a hiring freeze warning, but is warning now of a restructure. Yeah. Now is here we go.

SPEAKER_209: Now we're in full recession. It's a recession. Exactly. Because it has been and I have actually

Jason Calacanis: been waiting for something like this because all my homies and media have been lamenting and laying off and talking about how it is an absolute bloodbath in the ad market right now. And so the real test was going to be, will it be an absolute bloodbath in the ad market at Google and Facebook? And it

SPEAKER_212: seems that in fact, yeah, perhaps it could be, which is a big question is at places where they

SPEAKER_213: have so much cash, they don't have to worry about this. Will they take the medicine because they want

SPEAKER_06: earnings to look good, right? So here's what's happening. You look at a company like Apple, you look at a company like Google, look at a company like Facebook, they have tons of cash. This is not going to save so much cash that they couldn't weather the storm. They have so much cash they could weather it. So why would they do it? Well, if they perceive headwinds against the top line, right, people are gonna spend a little less on advertising or advertising growth is going to slow. Well, if they get those headwinds, then what they expected their top line revenue,

SPEAKER_04: instead of it being 12 billion, this quarter is going to be 11.5. Okay, great. So now we let go, we cut a billion dollars in expenses from employees and a billion dollars of marketing expenses, a billion dollars and whatever expenses offices. Okay, now we're going to be negative 500 million per quarter in expenses. Therefore, the earnings stay the same, or maybe even the earnings improved. Yeah. So if your top line growth slows, how do you keep people buying your stock? How do you keep your stock at a certain price? You make the earnings look good? How do you make the earnings look good? You got to cut costs. So that's what's happening here is they're not making these because they fear they're running out of money or they don't want the employees, or they don't want the resources the employees provide. They're like, you know what, we cut 10%. We cut 20%. Everything's more efficient as we had in the gospel according to Bill Gurley on Tuesday. Yeah, the gospel told us like, do a riff like and it has to be significant. So you can actually be brutal benefit. Yeah, you got to get the benefit. So this is the beginning. And you know, they I don't know why Sundar and Zuck are so, uh, genteel about this, but they've taken six months to warn their employees and terrorize them. Oh, everybody's got to work harder. We got to perform better. We got to be more conscious of expensive. So like, Hey, guys, make the goddamn cuts and stop torturing people about it. Like, if you're gonna do the riff, just tell every manager you've cut your bottom 1.5 people. So you got to cut 15%. You had a 200 person team 30 people got to go, you know what you're doing, you run your department, you have to wake up every day and hit your goals, hit your goals,

SPEAKER_221: or better with 15% less people. Let me know who we're letting go. That's it. It's been six months

Jason Calacanis: of this. It really has you're right. And now even the fact that they're doing a freeze, but warning of cuts is the same thing. All you're doing. And this is this gets to Gurley's other point, right? He was like, I don't like a 10% cut because you don't save enough money to make it worthwhile. And this is the important second part, you incur a morale. Yes, a morale hit that is unnecessary. And you didn't even get anything good out of it. This is just destroying morale internally. And you got to think at Facebook, your options are worth what are we at half now, what they were last year, maybe less. And so your options are worth nothing. You're constantly under threat that you're going to be laid off. It's like living on the dread pirate Robert ship, like I'll most likely kill you in the morning. You're not doing your best work. It's amazing that they managed to put out the like the auto generate the unicorns thing because you got to feel like

SPEAKER_225: they're not that stoked about working there right now. Hey, everybody. I'm here with my pal, Tom Eschbacher. He is the senior sales manager at LinkedIn marketing solutions. And today we're going to talk about marketing for startups. And LinkedIn did a great new internal report called today and startup marketing. Welcome to the program, Tom. Thanks, Jason. We all know organic reach, super important. You make great content, you get your likes, you get your shares, you get your comments. But what people don't know is that you can boost organic

SPEAKER_228: and it creates a bit of momentum on your site. Can you unpack that for people? Definitely. So organic is just going to go to the audience who's already following you and then a smaller group of members who are connected to any of those audiences. So what we often encourage is keep an eye on your organic engagement metrics and who are the people and companies and segments that are engaging most frequently with your content and then amplify that reach via our best in class paid advertising targeting. So what that means and what we've seen, especially for seed and series a companies is by boosting successful organic posts with paid, it results in a 13 X lift in unique reach. And that's really meaningful insights that can help inform your product and go to marketing strategies. And open up new audiences for you. You can go to linkedin.com slash this weekend startups and get

SPEAKER_225: the report for free, as well as a hundy $100 from Tom, here's the next year to drop. It always was

SPEAKER_04: in our industry that if startups weren't hiring, you had this backstop. I can go get an offer from Apple, Google, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, I can go there, I can get like two offers, then I can bring it back to my startup boss, you know, series B company, and ask for more equity, you know, negotiate harder. Now those people who are getting like gonna get laid off from Facebook and Google, they're gonna be like, I need to get a job. And they're gonna go apply Google and goes like, we're not hiring and Apple's like, we're not hiring. And they say, well, I'll go work at startup. And now the startups are say, we've got six months of runway. And this is when you actually get a recession. It's like, there's a couple of towers that have to fall along this process. crypto is easy. There's no core value

SPEAKER_234: there. Yeah, totally. It was just it was always a bubble. It was born in a bubble.

SPEAKER_04: It the bubble never got filled in. It was just all hot air. So like, okay, it decompresses 90%. Some coins go down 99%. You know, the best coin Bitcoin goes down by whatever 60 70% goes down to 20,000 from 70,000 19,000. Okay, great. We deflate that bubble stocks. Okay, which one's we go first growth. Great. Boom, we collapse them. The buco capital tweet, we all love that buco capital. Yeah, can we pull that up about Apple? Nick, is that the one you're talking about? Yeah,

SPEAKER_82: this is buco capital after Artie buco from the Sopranos. This is Nick. It's incredible. It's Nick's burner account for sure. It's so good. Anyway, he's like, yeah, this is one of the towers,

Jason Calacanis: right? You start to see Facebook freezing and laying off and then Apple stock, which is literally gold, right? You buy that not literally, but you buy it instead of gold. It is a nugget whose value will not go down. And this tweet was the other day was like investors who've been hiding in Apple are about to have a bad time, he says. Yeah. And then he's like, good colloquial listen for

SPEAKER_53: getting screwed. That is incredibly graphic from training day. I was wondering where that was from.

SPEAKER_11: Anyway, he says, let's get this over with flush it. No more ticky tacky BS. No more head in the sand.

Jason Calacanis: Can't heal till we're fully broken. And there's no hope left to repent. Give us our medicine. He's basically like sell Apple. There's nothing you can not if you refuse here. He goes, what don't people get? If you refuse to relent, you keep trying to hide the Fed is going to keep destroying your wealth stocks need to go down, spare us the pain, speed up the process, quit trying to

SPEAKER_04: fight it. Sell, sell, sell. I mean, Apple was the last place you could put your money and feel like, okay, this is the this is one of the last towers, right? So this is the bottoming out process.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah, today, Apple's that was 6% today. And Apple said, remember how there was that like, they were going to produce more iPhone 14s, then they walked that back. And we're like, ooh, actually, we are not going to produce as many i 14 iPhone 14s, even as we had initially, I think predicted because the demand was not there. You had that tweet about discretionary spending. The other day, you were like, people can wait. People are waiting on the new iPhone. So this tower predicted that Yeah, some bricks are coming out. This is the process, right? Like they want

SPEAKER_75: to stop inflation, they raise the rates, they threaten to raise the rates more, and the free

SPEAKER_04: money train stops. And here we go. Eventually, tech workers, high paid work from home tech workers were like, it was like finance people, media people, tech workers, like finance people, they got washed. Okay, media people, like journalists, obviously, they got washed. Okay, tech workers is all that's left. They're about to get washed out. Not all of them, but 15%. The other ones are still going to make their, you know, 200 grand a year or whatever they're making, and get their laundry done. Or maybe the laundry service is going to be like limited to like one bag a week or something.

SPEAKER_03: XNA on the laundry. Yeah, exactly. But no, it's just, it's

Jason Calacanis: austerity. It's almost like how you know, we're there. I have I feel a weird sort of relief when because you know, like being on being very online and working in the industry that we do is machine like you, you know, what's gonna come. Like we see the future, right? By virtue of people on the ground in different places who are already living that future or because there's so many signals that it is, you know, we're pretty good prognosticators, it's impossible to miss. I feel almost like a bit of relief when the future finally arrives. And I feel like we're there now, like the recession started this week. You know, the bricks are coming out of the Apple Tower, like, absolutely. Okay, now we know we can get we've prepped and prepped and prepped and prepped.

SPEAKER_226: Yeah. And now it's here. And we just gotta get through it. The storm is here. You know,

SPEAKER_83: it's almost like it's this, you know, and you know, I hope everybody in Florida is okay. I was

SPEAKER_04: trying to avoid that exact metaphor. I know. This is part of it, you have to weather the storm, and you have to make plans for it. And you know, some houses that were not, you know, built the correct way, or they were built in the wrong place, they get washed out. And that's, that's part of the process. And this is like companies that were not on stable footing,

SPEAKER_06: not unstable foundations will get washed out to see they're gone, right? Like that,

SPEAKER_83: and that startups or other companies going away. And, you know, it's, it's brutal when you go

SPEAKER_04: through it. But I kind of feel like you do, that this is the bottoming out process, we were technically in a recession, we had two quarters of negative growth, it seems. So the question is, how many quarters does recession last, I think they typically last three to like eight. So we're in four or five quarters, and then we start building back up again. So I, I, and you can build a great company anytime, as Bill Gurley said, so this is a great time to build a company, because now somebody got laid off from Facebook, somebody left Google, they got reorganized out of Apple, whatever it is that where Apple says, Hey, guess what, we're coming back to the office five days a week, you don't like it, you just voluntarily got laid off, and we don't have to give you a severance package. Thanks. Like, that's the power move. If I was Zuck, I'd be like, Yeah, you know what, we're coming back to the office four days a week, if you don't show up, you're out, we're done. I mean, and suck me do that sucks, hardcore. If I was stuck, that's what I would do. I'd be like, you know what, there's no COVID anymore. It's an endemic. It's not a pandemic, we're done, come to the office, or you have no job, the end, and then you don't have to pay six months crazy severance, whatever these tech companies do, and your options are washed, you're good. That's like the

SPEAKER_83: hardcore move. I bet you he does it. I bet you he does it. It's just like coming back, coming back, that's it. If you don't want to come back, it's okay. If you don't, that's what that's what Apple

SPEAKER_277: did, right? They said three days a week. They did. Yeah. No, I think they're different. I

Jason Calacanis: think Apple's a little older school. Like, I think we're starting to realize that, that Apple is a little bit got a little bit of 90s management going on. It's like very top down, very hierarchical. Like, I'm not too surprised that they're the company that said come back.

SPEAKER_03: A guy who's building the metaverse has less of a leg to stand on with like,

SPEAKER_280: I have y'all in the office, you know, it has like a thousand acres on Kauai, a thousand acres on

SPEAKER_55: Kauai and like 18 acres of lakefront property at Tahoe. Like, is that kind of hard for him to come

SPEAKER_04: back if he's living in Tahoe, Kauai? And by the way, I'm not like doxing him. He's incredibly public. He's like, literally carrying an American flag on Lake Tahoe. He's not very subtle about it. Exactly. It's like literally in a war with the people of Kauai over like their ancient burial

SPEAKER_06: grounds and like ancestors land. And he's like, yeah, I bought it. And they're like, but you can't buy that piece. He's like, yeah, I bought it. Dude, read the room. Everybody hates you. Do you have

SPEAKER_04: to buy everybody's acreage in Kauai? Like, just buy it and make it part of a natural preserve and, you

SPEAKER_181: know, name it after some, you know, ancient, uh, for, uh, bear forefather or foremother, you know, in

SPEAKER_31: Hawaii and be a cool dude. Instead, he goes to Kauai like an idiot and just, do you know how the Hawaiian people are about their land and like their tradition? Like, I mean, we can't leave Larry

SPEAKER_226: Allison out of this conversation either, right? This is plenty of colonizing happening here.

SPEAKER_04: Well, when he bought Lanai though, he made it, I think he made this agreement that it would never

SPEAKER_290: be developed. So he, it was almost like he's going to die. He knew this. So when he bought it,

SPEAKER_04: I think he's building like a huge hotel there. He also, he's building, he's got this two hotels on it now, but he also has all the subsidized housing on it for the people who live there. And so he's like, he did it right. Like people love him there. He's, he's revered. I believe,

SPEAKER_297: uh, where Zuckerberg is like, anyway, listen, if you're a founder or an employee at a startup, it's critical that you become capital efficient at this time. Fundraising is tough right now. And cutting your burn is really important. And one great way to cut costs is to run all of your SaaS apps on one platform. And that one platform, Odoo. Odoo is the only software your company will ever need. Using Odoo suite of business apps means you don't have a bunch of messy SaaS subscriptions. No, everything you need is already on Odoo. All you have to do is turn it on when you're ready and they'll only charge you the apps that you use. Odoo has over 40 main apps and 16,000 from their open source community, sales, accounting, marketing, automation, HR, website builders, and so, so much more. And this will streamline your business. No more issues with transferring data back and forth. Nope. And you'll have one customer support contact across all your apps, not 20. And you're going to get more done in less time while saving a ton of money. And here's the best part. The first app is always free. And Odoo is offering $1,000 in credit on your first implementation pack. So go to odoo.com slash twist for $1,000 off. That's odoo.com slash twist. So this leads us into yes,

Jason Calacanis: briefly one more time. So Zuck's layoffs are coming. SoftBank is reportedly planning to cut at least 30% of the headcount of the vision fund. And this is such a this is like so dislocating to have been watching the shows, right? Like watching we crashed and just just remembering like kind of reliving the time when SoftBank came in and changed the with Maliby's book, changed the entire industry with this just like boat super yacht boatload of cash. And now has lost so much. It is confusing the structure. There are two structures, the SoftBank,

SPEAKER_302: the corporate and the SoftBank, the venture, vision funds, right? So there's the vision fund,

SPEAKER_03: which is the one that rampaged in with all the money and changed the entire vendor venture industry

Jason Calacanis: and has reported a loss of $21.7 billion in the quarter ending in July. SoftBank's fiscal Q1. And then there's SoftBank, the company, right, just this huge sprawling company, and SoftBank itself posted net losses of $15 billion and $23 billion in the last two quarters, respectively. So you could

SPEAKER_212: sort of see why they're laying people off. Yeah. And just so people understand,

SPEAKER_04: when we see the people who have the biggest piles of money doing significant cuts, you want to talk about a riff here, we're talking about 30%. Okay, Bill Gurley said five to 10 is not you're not going to feel 15 to 20 you do. Now we're talking 30 here. These are significant riffs that are going on here reduction in force. Yeah. And if the big companies are also doing riffs, I believe Apple's basically done a de facto riff, I don't know how many people left the company because of the three day a week

SPEAKER_31: thing which started in last month, I believe. But you are going to see a lot of people in tech looking for jobs. And when a job description goes up, you might have instead of like, nobody apply or a

SPEAKER_04: bunch of green people apply, you know, we candidates apply or no candidates play. Now you're going to start to see like, people competing for jobs, it's going to be gnarly 2023 is going to be a bit gnarly for startups. Fantastic. You might have somebody who made their money and got their options at Apple or Facebook. And they're like, you know what, I'd like to earn some equity. And I can work from home instead of going to Apple's office. Yeah, I don't care, pay me whatever you want. I already made my heart rate made a couple million bucks. I'd love to work on a startup. Yeah, I'm equity driven,

SPEAKER_06: not cash driven. So the people who used to be equity driven and want to own a big piece of a startup, you know, a couple of points, you know, at the founding of it or something. They were like, I'll take the points and the cash. I want you to match my Apple offer. And I want the cash and I had people come to me like I raised like a million five and this person wants 400,000 because that's

SPEAKER_04: their RSUs at Facebook or whatever. And they hit the jackpot and they got in early. And I'm like, yeah, you can't hire them for that. Like, yeah, that's not possible. Like, you're gonna offer them 150k. Like maybe, you know, like, you're a seed stage company that you've like, who do I hire? I'm like, get creative. And that's when people started hiring in Canada, Uruguay, Ukraine, like, that this is why people got creative. And this is the great thing about founders to get creative. Now you might be able to hire somebody in San Francisco Bay Area, you know, somebody living

SPEAKER_181: out in Utah, whatever, who worked at Apple, and they're like, Yeah, I'll take a flyer. So this is

SPEAKER_04: going to be great that now that now the industry builds back up, and the talent goes to the remaining projects. So now what we're going to see also Molly is the consolidation of talent. So let's say half of the startups that let's say, you know, in a given year, 20% of startups go away. Okay, now it hits 40. Right during this terrible time, like accelerates people can't raise bridge rounds, you get a bunch of companies hit the wall, they can't raise a bridge round. The most talented people from those can't get jobs at Google, they go work at the other 60% of startups, they want to work at a startup, let's say they prefer being in a small company, those folks now you get consolidation. So the stronger, the rich get richer, the stronger, stronger, basically. So the strongest startups get the best talent, and they get them at a better price. That means whoever makes it out of this is going to be hard core teams with like great benches, it would be like taking the NBA. And you're like, you know

SPEAKER_06: what, let's go down to 18 teams. Right? And you're like, we just distribute these players massive wealth

SPEAKER_75: redistribution. Exactly. And now instead of having one all star or 1.5 all stars per team, you got three.

SPEAKER_04: Now everybody's a super team. If you went to 10, if you went to 12 teams, six in the east, six in the west, and you just played tournaments, or let's say eight and eight, you just took the playoff teams would be just like getting rid of all the teams that didn't make the playoffs just 16 teams, boom, that'd be

SPEAKER_107: awesome, incredible, incredible, the league would be a much better to watch. In fact, Nick was saying

Jason Calacanis: this like Nick was saying the exact thing. Yeah, he's got a whole relegation strategy. That's like football, European football. And next up, actually, Jason, I have to go. Jason's going solo with Lon Harris.

SPEAKER_193: Solo doll. I'll take it. I got it from here. Okay. Okay. Thanks. Okay. Have fun. Okay. Bye.

SPEAKER_324: All right. It is Thursday. It's Thursday. That means this week in streaming with Lon Harris.

SPEAKER_78: Beards looking strong, strong beard game for those of you on YouTube.

SPEAKER_326: It could use a little more shape. It could use a little more form. I'm letting it go a little bit.

SPEAKER_78: We put a little hair gel in there, a little product.

SPEAKER_329: Yeah. No, I don't usually do the product, but I could say it needs to be cleaned up a little bit

SPEAKER_331: and like straightened. It's a little all over the place. I'm not watching Lord of the Rings.

SPEAKER_78: You're out. I'm out. I, you know, I was like, I think I'm going to wait to the end. And then when I have a dry season of nothing to watch, I'm going to binge it and give it a chance.

SPEAKER_329: Yeah, I, I, I, I love it, but I do recognize that it is it there. It has a level of

SPEAKER_339: depth for people who love Tolkien that, and I don't think they're doing, they're not going very far and bringing everybody else on board. Like they are counting on you being

SPEAKER_334: pretty invested in this world and its rules and it's how things progress and at least knowing the story of Lord of the Rings pretty well. And I'm finding that the less that you can pick up on all those references and Easter eggs and ideas, the, the more this show is sort of leaving you cold.

SPEAKER_78: This is the challenge, I guess, in today's modern age. You know, I just want to start with, um,

SPEAKER_83: House of the Dragon. I love the last episode. I was prepared. I came in, I was ready to be upset at the recasting of the lead part and it worked for me. So it's you know, mini spoilers here, but, and by the way, my wife is watching this. She hates violent shows.

SPEAKER_91: She refused to watch Game of Thrones and now she likes the show. I think because of the female lead

SPEAKER_339: characters. Yeah, I, I, it is, it is less, there is still violence and, and the gore and it is still upsetting at times, but it, I feel like it's, it's fetishizing that stuff less. Game of Thrones really came in with that very strong idea of like, this is not like other fantasy and this is the hardcore edgy fantasy. This is like, what if all this stuff was gritty and real? And I feel like House of the Dragon is like, okay, you love this world and you love these kinds of stories and the dragons, whatever. It's not, it's not, that's not the major selling point this time. The cruelty, the brutality, the sexuality, they're, they're downplaying that stuff more in favor of the storytelling and the maneuvering and the politics. It's also a thing I've been enjoying about it. It's, there's a lot less magic. There's a lot less fantasy. It's a lot more like the politics and it does happen to be this one family that has dragons. So there's that level of, you know,

SPEAKER_347: baseline of fantasy. It's not our world. There's dragons, there's seasons that last a really long

SPEAKER_334: time, but it's not every episode is, well, there's this magic temple they've got to go to, or there's, oh, the faceless men or this god or that god. It's very ground level so far in terms of like,

SPEAKER_352: just people maneuvering around one another. Palace intrigue is a lot of like the palace

SPEAKER_83: intrigue, if you will, uh, in the show. I guess the key thing was this high-risk maneuver. They decided to replace two characters, two female characters. Uh, Emma Darcy replaced Millie Alcock as, uh, Rhaenyra. Rhaenyra Targaryen, yeah. It was basically our main character. Our main character. And, um, you know, I wanted to be upset by this because it seemed like, well, they didn't replace the guy. They didn't replace her

SPEAKER_339: cousin. But Matt Smith, uh, they pulled it off, didn't they? I thought it worked really well. Uh, Olivia Cooke also stepped in for Emily Cary as Alison Hightower, who's currently the queen. Uh, I, I thought it worked really well. I didn't even notice the queen changed. Yeah. That's so weird.

SPEAKER_324: The, the actresses were so close that I didn't, I was discussing with my wife, and I was like,

SPEAKER_83: did they change them? Or is this like some aging or whatever? But Rhaenyra's husband also got aged, so they did replace a man as well. Yes, yes. So it wasn't just one person getting replaced. Yeah,

SPEAKER_339: they, they aged up. And I think, I, I really, I like how they, I like how they did that. It really reinforces not just how much time has passed, but how much has changed in the relationship between these two characters when we, when we last saw them versus when we see them again, we, we got to see them as childhood friends and now they've grown up and they are bitter rivals. And I like that it really reinforced that they like, this is a whole, we're stepping into a whole new world. This was almost like a new pilot in some ways where it's like, we got to reset the whole stage.

SPEAKER_334: And I saw some people on social media were a little negative about that. It's like, I don't want to start all over. I just got into this show. I don't want to get into a new show.

SPEAKER_83: I like the fact that they started all over and that they had these new actors. It is really effective to jump time to have these new actors jump time. Yeah, I, I really liked how they, how

SPEAKER_334: they sort of pulled it off. And also that you get to see the progression. I was sure the king was going to be dead by now because he's got leprosy or whatever is going on with him. Uh, but no, it, uh, he's still around and they got to progress his illness, which was really fun for the makeup and

SPEAKER_331: design teams. This show is like the greatest hit of the year. I think, I think this will be the show of the year. Am I correct? I mean, I'd look, there's a lot of great reservoir reservation

SPEAKER_334: dogs just wrapped up its second season on FX, which was amazing. Severance was this year,

SPEAKER_331: which is definitely one of my favorite shows, the bear. I really loved the bear. All of those, I think are great, but none of them have the scale. I mean, right this way,

SPEAKER_334: if you're talking about the biggest show of the year, the most like epic show of the year, then yeah, I think this is definitely, this is definitely up there, but I, I, I, I'm holding off

SPEAKER_376: on maybe best so far. Yeah. If I defined the best as in most popular, it's certainly a huge hit

SPEAKER_324: for the most well done. Cause you could argue, oh, maybe the performance is in the bear or, you know, I preferred severance cause it was, you might have preferences, but in terms of the impact,

SPEAKER_347: like, yeah, this is definitely delivering for HBO. And, and there were a lot of question marks around, is game of Thrones still even a viable franchise? I mean, people were really down on that final

SPEAKER_334: season. I, I think there, there was, it was a big question mark that was very crucial for HBO. They really needed this. And I think it was a question mark. And now it's an exclamation point.

SPEAKER_83: Exactly. It's like, this is the B. And so this is my other question. If it was a question mark, did they say, let's make the self-contained one or two seasons. Let's move the story along. Let's just get a big win here. As opposed to, Hey, they could have drawn this out. We could have had Millie Alcock for this season. They could have done this change next season or in the middle of next

SPEAKER_112: season. It feels like they're moving so fast here that this is going to wrap up.

SPEAKER_339: I mean, I don't know that he's got that whole fire and blood book that George R. Martin wrote that they're sort of cribbing off of, which is almost written like a history. It's not written like a novel. It's written like a history book about the Targaryen dynasty. So they've got a lot to work with. I think even if they, even if the focus shifts between characters, I think they've got this whole world 200 years before the battle, the, you know, Robert's rebellion and the story of game of thrones.

SPEAKER_31: Yeah. I mean, it is moving at a fantastic pace and, uh, I think that makes a good TV and I could see

SPEAKER_83: another production company or I could see another, you know, streamer saying, Hey, let's, let's milk

SPEAKER_339: this. Well, the other thing that HBO did that's pretty canny is rather than just putting all of their focus on one game of thrones, follow up, they worked on like eight, they've got, they still got a ton of spinoffs in development. So there was like, there was going to be one with Naomi Watts, where it was going to be about a different, I'm blanking now, but it was a different prequel story. And then there's one about the sea snake before the action of this show. And then there's one of Corlys Valerian. You've, you've met him. Uh, so there's one about him as a seafaring adventure. There's one about princess Nymeria, like a thousand years in the past, like one of the folk legends in this era of Westeros. There's the Duncan egg ones, which is about like a knight and his squire and their adventures. So I think they, they, they're, they're throwing everything at the wall and they're seeing which project looks the best, like which pilot looks the best, which series is coming together the best, which ones do we like the most? And then the cream rises

SPEAKER_388: and the others get scuttled. I like it as an approach. Yeah. I think that's a really smart

SPEAKER_339: approach in the fire. See what gets hot. And this show came out first because this was the one they felt strongest about. They were getting all these pilots and these scripts in, and they were like, this one's good. And then the next one that looks, I think the, like the best chance is the Jon Snow sequel series. So, you know, they, they, they're giving themselves time to see what bubbles up and

SPEAKER_347: what, what ideas are kind of coming together the best, which is a pretty smart way to do it.

SPEAKER_324: I mean, this is, uh, getting talked about. It's got a lot of buzz. Obviously people in your life are

SPEAKER_347: probably talking about it. Yeah. It's almost, I mean, at this point it's doing, it's getting about

SPEAKER_339: half of the viewership week to week more. It's getting, it's getting about 29 million views week to week at its height. Game of Thrones was getting 40, 45 million views week to week. Like to get that close to season eight game of Thrones within five or six episodes is stellar.

SPEAKER_347: I mean, very good. Like a sign that people are very much still into Westeros and eager for more content.

SPEAKER_324: This makes me sad that they couldn't figure out how to do this with Sopranos, uh, especially before all the principles started dying. Yeah.

SPEAKER_400: There could have been all kinds of interesting spinoffs and whatever.

SPEAKER_347: I mean, honestly, I liked, I liked all the saints of Newark more than most, but it definitely felt

SPEAKER_339: more less like a standalone movie and more like it should be leading into more of a prequel. Like I would really want to watch a story about, you know, Tony's ancestors fighting for control of central Newark against Leslie Odom jr and his crew. Like that sounds great. That sounds great.

SPEAKER_83: That would have been a great pilot episode. They should have done a pilot. It was like a movie. And then like we talked about going to that. Okay. So Warner brothers discovery is being soon a class action suit. Speaking of HBO. Yes. The suit alleges that Warner media inflated HBO max subscribers by 10 million during the

SPEAKER_339: merger. This is true. HBO, they basically, they admitted this in their August earnings report, their first earnings report after the merger. So the first earnings report of WB discovery is its own company this year in August, they came out and they said, they explain overall domestic us subscribers, there was a drop. And so they explained, well, this was because HBO max Warner media used to count. AT&T wireless customers who were gifted subscriptions to HBO max as HBO max subscribers, whether or not they signed up. So if you're an AT&T wireless subscriber, and we're like, Hey, go to HBO max, sign up with your AT&T wireless number, we'll give you six months for free. Even if you never bothered to go to HBO max and actually complete the signup process, they counted you as an HBO max subscriber. This is, uh, it's, it is definitely shady. It's gray.

SPEAKER_244: It's, it's, it's, it's gray. There's a little bit of gray on the black here. This is, this is, uh,

SPEAKER_83: really misleading investors. They're going to lose this. They're going to settle this case for sure. Right. And this is always for, uh, here we are on this week in startups and this week in, in, uh, streaming, just never do this kind of shady stuff with numbers. I know people want to hit numbers. The better thing to do here would be say, Hey, we have access to this many subscribers, and we've converted 16% and we think we can convert 70% based on hitting these targets. They should have just sent all these people a deep link there. If they wanted to fugazi, this is a better fugazi way. They should have just saying, sent everybody who's on the wireless, a link that said, click here to activate your free, and then opened a session with them with like a hash without them having to sign up and just start playing house of dragons. Right. If you click that link, you're automatically in as user 1234567, whatever.

SPEAKER_414: Right. And then it's a viable, then it's a subscription. You watched an episode. Right.

SPEAKER_83: Yeah. Then you're like, Hey, what shows do you like? Then on the back end, it says,

SPEAKER_04: put your email in. So, or, you know, put your family's emails in so they can also share this. And then it sends links there. So this shows like a level of, um, buffoonery on the part of the tech team. There's a very simple way to do this. You know, you have some websites, you click the link in the newsletter, you're logged in when you get there. Right. So when I, using next door, maybe using a real estate site, Redfin or Zillow, they're pretty sophisticated, like, we don't want to put up a login, we know, we lose two thirds of the people and have to log in. So what they do is they make the URL unique to you. It lasts for maybe a week in your email, then that URL turns off. And what's the crime? What's the damage if somebody you forward the email and they logged into your account? Oh, they watch Sopranos. And now your feed has a

SPEAKER_107: Sopranos episode watch. It's not a big deal. So dumb. This is dumb. Bad execution.

SPEAKER_418: It is. I think the one thing, you know, it's a little, this story got reported yesterday.

SPEAKER_339: And I think a lot of people thought they did detective work and figured this out. It's like,

SPEAKER_347: no, this is a thing we've known happened. And this happens a lot. Like a lot of other streamers have

SPEAKER_339: done similar things. It's really like the lawsuit named Zaslav and the CEO, the current CFO, uh, of Discovery. This is really on WarnerMedia. This is how WarnerMedia had been counting it during the AT&T era. They just didn't, Zaslav probably knew and didn't say anything, but it wasn't his call. This was a, this was a WarnerMedia way of counting HBO's max subscribers to maximize them,

SPEAKER_347: to make it sound like the numbers were a little bigger than maybe they were.

SPEAKER_423: Well, I'll tell you what, It's also 10 million that's not even moving the needle.

SPEAKER_31: Yeah. At this pace, with the Game of Thrones, with the industry, Euphoria, I think HBO hands down is the best streamer right now, which you're ranking right now.

SPEAKER_324: Yeah. If you, if you had to keep three services, for me, it's HBO. Give me one of yours. You have to keep.

SPEAKER_347: I think, yeah. I think if you're talking in terms of bang for your buck, like most good quality content

SPEAKER_334: for what you pay, HBO Max and Hulu to me are pretty, pretty far and away the, the, the best two.

SPEAKER_341: And then I put Disney Plus rounds out my third because I have kids and I love the Star Wars franchise.

SPEAKER_430: Well, I like Disney Plus too. I like the Star Wars show. You know, I like having that stuff. And they actually have a surprisingly deep, you know, library. Like I just want Avatar on there.

SPEAKER_175: So those are your three. Those are your top three. If you, if you could, if this is for Lon, I don't want you thinking about this. Like I said, journalist or an analyst. No, no, no. I know. I I'm turning off. I'm changing your passwords for four down. You can keep three. I'm changing those passwords for the rest of you.

SPEAKER_347: Those, those are my three. The other, the only other thing I was going to say,

SPEAKER_339: those are my three. The only other thing I was going to say is if we're talking about consistency,

SPEAKER_347: like they have the most good stuff versus the stuff they release. Apple to me is, I've never,

SPEAKER_339: like Apple's batting average is beyond any, almost any studio I can think of.

SPEAKER_437: Like I watched it. Was it Tehran was on there? Yeah.

SPEAKER_83: It was out in Amazon. No, Tehran is Apple. Yeah. I mean, that was really well done. That was like watching a better version of Homeland. Not maybe the actors weren't as good, but I was like, this is incredibly well done. They seem to be like, and they're almost like an HBO ish, but maybe not as edgy.

SPEAKER_443: So you don't get the sex drugs and rock and roll.

SPEAKER_347: It's that same. It's the FX. It's the HBO. If a show is on this, this network, it's a good,

SPEAKER_339: it's good. You can rely on something. Yeah. And like, that's for, for a non studio to come out and right away, develop that level of curation that like, there was wild horses that Gary Oldman's spy show, Olivia cook, who's in house of the dragon. She's in that. I just, it didn't even interest me that much of this British spy show Gary Oldman's in it. Terrific. It's just, if it's on Apple TV,

SPEAKER_347: you can pretty much count on, it's going to be worth your time. And that's, that's really,

SPEAKER_339: I really value that. So I did want to single, single them out. They don't have as nearly as much content as the other competitors. It's cheaper though, but excellent curation.

SPEAKER_04: I think Gary Oldman to me is how a lot of people feel about Stanley Tucci. Like I could watch Gary Oman makes an omelet. And I mean, they're both great. Tucci's great. Like who is an actor,

SPEAKER_06: an actor doing something incredibly mundane. You'd still watch it. You tune in, you click like

SPEAKER_31: literally making a French, teaching you how to make a French omelet, like the classic French

SPEAKER_333: omelet, very simple thing to do. Oh, I mean, I, I like, I would click on most actors. Like I, I love,

SPEAKER_424: I love a lot of actors. I would, I would love to watch them make an omelet. Obviously, Nicholas Cage making an omelet would be an event that you would want to see. Christopher Walken.

SPEAKER_459: Michael Shannon making an omelet. Who wouldn't want to watch Michael Shannon make an omelet?

SPEAKER_460: Helen Mirren making an omelet. It would be amazing. It would be amazing.

SPEAKER_463: I like to crack the eggs. I use a little butter. Guys, step one, you gotta grease the pan. I use a fork to break the yolks. I don't want the yolks to fight me. I kill them first thing.

SPEAKER_04: Everybody. Yeah, I would definitely, you know who I like is the guy from Boardwalk Empire who also did the seventies music show. What's the tall guy's name? Bobby Cannavale. Bob, Bonnie, uh, yeah. Bobby Cannavale making an omelet would be fantastic.

SPEAKER_83: Yeah. I'm thinking about this because I just watched on Netflix, Jon Favreau and, uh, the chef, um, Chef. Chef.

SPEAKER_471: Oh yeah. Yeah. The, the, the, the chef show that he does. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: It's a chef show and you know, like I could, Jon Favreau, like cutting onions and like getting instruction on how to cut the onions is interesting. Yeah. It just shows you like some people are, have charisma, you know, the charisma thing, like. Sure. Some people just have.

SPEAKER_474: Selena Gomez has an HBO Max show where she cooks with celebrity chefs. You know, I haven't seen that yet. I want to see that one.

SPEAKER_477: Selena and Chef, yeah. Hmm. Interesting. Uh, all right.

SPEAKER_83: I, I know this because I, I went down the chef rabbit hole the last few days because I was coming, I'm in downtown LA for 24 hours to see Roger Waters. Incredible show last night.

SPEAKER_475: I was in the front row. Shout out to my friend, Mark Jeffery, who got first row seats for us.

SPEAKER_04: Wow. Just unbelievable. I mean, high 79 years old puts on a hell of a show is like, it's really interesting to watch somebody from the sixties or seventies, like a radical still keeping up that radical.

SPEAKER_482: Yeah. Well, he is very outspoken still. Yeah. Very outspoken. And he was,

SPEAKER_112: I mean, just going to his show, I got myself in trouble. Like, people were like, you went to see him. He thinks this about that. And I was like, yeah, didn't check his speed. Well, he was saying some anti Ukraine stuff. He, he was taking sort of

SPEAKER_424: Russia's side in the Russia Ukraine business. And you know, then you watch him do the show. He's

SPEAKER_04: just a pacifist who doesn't want people murdered because he experienced a lot of pain and suffering in his life. And he's just very, a very hurt person because he saw people suffer and die. And it's like really interesting, like breaking down this issue of the artist and what their experiences in today's lens of like the artists belief system has to be put against

SPEAKER_76: whatever today's cultural lenses. And I was just saying, yeah, how would the wall have been received

SPEAKER_496: today? He's also, it's, it's just, it's this bizarre shift. He's from this era where rock stars

SPEAKER_339: were supposed to be jerks and difficult. And that was, that was part of it. Like that was part of the persona was that they're iconic class and they're, they, they have their own. Turning over a table. And I mean, it was a whole generation of these guys. We, we hate that now. Now we want them to be good boys and everybody should be nice to everybody. And like, it's just, the culture has shifted so much that it is hard to imagine how a Roger Waters, like, would he even have a career

SPEAKER_451: today? Or would it right away be like, this guy's a jerk. We don't want to, it would have been like

SPEAKER_439: the wall. Like what is, why are you putting us through this? Like, you know, painful thing to

SPEAKER_83: watch these songs are too abrasive. This is like, get over, you know, they would just be like, why are

SPEAKER_19: you singing about this? Like, can you just, you can't dance to this? I was just sitting in there

SPEAKER_500: watching. You're saying children don't need an education. Yeah. Like, wait, why are they not

SPEAKER_112: listening to the teacher? What is it? What about the teacher? Why should you, and why are you telling

SPEAKER_324: the teacher to leave them alone? What is the teacher doing to them? Is it in Florida?

SPEAKER_339: To me, to me, that's the whole shift. It's like, rock stars used to be this like, elusive, and it was like a magical thing. They were from another plate. They weren't like us. You know, it was like, you were, you would go to a concert and you're, you're convening with them for like an hour and a half, but then they're going to go back to their rock star world and you have no idea. And today it's Twitter and Twitch, they're everywhere. Which rock star? There's no mystique anymore.

SPEAKER_112: Which classic rock star, if they were alive today?

SPEAKER_04: On Twitter, which you most want to follow. Wow.

SPEAKER_511: That just comes right up to my head. I mean, John Lennon would be banned from Twitter. Exactly. You nailed it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_515: He would have been banned from day one. He would have gotten himself banned like day one. You want me to take a vaccine? Yeah, right. No, like pics or something,

SPEAKER_347: like he would have gotten in trouble immediately.

SPEAKER_518: But that's he from that era. That was what you were supposed to be like if you were a rock star back

SPEAKER_509: then. He'd be on Twitch with Yoko Ono in bed. He'd be like, we're live streaming from our bed. This is a message to Donald Trump. They absolutely would have. Secure the border. Build the wall.

SPEAKER_522: Wait, no, no, no, no. Uncle John, don't. Yeah.

SPEAKER_31: Don't build a wall. All right, listen. Speaking of walls being built, I've been really wanting to see this film, Return to Dust. Have you seen this?

SPEAKER_347: Yeah. No, it played at the Berlin Film Festival, but so far I don't think it's gotten much of an international release.

SPEAKER_527: Mostly in China. Yeah, I've been hearing about this film. I've also been hearing about the film The Wow. Those are the two films. That's the Aronofsky one with Brendan Fraser.

SPEAKER_78: Yes, I like Aronofsky. I mean, I know he's off the rails sometimes and it's hard to watch his stuff, but this one, The Wow, which was based on a play with Brendan Fraser.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. You know, they give him like an eight-minute standing ovation, a con,

SPEAKER_18: which I think the average is like four minutes.

SPEAKER_347: Brendan Fraser's already a large guy, but he's playing like a 400-pound, housebound man, and so he's putting on a lot of prosthetics. And they're saying the – I haven't seen the movie.

SPEAKER_424: They're saying the performance is incredible. It's earning a lot of comparisons to The Wrestler, which is probably my favorite Aronofsky movie.

SPEAKER_534: Oh, The Wrestlers. I have to watch it again. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. I'm looking forward to that one.

SPEAKER_347: Yeah, Return to Dust is, you know, it's like a pastoral. It's like a love story about a farmer and his wife over the –

SPEAKER_339: but one of those like over the course of decades, like taking in their lives from their courtship when they – I think it's an arranged marriage when they first meet and get married and then over the course of their whole lives together on this farm. And it's a realistic depiction of, you know, the gritty, tough life of a Chinese farmer. Uh-oh. And so what we're leading into in China right now, the Party Congress, which is like the biggest event for the Chinese Communist Party, all the party members get together, ceremonies and celebrations. And they really like it to take place during a time of national pride and patriotism and a celebration of the Chinese character in the country of China. And so they – this is all conjecture. This movie, Return to Dust, played at Berlin, was celebrated, was a hit film in China. It's now on Chinese streaming services. But this week it has been totally pulled. It's gone. And there was social media. There were hashtags about what happened to it. And then those social media hashtags have been banned. Yes. Okay, we know what's going on. There's obviously something going on. And the theory is that it's because we're so close to the Party Congress that the Chinese Communist Party is like, look, this movie is about how it sucks to live in the countryside and farmers have it really tough. That's not the image we want people to have of China right now. Let's get rid of this thing.

SPEAKER_181: This is like their Nomadland, the Francis movement. A bit.

SPEAKER_339: Right, a bit. It's like sort of demystifying, like taking away, humanizing the mystique, taking away the mystery and making it like, look, we romanticize stories about Chinese farmers and the rural life of the peasants or whatever.

SPEAKER_544: But this is a more realistic, sort of gritty, everyday depiction of their life. Did you like Nomadland, by the way? I did.

SPEAKER_339: You know, I thought the Amazon stuff – Nomadland. I thought the Amazon stuff where they were working at the Amazon warehouse was real weird

SPEAKER_347: and felt sort of like artificial. I know Chloe Zhao wanted to shoot in those Amazon warehouses and that far felt disconnected from the rest of the movie.

SPEAKER_334: But once it became Francis McDormand sort of on her own with the amateur actors, I really liked it. I liked all that stuff.

SPEAKER_78: I wonder if Amazon, you know, in some way participated in this, like allowed them to shoot a factory? Oh yeah, they did.

SPEAKER_331: They did. They did. Yes.

SPEAKER_339: She got permission to shoot inside the Amazon warehouses for those scenes. But I mean, I think that's also why, if you notice, the characters, they're all pretty upbeat about their Amazon jobs. Like they love the Amazon job. They wish they could last more along the year.

SPEAKER_451: They're like sad when it's over and they've got to go back to the desert because it's a good search.

SPEAKER_372: Which I think is accurate. Like the people who get those jobs.

SPEAKER_549: I'm not saying it's not. Yeah.

SPEAKER_401: I'm not saying it's not. It's – I feel like another filmmaker would probably engage with that more because it's a topic. Yes. Like there would be more of a balance.

SPEAKER_31: I found that the most interesting – Well, that was the thing I found super interesting was I was thinking about my parents,

SPEAKER_04: which one does when you're starting to think about people in their 70s or 80s when you're of a certain age. And I was thinking, well, what if my dad or my mom had to do this, right? And they needed money and this was an option they found to go work for three months before Christmas, you know, work seven days a week, whatever, 12-hour shifts. And these 70-year-olds packing Christmas toys and whatever for the holiday season and then living, you know, like this very nomadic lifestyle, like in a parking lot, essentially in a campground. And I was trying to think of if like the humanity of it, you know?

SPEAKER_31: And it kind of messes with your brain a little bit thinking about the humanity of that, doesn't it? Like –

SPEAKER_339: Oh, yeah, for sure. And I still liked how it didn't feel like it was being pushed into a narrative. It felt like we were following Frances McDormand's character and it didn't feel like it was rise and fall, this happens, then this.

SPEAKER_334: It's more just like the rhythms and patterns of her life and like a year in the life of this woman and I really did. I like that sort of rhythm of it.

SPEAKER_06: It wasn't like we're going to uplift you at the end and she's going to become,

SPEAKER_04: she gets stock options at Amazon and gets a mansion and a jail. Right. It's like she doesn't take her money and buy Amazon at $2. And it's just –

SPEAKER_339: Yeah, it's more like how a chapter in your life is. Like you start somewhere, you end up somewhere else.

SPEAKER_347: You've maybe grown or learned things, but it's not like, well, everything's resolved,

SPEAKER_334: happily ever after. And I like that and it added to the lived in kind of realism of the rest of the movie.

SPEAKER_424: I also thought some amazing performances from amateur actors, almost everybody except David Strathairn, he's professional, the guy she starts dating.

SPEAKER_339: All the other people that she's living with who are in the sort of RV little area with her, those are all real nomads who live that lifestyle for real, including the guy she's talking to is like the author of the book about how to live that lifestyle. Yes, yes. That's the real guy. He's telling his real story about his son dying and how he got to be on the road.

SPEAKER_347: And that's such a moving scene to get from a guy who's not even an actor just telling his life

SPEAKER_565: story. I think this film is going to – I have to watch it again. This film has haunted me since I've seen it.

SPEAKER_83: My connection to the tech industry, obviously, if you're in the tech industry. I think that this film is not judgmental in any way. It's not attacking Amazon. It's not – No, it's just matter of fact. It's just like you're saying, they're just like, here is actually what's happening. It felt so authentic. And then these people want to be in this lifestyle. They're opting into being this no matter of lifestyle. It's almost like they're at the end of their life. And I often think about the end of my own life and other people's lives.

SPEAKER_31: And I think, what is that last 10 years where you're trying to figure out what just happened?

SPEAKER_04: You know that, like, what just happened in my life the last five years? And then while I'm still alive, so maybe I get something out of this last five or 10 years. And what I want to get out of this five or 10 years is just being with these people and just making some coffee by a campfire. I thought in a way it's one of the beautiful films of our time that I don't think people saw it. And I think for a lot of people, they missed it. They were looking for this Amazon. I'm going to make a point at some point. You know, I'm going to make some. Yeah. I'm going to tell you how to feel about, you know, people working in factories. Or I'm going to tell you how to feel about e-commerce and local stores going away and the Walmartification. It wasn't a tree state on capitalism. It was a meditation on the end of your life and what you want to get out of it. This film is so powerful.

SPEAKER_347: And it's Chloe Zhao's not afraid to, like, give you time to think. It's a patient movie. There's space in it. Yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_339: And so often films, even indie films, even lower budget films, even smaller films, they have that relentlessness of pace.

SPEAKER_347: That, like, this, then this, then this, then this. They're afraid you're going to look at your phone. You're going to look at your phone.

SPEAKER_339: There's that Miyazaki concept of ma. Do you know what I'm talking about? Miyazaki, the great animator, Hayao Miyazaki, he talks about, he calls it, it's a Japanese word, ma, and it means emptiness or like stillness.

SPEAKER_347: And he's like, in every movie, he has to figure out how is he adding, it's like umami, like the fifth taste that it's hard to sort of describe. It's hard to sort of necessarily describe ma when you see, but you know it when you see it. It's a moment in a film or a show where it's just, it's, it's characters walking. It's, it's wheat grass blowing in the breeze. It's rain. It's a moment of quiet and stillness to allow you to reflect on what you've just seen, what you're watching, and where it maybe is going to go next. And it invites you to do that. Exactly that kind of contemplation that you're talking about that I think people, we've trained them to not do during movies that you're, that you're supposed to do to get the most out of it.

SPEAKER_04: This is the problem. I have a concept at movie theaters, there should be a movie theater, you know, uh, with the collecting of the phones, uh, at comedy shows.

SPEAKER_31: Right. I have now, uh, I'm lucky enough to like one of my dreams came true as a kid. I always like love movies. I wanted to be a movie reviewer. I had seen Cisco and Ebert when I was like 12, 14 years old. And I told my mom the first job I ever told her I wanted to have said, I think I want to review movies like Cisco and Ebert. Cause you get paid to go watch movies. And I love movies. This was like a mind bending capitalistic thing that I made the connection. And, uh, anyway, I have a movie theater, uh, in this, uh, ski house that I bought. And, uh, you know, I now will find a great movie and I turn my phone off, or I put it on the other side of the room and I've just decided this year, I'm going to start leaving the phone out of the room and having no devices. Cause I do find myself pulling out my phone. Uh, and it's very easy to do that.

SPEAKER_04: Like in a Marvel film where you're like, well, I've seen every fight scene possible.

SPEAKER_339: Like this is one of those things about the theatrical experience too. Like when you hear people talk about the, they always think of it as avatar. Well, you got to go see it on the biggest screen and IMAX and 3d that's the theatrical experience. But part of the theatrical experience is just that if you're in a quiet, dark room with no distractions, like that's how movies were designed to be watched. And now we watch them in this very, you know, doing three other things kind of way. I'm, I'm not, I'm not blaming other people. I do this too.

SPEAKER_112: How do you not? The phone is like ever present. And it's right. You can pick this thing up and find the most interesting 30 second video. And that moment, what'd you call the moment moment of ma, ma, ma, ma, ma. So that mom moment, by definition, you have to let kind of sweep over you. Right.

SPEAKER_175: It cannot compete with the Tik Tok video because the algorithm has picked something to dopamine your brain.

SPEAKER_401: And now if a filmmaker puts that in the movie intentionally, we're trained to zone out. Oh, this is a good chance to check my phone. It's like, no, no, no. You're, this is the moment. You missed the mom moment.

SPEAKER_575: Now you get drawn into house world. This is how you learn. This is how spirited away envelops you.

SPEAKER_04: Yes. Yes. It's so lost. I mean, I'm the, the, the whole concept of going to a theater and having that experience, I think is become, it's going to be lost on this generation, but our generation, I think we have the last one to like fully embrace that. We would.

SPEAKER_339: My hope is that it, it becomes like a vinyl record thing, you know, like, like vinyl records are not the primary.

SPEAKER_451: That's not the way most people listen to music. Spotify is much easier and you can just pull it up on Spotify or YouTube, but for aficionados,

SPEAKER_347: for people who really care and get into it, there's a vibrant community of people who

SPEAKER_339: still collect record players and go to record shops and buy records.

SPEAKER_347: My hope is that even when I'm an old man, I'll still be able to go to a movie theater because there'll still be a little vibrant community of people like me who haven't

SPEAKER_373: let go of that yet. But most people, I feel like it's going to be on your phone or AR.

SPEAKER_439: I'll tell you the thing I miss most about it. Uh, when people looked at it as cinema and we would go to the Angelica in New York

SPEAKER_589: on a Broadway and Houston, we go down there. You've been to it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_107: I've seen the movie there. Yeah, we would go.

SPEAKER_76: And sometimes we go at like six o'clock. We'd look at what movies were available because buying tickets, you didn't have the internet. You just go, you look at what's available.

SPEAKER_339: This is how it used to be. You used to go to like, they would have six screens. You'd be like, we'll see what, what, what we're interested in. That's starting next is what we'll see. Yeah.

SPEAKER_112: So what we do, what we would do is typically go, we'd meet, meet at the Angelica five o'clock.

SPEAKER_04: We pick a movie could be at seven, eight, nine, whatever. Okay. Now we're going to go have dinner. Let's go. Oh, movies coming quick. We're going to go for some quick dinner. Oh, we got time. We'll, we'll be leisurely about it. But the best part was after the movie, getting a cup of coffee, getting a drink, whatever it was, and breaking down what you just saw. And that was like the whole tradition of it. Right. And, uh, I think for young people out there, see some of these like seminal grade films, but turn your phone off and then really have a discussion about what the artist was like attempting to do. And then this is why I really, you know, back to this film being banned to China, return to dust is where I really want to see it. And I, and I hope that this is my great hope is that like the theater experience can actually be even more coveted where like people come together and they have talks afterwards. I always felt like when I went to Sundance for the first time, and I really want to go back to Sundance and get a press pass because after each movie, these nerds would go and sit outside, uh, and go to the cafe at the Yarrow, have a cup of bad coffee.

SPEAKER_31: And we talk about the movie. I kid you not. I watched Napoleon dynamite watch, you know, this other film. We go set Roger Ebert's there just to come full circle on like my dream.

SPEAKER_317: Roger, he was there and he's alone. And two of us come walking up, he's like, join me.

SPEAKER_04: Whoa. So now we're talking to him that Elvis Mitchell from the New York Times walks up. Yeah. Remember Elvis Mitchell? Yeah, sure. Of course. This is like, that's what.

SPEAKER_596: Unbelievable. Film festivals that you really used to be like that less so now.

SPEAKER_347: I think they're more, it's become more of a comic con like crowded, like it's harder. But yeah, when I first started going to film festivals, it really was like that.

SPEAKER_451: You were just, you know, you would be walking down the street and you'd, you know,

SPEAKER_591: you'd just pass by random groups of people talking with celebrities and reviewers. And it was all, it wasn't that big of a community. But let that sink in.

SPEAKER_04: There was a, the celebrity at Sundance was Roger Ebert because he really thought about the movie, the art and what was there. And, uh, you know, this is one of the things I love about my friendship with you.

SPEAKER_360: In the early aughts, I'll tell a very quick story that I go. I know we gotta get out of here. Yeah.

SPEAKER_339: In the very early aughts, I went to the Santa Barbara Film Festival to cover it for like my college papers. This would be like 99 or 2000. And I was watching a movie. It was an adaptation of a Ray Bradbury short story. And then I went to there. There was a McDonald's down state street from where the movie was. And I got a little bite to eat before the next screening. And in comes, uh, Joe Mantegna, the star of the movie and Ray Bradbury. And they sat right next to me in McDonald's and ate their meal. And I said to them, Hey, I think Ray Barry gets a filet of fish. I like a burger or something. I said, Hey, I just watched your guys movie and it was great. They were like, Hey, thanks man. I was like, I'm talking to Joe Mantegna and Ray Bradbury in a McDonald's on state street in Santa Barbara. Like that was 20 years ago. Yeah.

SPEAKER_273: And if you're young and you want to make movies, go make art. All right.

SPEAKER_31: Listen, that's Lon Harris, the amazing Lon Harris. Follow him twitter.com slash lawns, get inside.com slash streaming the newsletter.

SPEAKER_04: And, uh, you can always play stump the lawn. Just go to twitter.com and you, you, you type in, I love this film and this TV show. Or you could say, I love this, uh, album and I love this TV show. You can say, I love this album. I love this type of food and I love this movie. And he will tell you more of what you'll love.

SPEAKER_31: He's literally an algorithm.

SPEAKER_567: He's a cultural algorithm and a cultural treasure. Thank you, Lon Harris.