The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - The man behind the Sandwich (Interview)

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

Adam Lisagor (Sandwich Video founder) takes us behind the Sandwich to share his insights into the importance of storytelling in the tech industry, the value of helping Founders communicate their stories effectively, the details behind his new AI company, and the apps he's making for Apple Vision Pro at Sandwich Vision.

What's up friends, welcome back. This is The Change Log. We talk to the hackers, the leaders, and those who are innovating at the forefront of software. On today's show, Jared and I are talking to Adam Lissagor, Sandwich Video founder, and he's sharing some insights into the importance of storytelling in the tech industry, the value of helping founders communicate their stories effectively, the details behind his new AI company, and the very awesome apps he's making for Apple Vision Pro

at Sandwich Vision. A massive thank you to our friends and our partners at fly.io. On Fly, you can scale full stack without the cortisol. Over 3 million apps have launched on Fly, including us, and you can too it's all about push button deployments that scale learn more at fly.io all right let's do this

hey friends i'm here with a new friend of mine, Shane Harder, the founder of Cronitor. Check him out, cronitor.io. It lets you keep tabs on your Cron jobs, Linux, Kubernetes, Apache Airflow, Sidekick, and more. With over 12 open source integrations, you can instrument all your jobs no matter where you're running them. So, Shane, for me, I'm using Linux, and Linux cron jobs are by far the most popular in my opinion, right? But there's so many other cron like things, Kubernetes, Airflow, Sidekick. Help me understand the full spectrum of background jobs and cron jobs beyond Linux cron. Yeah, Linux cron jobs are massively popular.

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probably in a in a real world scenario you're running both side by side for a while you don't want to have different monitoring tools or different monitoring strategies for every different platform that you deploy. So our goal is anywhere you're running a background job, you can use Cronitor. The number one way that we ensured that was possible is by having like a really simple API that you can just use with an HTTP request yourself, which is pretty abnormal for monitoring tools,

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That's C-R-O-N-I-T-O-R.io. Again, Cron dot I-O. Well, we're joined by Adam Listegore with Sandwich. It's so cool, Adam, to see your face, but not inside of YouTube or inside of a real TV on broadcast television, as I've seen you on multiple commercials during your career. Welcome to the Change Log. Thank you so much for having me. It's really exciting. And yeah, I used to be, there was a few years period where I was on every TV and every gym

and sports bar as the true car guy. I looked a little different than I do now than how you're seeing me now, but that was how most people in my life kind of knew that I was still alive for a bit. That's how you keep in touch. Like, oh, you're still out there doing stuff. Yeah. Well, that's actually how I knew of you in the first place. I know of Sandwich, your company. Sandwich Video is a lot of technologists know in the tech world. That's how I knew of you. It was like, not so much the true car guy but this well-acted but also quite dry humor actor that was also the company owner and the producer and the director it's like how many things can you do so well you know oh i appreciate that it was very confusing time because i would some

like especially early on i would just get mistaken for the founder of whatever company I was shilling often, which could go really, really well. Yeah, that's pretty nice, actually. You know, it's going to go really, really well, or if it's like Square or Robinhood, but it can go really, really poorly if it's like the coin card that everybody paid money for and then just kind of the bed. Right. So it all started for you, I think it was around the time that the iPhone came out. I mean, at least from what I'm remembering and being like, what are these videos? Because there was an app and I think maybe you were part of this one or maybe you were just helping represent it, the one where you would write a tweet before you would tweet, something like this? That was actually my app. That was in before my video company was started. I thought I was going to be making apps. I thought I was just going to start. I was transitioning from my old life in the visual effects world as an editor and compositor

into my new life as a software developer. And I tried to learn Objective-C at the time. I read some books. The guy I was working on this stuff with also went from zero and he just like, he was young and smarter than me. So he took it up really quickly. I became the creative director and he became the engineer and it was a nice relationship. So it was where I kind of found my footing as a creative director for software, which is, you know, it's kind of found my footing as a creative director for software which is you know it's kind of an interesting concept that's what john gruber called himself when he made that app he made a note

taking app many years ago it was named after some sort of alcohol or drink or something yeah i want to say absinthe but that wasn't it it doesn't exist anymore does it it was like vespertine or something but i think it was called vesper vesper yeah that's it um but he called himself the creative director uh of that software and i and i think it's fitting you know i i'm of this mind right now that all all media is becoming tech and the lines between tech and media are very, very blurred. So it's actually a benefit. The benefit of people in both realms that we sort of can cross over into the other,

I think that as traditional media is sort of not thriving right now, my hope is that a lot of those people can sort of pick up the skills to operate in a tech context. Can you explain that? The tech aspect that you just shared, like give us a bit more to what you mean. Yeah. So my premise behind this or the thesis is that film production, getting a lot of people together, sometimes hundreds to shoot something and commit it to film, you know, film in the abstract and then put it together.

So it's entertaining and beautiful for an audience is one of the hardest things that you possibly do. And I think people outside our world don't necessarily know that it's like architecture, but in real time, you know, like a hundred high missionical decisions have to be made very quickly, and they're linear. So one thing can't happen until the last thing was done. And so you've got scores of people that are operating based on this sort of framework that has existed for decades or a century of hierarchy, position, process. And it's an API that you plug plug in if you are a second ac on a job you already come to it like even if you're day playing you come to it knowing exactly what a second ac does just like a function so you step in you plug yourself in you do the job you're

supposed to do without error because if you make an error, it screws everybody else up. And then you get through to the end of the day or the end of the project. And that is so hard and process intensive in ways that people don't necessarily appreciate. But the process of that is actually sort of sadly kind of diminishing. And the industry is diminishing a little bit right now. And so all these smart, talented people that have learned all these skills and all this process and do it with really high degree of accuracy, their skills are going to be needed. So I'm just kind of putting two and two together. I hope that a lot of them can find their way natively into the tech world

because I think there's opportunity there for them. Might be specious, I don't know. Certainly where the budgets have been, right? I mean, one of the things that I thought was really cool about your story was after the Birdhouse video blew up, I'm not sure if the app blew up, but the video was very popular. I think Jack Dorsey came along, hired you, some other people. Suddenly there was a point where a sandwich video almost seemed like it was compulsory or required to have a successful tech startup. I mean, it was probably on people's pitch decks. Like,

what are you gonna do with the money? It's like, well, sandwich video. And then we don't know what else. And that's congratulations on that. But that was like a thing for a while. And I mean, you earned it. The videos are spectacular. I just watched the Slack one from a while back just today. And I was like, very compelling. I mean, punchy, entertaining, funny, but also very well describes Slack's advantages over what everybody else was doing, which was email or Skype or just random stuff. And the budgets were there in tech for a long time.

Of course, things had started to change a little bit. Big tech still has the money. Small tech doesn't have quite as much money today as it did. But are you saying that this industry, like the film or that industry is diminishing? Is that budgetary? Is that interest? In which ways are it diminishing?

Are you hoping that tech brings the budget back to video? I don't know if that's necessarily going to happen until this wave sort of matures a little bit more. I think we're at the beginning of a new tech wave in sort of build mode where there aren't a lot of budgets or resources. So belts are tighter. I've been doing it for 15 years,

so I've watched the cycle kind of happen a few times. Towards the end of those cycles, budgets expand and you know it's we're flush with with resources to play with big toys right that's the that's when it gets boring actually in tech and it's most interesting right now when there aren't really resources and after having gone through the cycle a few times, I realized like where I want to be is in product. I want to be building. I don't want to be at the mercy of the industry over and over and over again at the mercy of capital. Yeah. But there's, there's a few things you identified. Yes. It was like, it was such a, it was a good place to be in early on when everybody wanted the thing, the asset, the

sandwich video. And I guess after having done it for so long, what I've realized is there's value. Most of the value is upfront at the conceptualization phase because most of what a startup can't figure out for themselves is how to tell the story. The filmmaking is execution. There's always going to be filmmakers around to help do that. And there are millions of them and they're great, but the value of helping out, helping frame the story is, is more scarce, regardless of whether I'm doing in a production filmmaking context or consulting or whatever, I can still be around to do that.

I really like doing it. I love sitting down with a founder and saying, what are you working on? And understanding it on a technical level and then translating that into the value for users. And that's kind of like why I'm doing it myself now for my own thing. There's a lot of value in that. It's taking complex things and making them simple in a way. It's like you've got this complex story and it's all about packaging and concepts, simplification in a lot of cases, condensing, compression,

more buzzwords, of course. But you're right. That's really the funnest part is it's the ability to help someone share their story in a way that really is compelling, that really does get attention, that really does not just simply tell their facts and tell their basic story, but the true essence of the story that matters most. And I think you've done a great job of being able to reproduce that again and again and again. I appreciate that. At the risk of putting all the, I guess, accolades and attention on simply you, how much of that was you and how much of that was

just your ability to also find the right people to help you with Sandwich? That's a great question. Well, the team is incredibly important, of course. And in our team, I've had some of the same people around for, I mean, the longest one has been with me for 13 years, but some of them, a couple people for a decade. And people tend to stick around because we're a machine that works well. And we've got all of our processes kind of like institutionalized and they're repeatable. So there's like a lot less waste than there used to be. And when there's less waste, it's just a more fun job to do. You know, that's just the way it works.

So the machine is going to keep running. The client base also makes it a good job to have. Again, because we've been in that position of being a scarce asset that a lot of people identified as valuable, we were in a position to self-select, to select our client base early on. And, you know, it's, I, I hoped it's just like, you want to take on the projects you want to work on. That's, that's just kind of how it is. It's like casting and I, you know, I'm always with the metaphors, but if you're making a movie, you want to cast the actors that are your partners that are going to represent the story.. Our products in the

videos that we make at Sandwich, the product is like an actor. It's like a character. So we need to be working with the best product in order to tell the best story. So some of it is out of necessity. If we get an inquiry from a company that's working on something that's not that interesting, and I see that it's going to be a slog to tell the story and then on the other side of it not actually provide that much value that's one that i probably would would have less motivation to participate in because your brand's in a line too right like your every video is a representation of what sandwich is create is a is capable of really and you know one off video or one thing that's like off brand is like,

well, that one didn't, that was not a sandwich video. I mean, I see all the right people in there. I see the right kind of coloring and framing and, you know, angles or whatever, but that wasn't, that wasn't a good story. Isn't that weird how that happens? I love that you said it too. Cause it definitely happens. You definitely happens you know all just look at like i don't know if you guys are arrested development fans but arrested development seasons four and five are the perfect example of that for whatever reason all of the elements all the same elements were there but it just didn't come together they couldn't capture it again yeah yeah almost intangible so many thoughts around that going back to the process and the streamlined

like the well-oiled machine of course everybody wants to work there but as a creative person there's something i would i want to say constrained about that but i guess maybe boring to a certain extent like when you're trying to create entertainment plus sales plus all the things right aren't formulas the worst mean, I'm sure at a certain point, you could tell us the formula for a compelling two minute thing, but isn't that boring? To be honest, no. And that's what keeps it fresh is there is no formula. If you asked me. What about the ingredients? Are there ingredients? Not really ingredients, but principles. I think there's a difference. Ingredients would be things

like make sure to have the actor stand in the center of the frame, make sure that they show the product within the first five seconds, that kind of thing. Those are ingredients. But principles are things like signal to the audience that you care about their time and respect their intelligence's a there's a big difference between those two things and there's tons of ways of doing that yeah yeah most smaller like video companies probably work with uh from a standpoint of ingredients more and we we operate sandwich as a creative product more like it's i don't know it's a framework, but nothing is repeatable. And that's, sorry, everything is repeatable, but nothing is formulaic or systematized in that way. So like, that's the most fun part of the job, actually. It's like, get on a new call, a new intro with a founder. And I say, tell me what you're working on.

And it's always going to be a new thing that I've never, and there's bits and pieces. I can always recombine from the past experiences of, oh, this reminds me of this plus this. Even today we were working on a script that was like, oh, this is like a combination of, we did something for an app called Broadcast News early on that was MSNBC did a news app,

this commercial. So it was like, Oh, this is like broadcast news mixed with mighty. And it was, you know, when you can call back from a portfolio of like 900 projects that you've done, then it's easy to start like bits and pieces of each as breadcrumbs, but they're not, they're not like intentionally like mixed and matched. It's just like, it happens. Yeah, organically. Yeah.

That must be challenging too. I've had many conversations with founders in many respects through podcasts, our ad spots include founders in a lot of cases, the way we produce our ad spots are very, I would say in the narrative realm versus like simply tell the facts and figures and hope they go and sign it's more like what is your story what hard problem you're trying to solve how are you actually helping

developers get along or get further or products be better but there's times that I'm a little let down by their ability to communicate their story. And it's really kind of sad whenever they just can't. And I'm like, wow, how are you so good at this? But then you can't tell your story or it's even still coming together. And it's like, well, I really just want to tell you you're premature. You should like go away and come back a few months from now because you're kind of wasting your money. How do you feel about that like whenever you get called into that you're maybe you're excited but that initial call with that founder it may be new and unique every time but you're met with to some degree some version of excitement or even disappointment yeah that's such a great question and i love the framing of

it and and in your context it makes so sense. I think for those founders that feel like they're not able to do that thing yet, they should either bring in somebody who can, or they should get a lot of coaching or something. They should just work with somebody who has a gift for storytelling so that they can start to get a feel for it, just like a dance lesson or something. Some people are definitely more natural at it, have the instinct for it. I feel like probably statistically more of the founders that I talk to, even the early stage ones, have that ability to tell the story a little bit better. Sometimes you can feel that it's been calcified. And this happens to anybody working on anything for a long

time is you just, you start going through the motions. Like it's by rote. You forget what the actual principles were that made that, that drive the story that feel the story. And you just start saying the story as a structure, which is bad. But like, I feel like they've all kind of cracked.

If they're working on something good, then the story kind of has a way of telling itself. Sometimes the story, it feels like it's the wrong story. And especially this happens with later stage companies where they've brought in a team to sort of build up the infrastructure for their brand story or their product story. And they've gone in a wrong direction. That sucks when that happens. When there's like 10 people on a call and they're all so invested on the story that they've spent six months and maybe a hired an agency to build up and it feels like it's the wrong story and then i step in from the outside some snot nose you know lone uh what

do you call it uh lone wolf kind of yeah hired gun and i say guys i don't think you know and i don't actually say it because we'll definitely lose the job but sometimes it's like making subtle suggestions you know like i hear you saying these words but to me this this creates a it creates a misdirect in my mind and now i'm misunderstanding the story that you're telling what if we do this and they'll sometimes they'll take the suggestion. It's very rare that they'll actually take it and institutionalize it and change their direction because they're so fully invested in what they want. Sunk cost.

Yeah, totally. Sunk cost. Exactly. I just had a conversation yesterday. Literally what you described just now happened to me. I had an amazing fire call. It was awesome. And then at the end, I'm like, that was amazing. Thank you so much for your time. That was just fantastic. However, your homepage and everything you say out there says none of what you just said. What you just said was amazing. If that is your story, then your homepage and your marketing and everything else that shares your brand and your initiative and your story and whatever is not communicating that like what's happening there and I just said to him I'm like if you don't figure out how to market yourself you're going to be the best less known thing out

there and I'm not going to say any names because I want to point them out but he was very receptive to it and it's not that they're so wrong or so off. It's just like, wow, that conversation was good. Everything you said was amazing, but that's missing in your real marketing, in your real story that you have out there elsewhere. And he's like, we're changing. And you kind of have to feel for them because they're on the right path, but it's iterative. We as software developers and software makers really believe in that phrase or that word iterative. It's like part of our core. But everyone else out in the world does not really understand, in my opinion, very well like we do. Like it's part of our DNA, this idea of iteration and the benefits of iteration.

Almost no one else gets that. That's so true. And you find that in the tech industry, you find it also in the media industry. And it's one of the principles that I try to reinforce in my own company, that we have to be iterative in a process that's traditionally not that iterative. Usually, everything is very process-oriented in film production production where you have to lock the script in order to move on to pre-production you have to lock all of the assets in pre-production or and then if you change anything along that flow you're really screwing people up you're you know

you might be wasting resources but then you've got another style of doing all this process which is very iterative and you've I mean, you can call out filmmaker names that do this incredibly well. And you can tell that they're almost like making it up on the spot based on what feels right, which is more of an, it's definitely an iterative style of doing any work. And often, what does that mean? It means like shorter feedbacks, like shorter loops, right? And more responsive response, responsiveness. And you're making decisions in the moment that are based on real time feedback to that moment, not decisions that were made three months ago. And that's the way to do great work, in my opinion. It's just that when you're, you're working with so many

resources, and as I said, in film production, mission critical, you know, we only have one truck full of props and it's only got a certain set of props in it. Therefore, we can't really make too much stuff up on the fly because, you know, our resources are limited. But there's kind of ways of doing both, I think. I mean, you guys would be able to speak better to like mapping the metaphor together to the tech world and development world. What are the decisions that you needed to have made three months ago that lead to a decision that needs to be made today

when you're building a product, for instance? Good question. So much in software is malleable. So there's so many things that you can back out of relatively easy. And now there may be like specific technology choices that you make. Data structures can come back to bite you later or cause you to make a different decision down the line. But man, we iterate a lot and we try to take small steps, you know, and so you're never making a one big leap. You're making

5,000 little steps. And so that's just flexible and awesome. And there are moments in time where maybe you actually go to production and like, now we have a version 1.0 and it's like there are certain things we're locked into until we break changes and move on to version 2. But for now we're locked into these particular decisions that we made. Of course, backwards compatibility is one of those things where it's like we are stuck to our past decisions. But until you go 1.0 or until you ship to the app store, it's so easy to iterate and change and just move on the fly because it's all just bits.

Yeah, that's true. And that can be a difficult thing about working with clients in tech is that they expect a post-production process to be closer to what a tech process is going to be which it's it's often not with post-production you're you can't undo a lot of decisions and so it's you can't be quite as iterative so we've got these founders that are maybe like technical founders and they have a new idea to throw out and they don't realize that that undoes the last week of work that we did on accident. Right. Or the video has already been uploaded to YouTube and they finally want to

make a change. And you're like, you actually can't, they won't let you re-upload. You have to delete it and upload a new one. YouTube. Oh, I know. oh i know hey friends i'm here with brian clark vp of product at neon you know we use neon we love

neon so brian you're both a fan and a listener of the show. So you kind of know what our shows are about, who we reach. And of those folks that listen to our podcasts, what do you think they need to know most about Neon? I think the thing I found in talking to developers is that they really don't understand database branches. Sometimes they'll say, is this expensive? Or is it slow? Or like, I don't really understand where it fits in. And so we're changing the face of it a bit to like, maybe focus less on branching, because that's the tool and more on like, maybe calling it database previews. So you can better see how it fits into your development environment.

The more people can understand, oh, I get it. Like, hey, any changes you make, they don't affect production. Like, this is a separate copy. The cost of those changes is only the difference between production and whatever changes you made. So if you deleted a bunch of things or added new data, things like that, you're only actually paying the difference because we use copy and write. So I think it's like these sets of things is what I have the team really focused on. Getting people to really grasp database preview environments. And then like, what's the advantage? And like, can I use it in my system?

And that's where I'm like, yeah, like you should be taking this system on. Like this will increase your confidence. It doesn't cost a lot. It's super fast. That idea isn't out there. And I think it's because it's not in most products. Most databases don't have this kind of integration. Okay. So a concern I've heard out there is why not just run Postgres local? Why database branching? Why preview branches? However you want to frame it. A serverless

managed in the cloud Postgres may be more latent or slower than a local copy. It may cost more. There's more storage. Debunk this. Help me understand the true cost, the true speed. Lay it on me. So in a pull request, like a preview environment, this system is fast.

So neon databases spin up in 500 milliseconds or less. You're not affecting the speed of your CICD system at all. The copy on write for our storage means that there's no actual operation. It's like a kind of a null operation. When we create a branch, you instantly have access to the production data,

but nothing has changed only until you start writing. Do we actually save the differences there? Yeah. You're not paying for extra, extra data. It's not like you're creating a fork and then you like allocate a whole other 200 gigabyte storage system and a whole other separate compute. We attach compute directly to the original storage. Yeah, those things are super fast and that's in the pull

request environment. For the most part on your desktop environment, your laptop environment, you won't notice a slowdown there. And you can do reset and things like that. So you can make a bunch of changes. You can use our CLI and do branch reset and it'll just reset with whatever the parent branch was. But I completely understand the need for people to want to have a purely local environment and I want to get there. So Neon is super fast.

Production managed serverless databases that are basically never idle. They wake up in less than 500 milliseconds. That's fast. It's managed. It scales. It branches. What else do you need?

Learn more at neon.tech. That's N-E-O-N dot tech. Neon dot tech. so have you ever gone down a path i mean you said 900 projects tons of successes i'm sure there's been failures along the way um nobody bats a thousand but anything in particular not the names but has there been times where where you've met with the founder, what are you working on, I'm excited. Things go down and then eventually they fall apart and nothing comes of it.

And then how far down that path have you been with people? That's a really great question. Yes, it happens. We have failures. We just had one in the last few months that I won't name, but it's a sad, it's a little bit of a sad story. It's a SaaS design platform that we all know. And they hired us to do a video and they kind of had in their mind what kind of video to do. So we executed on the highest level per that brief. And then we all kind of found out together,

having gone through the whole journey from start to finish, that maybe that wasn't the right brief to execute on. We should have probably rethought it differently from the start. And the end result of that is that nobody will ever see that work because it just didn't tell the right story for this company. And you didn't know till the very end. I mean, to be honest with you, I think the work turned out great. The customer didn't know to the very end. Yeah, literally I messaged the founder and said, when we delivered the final cut and I said,

thank you so much for bringing us on to this, I couldn't be more pleased with how it turned out. I was really excited for people to see it. And he said, yeah, it was a fun process. We learned so much from you. We're not going to be able to show this. We've decided to shelf it because it kind of says, it tells a story that the brand doesn't really want to be telling right now. Ouch. You know, and it happens. And the thing is that early on in my career, okay, this happened for Quora actually. One of my first 10 videos was a launch video for Quora. I had actually gotten in touch with them, with the founders and said, Hey, I'm this new hotshot in town. I make videos. Maybe you've heard of Square. Can I make you a video? And they said,

sure, I guess. Yeah, we have some funding. And then I made them the video and it was really a hard video to make. Turned out cool. And then they just like, you know, three weeks after sending it, they got back to me and said, yeah, we're not going to be using this, but thank you for your time. They paid for it. Whatever. It doesn't matter. When that kind of failure happens in your first, and you've only got 10 projects as a body of work, it really hurts.

It really, really stings. One out of 10. When it's one out of, you know of this many hundreds, it stings less. And we weren't at fault. Accountability is- Yeah, that makes it a little better, right? Yeah, a little bit. But yeah, there's failures. We all fail. What kind of checks do you have in place to potentially prevent that? It's a gut. And a lot of it comes from, I would say as the person who's mostly responsible for

the output of the company, I'm the one who has to be constantly checking in with the process and saying, is this going to be providing the most value to this company that's paid us to do the work? Is the audience going to receive this as we had intended? And if not, then how do we fix it? How do we adjust or iterate? And we do actually do quite a bit of that adjustment and iteration. It's very rare that there's a one-to-one through line between your original intention and the final result. Very rare. Sometimes it happens and it's a beautiful thing. It's especially so when you get to the end. Sometimes the process is the product in a way, you know, even for them, like these versions where they don't ship it, you know, they, like you said, I learned so much. Thank you so much. I'm curious

that they came back and hired you again when they got their stuff together, basically. But, you know, sometimes you can't help them until you go through the hard work. And sometimes it is telling the wrong story so that they can learn what the right story is. And hopefully they come back to you and say, hey, Adam, can you do that again, but with the right brief or the right story? Well, we've done that a few times, actually, and it's an incredible thing. But what you just encapsulated was so perfect about the difference between good client services and bad client services is the client services is part of the product that you're selling like whether the client believes that you went through a good process even if the result wasn't awesome and it's happened a few times where and i'll give you an example mix panel

they were already a huge platform when they came to us and they hired us. We did, it was during a time when I was overwhelmed by too many projects and stuff. So I couldn't dedicate my focus to everything. And I figured, oh, this is kind of like, you know, it's a very technical SaaS platform for developers, not necessarily something that I needed to devote all my creative attention to and the video the first version of the video that we made for it was absolute crap just like you would never believe that it was sandwich that made it it was and the director was this like very very talented feature filmmaker who's recently made a film like a horror film that a lot of

people saw and like he directed this thing. Cause like sometimes, you know, feature filmmakers do commercial work and it's fun for them. So the video turned out crap. And then the client said, this isn't great. We're not going to use it. But to his credit, Suhail, the founder came back and said so how can we do this again and make it good this time and we did and like we we came back and we made a better one like much better and with my you know i i was more focused on it turned out great we've worked with that founder multiple times since on his different companies we're working with them right now. It happened on QuizUp also. QuizUp was like a fun quiz app for iOS. The first video we made for them was super fun, delightful, but ultimately

not that good. It told the wrong story. They didn't love it. And they said, how can we do this again? And we did it again and it turned out great the second time. And that's just a matter of like that trust. I guess you've engendered that trust with your client for them to say, okay, it was good. We learned a lot. This is iterative. And now we're doing a version two instead. Yeah. I find that consensus as best you can get to it

is what establishes trust to some degree. Like, it's the baseline. Like, if you think you got their story and you just go in your own marching orders with no consensus on what those marching orders are and you create and it's wrong, not that they have to bless every emotion you take, but some version of a source of truth of what is the mission, what are we trying to actually accomplish? What is the goal? So that it's a shared consensus direction versus like, hey, we're the smart people. We're the creatives over here. Let us just do our work and leave us alone and just tell us what you need to. I find that personally, consensus is like my silver bullet to like not

failing. I mean, I can still fail story-wise or still fail in other ways, but I haven't failed the process of what the goal really is. Because if they're not involved, they also don't collaborate or can't collaborate. And then it's just you lone wolfing, like you said before, doing what you want. And that's not the point. The point is the collaboration. The point is getting out of them what they can give you so that you can distill and can create the concept and can repackage their story in a way that is truly interesting. Yeah, that's exactly right. It's visibility. Consensus is the perfect keyword. Visibility, transparency, and inclusion in the process. And luckily, the tech and the pipelines have the ability to give us that. We can collaborate in ways that we didn't used to be able to.

And like old school agency model was you step away for six weeks, and then you come and you do a big presentation in a boardroom, and they react in the room, and then you take their notes, and you go back for another six weeks. And that's just not sustainable at all. It's a bad way to work. And now we are in Slack channels with our clients on almost every job. We're always telling them, this is the process. This is the decision we just made. What do you think? Any input? And I love that way of working. I really do. It's scary though, right? Isn't it scary to be like that to be that vulnerable

and i mean i suppose if you've got the right kind of you know a risky i was thinking a little fear because like you've always got your creative heart on some version of a sleeve even if you don't take it personally because it's like you're kind of always just out there with the truth you know i mean which is fine except for like it just it puts you in the in the ability to say yes or no or that's not good i suppose that's good feedback but it's kind of scary it's to be that vulnerable it is it causes us to be more mindful about our reactions in real time though and i will i'm going to be lay it out on the line for you last week i had a bad day and i got testy with a client in the slack channel in a way that like I got so reactive to the input that it caused me to communicate badly.

And the next day I was writing apologies. And even having done this for so long and promised myself that I'm not going to let any of it get to me because it's just not worth it. It's just commercials. Who cares? But still on a bad day, if you catch me in the wrong place, I'm going to be like, I'm going to have a sharp bitey reaction to something and I'm going to communicate poorly. So I guess it's just like the takeaway here is just, if you're going to expose yourself in that way in a Slack channel and be always open for that feedback loop, you got to be mindful about the way you communicate in order to capture all the value from it. Let me give you one piece of advice then.

And this is something I tell myself and that's why I'm going to give it to you. Please. Is I learned from a friend of mine who's a clinical psychologist. She's a doctor in clinical psychology. And she taught me about this method called 10-10-10 and so if you're triggered or if you're hungry or if you just have some version you think you should react do your best to employ 10-10-10 it could be 10 seconds some way to put in time inject time that's why even in a unsafe scenario like a police officer pulling over somebody and they have a

reaction they're trying to buy time same thing is like, just buy yourself time so that your frontal lobe can catch up with your non-frontal lobe, basically. What is truly a rational way to respond here? It is just commercials. These are my principles. This is how I react to my clients. Does all this line up? Okay, no. Let me put in 10 seconds. Let me put in 10 minutes. Let me put in 10 hours, potentially. Some way to inject a buffer of time before your next reaction. Such a great lesson. I love it. I'm going to take it.

I think Daniel Tiger also teaches us that, doesn't he? Oh, yeah. If you're feeling mad and you're about to roar, take a deep breath and count to four. When you feel so mad and you want to roar, take a deep breath in. Count to four. Count to four. There you go. It's so great.

All this stuff comes from the book of Mr. Rogers, doesn't it? Exactly. He's so good. I had a lot figured out. I had a lot figured out. Well, another thing I wanted to ask you about, if you put your business hat or keep it on, I don't know if it's on yet or if you want to keep it on, is I read about in Wikipedia, so fact check this, that you've, in lieu of cash

payments, you've taken a lot of equity, rev shares, basically getting your skin in the game for a lot of these. First of all, is that true? It is very true, yeah. I thought it was, but I don't trust my sources all the time. Then my question is, looking back over the course of Sandwich for 15 years, however long it's been, has that been a big win for you? Has it been more of a headache than it's worth?

Have you lost money, made money? Would you do it? Do you still do it? What's your big picture takeaway on that as a concept? Yeah, I still love it as a concept. It's the thing that signaled to me early on that the way to build value and wealth ultimately is to participate in growth that way, not on a services for hire basis. You know, basically if you, if you want to get wealthy, own equity in something.

Right. Now, do you do this with the ones you really believe in? Is it the ones that don't have cash? Is it ad hoc? Is it everybody? How do you figure it out? No, certainly it's rare. And I try to identify the ones with the growth potential to participate in where they're not desperate to save the money and therefore we can only pay you in equity because usually... Only way they can afford it. Yeah. Yeah. It's really that striking that right balance of they're early enough that there's still room on their cap table, but they've got enough resources that they're not expecting a video for free.

So a good ratio is like 75% cash, 25% equity. And then basically I'm foregoing, I'm going a little bit out of pocket and I'm foregoing, I'm going a little bit of out of pocket and I'm foregoing all of our profit margin. Basically it can end up as a breakeven, close to a breakeven for me in terms of hard costs. And then if they do well, I have all that upside. So it was a model that proved out pretty early in small ways. And then there have been a couple that proved out in bigger ways. And it's the reason, to be honest, that I identified within the last few years that I want to be in a growth business. Owning a creative studio is not that.

Even if you get acquired, it's not a high growth acquisition. So I decided not just because of money, but I really like the idea of building something that scales. And I'm not scalable by myself as a creative director. My team isn't scalable. We could add 10 more people to the team and that's not the kind of scale that I'm talking about. But software is scalable, as we all know. So it makes sense if you want to be A, scalable, and then B, 100% bought into the idea versus having a founder, you're a proxy for the founder

in many of these cases. You can make your own damn videos for your own damn products. So what are you working on then? i know we want to talk about your vision projects you have some ai stuff going on like what's exciting you right now well thank you i mean i'm really flattered that you asked and that you're interested and then i'm even here really um so what am i working on the startup that i've been building with my co-founder beamer wilkins for last year who was a listener of your show. What up, Beamer?

Hello, Beamer. So that's an AI startup. It's a productivity platform. It's based on the premise that a lot of people don't use AI because they don't think it's useful to them. the tool set that I use in AI, which is a very, you know, sort of carefully curated tool set and a very manual set of processes have 10 X to my capacity in a hundred different ways for, you know, increasing my interesting thought, my learning, my productivity. So like we've built up this framework that's based on the way that I work with these tools so that they can be accessible to a lot of people. Because I want everybody in my life to be using a very cool, comfortable, easy tool that makes provides resource to people that they otherwise don't have. And that resource

can be interpreted in a million different ways. Whatever that means to you, whether it's an ear to listen to you, a research assistant, a thought partner, like I said, a coach. I mean, those are all four of the main pillars on the spectrum from soft skills to like friend to hard skills, like data, that resource is something that's going to make us feel a little bit safer in the world, a little bit more protected, have a stronger foundation and whatever that resource means to the user. If that translates to them feeling even like a modicum more safe and grounded in this world than they otherwise would then the net gain for society is massive that's my that's my whole theory so i knew we set out to when i started the whole project a year ago we set out to sort

of improve processes at my own studio. So like work was easier for us to do at Sandwich. And then quickly realized, oh, these processes aren't just specific to a creative studio. These are processes that are for doing any kind of work on a personal to business spectrum. So we started building up product in that way. And that's when it got really exciting for me to like, think, wait a second, this is an easy way for anybody to kind of use this framework as a method of feeling more useful in the world. Yeah. It just, it makes me feel good. So I want others to feel good too. And what's it called? Is there a domain? Can we look at it yet? Is it, is there a video? Sure. This is the first time I've ever said the name out loud.

But it's called Useful. So I won't share a domain yet, but... Useful.ai? No. We're going to go guessing every TLD. Yeah, no, of course. I'll see what's up.

Useful. I like that. One word, two syllables. It says what it is. You know what? It's up. I'll see what's up on the... Useful. I like that. Yeah. One word, two syllables. It says what it is. You know what? It's useful.computer. The company is called Useful Computer, so that's where the domain is going to be. It's a bad landing page right now.

That's supposed to be... The Beamer is supposed to be updating today. He said he was going to do it after lunch, but we do have a very strong... Get to after lunch but we do have uh one week from this okay good i'll tell him that it's good to have a deadline there you go yeah we're doing we're out there about to pitch for our seed round okay so how does this this feel good manifest i mean what does it look like what's it gonna look like or yeah the product you're speaking about yeah you're speaking about ideas and principles which i all sound great making everybody a little bit more

productive a little bit you know more empowered all this what does it actually manifest as yeah a productivity tool for letting you capture your context and okay help it guide you guide you into productive action and insight stuff like that It's hard to describe something like this without using words. Yeah. Yeah. Hard to describe lots of things without words. Yeah, no, like the words are always so distracting

because every word just touches off some association in the listener's brain that steers them in a potentially different direction. Or just words sound crude. You know, the words sound like startup fluff right you have to define the product though that's the thing that i've learned is you can't just talk in abstractions so you actually have to say what the thing is but yeah like happy to share a demo with you as soon as we're out there it would be really exciting for me too actually that'd be fun well the number one threat to action is blank page, obviously, right?

Or just feeling intimidated, overwhelmed, inadequate, all the adjectives that sort of describe that feeling. Is that sort of the crux of what you begin with is like, hey, let me just take whatever that context is. Could be a document, could be whatever. And just kind of give you some waypoints to what a good next action might be is that where you're landing at 100 000 what you just said oh my gosh okay i love that because i feel like that's what i love most about what at least textual generative ai has given to the world in the last year and a half has has kind of removed actually I would say it's

manufactured confidence. And confidence is memory of past success. So you don't always have memory of past success unless you have experience. But if you got a buddy, like you said, or a friend, or a coach, or someone who believes in you when you can't believe in yourself, that's what a lot of people really need. And defining something that does that kind of thing, I think ChantGPT does that, but maybe not in its literal being. It provides that, but it's not the only way you can get to that, I guess. So if you're building a version of that that is laser-focused on that confidence builder,

which unlocks so much. There's so many people who don't do anything because they feel scared, inadequate, alone even. Whereas if you just had a buddy, even if it was the wrong direction, like your past videos that may have failed, they didn't land on the story. Well, hey, it at least gave us food for thought

for the next time. And there will be a next time. That's right. And yeah, a lot of people's first experiences and or the informing experiences of AI is that they input something, it reflected something inaccurate back to them. And that that signaled a total lack of confidence

rather than the opposite. It didn't reflect anything strong or true back to them. And so they said, oh, this isn't good. No, thank you. Bail. Yeah. Yeah. And they bail. And the thing about these tools is that the more context you give it, the better reflection it's going to give back to you. And the models are very, very good at organizing information and reflecting it back in an accurate way. It's a cliche, but good in, good out, of course. But just none of the tools are set up to be all of that rich in context yet

for users. And so, yeah, that blank page problem is a huge barrier for most people. They don't even know what to ask necessarily. And this is not just a failure of people's intelligence or imagination. This is a failure of the tools. I've seen some of the smartest people that I know completely clueless as to what to do when they sit in front of an LLM. Yeah. Well, it was the first, I guess, wave of, I don't know how to describe it, but prompt engineering. And I feel like what you can do with Useful is engineer the prompt so that the user doesn't have to be so smart or so contextually accurate. The interface to the LLM and how to ask the question or how to prompt the thing to give it back, the reflection.

I think reflection is kind of a cool name, too ever useful that doesn't work for you i think reflection could be kind of cool too yeah reflection is great yeah i love that idea yeah of the of the mirror back to you um it the llm sort of tells the story back to you that it's understanding and that can be the thing that self-perpetuates that can be the confidence builder or your buddy, as you said. The buddy, you know, we all know that the best buddies are the hype people in our lives are the ones that say, this is what I see in you. I see the best in you and I'm going to tell you about it. And then you're like, yeah, you know what?

Yeah. Yeah, that sounds right. That's me. And then, but the saddest thing is that a lot of people don't have that. A lot of people don't have that, but they have friends, of course, but the friends are not reflecting back at them in that way

because maybe it's just not part of the relationship. When you don't have that, you start to believe that it doesn't exist. And that really sucks. The challenge with some friends too is when you start to be successful, they have envy or jealousy and they hold you back because you're progressing and they're not progressing or they're progressing less fast. And so they don't give you what you really should get from a friend and they can't give it to you because of humanity, really. It's not even their fault necessarily. It's just, we're humans. It's interesting how people treat that situation. I think a lot of people just make the assumption that you don't need to hear it. Like,

oh, you know you're successful. Therefore, why would I need to tell you? Why would I need to reinforce it or reflect it back to you? When the truth is, even successful people need that reinforcement. One of my love languages, I don't know if I've ever said this on air, Jared, I don't know, is words of affirmation. I don't like to be praised necessarily, but it sure is nice to hear from the people that I trust, that are in my inner circle, that see my hard work, especially in most cases as distributed workers who don't have that real-time feedback from people. So for me, my love language, if you want to love me well, words of affirmation. Well, that's great. Two things. Number one, I think AI or LLMs are pretty suited to doing what you describe. That's a strange thing though, right? Isn't that a strange thing though to be loved by an LLM? Does it feel the same coming from a computer?

Well, if you're trusting that it's a reflection of you and not just the product of software. And this is a really interesting intellectual framing of what the technology is. The second thing I was going to say, Adam, is that you're really good at this. You're a really good

interviewer. I'm really enjoying this conversation. Jared, you too. Well, thank you. Like, you guys make a great show. I'm just like here as an active partner in the conversation. I'm having a really great time. So like, that's like, I'm reflecting that back at you guys because it's worth saying. Well, thank you for giving me words of affirmation, Adam.

I thank you so much for that. Those are very good words of affirmation adam i think i thank you so much for that that are very good words of affirmation you got it while we're here on that you're an amazing interviewee well let's find out this is love language first is this something that you love is it yeah do you like words of affirmation oh i love it so much but i've i've steeled myself i've steeled myself to not needing it like as as as much as i can because you don't want that to be the thing that's blocking you from moving forward or being successful. But yeah, I still need it.

Oh my God. Gosh. Well, when you're in that moment and you can't take action, the best thing you could do is take some action, right? If you're scared or you're fearful, take one small step towards the right direction and you got at least one good next step.

Now, I think your story is super cool. I'm like geeked out early on because i knew you from the true car commercials and you've done such a great job it's kind of weird and fascinating to meet somebody that i've seen like jared said on a tv you know on broadcast tv not just simply youtube which is cool too and i think you got a cool story I'm super interested in how you go from like creative director to software developer to, you know, to this next thing, which is like founding a company around AI and you're all in on it.

And I think you have some really good ideas because you're in that creative world to unblock people and everybody needs some version of getting unstuck, getting unblocked and everybody's different, but mainly you just need a buddy. I believe everybody needs a good buddy. Yes. And I've been in a fortunate position that I've built up this studio where I have people working for me that I trust. Most people don't have that. So most people don't even know the idea of having one person that's there doing a job, and their job is to reinforce you and increase your capacity. So it was already like modeled for me what the feeling is of having a multiplier of yourself. So that's why it kind

of came naturally to me. An employee is an agent in AI nomenclature, right? They are somebody who are going to take actions on your behalf that you would have otherwise taken yourself. And the goal here, I think, with this product is to give others the experience that I've had of a team of experts that you trust to act on your behalf, given all of the context that you provide. Well, I would love to dive a bit more into the details. It seems like it's a bit pre-product now. We're early.

Yeah, it's pre-product. It's MVP right now. Part of our pitch process is going to be going out and showing it because we have something to show but it's like yeah it's rough and dirty you know so but it's really fun i mean like we've had multiple uh times beamer and i when we've been and we've got another engineer in japan that's working with us we've had multiple times where we just like, we build something in, we watch it happen. It feels like magic. And then we're like, yes, let's keep going. You know, it's those kinds of experiences that you're looking for. So at what phase do you hire yourself to create a video?

Pretty early on. I mean, it's, that's one of the things I'm most excited about doing. That's going to be your best video ever, isn't it? It might, it might it? It might be. It might be the most impactful. I would think so. You got the most into it. You know it the best. You can tell the story better than anybody because you are the story.

It's your story. Yeah, it could be. That's exciting. It'll be fun. Sometimes you're too close, though. Ooh. Right? Yes.

Sometimes you're too close to the story to see the true essence of the story. True. You get all the feels and the hards and the bloody knuckles because you've been in the trenches on your own thing. But sometimes it's hard to see. I don't know. It'd be interesting to see how this plays out for you. Yeah, but the process is like you described earlier. You have checkpoints along the way. You sort of check yourself.

You have others check you. Does this feel right does this make sense to you and you're right hey friends i'm here with brandon foo co-founder and ceo of paragon paragon let's b2b sass companies ship native integrations to production in days with more than 130 pre-built connectors or configure own custom integrations. So Brandon, one of the challenges for engineering is obviously the backlog and prioritizing time for certain features or integrations. But then there's this other side where you got to really learn every single API and everything is hand rolled, custom, maintained. And over time, that kind of gets,

I got to imagine kind of taxing on teams. What do you think? So most engineers know that, you know, every API is completely different, can be completely different in terms of how they handle authentication, in terms of how they deal with different record types. And so it becomes this problem for engineering teams to basically have to become experts in other people's APIs and what could be dozens or hundreds of different APIs. And to build those integrations we've seen can take as much as three to six months per integration for a developer to write the code to build that integration. And it depends on the use case, of course, and the type of product that you're integrating with. But of course, that becomes a massive challenge at scale

when you're looking at how do we scale our product to support 10 or 20 or 50 different integrations. Paragon was really designed to solve that problem and to distill the complexities and the nuances and the differences between hundreds of different SaaS apps into a single connecting platform, into a single SDK that your engineers can install in your app, and then easily connect your products

to all these different SaaS applications in the market. Okay. Paragon is built for product management. It's built for engineering. It's built for everybody. Ship hundreds of native integrations into your SaaS application in days. Or build your own custom connector with any API. Learn more at useparagon.com slash changelog. That's U-S-E-P-A-R-G-O-N dot com slash changelog. Well, Intel Innovation 2024 Accelerate the Future is right around the corner. It takes place September 24th and 25th in San Jose, California. This event is all about you, the developer, the community,

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Well, here's a question and yes, this is a segue. Will this video be shot in 3D with spatial audio? It should be. I mean, I have to to combine i have to bring all the threads together i mean this is this is cool stuff you're doing despite what i would say a small market you know we uh when justin searles was on the show talking to us about his apple vision pro life i jokingly referred to him and the 11 other people who own one and that was an understatement, but not by much. It turns out they've sold 100,000-ish units. Of course, it's very expensive. So not meant to be, I don't think, for the masses at this point.

Clearly, Apple wanted to get something out there. But exciting nonetheless. And you're on the bleeding edge of it with, what's it called, Sandwich Theater? Sandwich Vision? Sandwich Vision is the company, but the products that we've launched are television first and theater second. Television and theater. And so what are the two products then? Television is literally like a selection of theaters that you can choose from, put in your space, and watch your videos or YouTube

on them. If you go to sandwich.vision, that's where those apps are to be found. Theater is a more immersive experience. I think of them as television being outside the box and theater being inside the box. It comes from the premise that the most compelling use case for the Vision Pro so far is those entertainment experiences. That's where a lot of value seems to be right now and not like productivity and things like that. Although putting the Mac virtual display in your space and working in it all day is great because you have a huge screen and it's just about to get bigger with Vision OS 2. But the experiences that people have responded to the most, the experiences that seem to prove out the case for the product case for on that mission which is doing the same thing that a television does but putting you in a theater but we realized when we shoot john gruber's talk

show live in san jose every year during wwdc we realized though we're going to do that again this year what's an interesting way to do that you know in a new way oh let's shoot it in stereo let's shoot it like with spatial video type thing i wonder if we could do that and present it real time in the vision pro oh yeah we're building an app that puts people in a theater in the vision pro we're shooting this thing in a theater why don't we combine those and present people with the live event, the talk show with Apple SVPs, Federighi and Josviak and the AI guy, JG. Why don't we bring them together, put them in the audience or put the user in the audience in our theater and have them experience it in real time while the real audience does. So we fired on all cylinders for a couple of months,

making sure that experience was going to be good for people. And then on the day we made it happen and it was one of the most thrilling two hours of my life. I sat there to the side of the stage at the California theater with my vision pro on experiencing the whole show from the audience perspective instead of theater app. Yeah. From the theater app. Yeah, from the theater app. And it was just like- That's crazy. It was a wonderful proof of concept that I realized there's an opportunity in here to keep building on this premise.

That might actually be the killer app that makes me buy one of these things. Adam finally wants one. I'm thinking about this because, so my biggest issue with going to the theater, especially when you have popular movies and you're going during a popular time, is getting the right seat.

And I'm all about the right row and the right seat. Okay? 100%. If I can't get the right row and the right seat, I'm going to skip that time

and go when I can get the right row and the right seat. Even if it's inconvenient. I agree. Same. And I'm just thinking like with this, you can always and the right seat, even if it's inconvenient. I agreed, same. And I'm just thinking like with this, you can always have the best seat because you can kind of choose-

Where you're sitting. Which seat you want to even be in. And maybe I want to attend a concert with folks. That's right. The ability to experience things live or seemingly live is now possible because of this. And I hadn't really thought about that. And even the TV thing is super cool too,

like taking YouTube or I don't know, whatever else you can put on it, like put that on an old school TV. That's kind of cool. It's kind of cliche after a bit, maybe it gets old. It's fun as like a shtick for a bit. Well, I think it's also getting YouTube in there

because Apple didn't just put YouTube in there. It seems like a gap in there overall. Is that what it is? I mean, it's not just YouTube. Well, the demos in the App Store show YouTube. That's why I use that. Well, our app is just YouTube or your own library videos. But yeah, the only platform

that we integrate at this point is YouTube. And even just getting YouTube working was pretty hard. It's a web view. YouTube offers up the APIs to do this for developers because it's in web view and like youtube offers up the the apis to do this for developers because it's in their best interest and the other platforms are way more closed sure this reminds me a bit and i'm going to ask you about the the technical process if you know much about it to capture the theater to make it 3d able i don't know make it visionable because i'm

thinking about tell me if you've seen this movie. It's Gran Turismo. If you miss a line in the game, you reset. You miss it on the track, you could die. It seems like you probably shouldn't see it, but it's a really good movie. And the game- Is it based off a video game? Yeah, it's a movie. It's new.

It's 2024 kind of a movie. Okay, it's a racing game. It's a racing game, and it's a movie after the – it's about the game. Gotcha. And so Gran Turismo, the way the game came about was to be as close to a video game simulator of real car racing. And the way that they photographed or, I don't know, they you know laser grid to capture all the cars and the sound like this is I'm assuming what you've done Adam which is like you've gone into the immersive details as a creative director to say how can we truly capture the essence not just

what we think is the essence of this theater but truly the essence the feel of the the seats which you can't feel in Vision Pro yet smell of of the popcorn. Yeah, I mean, there's some stuff in there, you know? Maybe you ship somebody an envelope that has some smells. I don't know. Whatever. But you've probably done something to capture the realness. Maybe there's somebody kicking your chair behind you while you're in there. Yeah, even just last night.

So the environment that we're releasing next is called the Eagle Theater. The best movie theater in LA is called the Eagle. It's the Vidiot's Eagle Theater in my neighborhood, which is in Eagle Rock. Vidiot's is this cultural institution that's been around since 1985 in LA. It was a video store. And then they had to shut down because nobody wanted to rent videos anymore. But it's still got this cultural status and so much support. So they decided to open up a movie theater and they built,

they spent a lot of years. They built up a movie theater. It's a beautiful movie theater. They play old films. They play some new films and it's just always such a joy to go and sit in the audience at these things. I went and saw, I took my 11 year old son to the running man last night,

the 1987 version. Oh, yeah. It was so fun. I haven't seen that for a long time. Right? And I don't think I saw it. It was a slumber party movie when I was a kid. Yeah, totally.

I never saw it in an audience. But to experience that in an audience in 2024, it's an entirely different reaction. You get that the psychological phenomenon behind it is called collective effervescence. And you can sort of imagine what that phrase means. Yeah. It's that feeling of sitting in a big, like let's say amphitheater or concert hall and the music is stupendous and it

builds to a climax and then the audience roars and you start to get these tingles in your head, right? It's like you're, it's, it's an energy that's almost palpable. You can almost feel it physically. And it's the psychological phenomenon

that was identified probably a century ago called collective effervescence, maybe in the 40s or 50s. Also known as vibes. Vibes, totally, right? It's vibes. Yes. It is vibes.

And when you're in an audience, you pick up on the vibes that you're not just getting you're getting different vibes if you watch something at home by yourself or right if you're sitting in the wrong seat in a movie theater the vibes are super off right and that happens to me always adam like we take our kids to see kids movies and i don't ever get to see grown grown up movies anymore but if the vibes are off like it feels like the experience of the movie is ruined for me in some way

every single time I go you know like it's just somebody talking too loud or like somebody sneezing a lot you know all these things you're sitting in the wrong seat and such a high rate of failure that it's almost like I'm just not even going to try anymore because like 8 or 9 times out of 10 somebody ruins it right exactly and so it sucks the software and hardware

now exists to make that experience way more controllable still get the collective effervescence really get to immerse yourself in the in the thing that you want to watch and provide value to you and that's value that i think a lot of people are going to be willing to pay for. Especially as the, you know, 18 months out when the consumer version of the vision comes to market is more affordable, there will be a market there for a lot more people to want these experiences. I have a free feature for you. I'm going to give it to you. You don't have to pay me. And if you've already built it, you owe me money. Because you've stolen it from my brain somehow.

It is the next logical step, though, honestly. Is a buddy pass. You can call it buddy pass. I'm going to give that to you. And it's where Jared and I can attend this thing and sit next to each other. Oh, yeah. You know, like the collective effervescence or the vibes are only as good as they can be. Because you still have the software and the hardware.

And you kind of still potentially are alone. It's a siloed solo experience for the most part to be in a Vision Pro or in this immersive experience. So, add a buddy. A buddy pass. Yeah. Absolutely. And it's, I mean. Is that a feature you have yet? Yeah, it's called SharePlay.

Apple sort of has this API called SharePlay where they allow you to share. I know. And that works already with it or can work with it? It works, yeah. It works in, the implementation in theater is a little weird. The first time that me and my two development partners turned on SharePlay in the theater

app, we all ended up behind the back row and we were like kind of looking at the screen between the cracks and none of us could figure out how to move ourselves. So that was like a funny, weird, brain-breaking experience. The television implementation of SharePlay is really solid. Of course, now they updated the OS and everything breaks every time there's an OS update.

But yeah, SharePlay is the proof of that concept for sure, where you and your buddy can watch the same thing in sync and feel presence with each other. That's awesome. Apple. Touche. No, you said, Adam, if he already has the feature he has to give you money. thing in sync and like feel presence with each other that's awesome all right apple touche no you said adam you said if he already has the feature you have to he has to give you money that's true this is the best outcome you can possibly imagine okay well what's your venmo

so uh adam alluded to it earlier but did you have to use special capture equipment in order to recreate the theater the the talk show? How did you do that? Was it just two cameras or was it 17 cameras or how did that all work? No, exactly. No, it was two cameras left and right. Yeah, so obviously the iPhone 15 Pro, it lets you capture spatial video, so left and right, side by side, or it's just stereoscopic.

There's not a good, easy way to get that video stream out. So you can do things with it, like stream it. So what we ended up doing in order to try to get the highest quality experience is we used these two like Panasonic Lumix cameras, camera bodies or 4K cameras with prime lenses on them, 17 millimeter prime lenses on each and then like a very very meticulous calibration process to align them because alignment is everything in stare in stereo if it's off then people can feel queasy it doesn't feel real the elements pop out and converge in a wrong in a in an incorrect way so we it actually took a

couple of hours on site to calibrate the cameras and lenses together uh in a very clean way and we even there were apple folks there that were kind of guiding us too like there were a couple of experts on the spatial team from apple that's because they really wanted this to go well for us as you you know because it was for sure you know it's cool show off their tech if it works then yeah it's their tech exactly so they were there being very very helpful dave and vedant shout out and yeah it went great and the only thing the only failure point was the bandwidth out of the theater which we had even paid for more bandwidth but the bandwidth was so constrained that there were like skipped frames in

the, in the stream, which totally sucks. The sound was perfect. And there was this weird, it was like an insight that if the sound is perfectly fluid and present and immersive, you can get away with imperfections in the picture.

That's interesting. Yeah. So like we learned so much. It was the first, it was the first go. It was like a high wire act without a net because it was in front of a lot of people. But I figured what better way to launch this thing than, you know, get it in front of a lot of people and try to pull something off that was like really compelling. Yeah. Kind of step out on a limb sometimes you know see what happens you do and then you have the best couple hours of like the most risky but also like the most memorable couple hours of your recent life right like that was very exciting for you it was thrilling the next time and then and then we're just going to keep learning more and more and iterating the next time is the next thing

we're doing is next week a friend of mine is an artistic director at a local theater company like they do you know live theater which like nobody goes and sees life live theater but when i thought about it oh this is the perfect next proof of concept like try to even make it more immersive so replicate the experience that we already did with Gruber's show, do it in a different context of the content, and try to improve on the technicals of the experience. So that's way lower stakes. Nobody's going to see that.

I'll announce it on my Twitter, but if five people watch it, it'll be a triumphant success. Well, this has got me voting for the vision pro to become more successful because i feel like if potentially when it reaches some version of critical ish mass because given a hundred thousand of sales with apple scale is not compelling the prize is compelling but i'm thinking like football both versions like literal american football and also soccer football you know i'm thinking there's like so much people

who want to experience something from far away and the best version they have is a bar with a tv and maybe that's kind of cool too and i I totally get that, but maybe another version or at least one more alternative could be a more realistic, immersive version that this can provide. So I'm kind of long on this cause I think that's cool. And not everybody can afford nor want to be literally geographically in the place. Cause like everything about time is time and space,

right? Space time. It's where are you at and when are you at? And they can't always align perfectly. And this is the next best augmenter to that. That's exactly right. And it's funny because the key word is access. So for some people, access means spending the $4,000 on the Vision Pro.

For other people, access means you actually have a movie theater in your town and that kind of access is being shut off more and more movie theaters are sort of dying you know they're going away it's a shame too because it's political in a way too it's not just the movie theaters like it's also the you know hollywood in the way that they are very political with their access to their movies yep there's a of stuff, which I'm sure you're familiar with that stuff. Oh, absolutely. The industry is just evolving in such an interesting way. And I think, hopefully, there's this interesting alignment of motivation or incentives overlapping from the movie industry to the tech industry that gives access to these experiences so they don't go away forever.

Maybe hypothesizing on the business model a little bit, and maybe this is not so much the application, but maybe to the access part. Maybe you can boost some of their sales by buying a bunch and renting them. Would somebody rent the same way they would do a ticket? Can't be there. Send me the Vision Pro.

There's a kit that comes to my house on time and all you gotta do is ship it back you know you're leveraging the existing shipping systems that are there you send them a vision pro they already have it queued up whatever it is the account's already there however they just like they just put it on which may not actually be possible maybe they can link a version of buying the ticket. They can buy a ticket, and part of the ticket sale is renting the Vision Pro. And you get ROI because at some point, you cash flow positive on that thing.

Yeah, I don't know. It's a little bit like renting the VCR from the video store because you don't have one at home, right? But it's very immersive. No, I mean, in a good way. I don't know that the infrastructure would be there for Apple to be able to do this or for anybody to do this because it's such an expensive device.

And so, you know, you probably haven't had the experience of going into an Apple store, doing the demo and being walked through it. Not yet. But it's not like buying an Apple Watch. It's like pretty intense, like in terms of curating it for you as a specific user. I think it'll be more possible in the future with future hardware, what you described.

I just found out today that Apple Business is doing leasing programs for the Vision Pro, which is good. That opens up access probably a little bit more. It changes it from a CapEx to, you know, Expensible, essentially, which is cool. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, let's all hope for a better next version that isn't so personalized that you can rent them, because that'd be kind of cool.

I mean, I'm just thinking about it. I would consider, for the right event, being a subscriber or buying a ticket. You know, if I can't spend the two grand to go to a specific amphitheater in a different town, nor take the time for the travel, like any trip takes you several days on the flight, the flight, you got somebody leaning on you, you got a hotel expense, all these different things, and for the right thing, you're going to do it. But if the next best version of it, which is increasingly better and better as the hardware and software merge to enable it, I think there's an opportunity here that timing may not be perfect, but the thing is eventually perfect.

Yeah, and you want to sort of start building early there so that as the market matures, you can be ready. Yeah, I like it. so that as the market matures, you can be ready. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I like it. There's a production side to it as well that could potentially be interesting. So you mentioned this theater putting on a play. Well, there's lots of plays all around the world that aren't going to be accessible to anybody unless you're local to that particular theater house, right? So, of course, Broadway is the big one where it's like Hamilton.

They could produce their 3D spatial version of Hamilton and you could buy it through the theater app for instance but you could do that for like so many things all around the world not just plays that aren't typically monetized video but now all of a sudden you have access to a cool play that's going on in you know Pakistan or something that you could watch with subtitles in 3d and i'm just like there's lots of opportunities of course those are big dreams but i don't know no i love that idea of like foreign theater with translation right there immersively in real yeah like you're and you're in the theater there like you've i'd never go to a theater there but just because of time and place and money. But if I could be in the theater,

maybe it's the most popular theater in this particular city, and everybody goes there. But you need translation, of course, to be able to understand what's going on. So huge opportunities for bringing people all around the world. I'd even say sought-after venues.

Oh, sure, sure. Forgive my naivete, but is Fenway Park still a thing? Didn't the big green wall go away? The Boston? Not that I know of. I don't track MLB super close, but I'm pretty sure Fenway is still there. I know that the Chicago Cubs, their stadium was renewed.

So you've got these older stadiums that maybe you can somehow recreate, even if they're not in the real. There's some nostalgia there where you can experience something in a place that literally is not possible anymore. To me, that's kind of like where you're hunting. That's where you're going. How are you going to get video of a place that doesn't exist anymore? Are you going to stitch together old artifacts? I'm sure there's a way. I mean, Titanic's a movie because they explored under the water.

James Cameron is amazing. I just, honestly, I just rewatched Titanic. Don't laugh at me. It's a good movie. My wife was like, why in the world are you watching Titanic? I'm like, because it is the feats of nature, literally, that had to be accomplished financially as well as deep sea. To produce it. It was just like, wow.

To create this movie. So cool. Yeah, I mean, I think you can recreate a lot from archival materials we rebuilt the vidiot's theater just based on photogrammetry scanning it yeah it pictures and video that i took and i think that can the thing can be done that that kind of process can be done and i I think in 10 years, I was thinking of this the other day as we were driving through LA. And I was thinking at some point, 10 years from now, the technology will exist that the whole world can be recreated from archival materials. And I will know what it's like to drive through that same city in the 1940s or something like that.

Like, I just think that that will be possible and it will be computationally insignificant at that point. But culturally very significant. Yes. No, that's awesome. I mean, a lot of my wife's and my favorite shows and movies are just period pieces, not because of the story or the actors, but because of the period. And just like somebody went through so much work

to reproduce the 50s or the 30s or 1776 or whatever the time period is that you didn't get to live during. And who knows exactly how accurate they portrayed it, but some version of it is played out in front of you, and it's just fascinating to behold. So to behold that in 3D where you could actually walk around in it would be spectacular.

Something that comes to mind on that is Tombstone, super popular. The Marvelous Miss Maisel. Phenomenal acting, but at the same time just compelling, gone back in time to like old school New York. So cool. Right. There's some films and shows that, and that's a show.

Gangs of New York. Now you just mentioned New York. Now we're just going to start listing movies. Gangs of New York is a great one. Was that from 1999, Jared? Was that 99? No,

I don't think so. Maybe. Yeah. Pretty cool. Is this, is this the theory about 1999? This just is that 1999 was probably the best year in film history. The Matrix, right?

Yeah. So many. The list is, it's 30 or 40 deep. And you get 30 into it and you're like, that is a good movie. It's crazy. Still so many good films from that era, that year, that I just was thrown back to that show, that episode, because that was cool.

Yeah, we did a show where we just basically went through all the movies together, and it just wowed Adam how many there were, because they just kept coming. Well, thanks to the LLM and not hallucinating. Our little buddy. My good old buddy. That was useful. Yeah, that's great.

What else? I mean, I feel like we're almost more hyped about your theater app than you may be. Either your energy's gotten lower because the podcast is long or we're more hyped than you are or you're just like benign to the possibility. No, I'm super hyped.

I'm super hyped about it. We're your hype guys here, Adam. Yeah, no, I appreciate it. This is awesome. This thing you built is amazing. We haven't even experienced it, but we're just excited for you. I'm going to send the link out to people just to get them excited.

They linked to this episode just to get people excited about it. No, I'm so excited to build on both of these fronts. Now is such an interesting time to build. When I started my company, two conditions were in place. The iPhone had just recently come out and the SDK was newly available to developers to build for. And Web 2.0 was coming to fruition. The social web was coming alive. The web was becoming more reactive and interactive. and of course we know that both of those things turned into trillions dollar business opportunities but also it was just interesting for as a technologist to be present for and we're at the beginning of that cycle again right now so like i'm in my mid-40s but i'm so excited to be

alive right yeah right now you know it's a good time to be alive good time to be building software okay so sandwich dot vision and useful dot computer i am uh stocking both of these urls heavily from this day forth uh particularly useful dot computer i would be so excited and giddy to play with a demo or to be demoed so let's make that happen. Yeah. I'm going to tell Beamer I just announced it on your show. Okay. Well, Adam, it's been awesome meeting you.

Getting to put an absolute personality on the face, on the creator that we've known for so long, the videos. Excited for you. Excited for both on both fronts. I think useful computer might be huge, especially if you can bring to life what you described to us in so few of words and of course a totally amazing commercial for it which everybody is going to eagerly anticipate and then the 3d video stuff inside of the apple vision pro i mean i'm getting closer and closer to, you know, finding a way to buy one of those suckers and not have immediate buyer's

remorse when I could have purchased a small vehicle, you know, it's tough, but you're making me want one. That's for sure. That's for darn sure. Definitely. Gen two. Well, let's stay in touch so I can follow your journey with it. Cause I really want to know when you get there, I think it's going to be an important inflection point. And yeah, dudes, thank you so much for this time. It was a great time having conversation with you.

And yeah, let's do it again. Very cool. Thank you, Adam. Absolutely. Thank you. Right on, guys. I think it's funny here in post-production listening to the end of the show,

just really how hyped Jared and I were about the Vision Pro ideas and Sandwich Vision and the television app and all the cool stuff that Adam is working on. It's really kind of hard to sit down with folks like Adam who have such a passion for building and such a creative mind and the ability to build the teams to make it happen and not get excited about what they're doing. It really is. I still think the Apple Vision Pro is overpriced. I do not want to, nor will I buy it at its current price. It's not something I'm going to buy anytime soon. However, after marinating a bit more,

I do think these kind of features, this kind of thing, the television application and the theater application that he's working on is a really big deal. It has a lot of potential and it could be the killer app that makes me eventually buy one when it makes more sense financially. Until then, I'm just sitting on the sidelines. Okay, there's a little bonus after this show that's for everyone. It's not for the plus plus folks. It's for everyone. Adam had a question for Jared and I that just didn't fit in the end of the show proper. So I pulled it out and put it right after the outro track. So stay tuned for that. But also we have a bonus for our plus plus subscribers. So if you're a plus plus subscriber, you get something

too, not just everybody. And if you're not a plus plus subscriber, go to changelog.com slash plus plus. It's better. Some say it's better, go to changelog.com slash plus plus. It's better. Some say it's better. I think it's better. You might think it's better. But the first thing you got to do to find out is give it a try. Drop the ads.

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Learn more at fly.io. And those beats by BMC, we love them. Thank you, BMC. That's it. The show's done. We'll see you on Friday. Can I ask what you guys are excited about right now in the world? It doesn't even just have to be tech. I'm excited about, in my personal life right now,

we have a very small orchard out here, 25 fruit trees. And we've invested in this orchard for years, seven years exactly. We planted it when my daughter was born, my second daughter. And she's seven now, so I know exactly how old our orchard is. And for the first time, it's producing fruit in abundance. So we've had fruit before, and we've had the fun times of making the applesauce and eating the apples and the pears. But this is the first year where it's like, we got too many apples y'all. And that is amazing

because now we can just go out and we can just give them to our friends and we can, you know, figure out ways of potentially selling some apples. And like, for me, that's, that's really cool right now. That's so exciting. And, and such a wonderful answer. Um, what other fruits, what besides pears apples, are you growing? We have 20 apple trees, 2 pear trees, 2 peach trees, a nectarine, and 3 cherries. That must feel so good. And the cherries are actually the biggest surprise because they're kind of the most joyous because you just walk over to it and you just pull a cherry off and put it in your mouth.

Life doesn't get much better than that honestly i know i have a tangerine tree in my backyard that that fruits the most delicious tangerines you'll ever have and so when they when it was when they were in season i was making every morning ritual was making a tangerine juice for myself and it was just the best part of my day every single day when i drank that cup of tangerine juice, I closed my eyes and sort of like go through a gratitude process about this part of life. It literally tastes better. And maybe not literally, but it literally tastes better. You know what I'm saying? Like there's something about it. It's almost like the effervescence, you know?

It's the vibes, man. It's in your backyard. It's right there. It is. It's amazing all right that's my excitement right now i'll go somewhere similar then you know my boys and i we've recently begun to fish together so we go fishing frequently and i have an eight-year-old and a four-year-old and it's the coolest thing because they both have poles and uh my youngest surprisingly is an amazing caster. He can cast really well. And I didn't even have to teach him. But my first son, I had to teach how to cast. You got a natural on your hands.

So good. And he catches the fish frequently. And so just being a dad and that time and fishing, that's what's exciting me. Like planting an evening fish after dinner or a saturday morning kind of fish with them you know is that what you call it gone fishing i know but like you say yeah you're planning a fish i don't know if that's a proper phrase or not but yeah that's what we do fishing session yeah i'm excited about that stuff i'm it's it's like well how can i get to more fishing with my

sons you know and it's not even like we're hardcore it's just we're just together it's all it's about yeah oh it's beautiful communal that's that's the thing anything you get to do with others that's the magic of life it's good good guys. So Adam, given that you're a filmmaker, would you call yourself a filmmaker? Obviously, you make films, but do you identify as a filmmaker? I went to film school at NYU. I was definitely a filmmaker and now I'm just multi-hyphenate. But yeah, one of the things that I am still is that. Okay. I'd imagine, given that background, that you have a passion for particular movies, particular directors.

I'm curious, is there a particular director or a recent movie that's just like, I can't wait to see it, or I'm so excited they created that film? Yeah.