The Press Box - The Curious Case of Elon Musk and His Twitter Account | Damage Control (Ep. 512)

Episode Date: August 15, 2018

The Ringer’s Justin Charity and Kate Knibbs try to figure out what’s going on with Elon Musk and why we care (0:57), and then they discuss the downward spiral of MoviePass (21:02). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nibbs. Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and divides us in popular culture. Do you guys like going to the movies? No. All right, we both do.

But we've been arguing over whether movie pass is a good deal or not for months, and this week we're going to look at the evidence. But first, once again, we're talking about Elon Musk. We can't stop. He's gotten himself in trouble with his investors. he somehow got an angry rapper trapped in his house. This week, we're going to figure out why exactly Elon Musk has come to represent everything bad about celebrity nerds in Silicon Valley. Okay, Elon Musk is having an exceptionally bad month.

His bad month begins as most bad months begin with a tweet. It's a really strange tweet, but let's get into it. Here's a tweet. am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured, $420. I feel like you have to say $420, though. You got to roll with the vibe of the tweet. Because it was definitely like a weed reference, right?

Well, yeah, right. We're going to get into the weird surreality of this tweet. So basically Elon Musk is suggesting that he might take his company, Tesla, private at $420 per share. Tesla is trading now at $330 a share on NASDAQ. And the funding that he's referring to in the tweet, according to the New York Times, would come in part from an arrangement he might strike

with the Saudi government. Just normal stuff. Just normal stuff that no one basically, but Elon Musk knew about until Elon Musk started tweeting about potentially taking his company private, taking his own corporate board by surprise. and taking federal regulators by surprise. He sort of created a mess.

I'm going to read one. I'll read a bit of one story from the New York Times. The headline is Tesla directors do damage control after Elon Musk tweets. That's the name of our podcast. Hey, well, that's, I mean, that's how Elon Musk ended up back in front of us again this week. So the Times story reads,

members of Tesla's board are scrambling to control a chief executive who some directors think is out of control. And it goes on, Musk has continued to post messages on Twitter, publicly plotting the company's strategy and in some cases making assertions of dubious accuracy. That is only added to the chaos engulfing the struggling company. Tesla's board members are also racing to inoculate themselves from the possible fallout from Mr. Musk's public statements. I love the phrase making assertions of dubious acts. That's like rich people code for lying. Yeah, it's weird.

It's weird how much media is coming up with euphemisms for lying. And the euphemisms always involve at least one adverb and three words that are longer than 10 letters. Making assertions of dubious actors. Elon Musk is strange to me. He's a very dramatic man. He is addicted to Twitter now, which is unfortunate. I think it's kind of funny, but it's definitely unfortunate for him. Yeah, it undermines him in a lot of ways.

But it's also, here's what I want to talk about with you. Elon Musk, to my mind, is a strange figure. He's not Steve Jobs, right? He's not Mark Zuckerberg. He's not a tech figure who you can sort of simplistically associate with the product that we all recognize. Like Zuckerberg, the reason we talk about Zuckerberg is because Zuckerberg is the CEO and founder of Facebook. We all know what Facebook is and we all use Facebook. Same with the late Steve Jobs, right?

Like, you know what an iPhone is? Great. That's your sort of American cultural totem. for understanding why you're supposed to give a shit about Steve Jobs. Elon Musk is not that. No. Like, if I'm somewhere, I mean, he's basically a thought leader. Like, if I have to summarize his actual corporate footprint,

Elon Musk is a guy who wants to go to space and who is drilling tunnels under Los Angeles and he sells flame throwers as merch and his web store. He's really into hyperloops. And he's in the hyperlubes. And then we're in. Tesla, he like markets electric cars to Republican homeowners. Yeah, he's definitely like, he's selling ideas more than products. Right.

His products are weird products. Yeah. Projects are weird projects. I think that people have a really strong emotional connection to the idea of space exploration. And for a lot of his fans, he represents the, like, great South African creep hope for for like the future of space exploration, I think that space,

I think that space acts more than anything else has sort of cemented his reputation. Or like, because he has a crazy fan base. Like, that's what's so weird to me. It's like the amount of passionate support that this strange, is he a billionaire? Strange, extremely rich guy has managed to gather around himself is really weird.

And yeah, I think it's probably connected to just the idea that he represents this like possible libertarian utopia on Mars that people are really into right now. Right. I think it, well, it seems like it's the space is half of it. I definitely think that the just, we're going to space part is essential. But I think you're right. The second, I think the crucial part to him having the sort of fandom he does. is that it's a desire to go to space coupled with a very bootstraps,

thought leadery vibe that Elon Musk seems to be working with all the time and seems to have fashioned into being his personal narrative, you know? That's so obnoxious because he's like not a bootstrap person at all. Like his mom is a model and his family like made their money. in like the apartheid. They're like, they have like a dark history. He's, but he, that's not how he talks about himself. I know.

Like, he talks about like, oh, you know, he talks about having to raise money. And I think like having to live in his car at one point or having to, in scare quotes. Like he talks about himself as if that's not his background. Yeah. There's an alternate universe in which Elon Musk could be some benign, vague space visionary. And instead, he is this, he's kind of got an edge to him. He's got, like you said, a libertarian edge to him. On his own, Elon Musk is a lot.

Twitter is what's really fucked him up a little bit. Like, certainly this month. This is definitely not a good combination. He's one of those. Do you remember, I want to say first-gen Twitter, where when Twitter was first popping, like 2007, right? I wasn't on it, actually. Oh, wow.

So I don't know. Yeah. I'll say, like, the first-gen, Twitter. The first wave of Twitter, you basically had celebrities who obviously predate Twitter, and they get on Twitter and it just totally wrecks them in a certain way. Like their relationship to Twitter just becomes such that there may be too overshary or too provocative. And it starts to undermine their persona and make you wish that Twitter was never invented because it ruined your conception of a person. Like Lupe Fiasco was like that. Am I?

Well, Azealia Banks is a later stage, but I think a lot of, like, MIA and Lupe Fiasco are two people where it's just like, the worst thing that happened to their careers was Twitter. It was the advent of Twitter. Elon Musk is becoming, Elon Musk is a contemporary example of that, where it's just he's lately way too into Twitter to the point that, again,

he's sending tweets that are generating, like, a crisis among the members of his board. he seems like he's in too deep. And it seems like Twitter specifically has, I think fundamentally altered or been one of the things to fundamentally alter, like the media's perception of Elon Musk in some fundamental way. Am I exaggerating Twitter's role and his use of Twitter's role and why he just seems kind of obnoxious now?

I mean, I've always thought he was obnoxious, but he created a Tesla crisis by tweeting. I don't even know if most people know Elon Musk has a Twitter is the thing. Even regardless, like I get what you're saying. In a popular sense, how many people even know Elon Musk has a Twitter account, right? But I think from Elon Musk's point of view, he just now spends so much time each day arguing with individuals. strangers about his businesses and about other people's businesses and about caves in Thailand. You know what I mean?

Like he he spends so much of his energy now micromanaging his image and micromanaging his his like public profile. And to me, it's it's unfortunate in the sense that I really just look at Musk as somebody who only really has a public profile because otherwise his business. seems so inessential to me personally. You say that, but wait till you get to Mars.

Via Hyperloop. Yeah. It'll be a penal colony on Mars too. It'll be a really dystopian on Mars. But that's why I think about him in Twitter is because he, it's not just because he tweets recklessly, but it's because the Elon Musk project to me seems like 90% a brand management project. And Twitter has sort of turned.

turned him into one of those people who can't let go of the idea that they can micromanage every single human on earth's public perception of them. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense to me because I think his whole thing is like, I'm not a regular billionaire. I'm a cool billionaire. And his casual tweeting for, I think in his mind, he was like, oh, I'm going to tweet like a normal person, like communicate with my underlings. It will be like, it'll be good for me.

but then he's, it hasn't necessarily been good for him. I don't really think it's like image management. It's like blowing up his image because it's making it really clear that he's kind of unstable. Right. Well, so now I think we can talk about his idea. Because the thing that Twitter's done, right, is it's kind of collapsed some of that distance between Elon Musk and people who have opinions about Elon Musk. Yeah. And Elon Musk himself personally,

collapsed some of this distance at a weird way this week this past weekend by allowing it's the backstory here is Elon Musk as we discussed in a previous episode is dating the musician Grimes

Yes and Grimes apparently has like some recording space in Elon's home or one of his homes and so Grimes invited I guess frenemy recording musician

rapper, Azealia Banks to Elon's home to record with her. This is Azalia Banks' side of the story, although I actually, I believe this side of the story. Just want to just want to say that established loyalty up front. But Musk has denied this

and Grimes hasn't said anything. But let's it up what it is. So Azealia Banks, her weapon of choice in the standoff or about to describe is Instagram, Instagram video specifically. Right? So Isaiah Banks who's from New York,

is out at Elon Musk's house. And apparently she's supposed to be recording with Grimes, but Grimes isn't really there consistently. Like she keeps sort of stepping out. And sometimes Elon and Grimes are there. And other times it literally seems like Grimes has left town and just like not really told Azzlyia Banks. They're like, oh, I'll be back in like a couple days.

So Azealia Banks is in Elon Musk's home for several. days and at one point gets on Instagram and start sharing these captions and they're white text against a dark background like she's sort of sending notes from hostage captivity and Azalea Banks is basically saying

these two people are out of control like they're messed up, they're this messed up couple Elon's sending these tweets about like taking his company private but really he's only tweeting like this because he's on acid

like Grimes and Elon are arguing about his business. Like basically, Aeselia Banks is writing these quasi-covert dispatches like a sleuth. She's just sleuth in an Elon Musk's house. And it's not really clear when, like, Elon and Grimes catch on to the fact that Azzalia Banks is getting really angry

because Grimes isn't actually reporting with her and instead is leaving her in a strange man's home by herself. But basically, like, Azealia Banks' dispatches suggest that Elon Musk does a lot of acid and that that habit fuels his tweets which I'm sure his, you know, his board is not happy to hear about. No. That Elon and Grimes have a strange relationship.

That Azalea and Grimes have a strange relationship because there's a point at which like Azalea Banks starts saying really rude things about Grimes and Elon and things I don't know that I should repeat on this podcast. She definitely, implied that they tried to have sex with her. Yeah. There's a point at which Isalia Begg says,

you know, I've been here long enough and this seems strange. I wonder in retrospect that this is a weird threesome type situation is what she says. Which is very believable because, like, my favorite tweet about, like, Elon Musk and Grimes as a couple with something about how, like,

they definitely referred to having sex as play. And I just, it makes sense. It makes sense. I know Azealia Banks is famous for like starting shit and not really having evidence to back up her accusations towards people. But this specific circumstance, I believe her. My only like slight insider knowledge into this is that I know that Grimes and Isalia Banks were friends in Montreal like a long time ago. Like they have they have a history of like knowing each other and making music. So it's not that surprising to me that Grimes would fly.

The initial invitation would be extended. Right. But it just seems they've turned into like a bizarre horror movie premise. Yeah. But the thing is, why didn't she like, why did she just do the tech? She should have showed us Elon Musk's house. Oh, that's true. I know.

I know. That would have been really dramatic. But, um, but I, you know, the Azalea Banks, I mean, to be clear, like, yes. On the one hand, they, Grimes and Azaleigh banks have a history. and that explains why she's out there. On the other hand, Izali Banks has, like you say,

she also has a history of being rude to celebrities and, like, turning on people that she maybe had a friendly or working relationship with, from Rihanna to Riza and Russell Crow at one point.

Like, she has a history of sort of being the consummate Twitter sleuth with a consummate social media sleuth, the multimedia social media sleuth. And this is sort of, On the one hand, this just seems like chapter two in the let's focus on Elon and Grimes dating celebrity dating relationship saga. But to me, it's more so important in this case because Azealia has sort of lifted the curtain. Like, Elon Musk is this guy who's begging to be demystified to me.

And that's very much what Azealia Banks project was being trapped in his house to be like, yeah, this is just a guy who does like a bunch of drugs. and he doesn't know what he's talking about and he doesn't know how to run anything because he's a man-child. And that's why he's trying to run his company from Twitter. And that's why his hero is Kanye West. Like, you know what I mean? And I don't know.

I just, I think that it put a lot of Elon Musk in perspective. It was sort of like the succession of social media beefs because it just made being wealthy look terrible. Yeah, for sure. you know that meme on Twitter that's like you live like this like the whole time Azealia Banks is like tweeting about Elon Musk's house I'm just imagining like the grossest possible house unfortunately yeah my only advice to I mean I have advice for everyone in this

situation like Grimes dump him Elon Musk change your life and get off Twitter and Azealia Banks take video The thing I have trouble mapping out here, right, is what would I, what would Elon Musk ideally be? Because I just look at him, and again, he's demystified himself with Twitter. I feel like Grimes has helped demystify him on Twitter. Azalea Banks has certainly demystified him on Instagram. And I just look at Elon Musk or I listen to interviews with him where he just sounds sort of like a TED Talk core dipshit. And I struggle to, I struggle to perceive like what he would ideally be, right, as a visionary of any sort.

I mean, I think that he would be someone who supported the unionization of his workers, for starters. But I just have trouble imagining a benevolent billionaire at all. So like, I don't really have an ideal Elon Musk. I just wish there was no class of person with that amount of power. Right. And even if you take it, even if you, I think, decentralize the idealization from just him as a billionaire to even his enterprises, it's hard for me to understand what the, it's hard for me to understand what the ambitious, benevolent, inspiring version of SpaceX even is, or Tesla even is. Because they both, they just seem to represent like the private. Yeah, but I get it. It's like the product. Like, sure, but the companies themselves and the fact that they're run by who they run by

just seem to represent that very American idea of like the privatization of like public aspiration, you know? Like there's something, there's something just really somber in the fact that SpaceX exists in sort of lieu of NASA. Yeah. You know? And that creates a weird ceiling of the imagination for me on what I'm. I'm supposed, like the sort of awe I'm supposed to feel about SpaceX, right?

Same. I think his enterprises are sort of inherently troublesome, problematic, as it were. But he is a pretty weird face for. I will say, I was telling you this, I want to ride a hyperloop. If Elon Musk. Elaborate on the, please tell us about that. Come on, illustrate this for us. Like, what's your dream?

Yeah, okay, you know what? I will, like, change my. entire attitude towards Elon Musk if he hyperloops the shit out of America. I, my dream, get in a pod and I'm in, oh, I'm back in Chicago in two hours. Amazing. Hyperloop. He should hyperloop us. You're cutting ads for Hyperloop on damage control. I know. In a segment about him, there's just like an ethical thing. There's just an ethical quagmire

happening here. I'm cutting your mic. We're moving on to our next subject. I am not exaggerating when I say that you and I have been bickering about movie pass for like five months, yeah. And we just did a written back and forth, which you guys can read on the ringer.com. We did it a few days ago. I've kind of changed my opinion since then, as low as I am to admit that. Because, you know, I've always firmly believed that we should be grateful for movie pass's nonsense business plan. as long as it gave us free movie tickets. Or not free, but cheap, really cheap.

But recently I've been hearing all this horrible stuff about how MoviePass is making it insanely hard for users to cancel their subscriptions. Like after on Twitter yesterday, a bunch of different people were just showing me evidence of how MoviePass had basically like charged them money even though they had tried to cancel their. their plans. So now I am coming around on the idea that movie pass is movie ass. But I want to talk about how we got there. Because so you did, you subscribed to movie past long ago in a more innocent time and were, you were excited about it back then, right? I mean, I subscribed at the peak of the hype because of the price drop and everything. And I, I subscribed. It took a while to get my card as I think a lot, it took a lot of people a long time to get their card. Yeah, I think mine took like a month

to arrive or something. Mine took two weeks, I think. But I think immediate, I think a week after I got mine, I was like, something about I think I just spent so much time with the app instead. And I was like, this app seems really janky.

And I always sort of like have an exit strategy for subscriptions where it's like, okay, like, what is it like to unsubscribe? I just remember the era of like paid subscription. when things were trickier on the internet and like it felt like the internet was always trying to scam you.

That still happens all the time. CBS All Access, I canceled them and then they kept charging me. Like I had to cancel twice until I actually stopped getting charged. Or like you remember when Spotify used to Spotify used to be really hard to cancel. Spotify would do, they would do the thing where they would put up five different, are you sure? And they, like, some of them would look like you would cancel. But in fine print, it's like, are you sure you want to still do this?

It's like, yes. Yeah. But I started looking, clicking around in the app of like, okay, if I were to cancel this, like what's the process for it? How long would it take? And I noticed that like you hit the first two buttons to go through the cancel process and the app would just be like, uh, the app's broken. Check back later.

And I just kept, I kept trying to do it for several days. And then by the time my card came, I was just like. something, this is messed up. And I emailed. And I was like, cancel this. Yeah. I'm not doing this. So I don't like this.

I didn't try to cancel because I was so jazzed about seeing all these movies. But that is. Hey, tell them how many movies you were seeing. I was seeing how much money was costing you. Well, I was seeing like two a week for some stretches of time. At least one. And so that, like a normal movie ticket in these. New York costs like $16.

It's insane. So I was sometimes seeing like 10 movies a month for $10. Whereas it would have cost like 160. So it was a crazy deal. You literally like Kathleen Kennedy over here. You're just like a movie mogul. I love the cinema, man. Okay, so tell us how movie patch changed your life.

It didn't change mine because I canceled it before I could even use it. Well, it would just, it changed going to the movies from being something I would do like once or twice a month is a fun, like, date night or treat to myself into just something I did all the time. And it made, it lowered the bar for like what movies I would see. I would just be like, sure, I'll check that out. It just made my life a little more fun. I'm also really lucky because our work is right in walking distance from like four movie theaters. So it was really easy for me to just go to a movie after work for just one time. during work.

But yeah, so I thought it was such a great deal. I knew it didn't make sense because I was like, why am I getting all these movie tickets for $10? But I was willing to look past the fact that like the user interface sucked. And I had heard that there were people like a lot of problems with the app. I didn't really have any. I looked past that because I was like, I'm saving so much money.

and I'm becoming a cinephile. Right. So we'll talk about the problems that arise in a second, but first I want to say, like, you talked about, oh, looking past the sort of fundamental illogic

of like, I'm getting all these movies for $10 a month. How does that make sense? How does it make sense? Like, let's try to make some sense of it. It didn't. It didn't.

It didn't. Yeah. That's the short answer. But one of the, like, they were trying to do a few different things with the business. They were trying to sort of convince,

like, movie companies or whatever, I don't know, that's not the official name. But they were trying to get like advertising partnerships. Then they were also like taking our data and like our location data, what kind of movies we saw, our demographic data and selling it, which is very creepy. Like for privacy, it's not good. But at this point in my life, if I can see like a shitload of movies for free, I'm, my privacy is already so screwed up on the internet anyways. I was willing to make I was I read all these articles about how like movie past was was bad for privacy and I was like I don't care which is probably says something to my skewed priorities but no it says

something about this state of millennial relationship technology yeah it's like what are we how many years deep into Facebook are we like I think we we are we we came up off our privacy a long time ago so that's why I've always been really like cheering for movie pass. I just like love getting stuff for super cheap. Right. Which seems like pretty uncomplicated, even if it doesn't totally make sense to movie pass is investors and doesn't make sense the long term as a business model.

Seems simple enough if you're a consumer. But then like in the past several weeks, movie pass has been throwing out plot twists of their subscription. Yeah. And honestly, I might cancel because it's been. like it's not functional anymore. Yeah, let's talk about what they've done. So they're raising the price of movie paths.

The monthly cost rate from 995 to 1495. Yeah, although I got an email that mine's still 995. I'm very confused, but I can only go see three movies a month. Right. Yeah. So that's the thing. They're rolling out different things and it's not clear which the sequence and the scheduling because they're raising the price, but they're also.

movie pass is instituting a monthly cap of how many movies you can see. I think three, right? As you said, it's like three movies a month. But then they're also rolling out a thing that was very much not part of that before, which is they're blacking out certain titles and certain dates for when you can see movies. So for instance, if you had tried to see Black Klansman on its opening night, they're not letting you do that. They also were blacking out so many movies.

movies that the other like last Friday afternoon I tried to go see a movie and like literally the only option was Slender Man and I was like I don't want to see this scary movie and it just it's not functional at the moment I'm hoping that they can fix it because obviously I preferred when it was unlimited movies but three movies a month for $10 in my mind that's still worthwhile if they can fix all the other stuff. Right. So one thing about the movie pass discourse online is that online has turned on movie past or is slowly turning on movie pass is.

I think sometimes it's something to be like, is this just a bunch of people in New York and L.A. who live like in the vicinity of a bunch of movie theaters and are sort of like maybe interact with movie theaters or have a greater variety of movie theaters in striking distance than the average person. So I talked to Ringer correspondent, Rob Harvilla. Heartland correspondent. Reporting from Ohio, Rob Harvilla. I was just talking to him about movie pass.

And, I mean, he was reporting the same frustration. He was just saying, like, I literally asked him, do you use movie pass? And he said, well, I did. I still have it. But nowadays, I just stare at the app in disbelief. So Harvilla is reporting the same problems you're having, where it's like very much unlike when you could just go see any movie using movie pass. Now it's like you'll look at the app and see one movie that you can see and it sort of take it or leave it.

And he was just like, yeah, there was a window when movie pass just worked perfectly. And it worked at that just preposterously low price point of $9.95 a month. And now it just seems like a disaster. And it's wild how movie pass sort of unraveled in the, this very short span. It all happened so quickly. Yeah. That's why I was like still holding out so much hope that it would fix itself.

I still have like a tiny little bit. Well, it's been such a short span that we, I mean, we were, you and I literally wrote a post. Yeah. Arguing about whether movie pass is a bad product or not. And then, yeah, after, like, I think right after we published it, there are these reports that come out about movie pass literally uncanceling people's accounts and being like, we're charging you for the next billing cycle even though you canceled your account because... We're shady.

Yeah, we're shady. Like, movie pass is just, that's the weird thing. It's not just that their business model is unstable. Because I actually, I think a lot about other subscription services like this. And we can talk about the difference between MoviePass and Spotify, but just in terms of the experience of like, you have a web-based subscription for entertainment and these companies are maybe startups and they have growing pains. maybe they change their price point at some point.

Maybe they change their marketing. You know, I think about title. Like title, if you take the music streaming services, title always seemed and seems like the jankiest one because it's the one where, you know, it's the one where they sort of leaned heavy on the idea that like, you'll have exclusive Rihanna albums, but then their sort of library is kind of weird and spotty.

And I think, like they have a different price point for different quality of audio one title. And it's like, that's, to me, that's the more sort of bits you're doing as a company like that, the less I want your product. Because it's just like, to me, the ideal product like this is to borrow a phrase, one that you can set and forget. Like, that's how my Spotify works, right? It's like, I don't remember when I subscribe to Spotify, but I've literally, really never thought about it again.

Because I just used Spotify and it's so seamless and it doesn't like barrel roll in front of me and be like, we're changing your subscription. We're doing this. We're limiting this feature. Like it makes it easy for me to just throw money at Spotify and not even think about it. And movie passes like the opposite of that, which is like it's cheap. But it also makes you think about it all the time. It makes you think about what its limitations are and what it's fucking up in a way that

Spotify or Netflix doesn't make you think about. Yeah. I mean, I will say I didn't like this movie pass, movie pass's decline happened really quickly before it. I wasn't, I was just like, yay, movie pass. Like, um, and it, as far as like Spotify and Netflix and all the streaming services are concerned, yeah, they're, they've definitely got it figured out. the movie past thing is like way more complicated

and also just I don't know how they would ever make a profit. Right, right, right. So yeah, I think they're different. It's such a shaky proposition that I don't know whether to think. I mean, for the longest time, even music streaming seemed weird. Like I remember the period when it actually seemed weird to me as a consumer that like,

I want to pay $10 a month for all the music. Yeah, and I was actually kind of late to the music. streaming gang because I lived in Canada until three years ago and Spotify came there much later. Like we did not have access to any of the streaming services for years while America did. Like I would hear talk of Spotify and I would be like, ooh, that sounds so cool. And I couldn't like, so I feel like when I finally got Spotify, first of all, I had worked all the kinks out. Yeah. And second of all, like every, it had just become part of like the fair.

epic of being a, like, young person in America. Right. But before that stage, Spotify, Spotify was similarly fascinating where you looked at it, you know, like, one, it's exceptionally cheap. And two, you know, you sort of compared it to the past before that service even existed or audio or other services like it existed where it's like, I mean, Kate, you have to remember, like, the 90s and like the a odds where being a regular consumer of music meant spending like X number of dollars

every time you went to the record store. Like it was certainly more than $10 a month if you were really into buying CDs. Oh yeah. You know, like it was not like, let's see. I spent like all of my money from my summer job at like borders. Right.

And Spotify and title and all these other services made it relatively cheap to be a music fan. And not even made it cheap to consume the same amount of music, made it cheaper to consume way more music. Although I will say so, like, for me, I think we're the same age, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I had this weird thing where I got used to spending money in my teens on, like, CDs and stuff,

and then Napster came out, and then iPods came out. I remember in college just, like, hoovering up all of these MP3 files from, like, my, there was some weird program in the dorm where you could see everyone's iTunes and take their MP3s. Do you remember this? It was crazy. What the hell kind of? I don't know. I don't know. But I had so many songs on my iPod. So then I was like, I don't pay for music. Like, I'm a pirate. And there was this whole, and then like the streaming services came out and you had to get reaccustom yourself to paying for music again, even though it's a ridiculous. ridiculously low price point.

I also do not support privacy or piracy as... You don't support privacy. We established that in the last segment. You also don't support piracy. I don't support piracy. But basically what I'm saying is like movie pass, it's tempting to look at it the same way where it's like, you know, it's made movie going so or, you know,

for the period where it was ideal and worked well, it made movie going so cheap that you can't help but look at it and be like, this doesn't make any sense as a business. But at the same time, it feels like their movie pass competitors, movie pass knockoffs emerging. Yeah, the AMC one. It's a little more expensive, I believe.

It's like... It's twice the cost. It's $99. That's still like the price of one movie ticket anyways. And it's also like AMC seems like a more... They have a stronger... Yeah, hold in the marketplace already. Yeah.

The theater going. But it's weird. It does. feel like a weird Schrodinger situation where it's equally easy to imagine that movie passes a fluke it was a scam of a bunch of investors and ultimately it's going to fold and we're not that's not that's not much not going to be the future of movie going because it financially just doesn't add up or envision a future where a more competent a better structured company comes along and makes it make sense like I can imagine both of those things in the same way that

that, like, I could imagine when Spotify made no sense whatsoever and just seemed like it was way too advantageous to me, the consumer, or the alternative reality in which Spotify redefined music. I hope there's still ways to see movies at a more reasonable price point. Because, like, $16 a ticket is not okay. Not for the magic of cinema, Justin. Especially not if you see 30 movies. I'm off like Kate Nibbs.

Shadow film correspondent, Kate Nibs. Anyway, so yeah, movie pass, I'm ready to admit, I don't really see how it's going to fix itself. I'm probably going to cancel my subscription. Also, they should, if they let me. But I do hope that movie passes will, like, inspire other businesses to offer discount. movie theater packages of some kind.

I also would love it if they, you know, they did that for other stuff. Like, I love going out into the world and seeing entertainment. In my ideal world, there'd be like a movie pass for the theater and a movie pass for sports events and a movie pass for concerts. That's the world I want to live in. Wow, you're like your own Elon type figure, your own sort of visionary. If anyone is a venture capitalist listening to this podcast, please give me money. Oh, my God. I'm going to end up being like your vice president for something or other.

It's giving yourself a lot of credit. That's it from us. I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nibs. And we'll see you all again two weeks from now. Bye.