This Week in Startups - Adobe acquires Figma for $20B, Patagonia founder donates profits + Streaming consolidation | E1561

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

J+M kickoff the show by discussing Adobe acquiring Figma for $20B! (2:30) Then, they cover Patagonia's founder donates nearly all profits to solve climate change. (21:53) Finally, Lon Harris joins to discuss streaming consolidation, consumer burnout, and some interesting new projects! (46:36) (0:00) J+M tee up today's topics! (2:30) Adobe acquires Figma for $20B in a cash and stock deal! (14:42) LinkedIn Marketing -  Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at https://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (16:12) Post-merger thesis, large deal user diligence (21:53) Patagonia founder donates his profits to solving climate change (29:46) SnackMagic - Get 10% cashback up to $1000 until October 15th with code HOLIDAY, and see more at snackmagic.com/twist (31:08) Lon Harris joins to break down the state of streaming: consolidation is coming (37:26) Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub - Apply in 5 minutes, no funding required, sign up at http://aka.ms/thisweekinstartups (38:49) More cuts coming to $WBD, price increases coming to Disney+ and other services, streaming fatigue (46:36) New content to keep an eye on!: new Blade Runner series green lit at Amazon, Spotify series coming to Netflix, and more FOLLOW Lon: https://twitter.com/lons FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1

Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. It is Thursday. Oh, we're going to make it, Molly. You and I, just drag me over to finish line. Cheers. Ooh. Cachunk. Cichunk. And then tonight we have to do our first appearance together in public at a private event.

But today, we're going to talk about a huge, huge M&A out of nowhere. Adobe is buying Figma for $20 billion. Billion. This is like startup fairy tale right now. We just get to play the full Prince Charming startup dream from start to finish. We're going to go from we're going to do the seed investor multiples all the way to the acquisition. It's delightful. And then we're going to talk about the justification for, sorry, for the justification for this.

So we go into the detail of how does Adobe justify paying probably three or four hundred times revenue for this company? It's a really important discussion for the founder. When we ask you, what? happens when the incumbent builds the thing you're building, we're going to give you the answer to that question also. And then our Guy Lon Harris is here for this week in streaming. We're going to talk about the Emmy wins. We're talking about the layoffs. General Zodzloff is doing at Warner Brothers. Some new shows coming out that you should look for, including the Spotify story and Blade Runner 2099 from my guy. We love Thursdays. Thursdays are the best. It's going to be a great show.

Stick with us. This Weekend Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Marketing. To redeem a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. Snack magic and swag magic are global gifting platforms and the most stress-free and customizable way to delight employees or customers. Get 10% cash back up to $1,000 until October 15th with code holiday. and see more at snackmagic.com slash twist. And the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub helps all founders build a better startup at a lower cost from day one.

Open to anyone with an idea, you'll get up to $150,000 in Azure credits, technical advisory, access to mentors and experts, free dev tools, and so much more. There is no funding requirement and it only takes minutes to join. Sign up today at aka.m.s slash this week in startups. All right. So we've been doing Series A and M&A, and since we have started that, this is the biggest M&A news, I think, to come along that. That actually just people are like so excited about and a massive exit. Adobe has agreed to acquire Figma for $20 billion. According to Bloomberg, this would be, I mean, really. Right? This is like all that cash that everybody's been piling up, apparently.

Adobe using its Stimmy on Figma, $20 billion. According to Bloomberg, this would be the largest ever takeover of a private software company. The market did not like it. Adobe's stock was down 18%. Adobe's market cap is currently $147 billion. And Adobe is reporting quarterly earnings for fiscal Q3 today. According to our guy, Alex Wilhelm, he noted, the markup from its series A.

Pitchbook pegs the post-money valuation of the Figma Series A at $48.3 million. And a juicy series A at that. And that was a pretty juicy series A. And here, this makes for a 413x return at $20 million. Just keep in mind if those returns did not take their pro rata, in other words, they didn't keep investing. And they did five rounds, which they did after that. They did a BCD and E, I think. Each of those rounds would dilute 10%.

you can pound the 10% or even 20%. You might have 50% of that. So it would net out to maybe a 200x return. That means if you did put $5 million in there, you returned 200 times $5 million a billion dollars on a $5 million investment. It's a living. It's a living.

And if you're fun, we talk about fund size sometimes. I just got to pause and say as a podcasting moment, mic drop. It's a living. It's a living. Now here, now this would have come out of a $250 million fund. So the first 250 million would go to return the principal invested.

You'd have 750 million in gains from that fund just off this one investment. Let's assume all the other investments in the fund went to zero. Just a little back of the envelope math here. 20% of 750 million, 150 million for the partners. Five partners in the firm, three partners. Well, five partners in the firm of that size. Five partners divided by 150 million, 30 million each partner. Everybody's getting a plane.

Everybody's getting a ski house. Let's go. It's a limit. So what is, I feel like we should do a little like, what is Figma and why'd they buy it? Figma is software design startup. Creating mockups for UX and UI. InVision would be a contemporary. So if you're designing something as a team, your designers will make it in Figma.

You can click on it. So when I get a new version of Inside, when they do the job board at Inside.com slash jobs, they would send it to me in Figma and we'd have conversations on it. So it's collaboration around the production of web-based products, iPhone apps, etc. And then so people will do what's called user interface, UI or UX, which stands for user experience. You don't have to go all the way back to like level one here. I was doing for the stake of the audience. It's not you normally, but okay, good, good.

But anyway, it's multiplayer is what you need to understand. So you know how Microsoft Word, single player, you edit the document, you send everybody the document, you get four copies of the document back, and you're like, oh my God, four different sets of edits. Yeah. In Figma, it's live. You're on the web. You get a link. You hit play.

And on your phone in the browser, it looks like the app. So you can actually build an entire. app in Figma, that's a clickable, what's called a clickable mockup. So then the CEO, the sales team, everybody can play with it. And then you hold on it and you put a comment, hey, I don't understand why we're putting, you know, this piece of copy here. Shouldn't it say this? Then somebody else replies, oh, we had this discussion. Here's a link to our code and notion page where we discuss that. But you can have discussions like you do in a Google spreadsheet. Yeah. It's amazing. And you can see why it should be the kind of thing that Adobe.

this is a classic disruptor story. Like Adobe tried to build this with Adobe Express. People were like, we want you to be more web-based. The idea of collaboration, once Google made that completely obvious and available to everybody with docs and sheets and all the different ways that you could collaborate in real time, it was like unacceptable not to have that. And when Adobe tried to build it, it just didn't, you know, when you're the incumbent, you have a hard time.

like companies come to us all the time and say, you know, and I'm like, and we say, well, what happens if Uber just builds this or Adobe builds it or Apple does it or whatever? And what they say is, when you're the incumbent, it's really hard to do this and we're just hoping they'd rather buy us than build it. And this is an example of Figma being right. Well, and here's, if you, if you double click even one more time, we'll call us the triple click. So that was a great double click. I'm going to do another double click on your double click. This grew virally. Now, this is where network effects and virality and growth are so important. So the answer typically to the question you pose, the valid question, what if Uber does this?

What if Microsoft does it? What if Adobe does it is? Well, we have virality built into the product. So we're going to grow so fast, they won't be able to catch up and then we'll be the standard. So because it was multiplayer mode, just like in Notion Coda, Slack, Google Docs, you say at Jason, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, I click on the link and it's like, you don't have an account. If you want to reply to this comment, log in with your Google account, log in with your Twitter account,

whatever, log in with your Microsoft account. That virality is. what creates the gap. Now, what Adobe should have done was, they should have made their version of this free. F-R-E-E-E. Yeah. Yeah. And that would be the way to do with them. Who faced a similar challenge and made it free and won? You think of a situation where somebody had virality as a startup. Yeah. They've won the day. And then a bigger company made it free and screwed him and had so much headwinds that the company had to take drastic action. I don't know what example you're thinking of, but I sort of feel like it had to have been like Apple or Amazon. Microsoft,

right? Microsoft did. Oh, Microsoft Teams. Versus Slack. All right. They did that. Look at the whisper in the air. So anyway. Thank you. Thanks, Nick. Remember Slack. It's like you guys talked all the time. I spent too much time with Jason. I was just going to say, it's like you guys are one brain up in here. So, I mean, somebody said at some point to Slack, what if Microsoft gets in this game? And it's like, well, they will have created, I think they, when they sold the sales for us, it was $25 billion or $30 billion. So, you know, even more than this sale. and they had gone public,

but they just turned Microsoft teams on for everybody, which kind of makes you think the new antitrust is to make a product free and bundle it, which is what Microsoft got in trouble with. Bundling always a little reflect. But how do you argue against bundling

if you're giving something for free? It's kind of hard because there's no consumer harm. Obviously it does, and does it make competition go down? No, it makes the other people work harder to provide value. So anyway. I don't mean to be a big antitrust nerd, but consumer harm is just generally reflected as higher prices,

but that's not like the statute. So a big argument in the antitrust circle is saying, like, we've got to measure consumer harm in a different way. What does the lack of competition actually mean? And then we're stretching for like some alternative universe, right? Now you're in an alternative universe land. Like, has Microsoft made Slack better? Of course it has.

Microsoft teams made Slack 10 times better. That was like a kick in the ass they needed. Yep. Now they have to justify their existence. And I think Slack is still. winning, but it's close, right? I think Slack is still growing, but I don't think people who use Microsoft Office or have what is Microsoft 365 are going to embrace Slack.

You're just going to use Teams because they're already logged in and it's there. And people who are in Zoom, because Zoom is going to launch a Zoom teams? What do they call them the Zoom Slack competitor that I have predicted to? Zoom communications or I don't know. To Zoom chat. Persistent chat will be coming to Zoom Teams. Zoom team chat. Zoom team chat.

Zoom, yeah, Microsoft Teams, Zoom Teams. They should call it Zoom Teams. The end. Full stop. But it's not free because it's part of a paid bundle, Molly. So then how does antitrust look at that?

I know this is like super nuanced and we're in the weeds here. No, I love it. Yeah, congratulations to Figma. Congratulations to the Figma. And those seed investors. How did they do? Because that must have been a what,

a $10, $20 million value? So the Nick did the calculation for us. Index Ventures led the seed at a $14.8 million. valuation. So this is a 13151x from the seed. The total capital, total invested capital in the seed round was $3.8 million. So if we're assuming that index did half of that as the lead or $1.9 million, times a thousand X, that would be a $1.9 billion return. And I would I would cut it in half because dilution. Delusion, possibly. But they're the type of firm that might actually take their pro rata every time. But if they didn't take their pro rata, it'd be a 500x. And so, you know,

these things do happen. A thousand X is incredibly rare in a career. So congratulations to anybody who, you know, joined the one comma club in multiples. I've been there myself and it's a wonderful place to be. I hope to get there with one more in my career. It's just a hard one to get to. But if this is 20 billion.

It's great story. Adobe's making $5 billion. How much is Adobe making a year? They make $4 billion a quarter or something like that? I think so. Yeah, Q3. revenue was $4.4 billion, so up 13%. They've gotten clobbered, obviously, post-pandemic, stock drop, but interestingly, has only $5.7 billion in cash in short-term investments.

They can get cash from somebody. They're taking on some debt, maybe. Or they're doing stock. I bet you they're going to do stock. Because the stock is low right now? It's half cash, half stock. Perfect. Ten billion in cash. They can get a loan for that, you know, at a low interest rate from somebody, not as low as it used to be. And then they can, yeah, they guess they get a bond, basically, get the loan. And then they, they, they, The other 10% means 10 billion in, there are 150 billion market cap, something in that range? 143. Okay, yeah.

So, you know, it's not even 10% of that in stock. This is the same as WhatsApp. Everybody thought WhatsApp was a stupid purchase. Mm-hmm. Because it was, at the time, was it 10% or 15% of Facebook's value, I think? Here's what I'll say. This is a blocker strategy as well. Yes.

This is removing the existential threat. If Figma then started to make Photoshop Illustrator is Adobe Premiere. Yep. Premiere is the video editor. So, you know, if Figma is doing so well, they go public, maybe they start buying or building their own suite. And they just go one, two, three down the line. Because they were at the go public point. At least like, it seems like revenue and growth wise, yeah, 100%.

I wonder what their revenue was. That would be good to get the multiple of revenue for Figma. I don't have Figma's revenue. It's not a public company. Right. But I'm going to take a guess at it right now. Last valuation, if this helps you, was $10 billion. Okay, so $10 billion.

They could have gotten 100 times revenue, which would have been $100 million in revenue. Yeah. They could have had $200 million in revenue and done 50 times. So I'm going to guess they got 50 to 100 times their top line revenue. Now, that sounds crazy, right, to pay that much. but if Figma in any way would have destroyed revenue and market cap of Adobe, which it obviously was doing. Already was.

They just look at your market cap and you're like, well, listen, this is going to keep us from getting to a $250 billion market cap. Take it out now. We remove an existential threat. So it's like a really easy layup of a decision, even though if Wall Street doesn't like it, you know, you wouldn't like Adobe stock going sideways for the next five years or going. going down. That would be a worse situation. And if they bundle it with their product or they expose their existing user base to it, maybe they could increase revenue 50%. They could accelerate revenue 25%. If they accelerate revenue 25%, 50% for the next three years, well, then that takes that

that multiple down, doesn't it? Yeah. So the multiple wouldn't seem as bad it is it. So that's what they call in the M&A business having a thesis. Hey, everybody. I'm here with my pal, Tom Eshbacher. He He is the senior sales manager at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. And today, we're going to talk about marketing for startups. And LinkedIn did a great new internal report called today in startup marketing. Welcome to the program. Tom. Thanks, Jason.

One of the main topics covered in the report is validating product market fit. That's so essential. So how does marketing play a role in validating PMF? One of the challenges from the pandemic was it disrupted normal feedback loops that startups get, and particularly when trying to scale. assumptions based on small sample sizes. You can't go to conferences anymore. You can't do events. And so we've seen a clever adoption of LinkedIn's free analytics tools here. And one that's become table stakes, and I mean, 92% of Series A startups are using it, is the LinkedIn Insight tag.

A feature here is the website demographics functionality that provides a valuable view on your site visitors professional attributes. What's their job function, their seniority level, what company are they at, the industry, the company size. This is all a bunch of actionable insight that you can use to back up your instincts around who your addressable market is and help inform early marketing strategies. Fantastic. Okay. And so if you would like to get this incredible report, you can go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. And not only can you get the report for free, you're also going to get $100 off your first marketing campaign from Tom at LinkedIn. Way to go, Tom. So post-merger, what's your thesis?

The post-merger thesis for YouTube was what? The post-merger thesis for YouTube was YouTube's going to continue to grow and be something that gets us customer lock-in in accounts. We can distribute it across our cloud and to every country because we're already in. If they have the cloud then? But yeah, yeah. Well, they had their own network. They had the private network. So they said, listen, to YouTube, we're buying this for 1.6.

Who cares? Like, we're going to be able to send this. We've already got Google search working in 100 countries. Every time you search for anything, you get a YouTube video. Exactly. The end. Instagram. They were like, hey, list things at whatever it was, 50, 100 million users, I think, when they sold.

We got a billion. We could just, if we'd let them cross-post or Instagram to Facebook, we can get Grandma and Uncle Joe and cousin Bobby over to Instagram. So that's the thesis. It's like, if we owned it, what can we do to accelerate its growth? And Salesforce probably had a similar thing with Slack. Hey, if we owned it and we expose everybody who is in the Salesforce group to it, could we do more? If we had our sales force sales team selling it, would we be better than Slack's existing

team? So those are the what are they called machinations? Am I pronounced it? Machinations. Yeah. It's the machinations that the M&A team and the CEO and the BD, the business team go through to justify paying a high price. What if, what if?

So they make a couple of scenarios and they say, what are the chances of these three scenarios happening. And that's something when you're building a company that you can work on to increase the sale price. Okay, yeah, you want to buy inside.com? Yeah, it's a social network. It's got 15,000 people on it. But if it was owned by Business Insider or Vox, and you put all your 500 journalists on it, in addition to our 25, now you'd have 500 journalists participating. They would each bring a thousand people. Now you'd have a half million people in the service. So if Jim Bankoff at Vox were to buy Insight.com, that would be my pitch to him. He's like, you don't have a social network. You've got 500 journalists. Put all 500 journalists on here, have them start

talking about their stories. They all have Twitter followings. Now you've got a social network that competes with LinkedIn for all these businesses. That's pretty good. Maybe I could talk. Did you just make that up? Oh, I just made it off the top of my head. I just think about the acquire and what they would do. I was just probably clip this and send that to him. Okay, anyway, somebody clip this and just at bank off it. Hey, at bank off, let's talk. Overpay me for my startup. Let's go. Let's come out with a let's have some machinations over some theories. Yeah. That was, yeah, it's a good pitch. You should write that down for Before we move on, can I ask you a diligence question about this? Yes, sir. Yes, sir. So is it standard practice for the Adobe team to cross-reference Figma users with their own users to see how much upside they have in terms of like, how much expansion can you really have if so much of the users are overlapping?

So this is a little touchy, right? Because you don't want to expose your whole client list. So what you would do is you would take a sample of them. Say, who are your 10 biggest customers? Okay, it's IBM, okay, it's IBM, okay? And you got Microsoft, you got Apple, great. We have all those. How many seats do you have at Apple? Oh, you've got 700 seats at Apple? We've got 7,000. Okay, great. There sounds like the difference between 7,000 and 700 is 6,300.

There's 6,300 people who we could probably just turn this on for, and wow, revenue comes pouring in. So, yes, that does happen. When we sold Weblogs Inc. to Jim Bankoff, who was at AOL at the time as an executive vice president, they did look at Engadgett, AutoBlog Joystick, and say, who are the top advertisers? Oh, Samsung.

and, you know, at the time, Radio Shack and, uh, T-HX and, you know, PlayStation, whoever. And they're like, oh, yeah, we have them as advertisers too. And it's like, yeah, we sold them a $250,000 deal. Like, oh, yeah, we have them on a $25 million a year deal. So I was like, okay. And the, and the theory for AOL and Bankoff when they bought us was the AOL tech channel and the auto channels are sold out. We have no more inventory.

But we have a lot of users. So if we just link to Mali, the top three stories on Engadgett and Autoblog every day, We can take the ads and we make Engadgett part of the AOL tech ad buy. We make AutoBlog part of the AOL autos ad buy. You have better stories than us. Put the three stories there. Boom, we ship them over there. And Brian Alvey built Blogsmith and it could scale and it had like kind of CDN-ish kind of features in.

It was really good in terms of cashing. They would send us a half million people. They had sold out the ads for a hundred dollar CPM. All of a sudden, boom, $50,000 in ads in one day. Boom, 50,000 ads when they were. They bought the company for $30 million. They immediately got us from $3,400,000 in revenue to $5,000 million in revenue, like just year over year. So their thesis was, we're sold out anyway.

Everybody wants more impressions in these two categories. We have an infrastructure to turn this on. Yeah, totally. Fascinating. Looks like Surge Dog, my guy. Yeah, Noddy. He says 20, 21 revenue is $51 million. I think I said $50.

to 100 or 100 to 200. You sure did, yeah. This is the SCBNs. So I said 50 million would be 20 times revenue, right? Top line. I'm sorry. 100 million times 100. So maybe 2022 was looking like 100 million, 100 times 100. It's 10 billion. Yeah. And they probably doubled it. So they have it, folks. So that would be 400 X last year's revenue. But you would look at the run rate.

So what happened last month? They got to have twice as much revenue. So if that point in time they were doing $4 million a month, they're probably doing $10 million a month now, $20 million a month, something like that. So the multiple would come down. But it's in the line of overpaying on a multiple. And it being worth it as we just broke down. Great job.

Let's talk about a whole different thesis because there was like another huge breaking news story yesterday, late yesterday, that we're going to unpack today because it took us that long to wrap our heads around it. Reverse M&A. Patagonia CEO dumps his company. Patagonia's founder is giving the company away to fight climate change. So has effectively divested himself and his family from Patagonia personally, created a trust so that the profits of the company, which he founded 50 years ago, Yvonne Schuinald, will go to fight climate change, basically. There's the guy who did let my people surf.

You see the guy who wrote that book? Let my people surf. I don't know. Let my people go surfing, I think, or something like that. This guy is like a baller. He built this company. He treats his employees incredibly well, from what I understand. I think they own it outright.

They own it outright. So what they're doing essentially is similar to what Gates did with the Gates Foundation, except maybe for 100% instead of 50% or 51% of his net worth. They put his holdings in a trust. So I think they make $100 million a year in profits, they said. Yeah. Let my people start. guy. A hundred million in profits will go towards climate change or buying land that, you know,

becomes protected spaces. And a billion, by the way, they sell more than a billion dollars a year. I was talking about profits. Oh, oh, yeah, sorry, sorry. I was going to profit. They have a 10% profit, 100 million a year. Right. Yeah. A hundred million dollars a year buys a lot of acres. Yeah. So I love this as a concept. And I just immediately tweeted, I'm literally, my plan for this weekend is I want to get some more active wear anyway. I'm exclusively shopping at Patagonia for my active wear, whatever my needs are. I'm literally, I've shopped there, of course, a couple times. I love going to the stores. I'm just going to be like my exclusive thing because I'm like, wow, if I shop there, it goes to, you know, this. I'm going to, Nick says good snow pants. I'm,

I'm all in. Great snow pants. Great jackets. 98% of his stock went into this nonprofit. What percent? Which will be called the 98%. They, they took some, they donated their shares to a trust, So they have to pay $17.5 million in taxes on that gift. And then the other 90% of Patagonia, its common shares, go to this new nonprofit called the Holdfast Collective, which will, as you said, be the recipient of all the company's profits and use the funds to combat climate change. It's a 501C4. So it can make unlimited political contributions and it is not a tax write off for the family. The family is taking no tax benefit as a result of this. Unlike the philanthropic, and I am not trying to suggest that the Gates Foundation doesn't do a lot of, you know, great philanthropic work.

Yeah, they get a tax break. It's also a tax break. Yeah. And, you know, it's sort of in line with Warren Buffett saying like, listen, the bill I get isn't the, I could pay more taxes. Of course. And this is this family. In addition to saying all of our profits are going to go toward, you know, fighting climate change as a philanthropic effort, which is two percent of philanthropic giving right now, fighting climate change. Two percent of global philanthropic giving is to fight climate change.

They're also saying it's not a tax dodge. No, it's not a tax dodge. It's a pretty remarkable. You had Bezos gave $10 billion. So, you know, Bezos is 1.9% of that. This is 0.5. Like, congratulations to people taking this seriously. And I think the power move really for rich people is to buy land and preserve it.

And I know Gates bought a lot of farmland, but I think it's an investment, but I also think it might be a preservation move as well. That's problematic. That's, uh, yeah. I don't know if you bought it through the gate. I think it bought it personally, not through the Gates Foundation is my understanding. But I don't have enough information of that. But I know other people have bought large swaths of land. And they did this.

I remember when I was in New York around the Hudson River, they wanted the Hudson River to get clean. And they're like, you know, what we're going to do is we're going to do this Hudson River watershed project, I believe it was called. And one of the Kennedys and some other folks in New York just started raising money at parties in New York. And they just went up and down the Hudson and bought the acreage around. it. Well, if you own all the acreage attached to the Hudson, where you can't dump refrigerators and oil and whatever toxins into there, you know, or runoff. I think there was a point at which that mattered, but I would also, like, we need green housing. We need more. We need financing for renewable energy projects. Like, there's a lot more that can be

done than just like taking land away from, you know. I just think it's like, it's like, it's a beautiful part of the solution. Over climate migration. So if you intend, if you have a set up a trust that intends to make some of that land available for climate refugees? Sure. Great, right? But like, I don't know, just or whatever. I mean, if you look at what's happening in like the rainforests, whatever. I mean, there's enough, we have enough land for people to live on.

The amount of land isn't the problem. It's like how we're using it and the zoning. But I think also these people buying, what a lot of people are doing is now, they're going to the farmers. The people who are selling their land in the rainforests for wood, they're not actually making that much money. So going there and making a preemptor saying, don't cut down the wood, we'll just buy the land from you.

Right. Great. I'm into that. And you can use it. Like, that's super cool too. Anyway, I just, I'm fascinated by this idea of buying forests and maintaining them. Yeah. And sure, housing is important too. Both of these things are true at the same time. Totally. Yeah. Anyway, this is a remarkable group because of this nimbie. That's all market reasons for. Oh my God. I'm not trying to derail us. I'm just saying that like throughout all of history, private land ownership by the wealthy has produced issues.

Well, this is nonprofits, though, earning it. I'm talking about non-profits. If it's nonprofits and the trust, I'm just, you know, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just saying, I wonder about that. The philanthropic solutions that we could think of. Like, and I'm not, that everything should happen. I am an everybody in the pool girl. You're a little bit cynical about it.

I understand. You're, you're wondering if people are abusing this. Is that my correct? Yes. Or it's the most optimal, if I'm listening correctly. Is it the most optimal or people abusing it, I guess, are two valid concerns? Both of those are my questions, right? Like, I think, like, is it the most optimal?

I don't know because what we really need to do is get off fossil fuel. So if you buy like a whole bunch of land to preserve but you know, like, I don't know. It's a 50-50. Buy some land and then put up solar panels. We're all good. There we go. I mean, actually, yeah. Actually, yes.

Right. And put a nuclear power plant in the middle of it. Buy the rainforest. Pop a nuke right in the middle. Nobody wants to live near a nuke. If it's already cleared. Yeah, listen. They probably cleared a lot of it.

You just dump a nuke right in the middle of the rainforest. You run some things. Now we're getting creative. Now we're getting creative. Here we go, folks. There's a lot of memes that came out of this, but the cousin Greg won won the day. It really did.

I mean, life imitating art is never gets old. Here's cousin Greg. Well, my grandpa gave my inheritance to Greenpeace, which is a pretty great moment in the show. Greg is such a complex character. He's such a buffoon. Also, shout out to Nicholas Braun. Emmy nominated for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama series.

He got a nomination. He did get nom. And Tom won for Best Supporting. Isn't that so perfect? Tom one? Tom one. And Greg was nominated, which was really almost the only outcome to follow the show. If you're going to make a Tomlet, you're going to have to crack a couple of Greggs.

A couple of Gregs. Got to break some Gregs. Got to break some Gregs. Listen, that makes total sense to me. Tom, wise, what's his last name? Wams Gans. Wagsgant? Oh, he's the great.

He's the greatest. I just thought both of these characters because they're the same person at different points in their career. They're the same person. Greg's just naive, but trying to be a sure. shark and trying to navigate this. And then Tom is like, he just immediately navigates this. And there's so much more to talk about streaming. So why don't we bring our good friend, Lonn Harris, on, to double down on streaming news. Welcome back to the program, Lon Harris. It's time for you to beat the holiday rush with Snack Magic and their new partner in crime? Swag Magic. Yes, Snack Magic and Swag Magic are

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Okay, we got a lot to get to it. We got a lot. I don't know what's going on. Every week, this week in streaming becomes a docket that runneth over. It's like it's a huge part of the economy or something. Well played. I guess it's two out of my nine J trades are based on this thing. Well, when do we make in America anymore?

We just make shows. By the way, this is Lon Harris. You can follow L-O-N-S on Twitter. If you want to get a nice mixture of, you know, full Bernie Krat plus... It's really not a lot of Bernie. I really don't post a lot of Bernie. I love one Bernie for every nine interesting insights.

It's... You make it sound like Eugene V. Debs over there, and it's mostly about TV shows. Like, that's me not. I was about to say, 10% burning 90%. Once in a while, just like some full content awesomeness that I wish I said. Yeah, he does do some full content stuff. I'm just giving for the warning to the 17%.

Contact, rather. Listen, if you're a big fan, you're maybe not going to be into it. My delightful. My delightful. Good for you, by the way. Okay, where are we going to go here, though? Are we going Emmys? Are we going Jason's favorite movie Blade Runner?

Like, do we want to talk about Zazelab more murders? Almost as many murders as House of the Dragon? I mean, there's that, there's that goal. Goldman Sachs conference is going on this week. So every streaming CEO has spoken there. So we could go through all the stuff they're talking about. They're arguing about how much Hulu's worth. And then Backish is basically giving away that they're going to merge Paramount Plus in Showtime fully at some point.

It's more at this point, I think, a when than an if. And I already get. You can already bundle them. Yeah. Let's start with that. That sounds interesting. Yeah. What are the biggest headlines coming out of this?

So what is this conference? Goldman Sachs, they're having a conference. I believe it's in LA. It's tech, it's communication, whatever. It's one of those excuses for every CEO to get on stage and talk about how great they're doing and how good everything is going and how promising the future look and buy our stock. Exactly. So the biggest headline was the Wall Street Journal earlier this week published a report

that was basically within Paramount Global, they're having a lot of discussions about dropping Showtime as a free-standing streaming service and just roping it in as part of your Paramount Plus subscription. There's already a bundle that's lower cost that I do. So you can already get Showtime content pulled in through Paramount Plus. But this would just be dropping the. Showtime would become, you know, like how FX works with Hulu. It's a hub within this larger system, not its own service that you have to add on.

Yes, please. Yes. Yeah. I mean, we're seeing the premium cable networks, HBO, epics, stars. Like, they're kind of in this weird in between place right now. So all their parent companies are figuring out, you know, what the heck to do with them. Like epics were part of MGM. Stars is owned by Lionsgate.

It's like they don't make enough content to live on their own and compete on their own, but they make enough good stuff that it's not just throw away. You know, like there's value there because Showtime has Yellowjack. They've got that new Dexter show. They did that W. Camel Bell Cosby special earlier this year that was really good. Like there's good Showtime content. There's just, you know, not enough. No one's paying for that alone.

At this point. At this point. At this point becomes the issue. And if you can get to, I'm going to pick a number. Like if you can directly get to 30, 40, 50 million subs, then maybe you deserve to be a standalone. But if you get to 5, 10, 15, you know, which is maybe we're in FX or a showtime or like Cinemax.

Is that the other, like, the next down the premium cable? Right. But cinema was one of those. But now Cinemax is owned by HBO, Warner. It's in that WB Discovery. So a lot of the Cinemax shows are sort of being pulled into HBO Max, or that's where they'll live from now on. But they don't want to be second fiddle to another peer brand is probably the issue.

So like having Cinemax under HBO as like a logo or a channel, does it actually mean anything to anybody? I mean, that's where you get into, it becomes a brand. I mean, I think the reason this hasn't already happened would be because they want people who still have cable to pay for Showtime as a premium network. That's not going to win. Right. Just like HBO still exists technically as a cable network.

So does Showtime, and they're probably not going to get rid of that. So that's the worry. If we just start letting you watch Dexter on Paramount Plus, who's going to sign up for the cable showtime package. But at this point, I think that's, that's, that's, becoming a minor enough concern that forget about it. You can't base your streaming future on legacy

cable networks in 2022. One thing I've also noticed that I sort of want to ask you about is that there's a lot of deals. A lot of deals on streaming services right now. Like I noticed that Disney is offering a big discount for sign-ups. I think it was Peacock is like

sign up for a dollar. Like between that and sort of this conversation about folding in the smaller, you know, networks into what sort of sound like cable bundles. Like the competition is real out here. It's very real. And I think we're in the very last gasp of like maximize subscribers. Like at the same conference, this Goldberg Sack conference, Gunner Widenfelds, the CFO of WB Discovery,

he gave a presentation. And he was talking about, first of all, every streaming service is underpriced in his opinion. They all should raise their prices. And the other thing he was saying is, we're, We're done with the era of all of these companies are giving away content for cheap to try to maximize subs. We're now in turn them into a real business. You got to actually earn money.

You're not spending more than you're making. And so I think that's what we're in this very last ditch effort to like, let's sign up as many people as we can before the end of this quarter because after that, we're tightening our belts and all this stuff is going away and we've got to start focusing on maximizing revenue and profit. That seems uniquely like a oneer problem or challenge because they have 50 billion in debt when they put those companies together. They have to service the debt. If you're running a startup, you know that every little bit of help counts between running your team, building the product, getting compliant, hiring people, studying customer support, everything.

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And as we've seen, they've been doing cuts and General Zodlov has been coming in. They did some extra layoffs to the ad team just this week. Beautiful. This is what General Zodzoff has to do. He has to come in and bow before Zodloff. He's the heavy. This is what he's got to do. He's got cut, cut, cut.

Let's go to this guy who doesn't even wait until the glow is off of the HBO M-U-Ns. I'm hoping that he fired people. This is my hope. Molly, I hope while people were at the Emmys, that's when he did the LAMIs, during the Emmys. They get back from the Emmys. They got a pink slip. Let's go. These were ad salespeople.

So it wasn't like he was, Gene Smart didn't get a pink slip from hacks when she got home from the AMI. I love that show. Keep going. Keep going. It's great. What did Zod do now, General Zod? I don't do it. I mean, that was the big WBD story this week was there.

More layoffs. They're probably going to raise the prices on HBO Plus and Discovery Plus if they feel like they're severely underpriced. I believe Chapix said that about Disney Plus 2, that he feels that they're underpriced. Didn't they come out at $6 or $7? That was absurd. Yes, they came out in an absurdly low one,

and now they're going to raise it because the ad, the ad package is coming out. So for $7.99 a month, you'll be able to get Disney Plus, but it will have ads. You'll have to go up to $10.99 a month, ad free. who's not spending I mean I think yeah I think

people are gonna do it I think people are gonna should be $15 $15 right well that's what Chapick was basically saying this week is it's still underpriced and it'll probably What does it cost to go to the movies for the average It's going to a lot

I mean I know for me I go to the movies out of a fancy Dancy place cost me I think $18 a ticket for these crazy I mean in LA yeah it's 12 to 15 It's always right just for the ticket and then you know everything else is on top I think the cost of one movie ticket makes it easily justifiable. So if a movie tickets 12 to 15, that's easily justifiable.

Especially if you're talking about a service that you're watching a lot of things on per month. I mean, there are those services, like I've been saying, you know, Paramount Plus or even Disney where there's a few shows at a time that are sort of must-sease Apple. It's a more curated thing. But if you're on Amazon or you're a peacock or you're on Netflix, they're coming. It's new stuff all the time. They're throwing it at you constantly. And I think as they consolidate, that's where we're going to see the ability to raise prices.

Like right now, the thing is that they're, you know, whatever, I've got six or however many I have, I don't even know. I'm not paying 15 bucks for each of them. That will cause me to go full General Zad on my streaming service subscriptions, you know? But if it gets to the point where it's just three or four, like, everybody rolls up. I think the breaking point is when people see 20 bucks. I think you have to think about it at 20. I think when you're 15 and under, it's a no, you don't even think about it.

That's my position. And I think the $7 one brings in people who, let's just, to use a term, are, you know, maybe the bottom third of earners in the country, you know, because they might actually care about 15. I think you look at also like an hour of labor, too. I used to look at the world, is I would look at the world of how many hours

do I have to work at $3.50 an hour to afford what I was going to do. I think there's an interesting, there is something beyond price too, where there's just like fatigue at the idea of having to have all of these services. Exactly. You hear that a lot from people

where it's like the idea behind streaming was supposed to be different from cable and we didn't need to have everybody's service. And it was just one or two things that we could find everything there. And so I think there is, just like we used to see when inside was apps for your phone, We would get amazing reviews.

People loved our apps. But then it would be like, but would you install this on your phone? And they'd be like, no, I have enough apps. I don't want any more. Not one more app on my phone. Or they install it and sign up and then don't use it, which is always soul crushing. You're like, oh, my God, five stars, but I don't open it every day. It's going to be great.

There's a huge mental barrier. Like, you just feel like that's too many apps. I don't want that many apps on my phone. And I feel like people feel that same way. Like, that's too many services. I don't want to have that many services. They already feel that way. You can't, like, you don't know, like, you don't know

what things are on. It's going to be great when one overarching service comes in and says, hey, let me offer you like a bundle of all of these channels for one monthly cost. And then you'll just be able to search across. You could have a guide and it would show you like which channel things are on. That would be like, I use Roku like that now.

I actually use Roku like as though my streaming services are my cable subscription. Oh, Roku consolidate some on a menu nicely. Yeah. It does and it's searchable. So like now I just go to, you know, I have my Roku TV. I go to the home screen. I search for whatever show Lon told me to watch because I have no idea what service it's on.

Which by the way, this was... And then Roku pulls it up and is like, it's on Netflix, boop. And I'm like, thank you. By the way, was Steve Jobs' vision for this was you just use Siri, you say what you want and it comes up. When you are using the Apple remote, there's a thing called Apple TV, not confusing at all. And what that does is,

it doesn't take you to Apple TV. Plus to see Ted Lasso. No. It takes you to a service that is supposed to be a consolidation of every title. Yeah. The hub. They call up the hub, right? Now?

I mean, everybody's trying to get that hub thing. Like, just watch. There's tons of these new apps and services come up all the time. They're trying to do this. Roku and Apple are probably the closest to anybody to actually make it happen. When you do it on Apple, you now in the settings, it's so confusing because you either go to Apple Hub TV, Apple TV Hub. Or you can reprogram that button on your remote to go to your home screen where you have your apps

and you can pick the individual HBO app. So if you go to Hub Molly and you pick industry. So you have to reprogram it to do the thing that you want to do. Exactly. Yeah, that sounds like Apple. I want to go pick. I want to, it turns out the dedicated app for HBO is a great experience.

I want to be in that app. I don't want to be in Hulu watching HBO. I want to go on the HBO one because it has like all the extras and stuff like that nicely neatly laid out. So this is where like it's kind of, of happening, but it's just wildly confusing. Right. And I think there's just a tendency about people to feel like, well, I have three services.

It doesn't matter how great this fourth one is. It doesn't matter how cheap it is. I'm at my limit. Exactly. I'm at my limit. I'm not in the market for a new streaming service right now. Happened to me with cars. It's the choices problem.

Like we have too many choices. And so we just start to like simplify, simplify. Like I just want this. And I think like Peacock and Paramount Plus, like I do feel like on some level, that's what's happening. It's not that they're that much worse than these other services. It's just people already had three or four. And they were like, I'm good.

I don't need it. I'm fine. I literally want to get like a beater up Jeep to take on the beach and stuff like that and in the snow, at Tahoe, whatever. And I've really wanted to get a Corvette, you know, I haven't had one for over a decade. And for me, it's just like with cars. I'm like, you know, I got three cars. It's just enough. It's enough already with the maintenance, with the tires.

I can only drive one at a time. I'm only driving 50 miles a week now, 100 miles a week. It's like, it makes no difference in my life. For you, it's cars. For most people, it's, yeah, 499. Exactly. I'm talking about getting a, even the prospect. For me, it's like a pairs of jeans.

Like, I already have to. No, I'm talking about like a beat up. I want to get like a 15 grand cheaper angle that's 10 years old that I can just beat on. And I just the... A camping car. The registering of it. It's like my car. Keeping the tires.

Right. Like, most people's vehicle. That's just my regular. I have that obsession, though, like with like a 2005 BMWX5. That's like the camping car I totally want to buy. Okay, let's move on to Blade Runner, shall we? We got Blade Runner. We got a new show to watch, not just Blade Runner.

We also have a show about Spotify. Let's talk about upcoming TV. Blade Runner 2099 was green lighted. Do we say green lighted or green lit? I usually say green lit, but either is acceptable. I like green lit because it's short. I like green lit. Trades will use either one.

Funchy. All right, well, it was green lit by Amazon. Nick just changed it in real time because that's how on the ball he is. with, because Amazon is signaling that they plan to continue to spend crap tons of money on awesome stuff. Ridley Scott executive producing a series. Right? This is not a movie. It's a series.

Fantastic. And it's a follow-up to Blade Runner. An animated series last year. This is the first ever live action. What was that called Lotus or something? Black Lotus. Black Lotus. It was okay.

Dang. So yes, this is totally in line. This is a follow-up to Blade Runner 2049, which of course came out in 2017. and it's in line with Amazon really like picking its shots, right? Like not, no spray and prey here. They're going full. Lord of the Rings. There's no word on budget, but.

Yeah. But the thing about Blade Runner that's so amazing is it, like, we've, they've had so many at-bats. And we know that this is a niche thing. Like, the people who love it, love it, and obsess over it. And we'll watch it eight times and buy the tie-in novel and the art of Blade Runner book. And they'll get the Blu-ray.

But there's just not that many of them. I'm sitting right here along. I mean, I'm one of them too. But like, because when Villeneuve, who did Blade Runner 2049, his next big project was Dune. And people were like, oh, man, it's going to be the same thing. It's another one of these niche sci-fi properties. But that one was a big hit. So it does look like it's Blade Runner just has a, there's a limited audience.

It's got a core audience of, yeah, whatever, tens of millions of people, not 100 million. Right. It's not a game of throw. or Lord of the Rings level property. It's the next year down because let's face it, it, it's intelligent. So are you saying you doubt this choice? You're not so sure about this choice. I mean, Lord of the Rings also, you know, same thing, right?

Like niche geek. I love it. I'm super pumped. I can't wait for this show. I mean, I liked Ridley Scott's other big expensive show. Nobody watched Raised by Wolves. I was the only one who was in that. Yeah, I couldn't get through it.

On age to go back. So, right. So I'm, I know I'm in. It's just to me, I don't. The breakout potential of a Blade Runner series strikes me as, like, limited. I just, I just know there's a lot of people that have that. Like, it's a little slow. It's a little cerebral.

It's not for everybody. And, like, it has its fans. But, yeah, I don't know. So what do you think that's about that? What does that say about Amazon's choices? Because that's where the money's going, right? Is these big, somewhat limited? Well, I would imagine this one's going to be cheaper than rings of power.

It'll happen. It's going to be a, yes, definitely scaled down from that, right? I mean, I don't know. You could do a, you could do a cheaper. Like, obviously, there's expense and you got to build future Los Angeles. And, you know, like, there's action. But you could probably rein in a Blade Runner project more than, like, epic fantasy. I would do this.

If, Molly, if you're asking about Amazon strategy, I think the strategy is executives getting to go to premieres and for employees to feel great about Amazon. Yep. So don't get attached. Instead of buying ads on TV shows, just buy the TV show and it's an ad for Amazon because you put the logo on the front. Yeah. So you could, I know this sounds crazy, but what's an underserviced fan genre that feels ignored that has, I don't know, 25, 50 million people in it? Is there some show, like what would the shows that you guys?

Buffy. Perfect example. Bluffie. The expense was the expanse was the key example. Like that's, he's already done that, where he came in, swooped in, saved the niche show that had a die hard, but not very big audience. Perfect way to make people feel good about Amazon, the brand, the company, the institution, make a little bit of money off of it. And if it loses a little bit, it makes a little bit. It just draws people into the orbit of Amazon.

And it makes people have an affinity for Amazon. So you're adjacent to buying stuff on Amazon, cloud computing. computing, Amazon basics, Whole Foods. It just makes people feel good about the brand. I look at it in a way as like monetized marketing. I think that's not really, it's a good observation and it kind of, it's like Amazon internalized the lessons of Comic-Con, right, and the lessons of fandom. Yeah.

And the importance of, in a way that Netflix hasn't, right? If you're just like spray and prey populist fare, then you have people who might just default to you because it's there and there's a lot on it, but you don't have the love. Like, you know, fandom is a powerful thing. It creates the internet army that protects you throughout your, you know, existence. It's what people line up for at Hall H at Comic-Con.

Like, I do think that Amazon seems to understand that love can be more powerful than numbers. It's like the podcasting game. And there, I mean, there is a personal touch to this. too. Like we mentioned the expanse. Jeff Bezos, a big outspoken fan of those novels who when they bought the show

was like, I love this series, I love these books. Do what do you think I would be doing if I was in his shoes? I'd be like, let's go. Gladiator, the series. Black Hawk Down, the series. Right. Blade Runner, the series. I would be like, totally. I think he's just a hard-dry-fi guy.

But this is why I'm saying, don't get attached to these shows because he's gone now, friends. And A. WS is Jassy's bag, so don't, don't get too comfortable with Amazon's media. As predicted by us, Amanda Seafreed. Is that any of course? Seafreed. Mm-hmm.

One for her Elizabeth Holmes portrayal. Congratulations. So amazing. Congratulations. And that dance she did? Yeah. Awkward Asperger's robot dance. That is that robot dance is what went for.

With her headphones in it. And she's trying to like, what was the guy's name? God, it's amazing. Who's her number two? Who's going to GF for a letter than her? Sunny. Sonny. When she does the equivalent of a lap dance for Sunny Bowani to try to make him like,

with the smooth. With the smooth. It's like, this is the least sexy thing I've ever seen. Like, I'm trying, I'm trying to give her the better, let her have her moment of being desirable on screen. And it was just like, I don't think that was the plan. I'm feeling nauseous.

It's just, is this person coming closer to me? And now we have a new show. Now we have a new, as predicted, this is the genre of the future, right? Thank you for the segue. I was trying to key up the segue. Give it.

Let's get a drop. You have time for you to get there, man. I know. Go ahead. As predicted, though, the tech industry is the new, it's the IP of the future. It's like the Marvel universe.

It's like the Marvel universe. Lana alerted us to a fictionalized series about Spotify called The Playlist. From Sweden. This is a Swedish show. So we're going to have to watch it with the subtitles on. They've made their own superpump. No, you don't. Everything on Netflix is dubbed.

I watch some of these Korean. Oh, yeah. You could watch the dub. I watch some of the Korean dramas with my daughter. And she just wants it in English. She doesn't want to do subtitles. Oh, really? No, the dub is so weird.

But okay. Yeah, I don't like the dub. But you could watch this dub. For a 12-year-old, it's kind of hard. Yeah. They will definitely doubt because they put a trailer up in English. So whenever they do that, that means they're going to dub it for sure. Do we like...

I love that when the mouth is not in any word here. It doesn't match, but that's okay. Do we, I mean, do we have a sense that the Spotify origin story is this dramatic? This is going to be the most boring story ever told. Like, it is, right? Yeah, I feel like it's a lot of negotiations with music publishers and the music industry. There's nothing interesting. Like, I think, like, they had one party where somebody drank too much and puked.

Like, that's going to be like the big controversy. is like, oh my God, did you see Sven? Schwen? He got chained at the Christmas party. He puked on Telelex shoes. It was crazy. The Stockholm startup guys, they want their own show. You got to let them have a show.

It's based on a book. The book, Spotify Untold by Swedish Authors, Sven Carlson and Jonas Lager and H-E-N-H-E-G-U-F-U-F-U-D. The book, I made that. I have no idea. The book is described as quote. I mean, the name is L-E-O-N-H-F-V-U-D. I think I did great as far as I'm concerned. And that was like, you know, that's my North Dakota roots right there.

The book is described as, quote, a David versus Goliath story about how strong convictions, unrelenting willpower and big dreams can help small players take on the Titans of Tech. Woo. I'm sorry. What is this story? It might be a perfectly fine business book. And then they released the Mac OSS, the Mac OS desktop version. Oh, and it crashed everybody's computer.

Crashed all the Spotify. I mean, come on. And then Steve Jobs said, we're going to. build our own and hung up the phone. Like, literally, that's going to be the scene. It's going to be Daniel Leck on line one. He's like, uh, Mr. Jobs, we'd like to barty. He's like, I'm sorry, who is this?

It's Daniel Eck. I'm sorry, what are you calling about? We're making a streaming service where you can play music. He's like, yeah, congratulations. It's called iTunes. Yeah, but in Oz, you're going to pay a subscription fee instead of paying 99 cents. Oh, really? Wow, you're a genius.

I never thought about that. Goodbye. Like, that's literally going to be the scene. And then I mean, Spotify did. win. Yeah, I mean, like, I don't, I realize when I was reading this, like, I don't, I don't actually know the Spotify story. Like, I know it appeared on my computer one day and now I have it. I lived it. I lived it. They got the rights in Sweden. They got the rights in some countries in Europe. In America, they couldn't get the rights. They were, the PR people were giving American journalists access to it with

like a home of a team. I had it for like a month. Exactly. I had it for a month or two. I mean, the rollout was very dramatic and certainly negotiating with the music industry is no joke, but it's not good TV. You know, it's like a lot of... Here's what they need to do, Molly. They need to start with... We signed Joe Rogan and he had Alex Jones on. That's the interesting story. The podcasting story is interesting.

People quitting. Did you hear what Joe Rogan said? That guy being like, oh, my God, we gave $100 million... You gave $100 million dollars to the... $200 million to this guy and you didn't listen to the podcast. Did you know he said this on the podcast? You get to cast, you get who's going to play Neil Young? Who's going to play David Crosby?

Now that's interesting. Who's going to play Jordan Peterson? You know, that's like a six-episode limited series. That's the fun of it. Here's the thing about Spotify. Young men are addicted to the service and then you can't get anybody's, you know, they wouldn't even distribute me.

And, you know, young men are paying for it and they keep paying. They keep paying with their souls, Molly. I'm just holding up my red flag. I'm not listening to a word of this. You guys see that Chris Pine said his character in Don't worry, darling. I'm on Rumble. The new Olivia Wild movie is Jordan Peterson. He said he based it on Jordan Peterson.

I know. I can't wait to see it. I cannot wait. Chris Pine doing his Jordan Peterson impression. Oh, well, time to go. All right, everybody. That's it. I didn't mean to trigger you.

Yes, you did. Join Rumble because I'm doing a... I'm on Ben Shapiro and I'm interviewing Trump from Marla. He's been framed. You know, young men look up to Trump. I'm sorry to get to come into a fog. You're wonderful, as always. I did start watching paper girls, but then I heard it's already canceled, so I don't think I'm going to that one.

At the time since I recommended it to you, they brutally canceled it. It is shocking to me that Brian K. Vaughn's stuff is not translating to TV. He did why the last man, he did Paper Girls. These are such great books. They're so great. Something about it and the adaptation is getting lost. Did you House the Dragons Forum? I hope for the next one.

I read all the recaps. I am up to date. Do you do you do house of four? Yeah, I'm all caught up. Yeah, I'm all caught up. I mean, I'm just, I'm determined it's just prostitution porn. It's prostitution porn. I had to look away at a minute because I was just like, I don't.

No, thank you. I'm like, incest, brothel, I just don't feel great watching this. It was a little, but I guess that's what happened in those times. People marry their own. A little light marital rape. People always say that. Like, they don't have to show. If they didn't want.

to do a story about that they didn't have to. It's not like that was happening constantly. I feel like this is like, okay, now I'm just going to get us in trouble. But you know how like we started and the and the showrunners were like, we're going to definitely not repeat the mistakes of Game of Thrones when it comes to the treatment of women. It feels like this is actually just like a Me Too revenge romp. The whole thing. It's like, no, actually, we're going to make a whole series about how you ladies have been treated throughout history. And then we're going to be like, it's history. What can we do? It is a weird bait and switch that beforehand so much of the conversation with, was about this is going to be empowering for women.

We're not going to do what we did in the old character, but they... No, she's not. Well, I mean, she rides a dragon and has crissed a bunch of people, but... You could make the case, but it's very like... Then you get these gas-lady articles that are like, it's actually all about the women and the power of the women. I'm like, no, it's prostitution porn. They're putting them through a whole lot before they get to the redest...

That does seem to be hard. Okay, I agree with that. I'm 50-50 on it. It's a little bit... It's a little bit, like, it's the bait and switch part. It's like, if you hadn't had that conversation up front, it'd be one thing, but instead it literally is like, oh my God. I knew this was an issue because, you know, at the end they do a recap because the shows are so complex and they're like so muddy and dark and all the names are hard to follow.

There's a lot of character points here to keep up with. So at the end, they're like, hi, I'm a female. I'm involved with the production of this show. Let me address the issues you have with how females are treated in the show. Right. So I wanted to do this. And she's talking literally about the brothel sex scene. And she's like, I wanted to do this in a new way from a woman's perspective, because normally

this is the man's gaze. So let me show you that how I manifested the woman's gaze, because women do have sex as well and enjoy it. There literally is like a short film after the episode. Yeah, and I do their like 10 minute making of the show right after. Did you see it in that instance? And to Lans point, did you see it or watch it or no. Like, to Lantz point, I don't usually watch those.

You don't have to tell that story. Just because I like to have the, I like to have my own reactions instead of parodying what the HBO people said. Right. You don't want them to give you their talking points. Right. That's professional. That's professionalism, yeah.

So weird. All right, listen, Lon, we could talk to you for hours. We always do it. So we're going to try to be disciplined today and let you get out of here. We're going to get out of here. I just also want to say shout out to industry. I'm very much enjoying the show. It's euphoria meets, it's euphoria.

Billions. As you described it. It's freaking great. And the actors are all amazed it. And there's only one actor I recognize. Ken Leung from Lost. Ken Leong, who I love. Yeah, he was miles from our show.

Maybe I'll start that one since your recommendation for me. Got the boot. All right. See you next week. Bye, Lon. All right, everybody. Thank you for listening. And thanks again for our good friend Lon Harris for joining us.

Follow him, Twitter.com slash L-O-N-S. And remember, stump the lawn. Ask him, tell him two things you like, and ask him for three more. That's what I want you to do. Stump the lawn. You can put the hashtag on. Stump the Lawn. At Lons on Twitter, here's the two things I love. Give me three more like it. He loves it. I have yet to see anybody win this game. So we'll bring it on. And then stay tuned

tomorrow, of course, for another great Friday variety show, a little news, a little series A. And of course, OK, Boomer. And congratulations to all the newly rich Figma employees joining Launch Fund 4. First webinar tomorrow Friday. Do you know this over 600 people signed up for or launch fund for a webinar. I do. I'll be there. I'm stoked. Yeah.

I'm not nervous, but I'm excited. It's a lot of incoming. Yeah. That's all, I mean, it's a little crazy. And we have over a thousand people signed up to go to the webinar. And I decided I'm going to do a story. Either Fortune or Forbes or Reuters. Somebody email me, like, and then I talked on CNBC about it.

Last night, people want to, people are like intrigued by this raising a fund in public. Yeah. And I'm super excited about it. If you're interested, just email me, Callicanis, my last name. at launch.co. And me or somebody on my team will get the, I mean, getting 20 to 50 people a day emailing about it. So mission accomplished with this. Like, I think raising in public is cool. It's going to be a little extra pressure. It's really, and you're doing it at exact, the timing is perfect because it's this exact moment when VC is becoming more mainstream. You're already

a celebrity investor. Like for, you know, to give this kind of, to have this brand at this moment that VC is becoming more mainstream and to give this look behind the curtain is catnip. I think it's kind of fun to everybody get educated and make a good decision. Somebody was like, is this for everybody? Absolutely not. It's for accredited or qualified purchases only. So it's only for 6% of the country. But I do think in the coming years, maybe launch from 5, 6, or 7, we would be able to set up

some kind of a pool, Molly, and say, hey, to our family members, not accredited people who are friends, if you want to put in $100 or $500 instead of, you know, going out this weekend and having a dinner or whatever, you know, Take a flyer, learn about venture, get educated. Go ahead and do it. You know, like, I think it's really interesting. I'm a little upset at myself if I'm being honest. I wanted to do this for Launch Fund 3.

I don't want to say I felt bullied, but I kind of got bullied into not doing it. Like, a lot of people are like, it's just don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. And I'm like, but my whole career is about increasing access to this asset class. Right. Why not do it? Like, because nobody does it because it's just the tradition, because it's complicated. I'm like, not for it. me. Not complicated for me. It's extra work. I'm like, not for me. It is a lot of extra work.

But it is, yeah, it's extra work. It is a lot more work. I can tell you, you know, these 20 to 50 emails a day, I asked people when you email me, hey, tell me a little bit about yourself, because I want to know who I'm in business with, obviously, even if it's a small check, even if it's a 10K check or a 25K check or a 50K check, which is nothing for an accredited or qualified purchaser, obviously. You know, it's like going away for the weekend. I mean, I've seen people play poker hands for that amount. much even larger amount. So it's not a lot for a rich person to put in a 50k check, but I still want to get to know them because I have a limit number slot. So I'm trying to get to know everybody. And with a thousand people already signed up, if this gets to 2,000, it's impossible for me to do that. So that's where I'm now thinking, how do you even CRM? Yeah. How do you even build relationships that many people? And that's why I decided to do these group webinars because I can reach 600 people a webinar or more. And so tomorrow's the first one. And then I'm going to do. do one, I'm going to do three of them. So one a week for three weeks. So if you're hearing this,

you missed week one, but week two and three, we still have slots open, Calacanus, C-A-L-A-C-A-N-I-S at launch.co. Not a com, C-L-A-C-O. All right, everybody. See you tomorrow. Like launch a company. See you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Bye.