This Week in Startups - Apple & Disney’s sports streaming strategy, Facebook’s plan to be TikTok, Obi-Wan, Star Trek | E1486

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

It’s Thursday, so we talk all about streaming with our guy Lon Harris! Spoiler alert as we dive into Obi-Wan Kenobi E5 (1:53) and Star Trek E4-5 (34:48). We cover Disney losing cricket streaming rights in India (41:44) and Apple acquiring MLS soccer rights (50:48). Finally, we hit on an internal memo that shows Facebook plans to be more like TikTok (57:17). 0:00) Jason and Molly tee up today’s streaming news with Lon Harris! 1:53) Obi-Wan Kenobi E5: sharing thoughts on the episode (SPOILERS) 13:52) Vanta - Get $1,000 off automating your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist 15:03) Obi-Wan: plot holes or symmetry + murder of children in television shows 20:58) Ourcrowd - Check out the deal of the week at https://ourcrowd.com/twist 22:04) Clunkiness in Obi-Wan: is it because of their real-time virtual production technology? 33:44) Liquid I.V. - Feel better faster. Get 25% off at https://liquid-iv.com using promo code TWIST 34:48) Star Trek Strange New Worlds E4-5: thoughts on the show (SPOILERS) 41:44) Disney won bid to broadcast Indian cricket for $3B but lost streaming rights 50:48) Apple signed deal w/Major League Soccer to stream every match for 10 years starting in 2023 57:17) Facebook wants to be TikTok, revealed in an internal memo according to The Verge

Hey, everybody, hey everybody. It's Thursday. So we're ready to talk about streaming with our Guy Lon Harris. Finally. It was a big week last week. So we actually have many, many. There's Lon. We have many episodes. To get through, we also have been literally stockpiling streaming media news all week long because we were stuck on crypto crap. And so we've been saving all this good streaming stuff to talk about. So it's going to be a beefcake of a show. All right, Obi-Wan, episode five. I am so, so am to talk about it. Star Trek, episodes four through six, which I think we can get through pretty quickly. Or maybe four and five will do, because I didn't see four and five yet. My homework and my homework is watching shows. I love four and five. Disney has lost their cricket streaming rights in India.

Apple has acquired MLS soccer rights. It's going to be a great show. It's a great show. It's a lot going on. Oh, my God, I stepped on one of your words. I'm sorry. I'm not mad. It's going to be a great show.

Stick with us. Coffee hasn't hit. This week in startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a sock to report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. Our Crowd Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs.

If you're interested in investing, you can join our crowd for free at OUR-C-R-WD.com slash twist. And Liquid-I-V, making hydration a priority will help you feel better on a day-to-day basis. Get 25% off at LiquidIV.com by using promo code Twist. All right, everybody. I am so, so excited. because Obi-Wan Kenobi episode five, or part five in the special streaming series, has dropped, directed by Deborah Chow, who is absolutely brilliant. I have no idea who this person is. Just killing it, though.

But she is crushing it. All of the concerns. She debuted during Mandalorian. She directed some of the memorable early episodes of the Mandalorian. Amazing. Yeah, I did read that. Also, I'd like Better Call Saul, Mr. Robot, American Gods. Wow.

An old school TV been directing great TV. shows here or there. Yeah. This show had a lot of people questioning it because of the slow start and a lot of weird decisions or seemingly weird decisions. And I think this is one of those situations, Lon. I'm not a perfect storyteller here, but I think there is something happening between a movie, a series, and a six-part event that has occurred here.

where people came into it with the expectation of a Mandalorian or a Marvel series, you know, whatever, 10, 12 episodes. They didn't expect this level of, I think, storytelling. And maybe it threw people because it was a slow start. But as I predicted, I am just going to say, like, my predictions were super spot on. I thought that we would get a Reaver Darth Vader fight. I thought we would get Clone Wars flashback. And I think it was pretty obvious

the Grand Inquisitor wasn't dead. So putting all that together, I feel really pleased that each episode delivers more. So starting at a slow pace, a slow burn, if you will, and then every episode just giving you more. Like in this episode, they gave us the flashback of hating Christian Anderson hating Christian sin

Hayden Christensen Hans Christian Anderson Hans Christian Anderson Thank you which to me was just delightful and then somehow they figured out

how to badass up Darth Vader to an entirely new level Yeah Yeah So I don't know where to start But there was a stand up and cheer Lon do you want to like

give us the big revelations in this one thing To what Jason was saying, I do feel like Disney more than any of these other streamers is really, they're creating this new category of show where it is in between a supplemental add-on to another series to some films. It's not maybe a full TV show, but it's not a film. It's this in-between thing. I think a lot of the MCU shows kind of feel this way as well. They don't have pilots in a traditional sense. they don't have premises like you'd get from another show.

And even in something like Strange New Worlds, the Star Trek show will talk about. It's built like a conventional TV show. There's episodes. There's even like spots where commercial breaks would go if it was airing on TV. And then Obi-Wan doesn't feel like that. It feels like its own unique kind of animal that is,

just like you said, it's kind of rising and falling in its own way. So, yeah, this week we got, you know, like plot-wise. I thought everything that happened storyline-wise was really terrific. And it really felt like almost like a philony Clone Wars kind of script, how it had this through line. We kept flashing back to this training duel between Obi-Wan and Anakin. I love that they didn't de-age them also. And I just say letting them just act that scene and not have to be under masks.

No, I don't think so. Hayden definitely looked like. Oh, I thought there was a little de-aging going on there. It might have been subtle, but Hayden, you could tell his, Like, he's just like, you know, he's a grown man now. So he's like, he's just bulkier and like, you just look more like his adult self than if you remember. Because I think I'm not positive exactly when in the timeline this scene is set. I actually, I think it's before clones.

I believe this is supposed to be like just before attack of the clones. I actually look that up because I was like, when did this occur? And I looked it up. And the speculation from the fans was this is before the end of attack of the clones. I would think it's before the start of attack of the clone. Before the start of attack of clones. Why? Right.

Because Anakin has both arms. Exactly. He doesn't have his robot hand and he's got his original lightsaber. Because he, Count Dugo cuts his arm off. Right. And he's still got the Padawan, like, rat tail. Like, this is obviously early, right. This is early-ish in the training.

But they're on Coruscant. I think it's the most reason to believe this is there on Corrissan before the arrival of Padme, which kicks off the action of episode two. Also, did you notice that? Far back, we're talking literal teen Anakin. And I like that they just let present day Payton play it. Just like act young.

And did you notice, Molly, that that arena where they were doing their battle was where the opening scene with the Pada on learning some what looked like Cada, like some forms and martial arts forms is the same place. So I guess that's the

training arena. That'd be the Jedi Temple. Yeah, of course. In the Jedi Temple. Yeah. Let me do a little, like, let me do a little plot rundown. Okay, plot rundown for the people who are just jumping into this cold and are like, I don't know what you're talking. They probably watched it, but spoilers.

But I love how that was woven through and actually paid off thematically at the end of the episode. It wasn't just flashbacks to fill in information. It was like a- No, it didn't feel boring. It was like really well done. So we have these flashbacks that are, again, super central to this story, which is like, who is Anakin becoming? He's fighting with Obi-1. He's being super aggressive, which eventually leads to him. losing, which, you know, a version of that plays out in the episode as well. But you see, so what,

you know, Vader, Riva and the stormtroopers arrived to attack the base. They, Leia's droid breaks the escape drawer. She like saves the day. Obi-Wan negotiates with Riva. And then, of course, the reveal that a lot of us did expect, which is that indeed she was one of the children, one of the younglings who saw the other ones get slaughtered at the Jedi Temple. She reveals she's been gaining Vader's favor this whole time in order to kill him. In bummer things that happen, we do eventually lose my favorite Tala, which I knew was going to happen, but I'm not going to lie, I still had a little ugly cry moment over that. And her droid, like, why is it so hard to watch droids die in Star Wars?

It's brutal. It's a bull. He sacrifices himself. It's a heartbreaking sequence for sure. So Obi-Wan surrenders. It's a great sequence where he just flops over her. And just tries to protect. Yeah.

Shades of those moments. K2SO in Rogue One, where he also like dies for the mission, sacrifices himself for the mission. And then that like the one in Mandalorian, the one that's like the protector droid. Oh, right. Yes. Tycho It's badass. Yeah, it's assassin droid. Yeah, that thing is amazing.

IG 88. Yeah, IG 88, Malia. Obi-1 surrenders and gets taken to Riva and convinces her to team up and try to kill Vader. Leah fixes the doors. Um, the path escapes. Vader, this is the moment where I actually like stood up cheered and rewound. Vader grabs the ship out of the freaking sky with the force. Yeah.

Unbelievable. Riva tries to kill Vader after the path gets away, but we'll talk about this fight scene. It was, it's, she's just completely outmatched. It turns out the grand inquisitor arrives. And as producer Nick points out, he's super sassy and he takes back his jewelry. And then Riva, and then the big, big, big reveal in some ways is Riva left for dead, finds the communicator that Obi-1 had been using to talk to Bail Organa and discovers that Luke exists, is on Tatooine.

And then some of the reviewers seem to think that she also realizes that Vader is their father in this scene. Yeah. Yeah. Which is a big deal. Unclear if she got all of that information out of the communicate, but it certainly seems. possible. And it really sets up a tantalizing final episode because we know

Vader can't find out that Luke is on Taddewee. Like at some point that ruins Star Wars if he figures that out. So they've got to somehow resolve this story with Reva having this information, but it never gets back to Vader. Okay. So

sometimes things look like plot holes. Oh, I don't think it's a plot hole. They've got to figure out how to do it. I'm not. Obviously, they will. Yeah, no. So that one I think they'll figure out. That'll be a great episode six. Or it could lead into a whole Obi-Wan series part two, which is- I do feel like we're getting set up for Andor. Like we said, Andor's going to span from Diego Luna's childhood all the way right up to Rogue One. And it's going to cover the formation of the early rebellion. So a lot of the threads we're sitting up here with the path, with Ice Cube's kid who runs the path and is getting all of these Jedi. safe and all these force users to safety, uh, obviously I feel like that's coming into play again and we're going to see those

characters interact with the and or characters. So maybe not an Obi-O-Wan series two. Maybe just in the next show that comes out and we're doing a whole rebel alliance formation of the rebel alliance timeline. I like that timeline concept. And I think one of the things they were floating is a trial balloon. And I had talked to John Favreau about this, uh, when I talked to him about Mandalorian.

is I said to him, why don't you just do the Clone Wars live action? And he kind of smiled and he was like, oh, yeah, that's an interesting idea. Like, as if I was the first person to ever say this. Yeah, yeah. But the Clone War series has so much material and they've been tapping it like crazy with Ashoka and other things. So, and they've been hinting out all kinds of other Jedi who are mentioned. So maybe what they're doing is they wanted to see that Anakin, they wanted to give us

the Anakin, Ewan McGregor, young, Obi-Wan moment, see if we delighted in it, and then open the window to then just do like a 100-episode series of just the entire Clone Wars. I mean, I think that's totally possible. I think they're getting a lot of mileage out of the version of that they're doing right now, which is a bunch of things can happen during that point in the time. Like, you don't have to just remake Clone Wars episodes. You could do new adventures with the characters we met in Clone Wars because they're all

here in this. it's a perfect platform. They all exist. Yeah, the in between time. And that, I think, very clearly is what they're doing. Okay. So some other Quinlan Voss is here. Maybe we'll meet them later.

And, oh, Boca Tan and all the people men, like every show now is sprinkling more details about all of these characters exist. They're all out there in this world. Yeah. Even, like I said, Jedi Fall in Order, even the video games now they're starting to reference. And this is a large scale. And then Tycho Waiti, I don't know if you saw his comments this week, where he was talking about He's doing a film and he's saying he's not interested in these threads.

Like, it's not going to be like, oh, it's Chewbalka's brother. Like, it's going to be all original stuff. And he's like, I'm the only guy who's allowed to do that. The tone of it was they're bringing in me and they're letting me color my own little corner of the world. But everybody else has to relate stuff back to the sort of backbone. I insist on a future episode of this show that you only do in Taeko-O-T-D voice. That was incredible.

I'm not very good. I'm not that great. It's a tough one. Believe me. I should work on my Kiwi. Yeah. It's a hard one. It's a hard one.

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Here's the best part. Vanta's going to give you $1,000 off your sock, too. That's Vanta.com slash twist for $1,000 off your sock too. So here's a plot hole. They show Anakin going to, or a potential threat. They show Anakin going, and they're really good at this symmetry, or synchronicity, right? So they show the battle of, you know, that training video, that training session. And then they're obviously paralleling that with this, you know, game of chess that Obi-Wan is playing, flipping Reva.

Right. And then using the shuttle inside the bigger ship. And the bigger ship is the decoy. He knows he's going to pull it down. He had that great line where they mirror it at Obi-Wan is like, well, there's other ways to win than fighting, which is, of course, you know, he says that in Star Wars. is it. Yeah, it's like a nice symmetry there. You don't need always, yeah, I like that they figured out because that's how, they're setting up a scenario where none of these characters can overpower Darth Vader

in a fight. Like, you're never going to have a character who's like, I'm going to take you to these Darth Vader. He's the most powerful force user at this time. So they've got outwit him. They've got to get ahead of him somehow because otherwise you lose. Well, they have to use his weakness, which is his rage and his desire to win. So his desire to win is so great he can pull a ship out of the sky. But, after doing that he's kind of spent and the other ship gets away the backup ship that was in the show

too quickly I actually revert like the first time I saw that shot I didn't see the ship in the background but then if you reverse they didn't either they don't cheat they're like I thought they might cheat they don't cheat they show you that there are two ships there you just don't notice it

because she put the other one prominently in the foreshunders. They do another mirroring with Riva as a child when Anakin comes order 66 to the temple to kill the children. They actually show him slashing children. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know if anybody else. Yeah. Yeah. Did you have this like with the school shootings? Just put the warning card in front of it. They did put the warning card, but I'm still. It was not only was it kind of traumatic to see that.

It was when Riva was talking about being a part of that and having to, and playing dead. And it was, I was a little surprised that they, rolled with that and it was upsetting it was i literally that's exactly where i was going molly they literally talk about a child hiding under another child during essentially a school massacre the jedi temple is a school for these padawan yeah and this insane young maladjusted uh rage-filled uh young person anakin kills children i mean the parallel is i mean it's crazy that that existed in the world. Like George Lucas was not, I don't think George Lewis was thinking of a school shooting when he had Anakin killed the children. He was just thinking what's the most savage thing he could do to

show he's a dark person, I think. But there's a moment where Riva is about to, spoiler, let's get killed or get a lightsaber through her stomach. And I'm trying to figure out if she was also stabbed when she was a child. Oh yeah. I think that's the implication is that he stabbed her as a, we don't see it. We don't see it. But yeah, I think the implication was that he wounded her when she was. was a child who somehow survived, now he's done it again. Yeah, because you see this kind of flash that's flashing back between the child person and the flashback. But they don't show it upsetting.

Which I understand. You don't want to show a child getting, I don't think you could show that. I will say they, this was at least conceptually part of Star Wars all along because Lucas had come up with that idea that the Jedi were wiped out. Like the empire, when they came to power, killed off all the Jedi.

And that's why, like, Han Solo doesn't even believe Jedi exists. exist because, oh yeah, he just, I think Jason, Jason just means George Lucas wasn't trying to harken back to a school shooting. He wasn't thinking about a school shooting, but he was thinking about there was a purge, you know, it's so, it's so, it was, it was, in the storytelling, that upsetting moment, or disturbing that our life has now become talking about children hiding under other dead children or a young person going out. It is. It, it, on some level I do, I mean, obviously they are, they are aware of this parallel. I don't think they, They weren't thinking about this at all when they were making the show.

But for Disney to even make a show with this as a theme, I mean, you've got to figure these real events happen regularly and not that you're not going to. Yeah, like you're never going to come out at a time when this isn't on people's minds anymore. And it's not an ongoing problem. I don't even, yeah,

I'm not even sure it's a critique exactly. It's just sort of an unfortunate. It's so close to what it has been. I have to feel like. That it was actually like, it was pretty upsetting. and maybe they left it in because it's like, look, it really is. It's that horrible.

Like, yes, it's that horrible. I have to feel like the creative team was aware of the connection. Oh, of course. This must have been. They must have been a huge discussion for the past two weeks. I don't know. Well, the other dark, troubling, but also interesting parallel here is Stranger Things, which the new Stranger Things season also opens.

I don't know. This is a very first scene, so it's not a spoiler. Yeah. With a bunch of murdered. children and 11 sees a room, big room full of, and the stranger things far, I will say, far more like grisly and on-screen violent than Star Wars is, you know, they're being killed with lasers and you don't really, stranger things, there's blood, there's mangled bodies, it's very troubling. They also put a warning on it. I almost feel like you would have cut around some of that stuff.

The narrative over Overton window has really, yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, that is, you do start to think about like, why do so many, of our big pop culture, tentpole entertainments deal with the mass murder of children. That is weird. Yeah. A little bit America. A little bit America. It's like on our minds, yeah.

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of betrayal that's like almost a double betrayal. So Obi-Wan surrenders, convinces her like, we got to team up to fight Vader, and then runs back in. And I'm expecting that he is going to stay there and they're going to team up and fight Vader. And instead he just- That was my prediction last episode. Yeah. But instead, he ditches her to fight Vader alone. It's like this double abandonment.

Yeah. And I love that they gave- I was like, Jesus. I love they gave Vader that line like, Obi-Wan was smart to use you like this. And it's like, I think that's true. Like, that is, that Obi-Wan's plan was, this will give me cover to escape. And then double-using.

But also, Dr. Fader is framing it in order to make her more dark side, right? Right. That's the worst interpretation. The best interpretation is, hey, we have to save Leia. We have to save all these people. Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. We are teaming up on this. You're the distraction.

Good luck. Well, right. She says, I want to kill, like, that's why she's there. Right. I do, I do have to say her. Her plan feels a little undercooked. She's been, if the idea was, unless you're the Grand Inquisitor, you don't get an audience with Darth Vader. And she had to do all this to be in his presence.

Then I feel like you could sell it. Like, well, she just had to do all this to get next to him so she could try to stab him. But we see that she's met him before. She's on that ship with him. And he's like, good job. You're another Grand Inquis. Like, why not just kill him right then? Like, what are you waiting for?

And then he's not, when she does. try to sneak up on him, which he's not distracted in any way. I mean, yeah, they over one's already left. Like when you stab him is when he's trying to hold a ship. It's not a great. It was just not, it felt like, look, I will grant that this was a moment when her emotion might have gotten the best of her.

But it was not, but she's been so strategic and so careful that I felt like she didn't deserve to be trying to sneak up on undistracted, full force, dark later. It was a great. Yeah, her, her, their fight is very, like, I think this comes back to a lot of my thoughts on this episode, which is I liked everything that happened. But there are, there are some wonky moments in terms of the actual, like, the editing, the blocking, the physical filmmaking. And I don't want to lay this on Deborah Chow or the people who are making the show. I feel like one of two things is going on here. You know what I mean?

What I'm, what I say that, Jay's like, like, they arrive and then. And Riva and all the stormtroopers are there. There's just this door keeping them. But it takes forever to like walk through the door. And then there's this all way. But then she can lightsaber the door. You don't know how wilds are all the way. It does feel a little clunky, like almost like a soap opera that's taking place in a finite amount of space.

Exactly. Yeah. And then like characters are whispering, but other characters who are right behind them can't hear them. And there's all kinds of stuff like this. And I feel like it is either, it's one of two things. It's either there's a time or a budget. crunch. They've got to get through this quickly. They've got limited tie. We just got to like make it good enough and then we got to get

onto the next setup. Or it's a limitation of this real time virtual production environment that they're using. Like you can only put the camera in certain places. You can only light certain angles because otherwise there's a screen or that's where the virtual set goes or something. But the guy who shot this, the cinematographer on the show is the guy who shoots like Chanwick Parks movies. So like the guy who shot Old Boy in the Handmaid. he knows where to put the camera to get the right setup.

So I have to feel like it's some other kind of physical limitation on the day. Oh, interesting. Yeah. It's just my guess. I'm not very good at noticing that stuff. And now I'm going to look back and see. But like that sequence where I feel like there was a way to shoot Riva sneaking up on Vader, that it looks more like she'd have a shot at really taking him out.

I agree with Molly. Also, it felt like a bad. If she's been, if she was that cunning, her whole life from past. To adulthood to do this plot, she should have had a better end game. Like this giant chess match, the end game is like, I'm just going to send my queen right into the middle of the frame. It reminds you of Skyfall, where Harvey R. Bardem's got this incredibly intricate plan. And then at the end, it's just like run over to Judy Dench and shoot her. It's like, you mean this elaborate plan to kill Judy Dench?

She's 100. And sometimes she goes to lunch in public. Just follow her. Like, what do you do? I do like Molly your concept of he's pulling the ship down. He rips it apart. The other one takes off. He's super distracted.

He tries to grab the second ship. That's when you get him. And then she takes a swing in him. And she actually, it would have been much more satisfying if she had actually hit him in the shoulder. You know, like, and maybe. Landed any kind of a blow. Imagine his helmet gets cracked.

See, I was waiting because you said that. I thought that was a good prediction. Yeah. I thought that might actually happen. And it didn't. I was really irritated. I'm like, man, she didn't even land. I would have to have her land

And it's this sort of double betrayal. It's like, Obi-Wan sort of uses her and dumps her. And then it turns out the Inquisitor was alive all along, which I didn't find that satisfying, I think, because I didn't watch the claim. You know, it's sort of like, oh, okay, she was double betrayed. But I think unless you really, like, have internalized something about the Inquisitors,

like it wasn't that satisfying. Yeah, the fans were complaining because that character is in rebels, the animated show that takes place after this. Yeah. And he's kind of a duval. He doesn't have this giant fat head. Yeah. Well, it's theoretically possible.

They only call him Grand Inquisitor. So it's possible it was a different Grand Inquisitor who just looks like this Grand Inquisitor. It's supposed to be the same point. It was kind of a giveaway to fans. Like, he's probably not gone for good. It's one of these shows, like, it's very, it's very interesting because like, I like I like Star Wars a lot. I am not adjacent about it.

And I'm finding this show simultaneously great and a little boring. Oh, wow. Yeah. And I don't know if it's just. I don't find it boring. I don't know. I think it might just be. like my like, I mean, last night's episode

was really exciting, but I have, but I also have these moments where I'm just like, okay, like, we're plotting along in the story and I know things are going to happen and stuff and I'm like ready for them to, it's a weird, I'm having a weird response to it. And I don't know if that's just me and my, it might be my relationship to our long shows. You know, it is the stuff that Lon's

talking about where it's just like, it's not, it doesn't feel all the way knitted together. There's a certain stagingness to it. I mean, I also think like, just like I was saying before, and this, I mean, if you're watching the of the Marvel shows, like Moon Night, Ms. Marvel, they're all kind of like this. They don't do the things that we expect TV shows to do that we've internalized.

Like, even if you don't know TV screenplay format, you do because you watch TV shows. So when it doesn't line up, you're like, wait, something's wrong. So, like, a lot of these Disney shows, we expect an inciting incident. Like, well, why is the show's action happening now as opposed to last year or two weeks from now? Like, why is this happening to the character today? You could have a show where the setup is that the lead character is broke, but he's always broke. The show's happening because he's getting evicted from his apartment today.

They have an unhappy relationship, but the show's happening because they break up. And Disney shows kind of sometimes don't have that. And that's just an example. Obi-Wan does. But I'm just saying like all sorts of things that you expect shows to do. Like in the opening episode, you'd give them like, here's the goal that they're going to be working toward for the whole show.

And like, they didn't do that here. They don't do that here. They assume that, well, this is you're coming in in the middle of this larger story. And so we could just kind of start filling things in. I mean, when did Obi-Wan actually take out his lightsaber? It's like, we want to see Obi-Wan. And where's Hayden, you know, like he's supposed to be here? Like, they cast him.

They made a big deal of setting him on the tour. Like, we still haven't seen him. We saw that one little flash of him in episode four, he's in the field. It is a little. When is he showing up? It's a great point, too, about TV structure because one, you are expecting those kind of action moments and breaks to happen throughout. Like you are sort of mentally calibrated for something that's leading into a

commercial break. And then it's also like, it reminds me of the period we went through with fine dining where it was like, you will sit here for nine hours and you will enjoy all of these little things that I'm going to bring you. And one of these things might be a chocolate hand and you only eat the thing that's in the hand. And if you bite the hand, you'll get yelled at this happened to me at Atelier Crin, where it's just like, you brought me food, but you can't eat that food. And it was sort of like, it was indulgent. It was chefs indulging themselves. And I sort of feel that way about the Marvel shows and even Obi-Wan, especially where it's like, you got to know all this lore to really enjoy it. Like, this is the 15 course Joelle Roble Bichon of shows at this point.

And it's great, but I also just enjoy a taco truck. Yeah, go down the rabbit hole. I advise you to go down the rabbit hole. Once you start going down the rabbit hole and watching the Clone Wars and start putting all this fabric together, it becomes even more pleasing. But I don't have to retire. I don't have the ability to watch it without thinking of the entire arc of the Skywalker saga. You know, like it's, and that's what I, that's what makes it pleasing for me. So yeah. And what happens in episode six or how do they wrap this up? Yeah. I mean, obviously we're going back to TAT everybody, all the main players are going to be on Tad. So Riva's going there, Obi-Wan's going there.

Bail Organ is probably going there. We heard Jimmy Smith say he was heading there. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, somehow this all ends on Tadouin with a fight to keep Luke. And we also know that Bonnie Priest, who plays Aunt Baru in the prequels, she is reprising her role. We've seen her, but only through binoculars from a distance so far. She's going to have to have some lines. They promoted that she was coming back for this.

And Uncle Owen has a big position. And we haven't turned Luke Skywork. talk. Right. So I would say, or do anything? We're going to have to go spend a little bit of time

on the Skywalker farm in the end here. It's going to be some kind of a battle. At least have a little interaction. That would be amazing. Just a little. That would be random because I think they got to get her home.

But you never know. Bell Organ is going there. Maybe. Yeah. That's where she's getting picked up. It doesn't break canon if they don't realize they have a connection.

If it's just he meets a random young girl, he wouldn't know. It would break canon if Luke Skywalker at that age were to see Obi-Wan or a lightsaber. Right? Right. Yeah, he's got no.

He can't see Obi-Wan. He can't see a lightsaber. He's seven years away from planning to go to the Imperial Academy. Like, when we meet Luke Skywalker, he thinks the empire is great, and he wants to go be a pilot for them because he's bored of being on the moisture farm. So he can't get any ideas about wanting to be a Jedi at this point. Right.

He really doesn't even know if that. stuff's real. Those are just rumors to him. So does this mean Riva comes down and Obi-Wan has to fight? And then Riva now has wants revenge on Obi-Wan and Obi-Wan has to kill Riva. I think it's got to be something like this. Or Riva's going to somehow sacrifice herself to keep the secret. Or Riva's going to tell some other players that we haven't thought about and bring them with her. Who knows? But- Or the Grand Inquisitor could come. Right. To go collect Riva. Yes. That's very possible. Vader can't be on Tatoline or that would kind of break. No, he would sense Luke Skywalker, right? That kind of breaks it. So other than that, I think everything is basically on the table. When you push your body hard, it's critically important to stay hydrated. This is especially true for people with busy work schedules like me and you. We're the ones doing all the work around. So if you want to up your hydration game, you need to check out Liquid IV.

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at Liquidiv.com by using the promo code twist at checkout. That's 25% off at Liquidiv.com with the promo code twist. All right. So we move on to Star Trek. We've done 30 minutes of Star Wars. I think we've got. I hope you'll enjoy it. I hope you guys all love this as much as we and J. Cal do.

All right. Let's do these. What do you want? Let's cruise through Star Trek real quick. Just do four and five. I think what I love about this show is exactly what we were just saying. It's like the opposite of what they're doing. with Star Wars, where it's like, it's the old school Star Trek vibe, but you don't need to know

any lore. You don't even need to keep up week to week. It's like short sci-fi stories set on the Enterprise and they go to different planets every week. I'm finding that very delightful. I love just dipping in. Here's a 40-minute Spock Pike Adventure, and then we're off to the next week. And they have no problem mixing up very much in the style of kind of the original Star Trek, too.

like episode four is pretty dark. Memento Mori. You encounter this like really scary race that had kidnapped and tortured, you know, that, that officer for her whole light, her whole childhood. Basically, it's awful. It's really, really scary. Cons dissented. Yeah, cons descendant. And then the next episode is like, Freaky Friday, body swap.

Yeah, I like the vacation. They go there on vacation and it's like a comedy one. But that, I don't really feel like any series since maybe next generation or the original has really played in that neighborhood of like, sometimes it's kind of funny and campy. Like, and they definitely went with funny campy. It was delightful. Like, I really like that.

It's so serious. So much Star Trek now. Like Picard, I like Picard, but it's very self-serious. And Discovery, too. They're very like, I don't know, cerebral. This is Taco Truck. Yeah. And this is not cerebral in that way.

Yeah. It's fun. It's just plain old fun. And also, I'm sorry. But for the ladies listening or the whoever thinks so, Pike. Wow. He's like that one girlfriend, which are sending each other pictures of him,

like straight up. Who is this guy? Has he ever been in anything before? Does he just have somebody from like, Vincent Mount. I mean, did you see Dr. Strange? Yes. The new doctor,

he was Black Bolt. He was the guy in the Black Bolt. Because he played Black Bolt in that show. The, now like the Immortals, the Inhumans. Inhumans. That short-lived Marvel in Human show. He was the star of that as Black Bull.

But he's been in, he was in Hell on Wheels, that show. What else? I'm looking at him up. He's been in a few other things. Hmm. I did, uh, I do think he's a great character. I like the Spock character. I like how they were,

I just like how they are getting back to basics. Like we're saying here, doing the solo, Dolo episodes, like they can stand alone. You can watch them out of order. It doesn't really matter. If you picked up on episode four or five, you could go back and listen to the first, watch the first three and you'd be fine.

I kind of like that, that they're kind of encapsulated. And I like this concept of like, spock and emotions coming back as like just a general theory. And like, I don't know if you notice, but like in that vacation episode, which I keep hearing the go-go's vacation song,

but they were showing him without the years, with the years, like struggling with emotion. And, you know, And having to fight himself. It's really on the nose, too. They're not trying to, you know.

Yeah. That's been also an Easter egg from the famous Kirk Spock fight from the original series Star Trek. They're actually using the same weapon and they played that the theme song. That they play it like as a specific recall. That was a lot of fun. Yeah. Did you also know this? That actor is playing Spock as Ethan Peck.

He's a Gregory Peck's grandson. What? It's true. Wow. Well, very cool. Yeah, this series is just well done. It doesn't feel cheap. I mean, this is one of the things that is amazing about technology to bring this back to tech,

is that they now have the technology to make stuff that looks better than the science fiction we experienced as kids, but to do it, you know, without having to spend three years making the film. So like Blade Runner with miniatures or the original Star Wars with having to do sound and, you know, also having to create miniatures and to do all this stuff. Now they're just like, yeah, we throw up the green screen and good enough. I mean, I know.

They have the real benefit of you could build out the enterprise set and then you just need like if there's a planet surface, it's like you pick one or two locations. And you can kind of just like sometimes there's space battles. But other than that, you could kind of make it like a TV show. Well, I did see somebody referencing that online where they said like when you do an episode like this one, the fifth one we're talking about

the amok, is it a muck? Yeah, Spock a muck. Yeah. Spock a muck. Yeah. It is low cost. So sometimes the practical thing is, remember the previous episode was like going into a comet and like the ship's ripping apart?

I mean, that was all CGI action sequences and this one had zero. I mean, except for people balancing it out over the course of the season, made of plastic, you know? And it doesn't have the kind of dysmorphia of the Star Wars episodes that we were talking about. Like, they just start keeping it simple.

I mean, also, like, we're used to Star Wars as these epic films where they're, you know, like the state of the art, like industrial light and magic making these effects that were mind-blowing for their time. And Star Trek has a long history of a bunch of actors standing a room going like, oh. Yeah. Like, they're not even going to try. Everybody left. Historically, it's always been kind of campy. And like, I think it sort of invites that, uh, this best week, the one that just debuted, I guess last week, featured a lot of shots of like this sort of big palatial.

It was set of this like high tech alien society. And people noticed online that they just used the mansion from Billy Madison as like this. Great. They redressed it to be like this fancy castle. It's just Billy Madison's house. I love when they use the Ennis house over and over again in L.A. from Blade Runner. Oh, sure. And they just use it for every time they want to have like a sign.

There are like three or four houses in the hills that are just like available to rent for productions. And you'll start seeing them over it. Oh, like there's one that was just in Dave last season that I've seen in like a hundred things. And as soon as you see Dave in the pool, you're like, I know that house. I know that. There's what I actually stayed in a house in Putamita in Mexico that is one of those houses. It's like in limitless and it's all sort of like in somebody's family, you know. Fast and furious too.

Now I'm like, I want to watch all the movies that that house is. Oh, there are too many. Yeah. Fast and Furious also has like a James Remar's giving him a, given him the business at a safe house that's just like one of those LA houses that's in like, like a shorty to like a bunch of other. Amazing. All right. So we talk about some streaming news while we have on. Streaming news while we got on here because this is the streaming wars continue. Lots of drama and cricket. I know.

Which you have definitely followed. So we talked about how Disney was trying to win the rights to broadcast Indian cricket, Indian Premier League. They've had it since 2017. They're losing the rights this year. They inherited it with Fox. So they won the bid to broadcast the rights and we'll pay $3 billion for the privilege, but then they lost the streaming rights to Viacom, which now people think. Collaborative deal with an Indian media company.

So Viacom partnered with an Indian media company, and together they have bought the exclusive global streaming rights for Indian Premier League cricket. So it may be on Paramount Plus in America. So this was just going to mean what, that Disney might not meet its subscriber goals as a result of this one deal? Disney's definitely going to lose some Indian market share over this because cricket's very popular. There are a lot of people will probably drop Disney Plus Hot Star and grab whatever this Viacomom offering is. Viacom 18, I think is the conglomerate name. But what Disney is saying, and who knows, we'll see what happens.

But what Disney is saying is the average earnings per user in the Indian market is so far below what they're earning in Western Europe, North America, even, you know, some of these are like in the Middle East, even some of these other international markets that they figured it was, it made more sense to pour all this money into content for those audiences instead of focusing so much on just the Indian market, which, you know, I think the idea is like cricket outside of India isn't going to have that big of an impact. You could do stuff that will go and be popular throughout a bunch of other markets with the same amount of money, which does, I think, make some measures. I mean, this is why discovery is such a juggernaut, because if you make a documentary about whales or sharks, you know, like Shark Week works in every language. You literally could just hire a voiceover actor and just have them read the script and you're ready to go in 150 languages. Same thing with history, too. You know, you just have these reenactments go on. animated stuff, family stuff. It translates much better.

You could just redub it and now it plays wherever you want to send it. And I think that there's, yeah. So there's, I think we're starting to see almost a little bit of a shift back. There was a few years where these streamers were just spending billions of dollars trying to spread themselves all around the world and interest people in every market. And I think naturally now that you're seeing, you know, the sort of the industry start to condense again, you're going to see a lot of those kind of ambition scale back. and they're going to focus on the most important markets

and selling people in the most, where they earn the most and there's still the most growth potential. They'll try to split the difference there. It does seem that sports still is a cornerstone. Oh, for sure. So Disney is spending $11 billion this year on sports rights, which is a third of the $32 billion overall that they're spending on content. And, you know, that's been a big knock on Netflix,

which is like, if you want to stay in the game, name Netflix, you're going to have to get sports. Yeah, I mean, it is one of the major reasons to watch live, so with Hulu and trying to get people to go to the live tab. The other thing people still watch live is reality shows that

have some of them have live components, right? Yeah, I don't watch them. That's the first thing that Netflix is their initial experiments with live are going to be live streaming events. So like next year's Netflix is a joke comedy festival instead of repackaging that as streaming specials like they're doing this year.

Next year, maybe they'll just live stream the two-hour Amy Schumer showcase or Snoop Dog's event or whatever. Why not do Coachella? Why not do music festivals? Well, that's already happened. Hulu's got Bonneru today. I don't know if you. Oh, they did.

Okay. Yeah. That's already happening. YouTube streams Coachella every year. Bonaroo this year. And I think it's Lollapalooza Bonaroo and one other are going to start on Hulu now. Yeah, those things are great. I don't understand why they.

Those are big. This is the big one. You know, I think we can make fun of CNN pluse. Right. It's easy to make fun of because they kind of did the one thing that doesn't work on TV anymore, which is these magazine-style shows, which like podcasts have kind of killed and short form. Like, people don't want to sit there at this slow-paced 30-minute magazine show. Right.

You know, it's from like Sunday afternoons on like, you know, your local CBS affiliate. These things just aren't compelling to this next generation. But what is compelling is like what we're doing right now or other people are experimenting, with live on YouTube, I just think a live streaming news 24 hours a day, pop culture news, 24 hours a day. Like, if they took the e-network and they just did like five hours of live pop culture news, almost like the ringer has kind of got their pause into with, you know, their view of pop culture. Like, there is a market there. Creators.

Like, honestly, start putting creators on their live streaming on Twitch anyway. You know, I mean, there's just a, if you needed 24 hours, you could start sprinkling some creators in there for an ad. of video gaming or an hour of this or that. We're also already seeing award shows to move over into the live. Like Paramount Plus just had, not only did they stream the Tony Awards, which were also on CBS,

but Paramount got an hour-long pre-show that was exclusive to Paramount Plus. So if you were watching the Tony's, the first hour where they were like, I don't know, people who were presenting an extra musical number, bonus, behind the seeds footage, whatever, you had to watch that on Paramount Plus.

So you're going to start seeing more stuff like that too where it's like, this event, you could watch it in a bunch of different places, but only if you have Peacock do you get to see this? And NBC Universal CEO Jeff Schell was talking about that this week as well at a conference that, you know, now that we're putting advertising is going to grow in the U.S. market, we're basically going to revisit the entire U.S. market again and try to win over the people who didn't sign up the last rush through and, you know, try to like solidify all of those markets. So who knows what's coming in the next few years? I was shocked by this tweet.

Top 100 most 2021 U.S. TV broadcast, NFL 75, NBA, NHL MLB Zero. Is this because, well, no, they do have, I think this is because the NBA sells their rights

to cable channels like T&T and they're not on ABC National except but for the finals, right? Or maybe, I don't know, maybe if the Eastern Western Conference Finals were, yeah, those are also, I think, on like ABC, but some of them are on TNT. Yeah. So this is just a choice they made to sell it.

But this is just a ratings chart, right? It's like the NBA, the NHL and MLB, none of those games made it into the top 100 most watched US TV broadcast in 2021. I mean, I think, but 75 of the 100 were football games. Like America loves live in a bell. The idea that, yeah, like the point that that he's making overall is true. Like, there are just more people who want to watch football games on TV than NBA games. But the NBA chooses not to sell to broadcast networks.

So you're saying it's not as popular. And if it were, if it were on CBS, then it would have. That is fair. Remember the NBA on NBC? That's fair. It was every weekend was four NBA games. Finals games are on ABC. Yeah.

Only finals, right. I mean, I think both things are. If a finals game was that popular, it should be on this chart. Both things I think are true. They are limiting their access by being on basic cable instead of on network TV. But it's also just less popular. I mean, I think you also have to look at there are a lot more games per season, especially like MLB, like one baseball game versus the whole season is like, well, you may or may not watch it.

There's so many more of those games. Whereas a football game, you know, there's only, how many weeks is the entire season? There's more scarcity. That would be interesting. So the cumulative viewers for the season for each team. So cumulative viewership for NBA, you know, they have 82 games. Right. The NFL has...

I don't know. I mean, I'm not going to be good at the numbers. 17. 17 games, I think, right? And then there are 17 regular season games? 17 regular season. Yeah. So nine...

Is it eight at home? Eight home games each and then you have two... It used to be eight and eight and 16, but they added an extra game. So now it's either nine and eight and seven. That's what I remember. And then the extra one they play in like sometime in Europe. Yeah, like shorter season, fewer games means that there's more demand per game. There's going to be more people watching.

So there's five times as many NBA games. When baseball teams play, it'll sometimes be like the Reds are going to play a five game series against this other tier. It's like, you know, who's watching all of them? Like, you know. However, although the NFL is America's favorite game, soccer is the world's favorite game or cricket. Absolutely. But. No, so.

So Apple, it's definitely soccer, yeah, by far. So Apple has now signed a deal. Apple missed out, of course, on NFL. Everybody did. Amazon locked the NFL up. But Apple has signed a deal with Major League Soccer to let them stream every match for 10 years starting in 2023. This could potentially be, I would imagine, huge audience. It's an interesting one because, and this is how Apple is sort of promoting it as well.

Like usually these leagues divide up the rights at some way. Like just like what we were saying. NFL games are on different networks. NBA used to be on NBC. Now it's on T&T, all these different. This is every major league soccer of thing that happens for the next decade. Only Apple TV Plus.

That's it. That's the only place to watch it. So if you're a soccer fan, it's now an essential destination. I wonder if they're going to do something unique with the content for the iOS operating system because they have a lot of features in iOS. It could be super interesting.

I always see these. soccer fans are so crazy that they're the ones who you see at like 9 a.m. on a bus or, you know, in a Starbucks, they're holding their, they're watching a soccer match, you know, all hours of the day because this is a global sport. How about in a bar on a bar? They got their phone out and you're just like, dude. Bars. If you walk around Manhattan or Hoboken on a random Saturday at 9 a.m. when the Premier League's on, it's crazy.

It's not craziness. Yeah. Well, why don't these restaurants just get the clue and just become like a brunch place to watch this stuff? I remember like with the World Cup, some places of Manhattan would become just absolute chaos. Like the places expats went, you know. There's a Brazilian restaurant in Oakland that plays the World Cup. And you go, I mean, you go at 6 o'clock in the morning, right? Because it's Pacific time.

And it is a blast. What a party. I have to say. Beer is at 6 a.m. Soccer is penetrating my group of friends who used to think that it was the lamest sport in the world. they're starting to care about the Premier League that actually are and they're going like I have well most of them just like to drink

and they're going to bars at 930 in the morning on Saturday and watching. Do you think it has to do with bar culture or the sport or some overlap of those two things? I'm being dead serious. I'm not saying like it's alcohol. It's definitely there have been a lots of demographic sort of studies on this. Starting when I was a kid

like Gen X, soccer became a lot more popular as a kid's sport to play in America. AYSO and like schools starting soccer burgers and that's what led to those kids grew up they played soccer when they were kids now they want to watch soccer and so that a YSO and that stuff led to a big boost in Americans caring about soccer because they knew the rules for the first time yeah the rules and then it's also um FIFA the video game soccer does an amazing job at branding and marketing at

stars so everybody knows who the top five players in the world are and everybody follows the teams of the players that they like to play with on FIFA. And also, I think the game has no breaks. So if you watch an NBA game or an NFL game, it's brutal. Like there's a million commercials, right? Soccer is there's almost, that's why the jerseys are, have so many advertisements on them because there's no time for commercial breaks.

I think those three things together, make people watch it. I actually read it interesting. There was like a, so psychologically the reason we like sports and the reason, a thing that gets humans engaged is anticipation, the sense of anticipation. And so soccer of all the sports has the most anticipation because you have to wait so long, ironically, for a payoff. But the payoff could come at any point. So even though they're very low scoring games,

like the NBA, there's like a payoff every few seconds. Somebody makes a basket. So your anticipation level is somewhat low. Football, the plays take a long time. Soccer, the plays take even longer, but you like never know, you could walk away and all of a sudden somebody breaks out and scores a goal and you would miss it. And so there's evidently psychologically, the sense of anticipation gets people really into soccer in a way that they're not as into with other sports. I think it's fascinating too. Like to me, soccer feel and then basketball too, they feel very much like they're live. They're things you want to see live. They're intense in the moment as live events. Football feels like a TV show with all the breaks and the pauses and the,

We got to replay this. Football is a hundred percent better on watching it on TV. Right. Like football's a better experience as a TV show than in a stadium. Whereas soccer, basketball, these are in the moment you want to be there feeding off the energy. The only way I really liked football games was my uncle Pauli, Prazac, would bring binoculars to the game. And he would study what's going on. And he'd say, hey, this is when I'm like eight.

nine, ten years old. Jason, look, see the guy, see the guy take his hat off and put it over his chest, that means we're on commercial brain. That guy puts the hat back on. That means we're off commercial brain. And he had studied everything. See that guy? That's the offensive coordinator.

See this guy, see him talking to him. This guy's the, you know, a training guy. And I would sit there with these crazy, expensive, awesome binoculars. Then we were, whatever, in the 15th, my dad at 18th row at the time, at the Metal Lands Arena. But it was like for me, like a really cool part of the game to zoom in on Lawrence Taylor and just try to watch him sack somebody up close.

But if you're watching on TV, they have these great cameras. Right. You see it as and it's almost cinematic. These days it's in 4K and yeah, exactly. Well, it's also cinematic. You notice they have like these shots that they do now in real time that feel more cinematic. To me, to me, the NFL, it just feels like it's made

and designed to be a TV experience, whereas I don't necessarily know that other sports have that. Best part about going to an NFL game is the tailgate easily. It's awesome. It's really fun. There's a ton of food. You're hanging out before the game. But the actual game itself is like it there's, it's a break every five seconds.

And a lot of times the player, it's funny watching them. The players are just standing around on the field during like random TV timeouts. Just like hanging out. I will say I used to have a really good time at UCLA games at the Rose Bowl, but it was just drinking. It was mostly the drinking. It was a little bit of the fun. football. All right.

Let's do this Facebook story where I got along here. I think you might have something to say about this. Good little piece. T us up here. So Facebook, evidently, not surprisingly, has decided to copy a winning formula. And this time, and we talked actually yesterday about how YouTube is having great success with shorts, evidently Facebook wants to be TikTok, according to the verge of Facebook

internal memo shows plans for making the Facebook product more like TikTok. and potentially recombining Messenger back into that. I'm not even sure what this would start to look like. Huh. Other than... I do think it was a mistake to take Messenger out of the Facebook app. It's created a on years-long ongoing nightmare situation where people are messaging me on Facebook,

and I don't open that stupid secondary app enough, and I just miss it entirely. If the app had specific functionality for power users, and Facebook didn't force you to use it and it was built into Facebook as well. I could see that working. In other words, like it was a fuller feature.

I mean, I think a lot of it is just, I use Facebook so much less than I used to that I'm just checking in on one app a lot less, let alone two apps. Like, there's not enough value in Facebook at this point for them to spread it across two apps for me.

I mean, do Facebook users like our parents, and are non-technical Gen X, you know, the half of Gen X that's not really super technical, let's be honest. Like our cousins who are, you know, just not super tech savvy. Do they want to make and consume TikToks?

I don't. They certainly don't want to make them. I guess they want to consume them, maybe. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. But what I do think is interesting is what this really sounds like is

more algorithmic interference. If the key to TikTok, like Facebook is constantly trying to figure out what to do with the news feed, right? Remember it was like, we're going to prioritize your friends and family. Now we're going to prioritize news. Oh, we broke America.

Now we're going to prioritize your friends and family again and deprioritize news. And what this verge story seems to be saying is that rather than prioritize posts from accounts people follow, Facebook's main feed will, like TikTok, start heavily recommending posts regardless of where they come from. So they're just going to try to feed you things

that they think you want. Yeah. Yeah. They're schizophrenic and their approach to all this. You know, it reminds me of Madonna. You ever, like, see pictures of Madonna today? Like, I, sure.

I love when Madonna does a great pop song. She was just a Britney's wedding. Right. And now every time I see Madonna, she's like 60 years old. And that's fine. But she's hanging out with a bunch of 22-year-olds, like trying to act cool.

And it's like that, Hey kids You know The North photo A fellow kids I'm just like Madonna Just sing songs

You don't have to be At every pop culture moment Let her live Jason I just feel like it's trying too hard Like you out of age gracefully You know like Harrison Ford It's just like

I'm gonna go fly my planes You know You're just gonna be Harrison Ford You don't have to make a big deal out of it I'm old Yeah I'm gonna do old people stuff From TikTok

I'm super confused I feel like Facebook is the equivalent of this. They're not aging gracefully. Yeah. I mean, they're trying to glom onto the latest trend and it feels weird. Just like be an old person's place. Be an old age home.

They're just, I think their problem is their background stuff. Like, there is still utility for Facebook in my life. I haven't deleted it entirely because there are a lot of people like I went to high school with or I went to college with or like my cousins from back east or friends of friends or whatever. There are, right,

those people. And if I ever need to get in touch with. or if I want to see a picture of their baby, you know, that's Facebook is where I'd have to go. But it's just not a day-to-day thing. And I think that's what they're really struggling with. How do we take this thing that still has some value,

but it's like once a month kind of value and turn it into a thing that has like immediate, oh, I got to check in on Facebook. And like, I don't know how to do it at this point. Like, I don't think TikTok is the answer. But I don't have a interest. You know, Benny Hahn and Molly? I think it's a growing back to Madonna, aren't you? You know, Benny,

Hannah, you go to Benihana. Yeah. You have that great experience. They chop up some chicken, the onion tower, the egg, they toss it in your mouth. You want the shrimp, extra. Great. And then they're like, yeah, we added a sushi menu. And you're like, why would you do that?

Yeah. Like, there's no, you don't need to put sushi on the menu at Benihana. Just be Benihana. I think this is Facebook's problem. Just be Facebook. Well, just let people interact with their friends and family. I mean, that's the part I don't understand. Like, why do you keep having it?

And I guess the only reason you keep having to mess with that is because you're trying to increase engagement, right? Content is king on Facebook. And at some point, your friends and family, I guess, get a little too boring for you to spend hours and hours and hours there clicking a targeted ad. But that's not, but every time they mess with it, it puts a whole bunch of businesses out of business, right? Because people are like, oh, I'm the school or the, you know, I'm just trying to have

my like small business page here and they screw with that. And then they, you know, over-emphasized groups that red pill people and turn them into you and then they now are going to like feed me a bunch of huskies to try to compete with TikTok. And it's like, just decide what you want to be and then be that thing. If you want to be Madonna and go to parties for the rest of time, great. I am knocking it. Molly, you do. You do.

You know the band YouTube. You've earned it. You have earned it. YouTube just goes out and they play the hits. Billy Joel goes to Madison Square Garden every month. He's got a 22-song set list. and you're going to get everything you want it. You're going to get Piano Man.

You're going to get Miami. You're going to get all the Italian restaurant. You can get all the good stuff. Yep. And he's not doing a rap song or EDM or he's not trying to do a co-lab. He's not trying to decide for me, Facebook. Just let me have what I want. I just want them to age grace.

That's all I'm saying. Like, be what you are. It feels sad to me. They can't, they can't be what they just are because they're like the, they're like the white pages at this point. Like they're just, it's not sexy what they are. And they need, I think they want, they want a sexier line to be in. I just don't know what that, I don't know what that.

I don't think it's going to be metaverse either. Yeah. I just, it's sad. It's like, MySpace just died. You know? It's desperate. Facebook's not desperate. They were like, you know what?

We had a great run. They were like a rock star dying at like 45 years old. I worked at Myspace in the later days. There was a lot of thrashing around on that death. Okay, but they OD'd. They went out on top. They were trying their best. We had curated communities about vinyl toys that I was editing.

They made a play. Forgot that you did that final. Yeah, they made a play. Who was the guy who did it? Was it Mike Jones? Oh, I believe it was. I think it was Mike Jones. Mike Jones for like two years just tried to literally revive the corpse.

It was Sean Percival who used to work with us at Mahalo. He hired me to go over there. Yeah, wow. Well, I mean, they tried to have creator run. So they would pay a person with a big MySpace account, post eight things a day about movies or about Star Wars or about vinyl toys or about coffee. They tried to go like YouTube Creator Studio. Yeah.

Right. And not a bad move. It didn't take. But that was their, that was their strategy. They paid you really well, right? You secured the bag of that one? It was a nice gig. And it was easy because all I was editing.

I was supervising all of those people. So I didn't, I didn't have to post anything. I just had to look at their post to be like, good job. Those are good posts. Who would want to do that? Who would want to do that? I feel like Instagram is holding up okay. Well, Instagram keeps...

It's useful. Like, Instagram has a thing that it does, and it does that thing well, and you're going to open it every day because you want to see what pictures your friends are sharing or what's going on in their stories. It's just immediate. It's fine. I think it's the one that makes people feel bad. And, I mean, we've talked about this a lot.

Like, in the producer chat, we've talked a lot about how, like, Instagram is the one that sort of gives you fomo or it makes you feel fat or you wish you had better style whereas TikTok is the one that you know again depending on the feed that you have carefully curated for yourself in my case all cute animals all the time

makes feel great like it's just fun it can just be plain old fun and I feel like all the reels the reels are just reposted TikToks like that is not I'm starting to see a couple more original reels but that one's not really taken off compared to TikTok such a power move by TikTok

you think about these little features that they let you download anybody's video. Yeah. And I don't know if that's a user setting or like you can say, don't let people download it, but I see people have made a cottage industry of downloading great TikToks and then tweeting them or putting them on Facebook.

And they do that thing where the watermark appears. So you see the user. That's the vital thing that other sites weren't doing is, even if you steal somebody's TikTok, everybody can see who made it. It's an ad for not just TikTok, but for that TikTok account. Exactly.

So go ahead and rip my TikTok. If you share it, it comes back to me. They get that final little thing where you got to hit pause in the final frame. You got to like, look at their ad handle and figure it out. And that's exactly what YouTube has been doing

the whole time is allowing you to embed YouTube's and have that branding everywhere. And I have realized, just as we're saying this, that that is one of the biggest irritations with Facebook and Instagram. It is so, hard to share off of those platforms.

You can only message each other. It's this total wild garden thing, which of course you were going to end up like dying inside the garden. They can't get any outside. They hit scale. So at the time when they hit scale, Molly, they were like, okay, shields up.

Yeah. We won. Shields up. Nothing leaves. Nobody leaves. There's no way you click on an ad. We're going to use the in-app browser. And you have to like navigate three clicks to take this ad

if you want to go open it in your regular browser. you know, so you can use your login or your payment system, whatever. And it, yeah, it was just, it was a clever move at the time. At the time. But now it's just like, but if you don't have scale in your building scale,

yeah, let everybody download everything. Imagine if YouTube had let you download other people's videos or like up to 30 second of a video, but they put a giant YouTube watermark on it and the person's ad handle, the URL. Yeah. That would have been dope. You could download up to 30 seconds of any video.

It would have been killer, you know. I use all these third parts. party services, or I'm sorry, my friend. Exactly. He uses all these third party services. My friend's who's not me. I've heard of things. Had an app where he could take a Mark Knopfler

bootleg channel and use this app on Windows that costs like $10 and download every video on the channel, put it on the thumb drive. So when you're on a plane, you could listen to all those bootleg contests like an old man. Wouldn't it be cool if YouTube premium let you download and watch stuff offline on a plane? You can do that. I have YouTube premium to do that now, too. But it's not as good as ripping it. Yeah.

premium, you can download. So when I'm on the mountain skiing, I've downloaded all these dire straits concerts. And if I want to listen to a nice concert while I'm, you know, shredding the mountain. Maybe I should take the five minutes to sign up for this. Like I tell myself to do every day. YouTube. You have premium loaded it. I loaded yesterday in the tab, like I'm doing it and I didn't do it.

Lon has YouTube premium. I've had it since the like YouTube Red days. I haven't. I get it. I used to watch Ryan Hanson solves crimes on television. That's how long I've been around. It's so great to have this thing. and not see ads ever again.

All right, let's end in this video here and we'll wrap up. We have a video to play us out. Yeah, some context for this video. So one thing I forgot to mention about why my friends I think like soccer is because it's like a very, you know, they sing songs. They like, they like sway. They put your arms around each other. It's like a very like collegial thing.

And there was a TikTok that went viral during the pandemic where they sing Savage Gardens, 1997 hit truly madly deeply. And I thought it would be a funny thing to play us out to. So I'll drop it in. Okay, here we go. Let's... Be your dream. I'll be your wish.

I'll be your fantasy. I'll be your hope. I'll be your love. Be everything that you need. I love you more with every breath truly madly deeply do. I will be strong. I will be faithful because I'll have you on a new beginning. A reasonable.

That's pretty great. That's awesome. I'm like, damn it. Let's move to Ireland. All of my friends were sending that to each other, like, mid lockdown, because, you know, you can't go out. You could go out for like months. And everybody was just like, hey, hey, I miss you, bro.

I miss you, bro. Like, can't we go out and drink again. I don't move to the UK and be a hooligan. And that also ties up to the TikTok thing because that you can see. That was like the perfect download. I always say it is the perfect TikTok. Very creative. I give them credit.

All right, everybody. Thanks so much to Lon for coming in. Everybody follow along at Lon's. You can see Lon's latest news summaries every day. Inside.com slash streaming. Inside.com slash streaming. Get his newsletter. He gives all kinds of great tips and just a great guy.

One of my great collaborators over the year. It's great to see you, buddy. Always great to be here. And anything we need to wrap up here in the outro, Molly. Well, tomorrow we got that big Friday variety show. As always, we're going to have some news. we're going to have some okay boomer. We might even have a little bonus content,

depending on what happens with that whole Elon Musk goes to Twitter situation today. The all-hands meeting must be leaking as we speak. So we'll dip into that. And Alex, our guy from the verge, got the scoop on it. There we go. Later. There we go. Awesome.

And then we also have an interview that you're doing today. Oh, that's going to be interesting. You want to use that for the audience? Do we want to publish that tomorrow? Sure. I mean, I think it's time. like a triple variety tomorrow going like Alex from the Verge talking about the Twitter all hands, then that, then OK Boomer.

Yeah. I mean, do you want to spill the beans of what we're doing in a couple of hours? Do you want to? Yeah, I think it's fine. Yeah. I mean, I'm shocked that this is actually happening. I didn't. Me too.

Yeah. But could explain. Well, there is a crypto trading platform called Cracken. Yeah. And the CEO had. a bit of a culture war, I guess what's what the New York Times called it at his company. Yeah. And he said some things and some employees said some things.

And you could all go read about it in the New York Times. The article is called Inside a Corporate Culture War stoked by a crypto CEO is the title of the article. He's interesting. Yeah. He's going to come and engage later. He wants to engage about it and talk about it. So I thought, yeah, sure, let's do it. It's kind of like the Coinbase thing, Molly, remember that?

Like, don't bring your feelings to work. Let's not let's just stay focused on work. Imagine that times 10. Mm-hmm. I saw some, I saw some Molly White tweets about this. Oh, yes. Web 3 is going great.

Going great. She was, yes, talking about it. So we'll have a little while. Okay, well, you have fun with that. That's an easy great. You don't want to join for that one. You know, I have a founder meeting at the same time. Oh, I have a sorting training at the same time.