This Week in Startups - Apple's new feature & potential ads business + more HBO Max layoffs & chaos | E1538

Episode Date: August 19, 2022

New segment alert! J+M debut "Little Big Things" to highlight a unique new feature from Apple (1:46), before breaking down the company ramping up its ads business and what that means for consumers. (10:49) Then, Lon Harris joins to break down all things streaming. (21:20) (0:00) J+M intro today's segments! (1:46) New segment! Little Big Things: Apple News audio stories (9:42) Embroker - Use code TWIST to get an extra 10% off insurance at https://Embroker.com/twist  (10:49) Apple's potential ads business: great for revenue, potentially bad for consumers (20:08) Vanta - Get $1,000 off automating your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist (21:20) Lon joins and Jason discusses Molly's appearance on the Pivot podcast! (23:47 More chaos at $WBD: 14% RIF at HBO Max, 30+ titles getting canned off streaming, bad feelings with creators (37:59) Revelo - Get 20% off the first 3 months by mentioning TWIST at https://revelo.io/twist (39:20) Digital distribution rights, how Netflix changed the industry and how Warner Bros Discovery might use this recent move as leverage going forward (43:20) New series premiering with massive budgets: House of the Dragon, Rings of Power; breaking down the math on why these shows cost $20M-$58M per episode (55:32) Streaming overtakes cable viewership for the first time!

All right, everybody, super fun Thursday show on this week in startups today. First up, a new segment, little big things. This is little things we're noticing in products that are awesome or that suck. And today Apple News is in my crosshairs with one thing that's awesome and then one thing that really sucks. Yeah, how a little bit thing can lead to a big conversation. And Apple's ad business is definitely that conversation. And then Lon Harris is back for this week in streaming. We're going to talk about Zazlov again and the cuts and the shows being put into the basement to collect dust, Sith Lord Zazlov.

He's not pleased. You know Jason's loving this one. They've removed over 30 titles from HBO Max, including 20 originals. Anyway, it is going to be a great conversation with Lunt. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This week in Startups is brought to you by, in Brokers Startup Insurance Program, Help Startup Secure the Most Important Types of Insurance, at a lower cost and with less hassle.

Save up to 20% off of traditional insurance today atambroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist. 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 SOC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. And Revello. Looking to affordably scale your product development with global tech talent in U.S.

time zones, hire vetted remote developers in Latin America with Revello. Get 20% off the first three months at Revello.com slash twist. All right, Molly, I wanted to do a new segment on the show. We have a lot of founders listening, and a lot of investors listening, and we have people who are fans of technology writ large. And so what I wanted to do was start a new concept. We live in the future. We do OK Boomer.

We do VC Sunday school. We do this weekend climb. We do this weekend. Streaming. We're never done. We're never done. We're never done. This is a new segment

called Little Big Things. There's a website called Big Little Things or Little Big Things. I don't know what the website's called. But anyway, Little Big Things. What this is is just observations about product excellence. And things were noticing that other people aren't necessarily talking about that you might appreciate. So I had one that I noticed and I asked people about this and nobody had known about this.

So I, I'm now a subscriber to like whatever the Apple Prime concept is. So I get the video games, I get the Apple TV, pluse, I get everything. I get storage. What is it called Apple One or something? Maybe it's Apple One. Yeah. So Little Big Details.com is a really cool design inspiration site.

So this is, I kind of stole the name from them. I'm calling it Little Big Things. People talk about this all the time in product design. So it's not exactly their idea, but you can go to little big details and see how U.S. designers, focus on little details. This is kind of tangentially related. But I was going through Apple News, which is great and getting better. And you know how I like to use these third-party software as to listen. I use third-party software to listen to articles because I like to go for a walk in the morning. And I got you in on that. And we use a couple of different pieces of software

for it. I wouldn't say which one. But we've used three or four different ones. And sometimes we'll get a PDF of an early copy of a book. And I'll take it and they don't have the audio book out. I'll run it through this audio software so I can listen to it. Anyway, put it all aside. I was on Apple News. So I noticed between stories, you know, when you're on your Apple News, you switch left and right. And then I noticed that some of these had a little note and we'll see it come up in a second.

There it is, boom. So here is the untold story of the Biden family, a reporter at large. And at the top, it says, play the story. And I hit play. It's a beautiful voiceover. you know, like really like done NPR style. Published in the print issue of the New Yorker. This isn't a computer.

No. This is beautiful. Yeah. Of the president's family. Oh, that's lovely. And so I'm like, whoa, where did that come from? And I started whipping through and I found like three or four of them. I never heard an announcement about this.

I didn't see it at a keynote. I don't know if I'm in the testing group. But the two details I want to point out here is just how powerful that is to get your news read to you. Now, who's responsible for that? Is this a third party company? New York Times had bought a third party company that was doing this exact business called Autumn. Actually, I tried to invest in.

I reached out to the founder. But they got sold really quickly. And I think they were just doing audio versions of, you know, long reads, Molly. So it could be a third party like that. Or Apple, I think, maybe started this program and is asking people to do it and then just linking to it. This could change everything. What an incredible business model this could be, you know, in terms of getting people

to pay for stuff. And I notice other websites are doing this on their own. The Wall Street Journal seems to be doing some stories. I don't know if you've gone to a Wall Street Journal story and seen play this story. I have seen that, yeah. Yeah. So, but now to see it in Apple News is pretty incredible. I think Apple News has a chance of becoming like the one and only news reader.

There were so many news readers. I had an app for news reading for Inside. I had invested in Circa, which was very cool. There was a whole swath of these. Smarter news tried it in the U.S. They're an incredible one from Japan and China. So in China, Japan, Korea, they have news apps that are social. So instead of going to Twitter or Facebook and getting news, you go to a news app and then you put social underneath it.

that never happened here, but I think Apple's got a shot here of having something very special. And then the final question is Apple's building quite an interesting ad business with their search. You do a spotlight search. You see some ads. You do an app store search. You see some ads. Those ads used to be on Facebook and Google. Now you see them in the app store. But swiping between stories, there's ads now. Who gets the money for that? If it was between a Wall Street Journal story and a Verge story, would the Wall Street Journal get the ad? Would the Verge get the ad? Or would need, get the ad revenue, or they each get a third, and Apple gets a third. This is like, you know, when a podcast player tries to insert ads into your podcast, that's no good, right? No one-o. Right. But if they put it after your show or before your show, they can't do it before. You

have to start with them. But at the end of the show, they will play an ad, I believe, between podcasts on Spotify. I need to get clarification on this. And it's like a dynamically inserted. Yeah, Bloomberg's. So who wait? And then if they do that dynamic, Molly, and they say, when you buy, it, we're going to give it to users who listen to this week in startups and pivot and all in and I don't know, marketplace tech. Shouldn't that be our money if they're selling it on the tech channel, not Spotify's? But then again, we want Spotify to make money and we appreciate them building a platform that we have our ads embedded.

So should we be cool with it? Very interesting question, right? Yeah, it is an interesting question. Well, in the case of Apple, Bloomberg's Apple expert who we found on the show, Mark German says a portion of ad revenue from the news apps to day tab goes to publishers, but it's not clear how much. German also mentioned that Apple lets publishers advertise within their stories and publishers keep the vast majority of that money.

Because to your point, it is sort of a double whammy. Like, you want these platforms to continue to exist. Yes. But not at the expense of news, which is exactly what the, you know, why everybody's been like suing Google and they're trying to get the snippets taken down and they're trying to like renegotiate all of their deals with Facebook in terms of how. who gets paid when stories show up, and now you've got this like additional layer of advertising.

So could somebody in the media business just drop a dime and tell us, send us the contract snippet or tell us what's going on here, that the public needs to know what's going on here. And what I would like to know from people in the ad buying business, if they can email producers at this week in startups. With this information, you can do it from a burner account if you like, but just some idea of what's going on here. When you buy ads on Apple News,

are they selling the verge and you can buy an ad that's, you know, after the Wall Street Journal of Verge, or are they saying the tech business channel, which includes the Verge Wall Street Journal? I'd like to know how they're doing that because if they're using people's names, and if Spotify is doing that with This Week and Startups All In, Marketplace, pivot,

whatever tech podcasts are out there, then they're interfering with our ability to do commerce in the world. They're like going to the same set of advertising and saying, hey, you can get the same users, buy them direct from us, as opposed to buying them from, you know, marketplace or NPR or Vox.

So I need some experts to drop a diamond rat on, what's going on with these platforms. I want to know what's going on here. I do too. And I do think that Apple is wading. Apple is obviously, we know, taking a lot of steps to increase its ad business overall and come for Facebook and Google in these various ways. And also, it's treading into dangerous water, right? Because Apple has had this good, if somewhat uneasy reputation with developers and publishers because it's like, okay, we got to we got to be here and it's really good for us and it's high quality users and it's high quality revenue.

But if all of a sudden Apple starts selling ads against their content, they might be upset and there's this big privacy question. Like Apple has been able to say, oh, we let you opt out of all kinds of advertising tracking. But all of a sudden, if Apple is the one who's like, yeah, but we still tracked it and now we're advertising against it, it's going to be a little dicey for them too. So I think Apple would be wise to be,

this is never going to happen. because it is not their MO, but Apple would be wise to be as transparent, as humanly possible about how they're going to conduct their ads business because it's dangerous territory from the publisher side and the consumer side. I'm going to quickly explain one of the crucial types of insurance that every founder of every startup needs to understand. It's called cyber insurance. It's a, you know, it's a little cyberpunk name. What it basically means is hacks. You got to be covered in case you get hacked. And in these crazy times, you want to be protected. So if you don't have business

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And, you know, they had the high ground for a long time. And now they have to explain themselves. Because we talked about how they were asking us to operate. into ad targeting. And they're like, but here's our, here's how our ad targeting is different. We don't have a database of all of your stuff somewhere. We, on your local phone, we have your preferences or whatever and we'll serve an ad based on what's on your phone, but we never have custodian of that. We're just matching, hey, you use your stock app, you know, five times a day, you know, Robin Hood ads and E-Trade ads for you. Oh, you use TikTok all day and I don't know,

what's a e-commerce site, you know, and Stitch Fix and whatever, we're going to show you ads related to Etsy. You use Etsy and Pinterest all day. We're going to show you a different set of ads for, you know, related apps. And you can kind of understand how that is different. But the fact that you're explaining yourself, it's kind of like a hard position to be in with Lee and Conn. And it's like you use Pinterest and you use Etsy and we know everywhere you went

and we know everyone you communicated with and we know every app you've ever downloaded and we have your contacts. And, you know, I mean, it's like. But they don't because it's stored. locally on your phone. So that is the thing that Apple is using to hold themselves accountable. All of your data is on your phone and your ICloud, but they don't have access to it is what they're saying.

And that is why they should say that and prove it and say it again and prove it again, right? Like that's what I'm saying is if you were getting into the ads business, you need to be very intentional about how you communicate to your business partners and your consumers because like you just said, this has been Apple's big area of high ground. whole time. Yeah, they're going to basically give up the high ground after they just built it. They climb the hill and now they're going to knock themselves off of it. Why? And like, why do you advertise it? Exactly. You're printing money. Yeah, I don't get it. It just feels like it's a dirty, I'm sorry, like it's a dirty little trench to climb into. And if I'm

Apple One and I'm paying all this money to you, Tim Cook. Yeah. Eddie Q. Why? If it's any Q's in charges, this message to Eddie Q. If I'm paying, why am I seeing ads? The whole thing of Apple is you hate ads. And now you're giving me ads and news and you're giving me ads in the app store and you're giving me ads everywhere. I don't want ads. I'm paying you money for a subscription. Take them out. Premium. I came here to be premium. Yes. And now you're slipping them in. And they might be coming to Apple Maps. What? They're going to be ads in Apple Maps? Maybe. Come on Apple. German reported maybe. And it would look something like Yelp ads. All right, here we go. So this is just a stupid, stupid decision. Tim Cook, Eddie Q, cut this. Somebody

send it to them. Okay, we are Apple users, fanboys, girls, etc. Nobody here wants ads. We picked your platform because we don't want to be tracked and we don't want ads. Now, you're making us have ads in the app store. Ads in news, ads in the stock app, enough with the Mashugana. I don't want that.

I pay too much for that. Like, not to be an elitist, we pay all the money so much money. And the reason. we pay it is because we don't want this like crappy Android. Do not put it in. I don't want this. Apple Maps. No. Apple Maps already sucks.

You can make it suck more. Come on. Yeah. Apple Maps is awesome, I will say. I've been using it for several years now exclusively and I love it. Ways is so much better. Oh God, I can't stand Ways. The only thing that I like about Apple. Because Waze is all cluttered up with ads and shit.

I don't want that. I know, but I want to optimize my route in real time. I want to see multiple routes. I want to understand it better. It doesn't have good routing Apple Maps. Putting all this aside, this business of apples with ads is getting big. It's dangerous.

It's getting big. And they want it to get even bigger. So like look out more. Apparently Todd Teresey, who is Apple's VP of ads and now reports directly to Eddie Q, is planning on growing ad revenue from its current $4 billion a year. Yeah, exactly. Look out to quote,

double digit billions. All right. EQ. All due respect to Todd Teresey. Fire Todd Terese. Reassign him. Get rid of the ads business. Throw it in the garbage. Focus on making the services better. Finish Apple Maps. Make news better. We're paying you. Some goddamn thing with fitness? Come on. Are you kidding me with that fitness app? You're going to give me ads and that fitness app I can't even be like I'd like to do leg day. Like sucks. I mean, really. So, so, such a horrible. Steve Jobs would never have let you do this. Full stop.

That's actually true. Steve Jobs would have if somebody brought this up, hey, you know what we could do? We could put ads in between the stories and the, you know, and then when you go on your map, we could put a Taco Bell there.

Steve Jobs was there, I'm sorry, can you say that one more time? One more time? You want the users to get ads? Mm-hmm. Is this guy? Can you get out? Can you get mad at here, please?

He would have thrown you out of the meeting and he would have thrown an iPhone. at the back of your head on the way out. Exactly. Steve Jobs doesn't want anything to do with ads. He hates ads. We all hate ads. Stop it. We all hate that. It is a bad customer experience. Honestly, people love to talk about what Steve Jobs would do and would not do.

And I will say this is one of the very few times when you are 100% right. He would have thrown these people out of the building. Now, if it's a host red ad and Eddie Q is going to read the ad, totally fine with it. If Eddie Q wants to read an ad for Casper mattresses, I'm okay. with it. But, you know, host ad red ads are just, you know, they're delightful. But everything else. You know, look, I understand that a publicly traded company and a capitalist society with a responsibility to shareholders has to keep making money. Apple's making plenty of money. Like, I don't understand. A couple of billion dollars is ultimately incremental. Double-digit billions is

still incremental revenue for Apple. That could be made in other ways without ruining the consumer experience to this extent. I mean, we don't know what it's really going to look like. Perfectly said. And then here's another option. How about if I'm part of Apple One, you say, would you like to see ads in any of these services? Sometimes the ads provide value in the app store. The only time I would want to see an ad really is the app store, I'll be honest, because that would give me some signal that, hey, maybe there's somebody who's got an app that's really good, and they really want to show it to me, and they're willing to pay for it. So maybe that's good signal. But that's it.

I don't want to see it in news. I don't want to see it in the stock app. I certainly don't want to see it on Maps. Just let if I'm Apple One, no ads. Defaults matter by defaults. So there's your little big things for the day. And if you have little big things you've seen on the web, just at mention us, Molly and I,

or you just send it to us producers at this week and startups.com. We want to find these little nuggets of interesting things as jump-off points for discussions because product is what drives the industry. And so when you see some interesting product feature that you never heard of before and it's kind of interesting, your job is to get it to us quickly. And then we'll give you a shout out on the show. And Molly, I would like you to be on the lookout as well. I love little things that you find.

Maybe something in your poll star, you know, something in your browser. It just got CarPlay. They weren't lying. I actually got an over-the-air software update for my car that delivered CarPlay. What? That is something that I would love to see Tesla has car play. When you get a thing that you were promised as a consumer house out, is it that you're just like, wait, what really?

We have a pretty low benchmark. We really do. We really do. A low benchmark of what are expectations from folks. big things. I love this segment. Little big things. All right.

We live in the future. We live in the future. And they always lead to big big things. Mm-hmm. That's why. Little big things. It could be something that annoys you too, by the way. I would like to see those.

Like the ad stuff is the annoying thing. Well, no, no. But here, the ads today, I presented two things I found in the same app. Right. The ads, especially because they were like mortgage refi ads. Like, really? Yeah, those were junky.

And if it was, if it was an ad, if it was an Apple ad, as an example where it was an ad for Game of Thrones. I actually would have thought it was like content. So it would have been like a better with it. So that might be a little nuance there. If it's better ads, I might feel better about it. It feels like you're doing a bad job, Todd Terese.

Todd Terese, bad job on the ads here. Do not allow schlocky ads in there. You're using some kind of ad network or you're letting people self-serve. Just make it top-tier ads. And don't waste our time with garbage. Now, see, now you're compromising.

No ads. I'm going full absolutist. Yeah, I'm good. I'm with you. Next up on the show, we got our guy, Lon Harris, for this week in streaming. Yes, more huge news from HBO Max and Sith Lord. Zazlov has come in, and he has not been pleased with the progress of the Dead Star. 14% riff, 30 shows canned. The Sith Lord is not pleased.

It's got the double light saber out. And you will hope I do not change the terms of the deal further. Get to work, everybody. And we think we may have picked a new show. We're going to talk about the massive shows dropping soon, including House of the Dragon. We might start watching that on Sunday and Amazon's Lord of the Rings series. I'm excited about both of those. So much TV, so little time.

Stick with us. Here's Lon. It's really important for founders to understand what SOC2 compliance is. Basically, if you're a SaaS or services company that stores customer data in the cloud, you need to be stocked to verified from a third party so you can call. close major customers. It's really simple. If you're not SOC2 compliant, you can't close big deals. But SOC2 verification can be brutal. The process is tedious. It's time consuming and it can be very, very expensive. But now there's Vanta. Vanta software makes it much easier to get and renew

your SOC2. Vanta customers, on average, on average Vanta customers are SOC2 compliant in just two to four weeks. Compare that with three to five months without Vanta. And they partner with over two dozen audit firms who have been trained to file SOC2 reports directly within VANTA. And congratulations to our friend Christina and the team over at Vanta for raising their $110 million Series B. What an amazing company. I was able to put a little bet in there. I invested in the company myself. Here's the best part. Vanta's going to give you $1,000 off. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. That's Vanta-N-T-A-com slash twist for $1,000 off your sock two. Our pal, Ann Harris is with us, and Molly is back from her triumphant recording co-hosting,

guest co-hosting. I think I did this a couple years ago with Carous Fisher for the Pivot podcast coming out this Friday. So don't listen to Pivot, go check out Friday's episode. Yeah, go listen. It's great, great, great, great, good company to be in for August. Oh, very nice, very nice. A little crossover action.

But no Professor Galloway, right? No, Professor, no. He's been off for all of August. And they've had all this, like, really big name co-host. and then also me and I was like, this is awesome. Oh, no,

you're a big name. You're talking about no, it's great. It was great. Is he on vacation for the whole month of August? Yeah, apparently this is like a new thing.

I've been listening him a lot to catch up and I guess he's like never taken a month off before or something. He took a whole month off. But I keep seeing him on Twitter. I heard him talk about you.

He takes the month of August off to go to a visa and take Molly is what he said. So. It's a new thing. We're just announcing. Sounds good. By the way,

starting next year, this is a great. This is a great. We're all going to be in Italy doing mushrooms. Sure, why not? It's going to be a crossover event, the crossover event of the season. Next summer in Ibita. Crossover podcasts and psychedelics in Abitha.

But Lon, of course. I appreciate it. It's the only way for this pronunciation. Shout out to Prop G. I mean, for a guy who's 66 years old to be in Ibitha, taking Mali is extraordinary. So, of course, Lahn is. And she was narrator and she was never invited back. Yeah, that's it.

She's never invited back. I don't hate Prop G. Just so we're clear, I thought he was a put on, you know, in the same way that Jim Kramer does like antics. I thought he's doing antics to make a point. And I thought if I made jokes about his antics, like that would all be taking good fun. But apparently he's super sensitive to me pointing out the fact that he thinks J. Krew is going to be a better bet and a better J-trade than Amazon.

or that Tesla and Uber and Robin Hood are going to zero and they're not. So anyway, I thought the guy could take a joke. Anyway. But you know what? People get old. They get grumpy. You know, when you're 68. Oh, my God.

All right. So here's Lon. Listen, if I was 70, I might be grumpy too. I might be grumpy too. Oh, my Lord. I'm a little jealous of that body. I mean, for somebody who's... By the way, Rachel is like, I'm sorry, have you seen the new J-Crew director?

Like, you need to trade that. She's a beast. Anyway, if I was 72 and I had a chest like that, I'd take my shirt off as well. Just, do you hate me? All right. So, this week in Zazlov. Yeah. We can just change the segment.

He's the newsmaker every week now. All right. Tell us, Molly, cue it up, please. Thank you. Yeah, welcome, Lon. Welcome back to the show, Lon Harris. Of course, writes the inside streaming newsletter, podcast host of Binge Boys, weekly guide to all things streaming,

or in this case, this week in Zaslav. So, okay, let's talk some more about HBO and HBO Max. And what this murderous nightmare of a man that Jason loves. loves is doing over. My kind of guy. Over at HBO. Apparently, they have now laid off 14% of staff under HBO and HBO Max's chief content officer Casey Blois.

All of those people are being laid off. The cuts are impacting about 70 employees mostly. This news broke a few days ago, I think, but we have just been hanging on to it to talk to you about it, Lon. At first, we had a moment of panic thinking, like, wait, is this the boys? But it seems like it's the unscripted and live. action family programming departments. We're going to talk about more title cuts in a minute, but what do you have, what are you thinking about this, these staff cuts right now?

You knew the live action kids and family programming was kind of on its way out. They'd already started canceling a lot of those shows. And they weren't really that heavy into doing that kind of stuff anyway. I guess it's just sort of a strategic decision like we're not competitive already with the people that are doing this full-time, that are really focused on kids' live action. We've got cartoon network, so animation is sort of going to be our bread and butter for family content. And so that's sort of been pushed aside. That one we already knew. The big news here was that, yeah, basically there's not going to be any more HBO Max-specific reality programming. They're just going to handle all reality nonfiction content through the massive and robust

Discovery Plus team they already have that specializes in that content. So I think this is probably the most obvious cut that we knew was coming because obviously it's sort of a duplicate group, HBO Max's nonfiction department and then discoveries already much larger and nonfiction department with already all of these relationships, Food Network, HGTV, Discovery Channel, all already feeding into that team. So it sort of makes sense like, well, yeah, if you wanted to do a new culinary reaction, show, why not just let the team from Food Network do it? Got it. So this is basic like merger stuff right here. This is just duplicative, like,

this is not a moment to freak out on Twitter about. Save your fire. I mean, look, I feel like all of those people are great people, I'm sure. And like, you know, it sucks to see a lot of people getting laid off. So I don't mean to minimize it from that angle. But yeah, this is very traditional merger redundancy stuff where it's like, well, now they have two teams making reality shows and they probably don't need that, and if you're already looking to save money, that's like an obvious place you'd start as well. These guys made Selena and Chef, but if we want to do another, and that, it is worth noting some of these HBO Max reality shows. There are a few that are pretty big hits that will probably

stick around. That's one that I mentioned. Selina Gomez has her cooking show where she has celebrity chefs come on. That's already going to have a new season, I think, in a few weeks, and that one, stuff like that will keep going. It's just in terms of new development. It'll go through discovery. Makes sense. I mean, we wouldn't even be talking about this if it was the accounting HR, you know, or the IT department. Those departments get merged and consolidated in mergers all the time, but because those are not fancy, fancy, fancy positions that are vocal, you know, or high profile. We kind of just like, oh, yeah, whatever. You lost your job and you're part of the legal department. Boohoo for you. You got a big severance package. Move on. You know, this is notable because these are creatives. And there's a lot of emotion that comes into. And when I say there's a lot of emotion that goes into it, that's not a dig. I think emotion is striking. Right.

I mean, you put your heart and soul into making things. These are your babies. Man, it's really hard to see them go away. And I think that is, you know. It's not a question of the popularity or the success of these shows. A lot of these shows are doing well or have fan base. It's just a matter of well, there's now two teams working for one streaming. platform.

So. Yes. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, this is the hard work of mergers. It's the hard work that a Zazlov, I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly, but I like Zazlov. I'm going to go with Zazlov.

I don't know. It sounds more super villainy. So, I think he feels to me like a mentor. Like if I could, if I could have like three mentors, he'd be like Zazlov, Slutman.

Who else is completely, maybe Bill Gates, circa 87. I would go Lex Luthor Steve Jobs Circa Mobile me

I would like to be in that room when he fired everybody mobile me I like those crucible moments where like the hero

and in my mind my mirror as the CEO Lay Steve Jobs is a hero that story? I don't know I've seen that

movie and I don't know if he comes off like the hero I would like the anti hero to I like the anti-hero darkness of this. No, it's great for the business.

It sucks for the people involved. Always, you know, everybody has our sympathies. But, you know, I have a hard time in the Western world when high-paid people get their six months of severance and go do yoga and go on vacation and then get a higher-paying job after that. Like, that's all we've known our lives. So I don't feel terrible for them. I always feel worse when a factory shuts down, you know, and we move it offshore.

The top people will probably jump to other streaming platforms and other reality TV departments. I don't know about everybody. This is a big group of people. There are probably going to be some people who this is their final entertainment gig and they're going to move back home and get a job locally. Like, look, that happens. That's the LA life. I mean, if you know any like Hollywood writers, you know that that is almost unquestionably true. That for some people, it's going to be like, all right, this is it. Because there's just the top people will be fine. Consolidation ultimately does lead to fewer employment opportunities. But it's what's notable, I think, about this in many ways, and we're going to get to even more notable, is the

kind of like rejection of any sunk cost fallacy whatsoever. It's like, if it's not going to be good for the business long term, it is out. And it does not matter that it was, you know, $300 million already invested in CNN Plus. It does not matter that that that girl was already done and in the can for the most part. Like, not going to do it. And there's just, there is a really clean ruthlessness about that. Like, it doesn't work. I don't care. What you spent. on it up to the state. Well, said. Well, better than I could even say it. I mean, I think the sunken cost fallacy gets leaders in trouble. And the more creative you are, the more tied to that you would be. Yeah. The sudden cost fallacy is, you know, it's a rough one. It's a rough one.

And so, and he is immune, apparently to it. But speaking of cuts, okay, now let's talk about the stuff that is going to be on Twitter. Yeah, this is the real sunk cost stuff. This is the real son cost of where it's like this may end up coming with a cost. HBO Max is removing 36 titles, including 20 originals from its streaming services. So this is like, they're not canceling projects. They're like taking stuff that's already been done and streaming and just disappearing it. And we knew about some of these like camping, vinyl, Mrs. Fletcher run.

They'd already announced that those, which are original HBO Max shows, we're going to go away or HBO shows. But now we've got a list. of, yeah, 36 more titles, including 20 that only lived on HBO Max. And it includes, like, animate the Cartoon Network animated series, Infinity Train, which has a lot of fans, was popular. Summer Camp Island and other Cartoon Network original that had an audience, that Elmo late night talk show parody they did, the Not Too Late Show with Elmo,

Uncle Grandpa, a well-known Cartoon Network show, My Dinner with Irvay, that show where Peter Dinklage played Irvay Villages is leaving. So, I mean, like notable content that I'm sure they're basing this in some part on the data. Like, it's not being watched as much as other stuff. And so they feel like they could save money. I've never met anybody who saw Mrs. Fletcher. And when I meet somebody who saw vinyl, we geek out at how awesome it was. You know, like, oh my God, you did see it.

Because I felt like vinyl, like, I don't know why that didn't hit. It was so good. It's so well done. It's just like, you know, there's so many of these shows. And I think some of them just do. they get by people close enough is another animated series that HBO Max is going to cut. And for some of these shows, close enough in Summer Camp Island and Infinity Trade are good examples. They don't live anywhere else.

They're not on physical media. They're not going to be on other platforms because HBO Max has said they're not going to start licensing these things. So they're just gone. Bobby Conavale is completely underrated. That is accurate. But so I have a like a, I don't. this is a business question for Lund. Like, I don't understand how this saves them money.

It's the residual. That what, what I don't know either, what variety is suggesting is that it's the residual payments to the actors and the creatives. That even though they don't have to pay like TV syndication because it doesn't live on television, they do have to pay. If you're leaving something on HBO Max, they do have to pay out some form of payment ongoing to the creative team to the actors, whatever they negotiated. So Catherine Hahn, when she said, you. signed on to make Mrs. Fletcher had some deal like, if this lives on your streaming platform, you got to kick me a certain thousand, this amount of money per month or whatever. I don't know what the deal is. So do we think that that's like so much money that it's worth like we're saying

literally disappearing shows that no one can ever watch again? That is the crux of the question is, we don't know what kind of savings he's putting together by taking all of these shows and not paying the residuals anymore. Obviously, somebody there feels like it's enough and these are, I'm assuming they're looking at viewership, but it's like, what are the least viewed things we could get rid of and save on residuals?

I have a theory. I have a theory. And I have some back of the envelope map. There is no way that the residuals are $10 million. Right. We would agree per show. No.

These are going to be small percentages of whatever the original fees were. There is no way the residuals are $100,000 per show. It's got to be more than that. Or why would they even negotiate it, right? I would say that's probably.

You're talking about movie stars and stuff in a lot of these cases. Yeah, I can't. I mean, why would you even have residuals of like a hundred thousand in total for Ms. Fletcher? Well, give you an example. One of the shows that's getting pulled is an animated series called Little Ellen. No celebrities on it, but it's inspired by the young life of Ellen DeGeneres. So Ellen DeGeneres has some deal where she gets paid every month for Little Ellen being on there. And they're going to save money by backing out of that deal.

Got it. So if it was 10 million, it would be 300. 60 million a year. Okay, that's a, that's a reasonable number to care about, right? If that went to their payments for their debt, it's a, it's a portion of their debt payment, right? And this company has 50 billion in debt. If it was 500 billion, it'd be one percent of their debt, right? So, and we know for, it's not three, it's not five million dollars, right? Because that would be such a de minimis amount. They would just leave it up there. Wouldn't be worth having this bad feelings. So it's got to be between those two numbers. Five, five million and five hundred

millions in saving. A hundred million in savings to create this kind of bad will is like, okay, yeah, I can see it. For 25 million, I don't see it. So anyway, I put the number here, you know, low hundreds of millions, maybe in order for it be significant. But here's my other theory. When you merge these services and you try to make one singular service, I'm guessing that you would then need to go renegotiate with potentially Ellen DeGeneres or it's a murky situation for her Ellen show. Okay, now it's HBO Max Discovery or whatever they're going to call this thing.

I'll just call it HBO Discovery. Yeah. But anyway, if I'm gonna call it HBO Discovery. That makes the most sense to me. So the HBO Discovery bundle. They probably, they might have to clear the rights since they own 100% of the discovery stuff. Maybe they don't have to clear it with HBO,

but maybe the HBO stuff, the way they did their contracts because they're more friendly to artists. Maybe they have to go then renegotiate the discovery portion and there'll be so many more viewers. maybe it's based on viewership in some way. So if the Ellen show gets seen by 200 million people, maybe you pay a different price,

where it's available to 200 million people, you get a different price than 50 million. So there could be an escalation when these two things get put together. That would be punitive. And so what they do is they say, yeah, we'll take it off. Beep that out, please, sorry.

If you're taking it off, then you can negotiate harder. Hey, we'll put it back on, but we're not putting it back on and paying you five times what we're paying you. Yeah, it could definitely... It's just a theory. I mean, we know that this is going to have a ripple effect

terms of like creatives notice things like this. And the idea that you could create something and then it will get pulled from public view and not even be visible. The creators of Summer Camp Island already started posting about it's like, it's like, you know, that doesn't even exist. Years of our lives are just pulled from public view. In the black hole. Just gone.

Right. There, there it is. So, yeah. So, I mean, I think this is the sort of thing. You're taking a risk or to back up what Jason was saying, you're putting people. on notice. You're making it known that, look, you're going to have to bear this in mind when you negotiate with WB Discovery moving forward that if you want your work to live on in perpetuity, you have to take a cut on the residual expectations or whatever. I don't know.

But it is, it's definitely an ongoing conversation that's now happening about whether your work is going to live on on these streaming platforms or vanish from view. If you're looking for highly qualified elite international developers, but you don't want to deal with the crazy time differences, I feel you. That's why I use developers who are in my time zone. And that's why you need to know about Ravello. Revello is your answer. It's a talent platform. And it matches you with vetted full-time remote developers in Latin America, which is where I have my developers.

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That probably makes the most sense, though. I could imagine that without it, I mean, because digital distribution, rights and negotiations are unbelievably complicated. They're way more complicated when TV is involved. But I mean, at some point, and my knowledge here is a little bit outdated because it's from when I was like, you know, talking with CBS and they were starting to just move. But it was like literally different rights for is it on an iPad, is it on a phone, is it on TV, is it on.

And so I could imagine a universe in which they're saying there are all these shows. They've just been hanging out here, not getting big numbers. And it was not a big deal because like you said, the residuals. were like a lot, but not a lot, de minimis. But that it could start to get a lot more complicated when every lawyer for every person involved comes and says, oh, you have a new streaming service now? That's a new deal. Yes.

This is why Netflix is in a great position. This is a good theory. They just told everybody. Netflix just said, we buy it for global distribution. You have no residuals. The end. We're going to pay you a high price. We own it forever.

No residuals. That's my understanding of the Netflix deal. Right. And they said, we're going to pay you more up front. So we're going to be the best pay in town, but we're going to be the least, we're going to be zero back end. And we're not going to actually give you the metrics. So that's the other thing that tweaks a lot of people is they don't, you don't know the metrics. They will selectively put out metrics when they want to appease Wall Street or whatever.

Oh, this is the most stream show ever or whatever. But they do not give creatives any insight to how much their shit's being watched on Netflix. Yeah, this is the idea behind these like creator mega deals like Ryan Murphy or Kenya Barris or Shonda Rimes. It's like a dump truck full of money up front, but then that's it. It's not a traditional Hollywood deal where they keep having little paydays down the road for the next decade. You don't own the Simpsons. Right. It's just like, here it is.

There's your money. Now we keep everything that you've produced forever. It is without a doubt going to shake up their relationship with creators. Like, no doubt about it. I mean, I think everybody, when you're in media, like, you kind of know that if another platform is in charge of your stuff, you don't own that, you know, and you've negotiated away the rights and what you know you don't own it. but to throw an A-bomb in the relationship like that, at least there was sort of an uneasy truce. Like you make a thing, it lives somewhere.

Right. And this is a very super villain move to just be like, oh, yeah. It's the nuclear option. Nice little show that you poured your heart and soul into, in the words of that creator, like, no one's ever going to see it. It's in the basement. It's locked up with the crown tools. The one thing I would add, the one thing I think that is still a question mark on all this

is these ad-supported tiers that are coming. Ad-supported streaming grew way faster. Everybody assumed in the early days that Netflix meant no one ever wanted to watch an ad again, and we were all going to pay premium for subscriptions to get rid of all advertising. And then consumers have basically said the opposite, that they're willing to pay a lot less and watch some ads every hour. So the assumption is that these shows don't have, you can't make enough money on them to be worth leaving them up.

because they don't earn enough to pay the residuals and we'll save the money by pulling them. But if Mrs. Fletcher would get enough ad revenue to pay off the residuals and then a little bit less, it might be worth leaving up somewhere. So I don't know. We'll see how this shakes out over the next several years. We may see some of these shows.

They're saying now they're not going to license anything or whatever. I think it's entirely possible. You could see shows that are getting cut from premium services like HBO Discovery, winding up on a on a 2B on an Amazon free V on a Roku channel on one of these other destinations. I mean, you never know. Or you put them up for purchase, right? If you really love this cartoon series so much,

buy the season for 30 bucks on iTunes. And I mean, I think, you know, I think we probably will come at some point to some kind of version of that where if you really do love something, it doesn't necessarily vaporize. It's available.

It's just not on HBO Max for everybody. Makes sense. All right. There's a lot of exciting things coming. And I have been so overwhelmed with the amount of great content that I have forgotten. I literally cannot keep in my mind anymore, Molly. What good stuff is coming down the pipe? Because I'm just getting over. I'm in the afterglow of Obi-Wan. I'm caught up with Better Call Saul, except for the finale, which I started last night, but I fell asleep because I've been working out so much. I'm, you know, it's not a flex, but I literally tried to watch the finale. of Baracostal three times I said. I couldn't do it. I kept, and I had nothing to do with how exciting it was

because I kept rewinding the same 10 minutes you ever do that in bed you remind the same 10 minutes and you just keep falling asleep and you're like, God damn it I want to watch this. It's great, you got it,

you'll get to it, you'll get to it. I know, I know. But putting that aside, I am delighted at the velocity at which content is going to smash into my brain in the fall. So much.

I had no idea that Game of Thrones, the sequel is upon us. Lord of the Rings, the Rings of Power is upon us. This is like, and then Andor is upon us. Yeah, well, She-Hulk premiered today.

It did? Yeah, Oh, my daughters are so excited. She-Hulk is out right now. I thought it was pretty good. That was today. Yeah, we've got House of the Dragon is Sunday. Yeah, this week.

Rings of Power is right over their horizon. We've got that Hulu's Mike Tyson series is next week with Tramante Rhodes, the guy from Moonlight. What is that? Biographical series about Iron Mike Tyson, the Life and Times of Mike Tyson starring Tramante Rhodes, who was the middle, the middle, no, no, the third guy from Moonlight.

You know, Moonlight, it's like three sections. He's three ages. He's the adult. Not a great film. Are we even started? It's a great film. It was okay. It was good.

Oh, my God. I don't think that's best picture. Sorry. Get out of here, man. We've got Disney's Pinocchio. coming up soon with Tom Hanks. We've got Cobra Kai, a new season of Cobra Kai coming out soon.

American Gigolo, that Showtime series with John Bernthal, based on the Paul Schrader movie. Atlanta, the final season of Atlanta's mid-Summer. My knowledge is this deep, and you just went, you dug the hole. American Gigolo is an 80s film from Paul Schrader starring Richard Gere,

where he plays a sex worker in Los Angeles, well-regarded sort of drama from the 80s. Paramount is doing a spin-off series where it's like, it's a sequel series. So John Bernthal is going to play the same character, you know, like a few years after the original American Jekyllis series. All right. Well, let's talk about the one that everybody's going to talk about,

which is the house of whatever. The House of the Dragon, premiering Sunday. So we finally have Sundays back in the Game of Thrones universe. One, there is zero and zero. incentive left, I'm assuming at this point for George R.R. Martin to ever finish the original series. Just today he did an interview where he said, uh, I don't know when I'm going to finish them. Stop asking me for a, for a date. Right, never. I'm trying my best. Leave me the way. Just retire. Just be like, no, I'm not going to. Just retire. He got a George Lucas's thing and just hand her off to somebody

he trusts. It's just, it's so hard. I'm sure because he got so much heat from that show that now he's getting phone call constantly. We want you to do this. We want you to work on this. We got this video. game, we want your name on this. And so, you know, how do you go back and focus on sitting in a quiet room and writing books when you've got 800 offers to do TV shows and films and games and everything else? J.K. Rowland figured it out. Did she? Exactly. Did she? Well, I don't know. Apparently there were seven of these books or movies. Bravo, blah. And there, wait, wait, hold on a second. I mean, she has a content.

In the mind. I mean, she's still making things, but they're not. It's a shadow of its. The sequels do incredible? What's the prequel sequel to? No, the Fantastic Beast movies. They were supposed to be five of them. They don't even know if they're going to bother making the next two. Oh, okay. Sorry, I have bad information.

I thought those did well, too. That franchise is not what it wants. How many? Is it seven Harry Potter's? There's eight Harry Potter films, seven books, but they split the seventh movie into two. So Deathly Hallows, one, and two. And then there are three Fantastic Beast's movies that have come out after that she She writes those movies.

They're not based on books, but she writes those. I'm not talking about her politics. I'm just talking about her. I'm just talking about her. You said she broke her brain. I took it there. I mean, I don't like her politics, but totally separate from how awful her politics are. I also feel like this fantastic beast franchise is not, has not been the follow up that we'd

all hope for from, from Harry Potter. I mean, I just want to be clear, though, to go back to Game of Thrones that we're not even asking George R. Martin to come up with some amazing. like new. I'm just saying you stopped halfway, bro. Halfway. Yeah. I got all excited. I read all the books. Like I'm like plowing through them. I did not know going in that they did not end. And so I'm like, I'm in the, what I read the fifth book. And I'm like getting, you know, they're huge. And it's getting smaller and smaller the amount that I've left to read. And I'm like, I feel like he may want to start wrapping up some of these 93 character threads here. Sons is still in trouble.

Exactly. And then it just ends and I'm like, wait, I just read five books and that's only half the story. And then it's never going to get done. And the crazy thing about this new show is it's based on one of the books he wrote, like one of the spin-offs that he wrote after he was finished with the main books. This is fire and blood, the like Targaryen history of the Targaryen dynasty spinoff that he did. Which, to be clear, is going to be awesome because book three is I just leave a doodle alone. He'll get to. No, he can shut up. I'm over him now. I only only. want to talk about the shows. Leave the guy alone. Let him write. A lot of the fans have now come around to this idea that it's Benny Off and Weiss, the guys who created Game of Thrones, the series. We've shifted a lot of blame over to them.

Including George R. Martin, who recently was like, they started ignoring me. They stopped taking my calls after a while. But who's ever fault it is, can we agree that at a measly $20 million per episode for the 10 episode season, House of the Dragon is going to stink? I'm just kidding. But it is astonishing to me that we have gotten to the point in content creation where

these episodes cost $20 million each to make, but that compared to other major projects like Stranger Things Season 4 at $30 million an episode or Lord of the Rings, the Rings of Power, at $58 million per episode. Oh, 3x. That $20 million an app is like, I guess it might be fine. Well, what's going on? Let's do the math here. I can't tell the difference between these and movies.

anymore. Yeah. You could, somebody recut the Obi-Wan, and I know that was done on those crazy screens, but somebody recut it into a movie.

I think if I went to the movies and saw it, I would be pretty pleased. And certainly with Game of Thrones, that looked like a movie to me, especially in the last couple of seasons. An hour of content for 20 million, a movie's two hours,

40 million. If you can make a, you can't make a Marvel movie for 40 million. You can't make a Star Wars movie for 40 million. Yeah, sure. It actually seems like 20 million an hour, even 60 million an hour

would be $120 million for a Lord of the Rings movie I think the Lord of the Rings movies those three correct me if I'm wrong law and I think it was like a six or $700 million budget back in the day so they were at

$100 million back. I mean they saved money by making all three back to back but it was still a ridiculously huge project years and I mean if you think about how much was practical like all those locations were real they built all those elf costumes

and all that armor and you have those behind the scenes they had work workshops going around the clock of just the physical props and the stuff you need to make Middle Earth come to... Molly, do we know is the Lord of the Rings, the Rings of Power, using the same IP? And do they have the rights to that IP, you know, the aesthetics, the armor, the look and feel as the original series, because I'm looking at it and I'm saying those are the same orcs,

those are the same elves. It's the same look and feel to me, almost exactly. They paid the Tolkien estate, so they own the rights to... Tolkien's writing, not all of Tolkien's writing, just Tolkien's writing as it relates to some of these aspects that they're developing. So, you know, but they didn't, this is not New Line. So like, they don't have the rights to Peter Jackson Phil. Who owns New Line? I thought New Line was owned by HBO. Yeah, Warner Brothers Discovery. But this new Lord of the Rings show is Amazon. Right. What's interesting is that literally today there's news that the Lord of the Rings

Hobbit and Tolkien IP are all being acquired in this late-night bombshell by Embracer Group, which I've never heard of, but it's going to acquire all of this right now. Let's see. It's acquiring it all from the Sal Zent's company, which has been the rights holder for the franchise since 1976. And they're the ones that produced the Jackson, like they collaborated on the Jackson films.

They Saul Zense or they? Yeah, Sal Zens. Not the Embracer Group. Have you ever heard the Embracer Group? It also just bought a bunch of the Square Enix Western teams. It's a video game company. Oh, okay. Well, that makes sense because...

How did Disney or HBO or Amazon not buy that? I don't know, but that's a little bit of breaking streaming news. I'm glad you asked that question because I just... Different because, Lord, like, that's the rights to adapt that book's story, whereas Amazon bought, like, the Simerillian-related stuff that they're adapting. So it is, like, we can have a bunch of different. Lord of the Rings middle earth projects going because they're different Tolkien stories in the same setting.

Lon, do you know the way that the Tolkien estate is set up with their IP? Isn't there something like the film rights are different from the TV rights or different from video game rights? They're like all separate entities. That's what I was saying about Newla. Like this is not being made in collaboration with the Jackson films in any way. In fact, Peter Jackson said he like had a conversation with the people who were making the Amazon show and then they like stopped talking to him and he doesn't have anything to do

with it. So to answer Jason's original question, like, they couldn't use Howard Shore's middle earth theme in the Amazon show. They can take their inspiration from the armor from Tolkien's writings, but they can't watch Lord of the Rings and then rip off those costumes. But wait a second. It looks exactly the same. The orcs and the armor with the exception.

That's how Tolkien describes them, I guess, would be the argument that we're basing it on the book, not the design of weather. Okay. This is interesting, though. There's a piece in the streamable.com that says it is curious that Amazon lost out on the bidding for the remaining rights to You would think they would If this is a huge hit, you don't want to do a sequel series

where you jump ahead and do Aragorn? Of course you would. Right. Why wouldn't you? So then why wouldn't an Amazon pony up, I wonder? Yeah, I don't know. This is developing more news as events warrant. And Breaker Group, breaking news, is got a $870 billion

S-dollar S-S-E-K. I guess that's Swedish market cap. I don't know what that equals in. you asked, but this could be a J-trake. I was just going to say, I'm like, are you about to j-trade? Well, Square Edix is a lot. Like, those are the Final Fantasy Games and King of Parts. And, like, that's a lot of valuable IP there, too.

The company said in a press release, opportunities include exploring additional movies based on iconic characters, such as Gandalf, Erdogan, Gollum, Galadriel, Ewan, and other characters from the literary works of J.R.R. Tolkien. And some of those are also in the earlier writing so they can be in the Rings of Power, but they could also be in Hobbit. and Lord of the Rings stories. Yeah, exactly. Because they're alive. So I feel like don't get too attached to whatever you watch on Amazon because clearly they're not going to make a sequel since they didn't pony up for the rights. I mean, it turns out.

Or rather enjoy it for what it is. They're in the second age. So they could make second age stuff for decades. I mean, it's a whole different age. Few. Anyway, super interesting news about that. And then let's actually, speaking of super interesting news, let's wrap with a pretty crazy streaming stat that also this news came out today just in time to have you.

online, which is that streaming has surpassed cable for the first time, according to new data from Nielsen. For the month of July, streaming among American TV households represented a record 34.8% share of total consumption, while cable and broadcast came in at 34.4% and 21.6%. Respectively, it's happened. We've tipped. Did you see there was also a report the other day that the average age of CW viewer on broadcast You guys want to take a guess?

Fifty eight years old. And that's CW, that's CW, that's Riverdale in the Flash. So that's younger skew it. Fox, it turns out is the youngest skewing, and it's like 55 or 56. It's just that the average age of broadcast TV viewers has gotten so old that it's dragging all these averages. The CW, that's amazing. I'm just imagining like a bunch of like 58-year-olds just sitting around watching all the vampire shows or whatever. So they, you know, CW just got just got purchased so that they were

releasing that like obviously the business model of making all of these teen shows when your average viewer is 60 years old. We're going to have to tweak this model is the idea. Nick reports that as a young person having cable is like an old delicacy like having a record player or a Louis the 14th style chair. Yeah, it's already like a niche thing. Like I don't expect people to have cable at this point. Still, it's a pretty notable. It's a notable moment. We've tips. Like, we've been talking about this for, I don't know, what, an eye on two decades now. Like, when are we going to, when is streaming going to win today? Turns out. There are a few of these networks that are in this interesting place. AMC is one of them. We were just talking about Better Call Saul, where AMC's not baked into any of the

big subscription platforms. You'd have to have AMC Plus to stream Better Call Saul. I feel like those are the last shows keeping people on cable. Like, once that last group finds its way to a big streaming service. Yellowstone was one of those too, right? Yellowstone was like whoever made it, sold it to somebody else and then they can't even have it on Paramount Plus or something? Paramount Network sold the rights to Netflix. So the year after it airs on Paramount Network,

those episodes go to Netflix, but it can't put it on Paramount Plus, even though it would be the biggest draw to Paramount Plus because it's the biggest show on cable. This is why, all of this is why, now that we have tipped, we are going to have to examine a little more closely the thing where if you subscribe to all the streaming channels,

you will pay well over $100 a month. Right. Yeah. All right, Lon, great job. Hey, on our, on my little 5K development project. Yes, crypto. We'll check in. We'll check in.

I just want to do a little check in here. I've been thinking about it. I'm wondering, since the other project has been picked up. Yes, new agency is developing it right now. And there are so many other shoes dropping in crypto. I have an idea for you. What if we made just a crypto? series that just covers that moment in time and weaves together a number of stories.

Oh, wow. I'm one step ahead of you. Okay. We have already been, me and my creative team, which is me and my friend Drew, we've already been workshopping this very idea of what if it was rather than just one crypto project gone frothy and then wrong? What if we tried to follow, you know, several projects in an ongoing way and we figure You're out some through lines that kind of pull the audience through.

I feel like this is the way. I have a suggestion there, which is including law enforcement who are chasing these people. I was just going to say like a procedural. Are you pitching a straight up like law and order colon crypto or more like a drama series, but with that as like a hook? I'm wondering if a drama series like the Sopranos or the Shields. Yes, but not a procedure. procedural is what I was getting a curriculum.

No, not procedural means it's like every episode is like onto itself. Like a CSI or a law and order. Like crypto team comes in and it's like, all right, this week we've got this. If you had a bunch of people who are like OGs in crypto, they were into it, then, you know, one goes down the dark path. One's going down the light path. One's in venture capital. I mean, that's what I'm thinking is you structure it around. It's a group of people that are all learning about crypto together in some way, shape or form.

And then we're following all of them as they join different. projects. Good and, good and bad, noble and. One does the monkey project. So the one goofy guy who nobody takes seriously winds up making the griff that makes the most money that nobody saw coming the griff, the monkey one. The monkey one, Molly. Board apes.

Well, I'm just saying a monkey one. One that's based on primates and NFTs. This is inspired by Shrew of Encyclist. Oh, not any specific yacht clubs, I understand. But somebody else makes the, see, I think they think somebody else makes the Bitcoin one one and we can make up our own. who is Satoshi. So I think we start with,

Satoshi is a group of people. They have the goods on each other. They are, they cannot break their science of who Satoshi is. It's five of them. One goes off and does Ethereum. One goes off and does NFTs.

One goes off and does an ICO pure crime. You're pitching like an alternate history of cryptocurrency, like a fictionalized, where we get, we have people tell us like back, you know, stories that are just too crazy.

And then we adapt those crazy stories. kind of like the mafia movies have done, right? The mafia movies were like, tell me the craziest thing. Okay. So you're like, we buried this guy in the desert, and here's what we did before we buried it. Like a casino, a blow. There it is, casino blow. Pull back the curtain on all this crazy time.

Okay. Well, we'll talk about this one. Okay, I'll go talk about offline. I think this is a good idea. That's fun. I think we can secure the IP by talking about it in public now. Yeah, that's it. Nobody can seal it.

So, well done. Well done. All right. Thanks, Lon. Bye, Everybody follow Lon at Lons and thanks for listening. And make sure to tune in tomorrow. We've got a really fun variety show because Friday.

Yes, we'll have a launch accelerator founder interviewed by Molly. I'll do some Ask Jason questions. And then of course, if it's Friday, it's Rachel and OK Boomer. You know, we got a little bit of everything to take you into the weekend. It's going to be a great show. All right. See you tomorrow.