This Week in Startups - Meta’s massive comeback, FED’s latest hike, GPT-4 rumors + Spotify earnings with Lon Harris | E1671

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

Jason and Molly kick off the show by discussing Meta’s Q4 earnings and the news that the Fed is raising rates by only 25 basis points (3:06), which leads to a discussion on unemployment, automation, and generative AI updates. (11:24) Then, Lon Harris joins to discuss Oscar nominations, Spotify earnings, “peak podcasting,” and more. (37:51) (0:00) M+J kick off the show (3:06) Meta Earnings (7:56) The Fed raises rates by 25bps (9:57) House of Macadamias - Get 20% off at https://houseofmacadamias.com/twist by using code TWIST20 (11:24) Unemployment and Automation (21:59) Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub - Apply in 5 minutes for six figures in discounts at http://aka.ms/thisweekinstartups (23:30) ChatGPT hits 100M MAUs + Google’s Apprentice Bard (36:46) Anyplace - Get $250 off your booking with the code TWIST250 at https://www.anyplace.com/twist (37:51) Oscar Nominations with Lon Harris (44:06) Spotify earnings (55:35) The Last of Us is another hit for HBO (1:00:58) James Gunn reveals chapter one of the DC Universe FOLLOW Lon: https://twitter.com/lons FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everybody, welcome to Thursday. It's a crazy day. Meta is just crushing the stocks. You're only doubled since November when I made my J-trade. They used there, Mowing. Up like 28% I think today. So we're going to compare strategies here and then advantages because we compare it with snaps earnings,

which were almost the same, but did not produce the same result. We'll break down why a little bit. And also, everybody's rip in today because the Fed hiked rates by only 25 bips. We're going to talk a little macro about what's next for the economy. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty clear they're ending their action of hiking rates. And the market seems to have concluded from their comments about deflation or the de-escalation of inflation, whatever term. But it was kind of doveish. And the soft landing is a possibility or a moral recession.

So that's good news for the economy. But the labor shortage remains. sense, we talk a little bit about automation in the face of this crazy labor shortage and what we're seeing in the real world. Yeah, and then we wrap up the news with a quick update on Generative AI story of the year. We have entered the AI era. Chad GPT hit 100 million monthly active users. Google is already testing a competitor, and Bing sees a chance.

Microsoft sees a chance and leap ahead. Yeah, they're going to incorporate it. And then Teams, Microsoft Teams is incorporating ChatGPT as well. So this is extraordinary that ChachyPT got to 100 million monthly active users in only two months. Took TikTok nine months to get to 100 million. And then we have Lon Harrison for another edition of This Week in streaming. Oscar nomination, Spotify, earnings, James Gunn in the DC universe. And we'll talk about my favorite new rom-com.

Episode 3 of HBO Smash Hit The Last of Us. It's going to be just a fantastic show. Yeah, stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by, House of Macadamias is the next big health trend. Get 20% off your first purchase at House of Macadamias.com slash twist by using code Twist 20. Microsoft for Startup's Founders Hub helps all founders build a better startup at a lower cost from day one. Startups get up to $150,000 in Azure credits, access to open AI APIs, free dev tools like GitHub,

technical advisory, access to mentors and experts, and so much more. There is no funding requirement and it only takes minutes to join. Sign up today at a.k.m.s. slash this week in startups. And anyplace. Do your best work in your favorite cities. Anyplace lets you rent furnished apartments that include equipped workspaces and gigabit speed internet. Available for 30 days or longer, get 200. $250 off your booking with the code Twist 250 at anyplace.com slash twist. All right, everybody. It's Thursday. Lots going on. We'll have Lon Harris to talk about all of

the things happening in streaming from Spotify to DC to HBO's. What is the winning streak? Zombie. Last of us. Yeah. Last of us. Episode three. My favorite rom-com of all time. Maybe this is time for me to face my favorite rom-com. I stepped on that great line. My favorite rock. I don't worry about this. It's amazing. All right, but there's a lot of news going on. I guess top amongst the news is meta.

I think that's the number one story. I think so, yes. I think that we have to acknowledge that one, J-Cal has played this perfectly. Like a maestro. Yes. Like he took that cello and he just made us weep with his J-trade. It's mercenary at exactly the right moment.

In doing this J-trading, you go check out J-trading.com, I said, you know what, I'm just going to put a little bit of money in a box. I'm going to just start trading and take it out of this. I had some money laying in a like a perfectly balanced portfolio account, you know, like a mutual fund type thing. So let's see if I can trade it myself to see if I can learn lessons about trading. And one of the lessons I learned and I said it to you was, I'm not going to go with. my heart or my ethics or my morals, I'm going to go with the pride that Zuckerberg has and never losing in his life and now being faced with everybody telling him he's a loser. Let's see. If he responds to this and that night on a Sunday night, he said he's laying off 10,000 people.

He's like, oh, he's listening to people. So I put an order in when it was at $90. It got filled at 94. And I think today it's trading at 180 or something. Yeah, the stock is up over. $196. It's the best trading day in a decade for meta, if not ever. Like by the end of the day, it could be ever. Well over 20%, I believe, after meta beat revenue estimates. And most importantly, and this is, I mean, this is what I find so amazing, right? It's like, you played the game perfectly and Zuck played Wall Street perfectly.

He did the layoffs. He announced a $40 billion share buyback. Incredible. And he stopped talking about the Metaverse for like five freaking minutes. And boom. Scene. Like no fundamentals have changed at Meta. They laid off like some, but not all of the people they hired during the pandemic.

Yeah. Massive share by-bath. 75,000 people, I think is the rough estimate. I think so. I mean, like an insane amount of people were laid out, right? 11,000 people. But I think that was still maybe less or about as many as they had hired during the pandemic. Reality Labs, I think still lost.

double digit billions, maybe, something like that. But he just, he turned that game around. He turned that story right around. He did the things that Wall Street wanted and J-Cal one big. Okay. Yeah, it's fine. I think looking at the newfound focus, they are getting focused on the existing business,

cutting costs, and leaning into AI, and maybe cutting some of the costs associated with the Metaverse. And so great. Revenue is down year over year a little bit, 4%, which you would expect in a down market for an advertising-based business, reality labs. January, $727 million in revenue in Q4.

I think there's some... But they lost a ton of money. But they lost $4.2 billion in Q4. And net income was down 55% year-over-year, $4.6 billion. I mean, this is why I keep saying, like, I actually don't think the fundamentals have changed. I don't think that.

There is a lot of like sudden new austerity or a change in focus. He's just playing the game better. Honestly, he's playing for with Wall Street in mind right now. Yeah. And if you look at SNAP's earnings, they were flat year over year. So slightly better on a percentage basis. Yeah. And they lost $288,375 million dollars.

So they're up 17% year over year. So SNAP's growing, not revenue, but the number of users. And they have that paid version for $4. a month, you can get some premium snap features, and they got two million people paying for that. So that to me is the most fascinating. What, you know, half a percentage point, 50 basis points of the users are now paying, I wonder if that can get to 5%. If they get to 5%, could that be 20 million people at some point?

Right. Paying for a social network and maybe that's a little bit of extra money, but they don't have the ability to do buyback. I think that's probably the big difference. Snap is up today. Everything's up today, right? Today is on a ripper because good transition. Snap is up, but its stock immediately dropped 10% upon earnings yesterday,

whereas Meadow, of course, through the roof. But yes, everybody is feeling great and in the green today because the Fed hiked 25 basis points yesterday, quarter of a percent, and noted that jobs and wage data are cooling off. And then I don't know if you watch the press conference at all, but I started playing a little fizzy water drinking game with the word disinflation. Like he actually said more than once, we are at the beginning of a disinflation curve. Yeah. Like he was like, I don't know what's going to happen, right?

We can't say word there yet, but the tone was very different. And that word, I think, you know, they're so careful. Like you parse the Fed down to the like emphasis on the syllable. And so for him to repeat, I think over and over disinflation is a big signal. they knew that we were getting to the end of this, right? Because they raised 75 basis points in November, 50 basis points in December, 25 basis points, I guess at the beginning of February here, and they're going to do it again, another 25 points. And that puts them from zero all the way up to 4.5 or 4.75, whatever that is.

And some people said, hey, maybe he goes to five and a quarter or something. But we knew we're getting to the end of this. And the question was, did it have any impact? And obviously it's had an impact. And I think he was saying, like, a lot of this was yet. yet to be seen. So if it's yet to be seen, I think that means they see their actions will continue, you know, getting to 4.5 or whatever.

They see their actions are going to slow everything down. And then people obviously trade ahead of the market. So they want to get into stocks now thinking, well, maybe next year or the end of this year, they go up. But I don't think there's going to be a cut or anything, but it's made me feel a little bit better about the economy that maybe they did the right thing by moving so fast. The Fed, that is, after doing the wrong thing by moving so slow. Let me tell you about House of Macadamia.

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We're still at the only sort of note of caution there not to get too macro is that we're still kind of at the mercy now. And by we, I mean, Fed sentiment is this was also kind of a big theme of the press conference is heavily dependent on what happens with the labor market. And as we know, the labor market is still artificially constrained by the fact that our borders are effectively closed. And so we can't, we're not bringing in new workers. Like, the Fed can't do anything about labor supply.

Yes. And yet is looking at wage growth and extremely low unemployment as almost like negative signals in terms of inflation. So they want to see unemployment go up. We have record low unemployment. Some states, I was looking at like Utah or something, had like under 2% unemployment. There are places in this country where like they can't find workers and they companies are holding onto workers. So if you've got three or four, you know, I don't know,

waiters or chefs or retail workers or whatever it is, you don't want to give them up because, you know, finding one's going to be hard, I guess, in some areas, but nurses, doctors come to mind as well with those shortages that we talked about here. And, you know, that's something they can't control. So I guess they're going to give up trying to control that and just be okay with inflation slowing down. And then if people have jobs and they're decently paying jobs, they can still spend money, but maybe people have burned off all that savings.

So I think maybe. But that's what I'm saying about. That's the one note of caution still is that they don't, at least right now, the Fed is not signaling that they're okay with where labor is. They're signaling that they're concerned about increasing wage growth and increasingly tight employment. But since they,

so it's sort of like, are they going to, so the big question was, is the Fed going to punish the broader economy? for what is effectively a supply and demand problem. Right. I think we're going to have to have our other representatives in government get together and say, okay, the Fed has pointed this out.

We need to have more reasonable immigration. If everybody in this country is going to retire early, if 7% of the country is going to opt out of working, you know, that's 69% peak labor participation we had in 99, 2000, 2001 time frame is going to be 62% now. That's seven point swing, which is about 10% of the overall active workforce. If those 10% are not coming back to work,

people are retiring early, people died from COVID. They're not even early. Like, boomer age is, they're retired. But there's also this phenomenon of people who did so well with their homes or stock. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Right. And they're like, COVID scared me. I don't want to go to work anymore. And they just, yeah, I mean, it's this whole combined thing. Yeah. And all it adds up to is there are not enough people for the job. And then that starts to constrain.

Like, I will tell you, I'm not that interesting. and going to a restaurant right now. Or like even staying in a hotel isn't as fun as it used to be because there aren't. I'm sorry. Like, I don't want to be a big diva. But the service sucks. Like, it sucks to be in a restaurant and have the price at restaurants.

They don't have enough people. It's more expensive. And you sit there for like an hour because they literally don't have a human to like bring you the check. It's just like not fun. And so then that starts to become a spending drag because I'm like, I'll just cook. I have to say, I went to a dumpling. There's like this really cool dumpling place that's really hot.

in San Mateo, and they use, my wife and I were talking about it, how much we love this toast system. You get to the table, you scan, especially when you're with kids, especially young kids, you scan the logo, you get the, it knows what table you're at. I already have a toast log in, so I'm logged in automatically. It's got my payment. It does Apple Pay. So it is so smooth and easy. My wife scans the same thing. It knows the two of us are at the same table. So it says you and Jade, they added this to this toast interface. It's brilliant. You and Jade are ordering. So then Jade, you know, I had to step out for a phone call. She orders two things. And then it says, here's what you ordered. Here's what Jade ordered. Split the bill. Now, we're married, so we pay the

bill together. But if you had four people at the table, it would be like, you each have your own check. You pay the check at the table through the phone. You order through the phone. They print the ticket. They tape the ticket to your table. When the dish comes, they just check it off. So, you know, the kids like the kids ate all these one type of dumplings and we just immediately order another one. No flagging a waiter. Yeah. You know, no no, uh, worrying about the bill. And then my wife was like, oh, I paid the bill already. And I was like, yeah, I want to order them dessert. Who cares? Just order two more desserts. It's not like a big deal. And then pay. They have so few servers there. It is unbelievable, the efficiency of it. So that's where we're going, right? And the

same thing I understand at McDonald's. I don't eat at McDonald's, but, um, you know, I went to one recently. So I was getting my snow tires change. It was the only place open in Sacramento. So I went to a McDonald's breakfast sandwich. It was horrific. Egg McDonald's terrible. But the hash brown was...

Terrible. But the hash brown was life-changing. I would literally go there in order for hash browns. Coffee was good, actually. Not bad for like a black, you know, hardcore coffee. Yeah. But you ordered from a giant touchscreen. And it's like, amazing.

Wow, you got the, like, that was just rolled down. out, I think. Not very long ago. It doesn't, I guess it makes sense that that would be the, this would be the region. Yeah. I mean, that is the way. It's just only automation can solve some of these labor problems,

but the thing is like, automation can't clean out, hotel room. Automation can't, like, treat your, you're, we have like a massive that shortage. That being said, another anecdote. I was in Miami, and there's a new hotel chain, citizen M. Yeah. It's a hundred seventy-five bucks a night, 200 bucks a night. It reminds me of the W hotel. you check in yourself. You get off the elevator. You just check in at a kiosk again, and it gives you a key. Now, there's a person there if you have a problem, but you can just check yourself in. And then you have an iPad in your room. By default, they clean your room every three days, not every day. Yeah. Fine. And if you do that, they donate $3 a day or three euros a day to charity. So you see on your iPad where you control everything through your iPad, and you can check it off. I want my room clean. Here's your stay. You're here for three days.

days and it says, which days do you want to clean? And it's off, off, on. But I can make it on, on, on, which I did. I want my room cleaned every day, I'm sitting a hotel. But I was just like, wow, this is incredible. It's so affordable. And I can pick what hotel. I could say at a $1,000 hotel, $200 hotel probably doesn't make a difference ultimately for me at this point of my career. But I'm like, I'm saying it's an M. I don't want to blow 800 bucks. And the room was perfectly clean. The betting was amazing. It's like right in brickle. So you come downstairs and you're in the middle of all the action. It's like, this is incredible. cheaper than an Airbnb, in fact.

Yeah. And it will be about wisely integrating those kind of features and automation. So that it's not a situation where like, dude, I just need a fork, but there's no one to bring me a fork and you don't have a fork anyway. You know, it's sort of like, if I'm in a hotel, I need you to take care of me a little bit and I like it. That's why I'm in a hotel because I don't have to be mom today. I saw these hotels, though, in Europe, like a decade ago. And I think it's actually a Scandinavian company. They do have these like business hotels that are meant to be, you're kind of on your own.

Super self-served. Yeah. If you forgot toiletries, you just go downstairs to front desk. They literally had the toiletries in a basket, self-serve, and you just swipe and pay for them, you know, if you need them. So I think that this is where the world is moving labor. It's just changing. It's all going to be like different. Exactly. We're going to have to overcome labor with innovation because we do not.

have no labor. Cafe X, this robotic coffee machine that we invested in, it had a really tough time doing stores in San Francisco. It was horrific regulations, vandalism,

the whole cohort of things that could be horrible in San Francisco. But they put them in SFO. The two machines are making almost a million dollars a year. It's like the highest per square foot revenue of any thing in SFO or any airport anywhere

because you go for less than an hour a day, half an hour, to change the milk, clean it, you know, just check on the machine, maintain the machine. So if they could have a hundred of these with like a Dunkin' Donuts logo on or something, you could have coffee machines. I don't know if the last time you've traveled was, but they're so short staffed at Starbucks, what was the line like for you at a Starbucks at the airport? Have you seen the lines?

Oh, yeah, it's insane. It was absurd. Like you literally would take the next flight to give you one to get to Starbucks. There must have been 40 people online at Starbucks the last time I flew. It was nuts. This, it's like so, we're just not, I keep thinking about this. Yeah. Like, how unaccustomed Americans are to having this sort of like these occasionally bizarre,

like Soviet-esque experiences where it's just like, you got to wait two hours for a coffee. And P.S., there's no eggs. And, you know, like, you might get a, like, literally it's so weird to go to the store and have there be no eggs. And, you know, this has been ongoing in the pandemic. Like, so many things combining at once, but especially the labor shortage are just like, wow, it's, we're going to have a different expectation. in life. And that might be great because we are really spoiled.

This is what happened in other countries. I saw it in Australia. You see it in Japan. And I saw it in Norway. Like I specifically saw this. I remember going places like that 10 years ago. And when the, you know, when the minimum wage was six, seven bucks here, five, six, seven bucks here in the United States, the minimum wage there was 15 or 20. Yeah. And you were like, oh, you normally, you would see maybe some immigrants perhaps in these certain category of jobs. and you didn't. You start people from Norway were busboys, were cleaning the rooms. And you're like, okay, that's interesting. And it's like, yeah, they're being

paying a lot of money to do that job. And they are protectionists. They don't allow people to immigrate into their country. And they allow those what would normally be considered like entry level jobs, first rung jobs on the ladder. They kind of moved them up to third rung in terms of union protections,

benefits, time off, and the hourly wage. In other words, being, you know, cleaning hotel rooms in some countries is not something for immigrants. It's something for the people who live there. And so they're very nationalistic. Like we have it. We want to have it all. We want to like be giant divas and only have like amazing awesome jobs, but then not pay people to do work that we need done and then be jerks about the service. Yeah. Yeah. Be crazy. Oh, America. You'll learn eventually. Doing more with less is more important than ever, especially for startup founders. So if you are

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I want you to write this down, aka.m.s slash this week in startups. That's right, AKA. dot MS slash this week in startup. Thanks to Microsoft for the Microsoft for Startup Founders Hub. Hey, let's do a real quick AI roundups. Speaking of efficiency and replacing humans. Exactly. Speaking of that, the topic of the year, according to semaphore sources, Microsoft will,

and this is a big one, integrate GPT4 into its Bing search engine in the, quote, coming weeks. Whoa. Now, GPT4, this is where we should do a quick, quick, quick level set, which is that right now, everything that you have seen from chat GPT that has blown your mind and made you think that like school is over and lawyers are over and most careers are done and producers are on the ropes and whatnot. That's GPT3. Yeah. And GPT4 is the engine that they say is going to be faster and more powerful, like way more, crazy more, right? They're like, it'll be a thousand times more powerful or

whatever. Sam Altman at an event that I was at specifically said that that GPT4 would be a slow rollout, that they didn't want to like release it on society before it was ready. But apparently, Microsoft is like, like, that's cool, though. We'll do it. We can have it. Just us. Yeah, I think what's happening right now is this thing has captured the imagination more than anybody expected because it's so good, it's so customizable, that it has hit the zeitgeist in the same way, TikTok, the iPhone, Bitcoin, you know, different NFTs maybe to a lesser extent. But sometimes the technology captures people's imagination and they flow into it. This hit a hundred million.

users, which to hit 100 million users, that normally takes years. And this thing has hit it in like months. What that means for somebody who got the pole position like Microsoft, they're going to want to squeeze this orange for every drop of juice. And it's putting them in the press. And I think it's going to attract people to the office suite. So remember I said that they're going to incorporate this into bang? and it's going to cause Google to really move quickly.

Yeah. Google is testing their own version with their employees now. Yeah. And I forgot what that's called, but I think it's called something like Apprentice or something. Apprentice Bard. Yeah, there are doubt with the naming and the framing. Very important because half of the results are wrong.

Some of the results are biased. As I showed the other day, like with like, hey, I said on chat, GPT, like make me a play or write a poem about the Irish being drunks. And it was like, I can't do that, buddy. And I was like, okay, make me a poem about Irish loving beer. And it was like, oh, the Irish and the love of Venus. And you're like, yeah, let's go. Those drunken bastards.

So people were like, hey, write a poem about how great Trump was. It's like, yeah, we can't really do that. It's like, write a poem about how great Biden. It's like, oh, Biden is incredible. Yeah, so I don't know if you saw this, but like now that they've proven some bias, which you predicted over and over again. So it's based on datasets. Which are based on humans.

Chattebt is a little racist. A little racist. And it turns out maybe it's part of like the left, not the right political party. So we're going to need to have a rumble version of chat GPT or something. I don't know. Oh, God. So today I saw our friend Sam Altman was defending the employees because the employees are now being attacked because it won't write Trump poetry. It won't write Trump poetry.

Right, Trump pro? I did not know that. Yeah, you can look it up. You can't even, you know. If you ask you to say something nice about Trump, it's like, yeah. I mean, that's the thing, right? Like, it's built on, it's built on human data sets. Yeah. And human data sets are super, humans are super flawed and biased and weird and, you know, like,

uh, da da da da da. But yeah, so regardless, that's where we are with it right now, right? It's flawed. It's wrong. It is probably going to put a lot of people out of work. potentially immediately if chat GPT4 is as powerful as we think, like it will be really hard to defend learning, law school, paralegals.

But does all the extra, what I'm trying to figure out Molly is, I connected it to a Slackroom, right? And I was like, hey, this is interesting. Like,

if you could connect it to a Slack room, we did it. And then I noticed like everybody was playing with it. But then kind of like a parlor trick, it was like, well, I'm not getting actually good answers. So it's a nice research tool.

It's a good starting point. Like a Google search can be a good starting point. Well, that's what I'm saying is like, that's where we are with this. But because everybody is excited by it and seeing a bunch of dollars, we're like, let's go. Let's roll that sucker out. Let's just let's make chat GPT4 part of Bing because Microsoft wants to win. And so all of the, so like unintended consequences don't have to be unforeseen. And we are choosing to be like, monkey see no evil about the unintended consequences.

because winning is on the table now. I think that's right. And so, you know, we're, I think if you put a big caveat in front of it, like, don't trust this. Number one, don't trust this. Number two, don't trust this. Number three, don't trust this. Like, you can't trust the results from it to make any kind of a decision in life.

Like, even a recipe, it might give you some tips on, you know, like how to do a party. but to do a recipe, you're probably going to burn your food or it's a coin toss. So if you ask it how to cook a steak, GPT3 might burn the steak. Kind of unreliable. And I think that's what I'm wondering

if GPT4 becomes reliable. Will any of this be reliable? And then there's the lawsuits on top of it, Molly. That's unresolved, citations. Where did it get this data? And so what this is going to do, if this gets released into the while when Google releases there,

is the reason Google doesn't want to do this they don't want to get sued. I know. And the lawsuits are already here. Google's a big target. But I guess now people are just saying, hey, we're going to deal with the lawsuits in the review mirror like YouTube did, like Napster did, and in YouTube, they survived, and in Napster it didn't.

Yeah. So we'll see what happens here. It's like the rollout, I mean, for all of Open AI's original stated intent, we are now fully in beg forgiveness rather than ask permission territory. We're full steam ahead here and damn the consequences and the consequences could be

pretty rough for a while. Pretty rough. And you got to think with GTP4, I think they're going to have to roll back some of the training in it because I don't know if you saw Elon tweeted publicly that he removed open AIs access to the Twitter fire hose and that the fire hose or the API is now paid

where it's going to be paid. You have to pay to use the data, which has been Facebook's position all along, right? in Craigslist position, or it's not an untenable position to say, this is our data, you can't use it to train your AI model. I think most people take that position. So that means there must be people who are looking at this and all the money being made. And if you have data that's in chat GPT3 right now, like if they scrape Quora or if they scrape Reddit,

you've got to think Reddit's on the phone with Sam Altman or Quora saying and Microsoft saying or Yelp. So if you're Yelp or Cora, you've got to be on the phone with these people saying, are you indexing me to train your AI? If so, we're going to file a lawsuit. You need to take us out. So I can see GPT4 getting worse as time goes on. Yeah. It might get better if the data set it has, but the data sets might get angled.

And this is where I think there's a good note of caution for all of the people who are really running for this right now, VCs. And entrepreneurs. There was a report or at least a tweet or something that said that half of YC's new cohort is stuff that's built on top of chat GPD. It makes sense. We've talked about how if you write, if you have a thing with a really narrow implementation, there's really a possibility there. And also, a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money going, like stampeding toward

this bubble when all of the things that you just said are true, chat TPT4 might have a real data ingestion problem. and all the things I said are true too, which is the unintended consequences might be super terrible in a variety of ways. And I don't necessarily mean end of humanity super terrible, right? I just mean like it's going to disrupt education in ways that might not be good or it will probably put people out of work

and maybe produce an inferior result. Like, who knows? Yeah. I think it's a tool for humans. Yeah, it's going to be a tool for humans, like a research tool, just like the web is. And so people said Wikipedia would kill education, like people will just copy the Wikipedia, and people do that.

Then they create a plagiarism, I say grammarily, you know, would like make it too easy to be a good writer. So I think hogwash, like, grammarly makes you a better writer. You learn over time the changes it's making because it tells you like, hey, here's the mistake, here's why we're giving you the change. So as a research tool, like does Wikipedia net net make people stupid or no? It makes people more informed. They very quickly find information that they can build arguments on top of. So I think this will augment human intelligence and performance largely because blindly following it is not going to result in a great answer.

You have to review it for now, at least. For now. People are underestimating how much progress is. I think the lesson for me is people are underestimating how much progress has been made in AI. So self-driving is, you know, people are really derided self-driving, right? Like their crews and Waymo, I heard. They're lobbying to get them out of San Francisco now because they are stopping too often and causing traffic congestion. You saw that story go by?

Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So that I think was very indicative of something. Well, I think that's, yeah. Well, the fact that it's causing some congestion, but that it's actually working, right? The fact that it's actually working is underappreciated. There are cars self-driving in San Francisco. go without a driver right now and we're just like, yeah, of course there are.

And it's like, wait, no, no, no, no. There are so many of them that they're effing up traffic. That's now becoming the dialogue. And we've kind of just skipped over the fact that, you know, that's AI in the wild working. And, you know, when this comes to, I got my chest x-ray and it's, you know, because I was sick and came up negative. I don't have like, um, uh,

pneumonia or whatever, um, upper respiratory problems, thank God. Okay. But I was like, hey, can I see it?

And they're like, yeah, here it is. Boom. So it's obviously instant x-rays now, right? You don't have to get film developed. And I'm like,

oh, okay, so are you reviewing? She's like, no, no, this other office is reviewing. I'm like, oh, they're like, yeah, yeah,

they, I'm on with the person right now. They're looking at your x-rays right now at the central office. I'm like, do you guys use AI? They're like, No, but they've been talking about that. So obviously what's going to happen next? You're going to get your x-rays.

You're going to get your pre-provo or whatever. And it's just going to be an instant AI analysis informing the doctors, the radiologist, whoever. Hey, here are some things to look at. Here are some possibilities. You know, you're not going to make a decision based on that, but it's certainly going to point you in the right direction, just like satellite imagery does now. Or weather, right? And then what we'll be complaining about in a couple of years is how it got nine things wrong. Because what we're going to realize is that we're sort of two things.

One, 85%, like I was saying with, you know, speech to text, 85% is amazing. It's that 15% missing, though, that makes you sound like a garbled lunatic. And AI will probably fall into that camp in a lot of instances where it's like 85% miracle. And the 15% is where the problems lie. And that's where we'll be complaining about the incidences that it missed and the things that it got wrong. But yeah, like, there's no, there's no look back here. Like, this horse has left the bar and the AI era has begun. Yes.

Buckle up. 100 million people in seven months for chat, GPT. That is just unbound. Apparently, thank you producers. Two months, two months. Oh, two months. By TikTok by seven months. Ah,

TikTok. So the previous record holder was TikTok. To get to 100 million users. Uh-huh. Yeah. Fascinating. All right. Well, next up, we're going to talk about, next up, the truth is stranger than fiction, but next up,

we're going to talk about fiction. We got Lon Harris on for another edition of this weekend streaming. We're going to talk about the nominations for Best Picture, Spotify earnings, how they may be pivoting, or have had mission accomplished in terms of spending a ton of money on content. And then James Gunn's announcement of the first chapter of the DC universe. It's a great discussion. And like many discussions with Lon, we could have talked for two hours. But we'll also talk about Best Picture and who's going to win Best Picture as well.

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All right, next up on the show, Lon Harris is here for this week. streaming. Welcome back to the show. Lonnie Donnie. Hey, I made it. All right. We had a little week off, but we're back. We're back, and there's just so much stuff backed up. You're causing chaos on Twitter, I see. You did not like Triangle of sadness. I didn't. I really, I thought I would because I like the same director as force

major and the square, both of which I like. Okay. So I sort of thought I would be into it. And I was, it's really heavy handed. It's really on the nose. I didn't. I thought the menu covers a lot of the same ground, but in a more clever, lighter, more fun way. Interesting. But it was nominated, Molly, for Best Picture. I know. I saw.

I mean, over some really amazing film. Which is so funny, because I feel like it's not unusual to hate a Best Picture nominee. I'm surprised that people are coming at you so hard about that. But this one also won the Palm Door. This one took one con last year. I mean, it's supposed to be a great movie. It's a esteemed director. I don't know.

I like this about Elon. Movie. But what we are. seeing here, you're witnessing it everybody, is even Lon Harris has a woke ceiling. Oh, it's not that it's too low. No, it is too on the nose about classism.

It's very on the nose. It's very right. There's no, by the time, and I On the nose is not the same thing as wokeism. To be clear. Spoilers. Nobody's a woke movie. By the time everyone on the luxury yacht is like barfing and pooping everywhere and it's literally rivers

of feces flies. I, We get it. We get it. You don't need to hit us with it quite so hard. Rich people are gorging themselves to the point of absurdity. And now the poorest person is lording it over them and sexually harassing them. It was literally. It was pretty blatant.

I feel like. It's literally the world. A little bit more subtlete. Chat GPT could have written this script. Oh, that's funny. That's funny. When you're doing satire like that, I feel like deploying a little bit more subtlety, letting us get there for ourselves

instead of hammering us. Dare I say Tar did that, which challenges you with the character. And this one is like, Chat GPT, write me a screenplay about all the tropes about classism. Yeah, about how obnoxious rich people are and awful and clueless and pampered and all those things.

Right on. Would you happy otherwise? Are you happy otherwise with the best picture, noms? I still haven't seen women talking. I really want to see that. I like I hate knocking it because technically I thought it was very impressive But I also don't really feel like all quiet on the Western front would have been one of my top ten as a as an adaptation on that book I feel like it's a little lacking it just haven't seen it's it's good it's well made it's very like handsomely done in the battle scenes are great and well act like I it's not a bad movie by any strange don't you think don't you think Hollywood just cannot resist a war movie

It's true And, yeah, especially when they're like sort of mounted in this way. And it's this very professional like well oil machine of a production. But I mean, to dominate this and like, I feel like nope and women king and decision to leave. There were so many movies I love this year that didn't get that kind of acclaim. Molly, are you excited for a Maverick being nominated? Yeah, obviously. Maver's win.

So you're going to lose your month. I'm going to watch it for like a seventh time. I do not think it is going to win. No chance. No chance. I think it has a chance. I wouldn't say definitely, I don't think it's, I don't think it would be favored. I would say to me, I feel like everything everywhere all at once would be where I would,

like, I feel like that's the, that's leading back right now. A good film. I really, I mean, I really liked it. And I feel like just the groundswell of popularity, it dominating the nominations process so much, I just feel like the momentum is all on their side. I feel like TAR's got a shot. I think Top Guns got a shot. Other movies are in play.

But to me, I feel like it's probably going to be that one. All right. There's a lot of streaming news. You got a favorite to win, Molly, in this group? I am definitely on the everything everywhere all at once train, and I think tar is my dark horse. Right. I mean, yeah. Tar is an infinitely better film than everything.

But okay. It doesn't have to do with. It's not exactly. Like, that's not what they're doing on. It's the best picture, but it's not the best picture. It's the one that makes us feel best about. our vote of that group. It's a lot of things.

If we look at the, if we look at the like history, if we look at Titanic winning or something, like you could imagine a universe where Maverick wins. They love to. I mean, there's a, there is definitely a contingent of the Academy that likes to vote for big, populist, popular beloved films. I mean, Gladiator won best picture. Like, there's a lot of, there's a lot of like, this was a huge hit. Yeah, Forrest Go.

I hated Boris Scott. That was my. Yeah, there are definitely a lot of examples of that. And I mean, Avatar 2 picked up a best picture or not. Not recently. Not recently. I mean, I don't think. Much recently they've, they, but there are definitely, you know, there's, there is a

strong political, you know, part of this. And I feel like with all the attention over the last decade, Oscar's so white and all these attempts to diversify, that's on the minds of the people voting. They want to project this new image. They want to. virtue signal. Is it though? I don't think it's

nominated, right? Nope is not nominated, right? But that's everything everywhere at once would. They'll only ever take it so far. Yes. Like it would have been another great example of like I think everything everywhere would fit that bill of making them feel good for a lack of representation of Asian characters.

That would fit that. Michelle Yo is the first Asian nominee since the Asian nominee for best actress since the 30s. Since the 30s. That's insane. The last time an Asian woman was nominated for best actress, it was Merle Oberon, and she hid her Asian ancestry so she could get roles. People didn't even know she was about to say, was it played by a white male. The last time an Asian woman was nominated was played by white male. She was afraid she wouldn't get, you know, romantic roles in movies.

Yeah. Oh, so many. All right. Well, there's a lot going on. Spotify. Stock is way up. I don't know if that's because of layoffs or what. What's going on here, Ma?

Or the Fed. You know, thank you. everybody. But yeah, Spotify did have layoffs. Also, though, showed strong user growth in Q4 earnings. And then kind of interestingly, seems to be implementing some austerity measures around content and talent. They had some executive turnover as a result of those layoffs, including firing cheap content officer Don Austroff, who was responsible, I think, for like a lot of those big blockbuster deals, right? The Rogan deal and Call Her Daddy and like really. bringing in a lot of expensive content to try to kind of put Spotify ahead. And this seems to indicate that like the margins were not there for that strategy.

Those deals were big deals. And they knew they were overpaying, I think, to make a splash and get people to listen to podcasts on Spotify, which Spotify is, I don't know if it's the number one, two or three player, but it's definitely up there in terms of podcast consumption. So in that way, mission accomplished. And they also had, I think they were coming in from behind Apple dominated podcasting in the early days to the point where that was it. It was like, well, you got to get into the iTunes store. That's where people find their podcast.

And so Spotify managed to, I don't know who's leading. I don't follow it that closely, but Spotify like mostly caught up. Like at this point, I feel like if you say, check it out wherever you get your podcasts, people are thinking Apple or Spotify primarily. Maybe Stitcher or a few other options. YouTube as a third. Yeah, all right. And so I think it was successful in that way, but I do feel like there was a downside they maybe didn't see coming, which was when Spotify is just the hosting platform, they can be like, hey, those guys say whatever they want to say and we're not, we're just Spotify, the company where you come listen to it, we're not in charge. But once they start making these $100 billion deals with podcasters, they own it now, people can go to Spotify and be like, why are you letting Joe Rogan say this? I wonder that too. I wonder how much of this now. I mean, you guys know my feeling about the black hole of content spending, right? Like if you're in a race, we're going to talk about this a little bit more. But like if you're in a race to get eyeballs, you have to spend absurd amounts of money on content. It's an unwinnable game because it's just an endless black hole of that spending. But I also do wonder how much of this has to do with Spotify saying like, you know what? We don't want to necessarily be in the business of curating, choosing, and then becoming responsible for the things. things that are set on our platform.

Yeah, they clearly don't want to stand behind everything Joe Rogan says. That sounds like an interesting theory. So the theory is, hey, we made this big splash. My theory, we made this big splash. We got ourselves to be one of the top two or three, clearly top two, I think, places to go to listen to podcasts. We got a lot of blowback. Now we don't have to deal with that blowback if we don't do these big money deals,

but we still get all the benefit of people thinking podcasts, open Spotify. So it's probably get your cake and eat it too. And then what that would mean is Joe Rogan and call her daddy and Alex and all those folks will just sell to the next highest better. Sure. Which will probably be YouTube. Quite possibly. But I mean like, does YouTube have a podcast specific offering or are they building that? They're building that.

YouTube.com slash podcasts. Remember they included us in that. So if you go to YouTube.com slash podcasts, they are now building a hub and the way it's a beta, but you give them your playlist as. like a proxy for your RSS feed. And so you will see them, I think, continue to work on this. I would be, I would not be surprised if you see on the YouTube app,

a podcast button. And in that podcast button, Molly, if you can subscribe and download those shows, right? Because downloading of shows is something they don't allow, unless you have premium. But podcasts,

that's kind of the core of it. Or YouTube podcast, their own... This weekend startups and All In, both featured on the YouTube podcast. I see All In featured under Bitcoin, which is hilarious. And other things.

stupid. This is our startups is under philosophy. Well done, Jason. Nice. Philosophy. Look at us. No, it's probably picking up keywords. So they got some work to do there over time, I think.

I mean, literally every recommendation for me is like MMA. Yeah. Anyway, whatever. Every time I look at YouTube, I'm like, who do you think I am? Yeah, those are clearly customized for you based on your subscriptions. Right, exactly, which is why I want all those dudes and. Yeah, which is why it's all. There are also people.

who take the time to do video for their podcast is a small subsection of overall podcasting. So, you know, work to do there, but what was their revenue like? Are they still growing? Spotify? Spotify. I believe so.

I don't know. We don't have earnings details in your list. Yeah, it looks like 18% year over year, 3.16 billion euros. Free cash flow, 73 million euros. So I guess they're, they're solvent. Negative, negative. Negative. Negative 73 million.

So we don't know how. much cash they have. But premium subscribers up 14% year over a year in a down market. That's pretty good, I guess. So it was a negative pre-cash flow, but Q4 cash in short-term investments looked like they were 3.3 billion.

Okay. And then monthly active users were up 20% year over year. So they seem to. I mean, they have definitely, like, if it was all a plan, spend a billion dollars, right?

Like buy eyeballs and then keep them. mission accomplished. Yeah, they got everybody to subscribe to podcast inside of Spotify. They also bought Gimlet, right? And they bought the ringer, but the ringer is still running independently.

So that'll be interesting to see what happens. But they'd made cuts of a bunch of... I just... They cut a bunch of Gimlet stuff. It's not like the other, like the streaming platforms for TV content, just because the idea of exclusivity didn't really take hold in the podcasting world.

Podcasters are selling ads on their own show. They want the maximum audience possible to be able to hear those ads. So it's not really in most of their favor to be like, I'm going to go exclusive to these guys or that guys. Unlike TV shows where they're all like we're on prime video. The default is, that's a good point. Default is exclusive. The only exclusives they had were Call Her Daddy and Brogan and maybe a couple of others.

Obama and Bruce is terrible. But that's right. So, you know, all the, I listen to a bunch of podcasts on Spotify, but none of them are Spotify inclusive. I could jump over to another platform and listen to how did this get made there everywhere. So I feel like if you're Spotify, like, you don't need to be paying for your blockbuster content. People are going to produce it and put it on your platform for free.

All right. Before we go to the most important news. Okay. Oh, well, I was going to say, you know what we forget about all the time that I think is like a slow and steady turtle here is Amazon. Amazon music has podcasting. built in and they just keep, it's almost like a Microsoft-esque strategy. It's this just like, we're still here, we're here, we got a new future, we got this thing,

we got like a clubhouse type thing, like da-da-da-da. And they get a lot of people like my mom who's just gotten used to using Alexa. So she'll just say, pull up this podcast and that's on Amazon because Alexa's pulling it up. Yeah. And if you don't think to change the default on your Alexa devices, it's pretty, which of course, my mom did not. Hardly anybody does, right? And we can go into settings, defaults, podcasting.

And, she's on Amazon podcast. It reminds us, too, that Audible signed the Obamas away from Spotify. Like, I think that there are way more years in the Amazon ecosystem than we realized. Dark Horse. Yeah, Dark Horse for sure. Definitely. And they also like to spend money.

If, okay, if they're, who should, who should buy the rights to Joe Rogan the podcast in the world. Who should buy the rights next? If he does do another deal, he could go on his own and just sell his own ads. That's probably best for him and just be available on all platforms. But if Joe Rogan were to do another five-year deal or something like that, who would be best? Who would get the most out of it? Who's the most likely to do it? Who should do it? Who should back up the brink truck to bring Joe Rogan's 20, 30 million people? I feel like he's just dangerous. Yeah, like you're going to get that, you're going to get a wave of bad press when you do it. You're going to immediately get a lot of people like, why are you, why he's an anti-axer, he's

promoting misinformation, he's a fascist. And I'm not saying, I agree with those things are not, folks. Listen, I don't want to start to Joe Roganard. It's a risky, it's a risky deal to me. That's the word out there in the world. You're going to hear from those people who feel that way. Neil Young still doesn't have his songs on Spotify. It's a real bummer.

Sometimes I want to listen to, you know, Zuma, and I can't because. I see YouTube. I see YouTube doing it. Yeah. I think they would, I mean, you know, I think like they could. I feel like YouTube willing to absorb that. Could potentially jump the fence. Although they haven't, well, I mean, they like incubate creators, but they don't necessarily,

they don't play that direct content game. I feel like, unless Daily Wire. We should just stop speculating because Jason clearly has an idea. Yeah. If Bench Zero and Daily Wire want to jump. I have an idea. I have an idea. Obviously YouTube should do it, right?

But they're not going to do it because they don't want to set the precedent of giving guaranteed revenue deals because their whole thing has been sharing revenue. So it just screws up their model. So it's even though they should do it, I don't think they will. Then you have Amazon, as you astutely pointed out, but maybe they don't want to deal with the chaos and the backlash. But who don't give an F and who kind of leans into the intellectual dark web? If you picked an executive who did, it would be Mark Zuckerberg.

He is intellectual dark web curious. Interesting. You remember he went on Lex Friedman? He went on Joe Rogan. He's doing MMA. He's slaughtering his own goats for me. He kills goats and then drinks their blood. He's exactly in the Joe Rogan kill zone.

I would not be surprised to see him. Absolutely he is. He's a listener. I bet he's a listener. I bet he's an avid listener. And so if he were to pick up Joe Rogan and put it inside of an exclusive inside of Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and you know, you had to have one of those three apps to listen to it.

You know, that's accretive to him. And he's letting Trump back on. He wants both sides. He's got Mark and Dresen on the board. Like, these are meme lords. It's in his wheelhouse. I would say, yeah, no, it's the best person to do it. It's bold.

It's bold. They haven't really done content deals for a while. So it would, it's like if you're coming back, maybe you make him that, you make him the anchor show in the metaverse. In the metaverse, you can go watch. They had Facebook podcasting and they shut it down because it had no differentiated. But there is an ongoing debate inside of Facebook right now. Should they really lean into splitting revenue with creators?

Because they see that they're losing that battle. And this would be a great opening salvo. Yeah. You just do a deal with. Just broader. Who's it happening? Who's the guy? Louder with Crowder.

You get louder with Crowder. You just go right down the bench of your phone. Oh my God. Just go right down the intellectual darkroom. That's like half of what you see. The Koch brothers' Rolodex and start calling those guys. Pretty much. Download Instagram and get my podcast,

I'm talking about Last of Us. Enough. All right. Did you watch it, Molly? Did you watch it? No. Because you hate zombies. You didn't watch episode three.

I am so scared. And then I asked my friends who were watching it. I was like, okay, scale one to ten. They were like, well, here's the thing. It's the scariest I've seen since the World War Z. Like, they're fast. And I was like, yeah, I'm out. I feel like you could watch episode three.

And be alone. The rest of the show. I don't think there are really, there's hardly any zombies. No zombies. That's what I heard. Episode three, maybe episode one, episode one, episode two. Episode three is my new Notting Hill.

Like when I want to, when I, I love Notting Hills like my favorite rom-com. This episode three of Last of Us is now my favorite rom-com. It's right up there with Notting Hill. Okay. I'm just going to watch that one. I'm just going to watch that as Donald. And I love Nick Offerman so much. And Murray Barlet, what a delight.

I mean, just watch it with that. I think you can, you know the context. Yeah. There's a global apocalypse going on. But I don't, there's hardly, it's not really very violent. It's not really, there's not a lot of horror beats in it. It's mostly a love story. But once again, the big story here.

Is that HBO Warner Brothers Discovery and Zodzlaw has created must watch appointment teleb. Correct, Lon? Yeah. I think the conversation that's happening around that, like, it's interesting. When something like Wednesday hits on Netflix, it's huge for a minute and there was that dance everybody was doing or whatever. But the binge model just means it's a quick burst. Like everybody's into Wednesday and then, okay, what else you got? That's over.

And I feel like the episodic weekly we've been already talking about Last of Us for close to a month. and there's still months left of season one, you really can't, you can't capture that with the Netflix model. There's just no way to do it. You can't sustain interest for that long if I can watch it all in one weekend. And you can't spend money like this.

Like this is HBO showing both discipline and quality, right? Like you make four unbelievable appointment viewing shows a year and you parcel them out a week at a time. time while Netflix is just, again, lighting money on fire, just pouring money into venturable content that's like immediately over. I haven't really seen a lot of very specific budget stuff about, I actually feel like Last of us is not as expensive as what we would think of as it's not a Lord of the Rings level investment.

Like, it's a lot of locations, but I don't know. It's, it's smaller scale than you'd maybe think based on like a global apocalypse. It's more like on a Walking Dead where like, okay, let's stay here for the full episode in one location with three actors. 10.50 million per episode. Which when you think about a movie, a movie's two hours and they spend hundreds of millions on a two-hour movie. A Game of Thrones might be a 50, 60 million per episode investment if it's, you know, Battle of the Bastards or Blackwater Bay or one of these massive scale, you know, like there's nothing like that so far. Even better. They can have like a high quality expensive show that isn't.

outrageously expensive. Right. I think that's kind of the sweet spot. It's if you could figure out a euphoria or a white load, like these shows that are doing so well, they're not all Game of Thrones level investment. White Lotus, they take over one,

four seasons for a few months and they pay a bunch of actors. That's it. No special effects. HBO is crushing it. So the last of us is, let's see, tracking 21.3 million viewers. That's per episode, and extended.

right, per episode in extended viewing. So that's on Sunday nights and then HBO Max, you know, afterwards. It's both. And then that third episode put up absolutely insane numbers and rose significantly over, like episode one did 4.7 million. Episode two rose 22% to 5.7 million because no one could stop talking about it. And then episode three rose another 12% to 6.4 million. I mean, this thing's a hit.

Yeah. And that's the live audience on Sunday night. And then you triple that. First night numbers, yeah. Yeah. Those are the first night numbers and you triple that. And this thing's going to catch heat. It's going to be like Sopranos.

It's going to be like Breaking Bad where people jump in the second or third season and work backwards. Because people got into White Lotus and watched season two, but then they went back and watched season one. It's growing at a sort of a Game of Thrones house of the dragon sort of rate at this point. And if you look at Game of Thrones, this is where it started. And by the end, it was 50 million viewers per episode, 60 million. So, I mean, they're on track. If they keep going at their current heat and building momentum at this pace, they're on track for another, like, massive, massive hit. Incredible.

And it's a video game adaptation. Like, I'm such a nerd that I just keep coming back to that. Like that is unheard of. So they've got maybe two seasons of runway, maybe two and a half, three if they make the second game last. But then, you know, like, who knows how they're going to keep this going. They could franchise this out. What did you think of the DC announcement on? James Gunn?

He did like a six-minute announcement of their slate. And it's a, yeah, and it's a little complicated because we've got, there's basically three tracks. There is the stuff we're already working on that we've got to finish up through the rest of 2023 track, which is the Flash movie with Ezra Miller, the Aquaman 2 sequel with Jason amoa, you know, all the other stuff that's going. Shazam 2, exactly. And then there's the else worlds, which is, this is stuff we're working on, but it's not

going to be part of the main DC universe continuity. Elseworlds, outside of it. That's a DC Comics brand. Elseworlds is like, here's a Batman comic, but it takes place in an alternate reality that won't affect the main Batman storyline. So that's stuff like Robert Patton's Batman 2, Wachene Phoenix's Joker 2, the Harley Quinn HBO Max show, that kind of stuff. It's like stuff happens on there

and it doesn't impact. And then there's the new main DC Universe continuity that James Gunn is going to kick off. That starts summer 2025 with his new Superman movie, which is called Superman Rebirth. We're going to get a

booster gold, HBO Max show which I'm excited about. We're going to get a swamp thing film, which is very exciting I think. And then you know, like there's a bunch of other projects that there's a super girl, like a gritty, supergirl movie coming up where she's sort of troubled and a lot of projects there. My concern is not that any of these

things sound bad, because I think they all sound kind of fun, for the most part. We get a green lantern show that they're comparing to true detective. Viola Davis is going to do an HBO Mac show where she returns as Amanda Waller from the Suicide Squad movies. Your prediction. Will it be? It's a little common. It's a little all over the place. Okay, well, let me just ask you this.

James Gunn is a Supreme Talent. I agree. Here is your question. Supreme Talent. So, will this be as good as what we've seen from DCU to date, which has been obviously a mixed bag? So we'll be better than, let's call it the Snyderverse. Yeah, the Snyder verse is where we've been since Van der Steal.

Patty. Patty Jenkins, but we call it. Because Man of Steel and then his Justice League, that was like he cast a lot of these actors. He kind of laid the ground. Better than Snyderverse. So if you were to rank, MCU to date, Snyderverse to date. And then we put in Gunverse, DC Gun. I mean, it's really hard to say.

Where will it rank? I think so much is going to come down to this Superman movie. It's very hard to say. Like, I feel like he's putting a lot on, because this Superman movie is. Young Superman. It's now a total franchise reboot, and people are going to be looking to that movie for like, here's our starting point. It's a very dangerous precedent.

It's kind of another, remember that Tom Cruise, the Mummy movie where it was like, universe is dark universe and it all starts here and it's the kickoff and they get, they tease like eight other movies and then nobody cared. You're always in danger of that happening. If that happens with this Superman movie, Gunn is immediately. behind the eight ball, like right away. It's basically like you take a supreme talent and you give him too much money and then he turns into Adam Newman.

Like you could go either way. I mean, right. Maybe if the Superman movie is a huge hit, then, you know, who's to say? Maybe it's going to be amazing. But like, this is kind of what happened with Batman v. Superman. Snyder put so many eggs in that basket. This is, I'm introducing Batman. I'm introducing the Justice League.

I'm introducing all of these threads. And then when that movie didn't really do that well. Well, you know, now he's in this awkward place where he's constantly going back to movie people that really like. My God tells me that I think, I don't think this is another MCU. I don't really feel like anybody is going to recap. So it's not number one. MCU stays number one. So then is it better than Snyderverse?

I feel like there's a lot of potential here. I trust James Gunn's instincts more than Zach Snyder's myself. Like, not that I hate. I like some Zach Snyder movies. But I feel like I'm more aligned with James Gunn's view of what these movies and this world should be like. Sure. And there's, I think there's some exciting stuff. The authorities are doing a team up film there.

Paradise Loss. He's doing a show set on Themiscera, Wonder Woman's, Home Island. So that sounds good. Like, there's a lot of cool stuff here. If they do them mascara, are they going to bring back Gal Gadot? He's the only two that we've gotten definite. They're done. We know Henry Cavill's done as Superman.

and we know Ben Affleck's done as Batman. Okay. Other than that, he might keep one, the woman might keep op-a-mom. He might keep one. It doesn't sound good. And he might keep the flash, he said. He might keep Ezra Miller. He might keep, Momoa is definitely still in the mix, but we don't know who he's playing.

But who's to say? And I mean, because Viola Davis is going to stay around as Amanda Wall or they're doing a new season of peacemaker with John Cena. So those characters are going to stay. So anybody in the Suicide Squad, Margo Robbie might still be Harley Quinn in something. Who knows? Because we're going to have Lady Gaga but that's an Elseworlds project.

All right. You know what I mean? It's such a grab bag. We got them. We got them riled up. All right. We got them riled up. You're the greatest.

We'll see you next time. All right, everybody. Thank you for tuning in on a Thursday. Tomorrow, Rachel's getting called up to the big leagues. Molly's out of town. So Rachel is going to read the Google, Amazon, and Apple earnings. Molly's out on the slopes.

You're going to ski? Yeah. I am. I'm skiing in your hood. Oh, be careful. Which I don't normally do. I'm not skiing like you ski.

Just you're not. You don't want to push it. When you get towards the end of the day, there is the last run curse. Yeah. Our boy, Matt, in our partnership department, took a spill yesterday on the last run. Last run curse exists. Always go easier on the last run. Oh, yeah.

I suppose to producer Nick, who on the last run is like, oh, what's the part? No, don't. say you just don't say last run. That's the rule. You never say last run. And then you get to the bottom, you say, I think that's a good last run. I'm the laziest skier in the world, you guys. I like to have fun.

Don't get hurt. Like four to six, nice long blue runs and then a hot toddy. That's my jam. There you go. Perfect. Yeah. So thanks for taking over, Rachel. I appreciate it.

I'm excited about this little last minute, John. Enjoy and we'll see you all tomorrow. And Molly Monday. I'll see you on. All right. Bye-bye.