This Week in Startups - Meta's text-to-video tool, Zuck's grand plan, Vision Fund to cut staff 30% + $WBD lawsuit | E1573

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

J+M discuss Meta's new text-to-video tool and what the future of creativity might look like (2:59), then they break down Zuck's grand plan (14:49) before discussing what a recession might mean for startups (27:18) and SoftBank reportedly cutting 30% of its Vision Fund staff. (36:41) (0:00) J+M intro today's segments! (2:59) Meta announces text-to-video tool (13:33) OpenPhone - Get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at https://openphone.com/twist  (14:49) Breaking down Zuckerberg's grand plan (21:58) Meta freezes hiring, signals that we've entered a recession (25:52) LinkedIn Marketing -  Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at https://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (27:18) How a recession and big tech layoffs will impact startups (35:28) Odoo - Get your first app free and a $1000 credit at https://odoo.com/twist (36:41) SoftBank is reportedly planning to cut at least 30% of Vision Fund staff (41:29) Jason welcomes Lon Harris and the pair discuss HBO's House of the Dragon and its 10-year time jump (51:37) Warner Bros Discovery sued for allegedly misrepresenting HBO Max subscribers by 10M during the Discover / WarnerMedia merger (57:48) Favorite actors to watch doing anything, rockstars in today's world (1:03:03) CCP censors a popular film for its realistic depiction of rural life in China FOLLOW Lon: https://twitter.com/lons FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1

All right, everybody, it is Thursday. It's Thursday. It's Thursday. We're going to make it. We're going to make it. That happened fast. What a delight. We do have a lot of fun stuff to talk about.

We're talking about meta's new text to video tool. You heard that right. And yes, it makes real videos. AI is here. AI is here. I'm officially scared now. Before, when I watch my Roomba bouncing off of everything and not being able to figure out how to get under the table, I wasn't worried about AI, but now I am.

And I think we are now in the first. final stages of the downturn. I've been saying, I thought the summer would be an inch of the fall. Q3 and Q4 would be this bottoming out process, bouncing along the bottom. And what were the signs? I said it all along. The two signs I'm looking for is like the big companies to do riffs and maybe people to cut salaries. Those are the hardest things to do. And right when we were on air, Meta is talking about a hiring freeze and then a restructuring, aka a gentleman's layoff is coming. Apple stock down 6% today after being down yesterday. That was a one of the final cathedrals to fall.

And then SoftBank, the Vision Fund is cutting a third of their staff. So major rifts, major market downturns. This is the end game, everybody. We're going into the trow of the recession. We're in the eye of the storm. But the good news is there's some really good news I get into for startups. Yeah. Fascinating, fascinating macroeconomic talk.

And then I scamper and J-Cal just has a hell of fun talking about TV with Lon. Yeah, we talk about House of the Dragon. the 10-year time jump, did it work or not? This class action lawsuit with Discovery for the HBO Max things. The CCP is obviously, yeah, a little bit of drama for General Zod's law. And the CCP centering a popular Chinese film. And then we talk about Nomadland and Amazon and just the great art of filmmaking and what Lon and I love about filmmaking. And which actors we'd most like to see do something completely boring like Make a French Island?

It's a great episode. Oh, stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Open Phone. As a startup founder, a lot of mistakes are easy to roll back, but using your personal cell phone number as your company number isn't one of them. Open Phone makes it easy to get business phone numbers for you and your team right on top of your existing devices. Visit openphone.com slash twist to get 20% off your first six months.

LinkedIn Marketing To redeem a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. And Odo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack your business. Your first app is free forever and right now Odo is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at Odo.com slash twist. That's ODOO.com slash twist. I saw trending on Twitter.

Meta is getting in the OpenAI Dolly game. Mm-hmm. You can type something and get back a movie? I mean, it's like, what do you even say when that's the headline? Like, we have arrived in the future, and it is exactly as banana pants as you thought it was to be. because evidently you can now auto-generate with AI. Like we knew AI AI art, AI was becoming a thing.

And AI text, text, exactly. It's been writing like little snippets for ages. But now, evidently, the software is not yet open to the public. Meta has not allowed any external media to play with this platform yet. But users can sign up for early access to the make-a-video. dot studio landing page and you just type in text and it creates a five second video max right now no audio i mean i don't know what i expect oh there's no audio in this video that a computer made out of the words i typed it's but it's bonkers well i mean absolutely bonkers you can

just type like i i want a teddy bear painting a teddy bear in an impressionistic style and it will make that so the datasets now are getting so good. The compute power is so good. And its ability to understand text is so good that, yeah, these things can look like they're CGI-ish. So I've always thought, like, I would be amazing for storyboarding to have a tool like this. I was always wondering why they didn't have this for storyboarding.

So, you know, you're working, you're John Favreau and Dave Faloni, you're doing the Star Wars stuff. And you're like, all right, let me see. give me a Shoka when she's like a young girl and it's like, not too young, maybe like a teen, no, preteen, like 10 years old. Okay, 10 year old to Shoka. All right, now I want her with her mom

and her mom is going to discover she has Jedi, she's force sensitive. And so I want to have her lifting a cookie. Oh, I just want a Shoka, it's like building your storyboards, but it doesn't look at this fidelity. This fidelity looks closer to publishable than storyboard, which is really like, whoa.

It's not cartooning. It doesn't look enter. I mean, it looks really. We should, we have a couple of videos. If you are not watching us on YouTube, you should be YouTube.com slash this weekend. Here's some, some video demos from this make a video website because it is bonkers. So this one is a young couple walking in a heavy rain. Okay.

That's heavy rain. That's heavy rain. I don't know how it decided a cobblestone street. It added aesthetics to it. Cobblestone street. Just for a bonus place. like beautiful like kind of light coming through. It's like the only uncanny valley thing about it is how they are walking in perfect sync. Do you see this? Yeah, that's a little bit of a giveaway. Yeah.

That's a little bit of a giveaway. Yeah. And that lady's head is like not quite right, but still. That's how you know their Nexus six, Decker. Right. It's how you know they're replicants. They look real, but they're walking in sync. They're walking in sync. No couple's walking in sync. There's always a little bit of like somebody's leading, somebody's dragging the other person's arm. Yeah. It's always a little bit of negotiation. Yeah.

Just like that. And then what's there was some ponies on a beach? Is that what the next one is? A unicorns running unicorns running along a beach. Those are some simitart looking horns. And again, they look like they're perfectly in sync. So this is something the algorithm's got to put a little variability into it. This is the algorithm being too perfect.

We never said we wanted them in sync. do better algorithm it's ridiculous the world is not that perfect the teddy bear the teddy bear painting a portrait the AI decided you must mean self portrait and so then you have this teddy bear

that's painting this like 3D version of itself yeah these are five second videos mind blowing five seconds just a loop these are little loops but we've seen this movie before you know like

somebody takes, you know, remember when drones came out and they were like, look, I made the drone go up and it stayed up for one minute. And then now it's like, yeah, look, I put a drone up there for 30 minutes and I put a machine gun on it and I, you know, killed three mannequins and came back at 70 miles per hour. Oh, and it did it with AI because it did facial recognition and killed only the three people out of the 50 mannequins that we wanted to kill based on AI. You're like, okay. That's how these things jump. So just if people are wondering about like self-driving technology or other AI, like, you know, solving chess, remember that one, or Tick-Tac-Tow.

These things, like, they kind of meander, and then they're just all of a sudden go, boop. You get this like hockey stick. And we're in that right now. That's what you're experience on this week and startups in 2022. And I think that's what you're experiencing with self-driving. AI is making the jump. Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's literally making the jump right now.

We're right at that inflection point where these things are actually. actually making us go, whoa. But previously, it was like, okay, you know, like, okay. Yeah, you guess the next two words in Gmail. Got it. Okay. I'd like to invite you too. You know, like, okay, good, you got two words, but yeah.

There's that famous phrase about, I think, bankruptcy. Like, how did you go bankrupt? And it's like, gradually. And then suddenly, it was Ernest Hemmingway. This is what we're seeing with AI. And for a long time, people were, you know, we were starting to get unimpressed with it. Like, oh, all AI can do is give me real-time traffic information and route me around accidents and police. I'm not knocking that. I wouldn't kick it out of bed for eating

crackers. That's pretty good technology. But then all of a sudden, you're like on the cusp of, wow, I could write a screenplay and have a computer turn it into the movie. I would kick them out of bed for reading crackers. That's just completely selfish. Crackers in the bed. He's like, utterly derailed. He's like, that is awful, the cracker thing. The cracker thing is unforgivable. Apparently, everyone is getting kicked out of bed for eating crackers in Jason's house. Not cool. Not just not cool. I mean, I have this like battle for like, my wife is like, yeah, of course you can eat in the car. So I get in my car the other day. There's three plates. Like kitchen plates are in the backseat of my car with fruit on them. Oh, yeah. No, we don't need the car. But you know, the car has been baking in the northern California heat waves. So I opened the door and it smells like I just, you know, opened the, you know, the dumpster behind Fuddruckers. I mean, I almost passed out as I took a picture. I said it to my wife, she was like, oops. I was like, I was like,

Am I going to put a pit? I literally am now at the point. This is how passive aggressive is getting. I was going to put a pin code on my Tesla so my wife can't drive my car. Does the kids get in there? You're hilarious. There's rules in my car. She messes up your speed thing, right?

Well, I locked all the cars in speed. I'm the other one. I told, she wanted me to, this is like the modern relationship navigation. I put a speed limiter on our cars, 84 miles per hour, which means that's 78, 79, it starts telling you like, hey, it starts slowing you down right about about 78, 79. Why do I put it there? Because that's where you get tickets in California. If you go above 80, you're going to get a ticket. If you keep it under 80,

just general rules. I, in my experience, this is not investment advice. It's not a J-Trade. But I think generally if you're under, 79 or under, they're not pulling you over. If you do pull you over, you get in warning, because they don't want to fill out a ticket for selling. So you don't really get pulled over here.

We don't really have. We don't have. We don't have traffic laws in Oakland right now. It's crazy. I went to Oakland and I was like, is this grand theft order out or Fast and the Furious? Because all I want to do is take my kids to, I found the greatest ice cream place in Berkeley. Oh my God. I've had it open in a tab ever since you mentioned it, actually. I need that's on my agenda for the weekend.

Right. All right. It's incredible. So anyway, this, I went down the rabbit hole. It turns out Meta, FCA Facebook. Really don't like this, but Meta's got some dope stuff going on with regard to AI. And so there is a heavily investing in this. Yeah. And so you go to meta.a.ai. You think it's only Google with DeepMine. You think it's only, you know, the open AI project. But it seems like Meta's hiring a lot of people, a lot of PhDs. So if you follow the meta, M-E-T-A-A-I Twitter handle, what I do is I go to the replies tab and the likes. And, you know, some of these tweets that they're doing, this is like a niche account. You start looking at the likes. And I found all the PhDs who work or who are fellows for, you know, some of these tweets that they're doing. And

AI at Facebook or meta or whatever and I started following them. So this is how I kind of like, just a little tip from JCal, like you find these little things. You go check out their likes. You check out their replies. You see who's replying to them. And you start clicking on them, look at their bios. You can kind of find the people who are building the future. These people are really building the future over there.

It's pretty crazy. They just spun out this thing called Pi Torch, which is like a Python framework for artificial intelligence that I think was built inside of meta. But they just gave it to the Linux Foundation and the, top individual at the Facebook AI is leaving to go run this foundation. So it's kind of interesting what's going on over there. Wow. Yeah, that's fascinating. You know, and again, people have no idea. I think the extent to which this research has been happening at meta and Facebook. And partly because everybody was like, why are they doing? And it was like,

why is meta building the greatest AI in the world to just what like optimize for groups you should sign up for, you know, to show me more and more. It was sort of confusing to think about how it was going to play into the news feed, for example, or Instagram. But you have to assume that all of this has been about, I mean, certainly, to be clear, it is about optimizing these ad serving products. That's what prints money. And the better they can do with that, you know, the more money they're going to continue

to make. So it's 100% aimed at that. But also, as we realize it's metaverse ambitions, we got to figure. It's about trying to create world building, exactly. It's terrifying. If you could make that five second video of unicorns running on the beach, that means you could just write that into code. You could write world building into code and have it auto-generate,

and you don't have to, like, animate any of that. If I may, put together your two points. Please. And build on them. On the program today is Dorena Kulia. She is the founder of Open Phone. Welcome to the show, Dorena. Thank you so much, Jason.

Great to be here. Now, what mistakes do most founders make with phone numbers in their startups? Really, delegation, right? Because what ends up happening is that as a founder when you're starting, you do everything. You are the salesperson, the support person. You make the coffee, you do HR, marketing, sales, recruiting, everything. But then eventually you have people joining the team. And what ends up happening is if as a founder, your phone number, let's forget about the privacy,

the spam, all that problem. Let's say it doesn't exist. but you're not going to want a year into your company, two years into your company, to have all the support calls or all the questions come to you because now you've just hired your support team. Why did you hire them? So that's another reason why having that separate number makes so much sense because you can always delegate those calls to your team as you grow.

All right, everybody, here's your CTA, the old call to action. Twist listeners, 20% off any plan for your first six months. Just sign up at openphone.com slash twist. and if you got an existing number, no problem. They'll put it right over. Openphone.com slash twist. O-P-E-H-O-N-P-H-O-N-E dot com slash twist today for 20% off. Two excellent observations there.

They hire these PhDs with the money they make from their ad network and then they make a deal with them. Okay, listen, get people to click on more ads and let's serve people ads that are so creepy, they think that we've got a camera in their house. Right. And we're watching them make spaghetti, so we're going to offer them this.

spaghetti sauce. Like, you know, all the discussions, like, I was having a conversation at the concert, and then I came home and it was a Volvo Ed. That's what you're experiencing there. So what you see in these cool, you know, teddy bear painting a teddy bear and unicorns on the beach, that's what they're doing with AI. That's why it seems like the AI is reading your mind, because it's got so many signals across so many people in your social graph. We discussed this before. Okay, now, they're terraforming. They're going to use AI to terraform, you know, the Metaverse. Yeah. This is why Zuckerberg is so drunk on this. And that's what I realized when I saw this. The reason Zuckerberg has so much conviction is because he's put these two things together, or really three. He understands

the social graph and he's mastered how to surface for you, things that provoke emotion in you, things that have emotional resonance, okay? So let's just keep that one idea. I'm adding this to your two. He understands the social graph. Okay, great. And he understands how to give you things. Okay, here's a bar mitzvah, here's a Trump story, you know, here's whatever news. that make you come back. So he's an engagement master. Okay, he's the advertising master. He knows how to get you what you want

and get those clicks for those advertisers, right? Most powerful ad network, one of the top two most powerful ad networks ever built, Google and his. Okay, now we've got those two things. Great. Put those two things together. You get social media,

you get Instagram, get all that good stuff. But now you add the virtual reality piece, as you're saying, and terraforming. What if he built for you, a world in which, you know, the rent the runway to do a callback to the rent the runway ad that we're doing here

or whatever rental clothing company competes with rent the runway just give me a couple names here so that I can spread the love here and RTR.com slash twist but yeah exactly I don't know you they have competitors stitch fix let's say okay stitch fix whatever so now we have these other ones in there and they build for you molly when you're on the way to meet me for our investment team meeting in the metaverse you walk through a hall and your hall is a fashion show of all of this incredible world designed for you. Now, my journey to our staff meeting is going to be like Nix and Mark Knopfler and other bullshit that draws me into buy like some vinyl version or digital version of a Mark

Knopfler concert that they recreated for me in the universe. They're going to combine these things and they're going to terraform ads in virtual reality with this technology. Totally. So it's going to be bonkers. Like the edge you see are going to be nuts. I'm finally going to live my preteen dream. as as evidenced in my absolute favorite show of all time back then,

gem and the holograms. Basically going to be gem and the holograms. It's going to be gem and the holograms in real life. It's going to be truly, truly, truly outrageous because I will walk into my virtual closet. Stand on your pedestal. Stand on my pedestal and wear whatever outfit I want. And you'll be able to talk to me like, no, a red, no, more like burgundy.

Somewhere between burgundy and a burnt orange. like a Sherbert and a let's go accessories now. Diamonds. No, not diamonds, emeralds. Oh, boom. And it's just going to be boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Your outfit, then it's going to be like, okay, based on everything you said and the last three movies you liked and the two places you ordered from on DoorDash, here's where we think

your office should be. And then I'm going to ride all that on a unicorn to our staff meeting. With hummingbird winks. Perfect. To our staff meeting. That is how I'm going to come to the staff meeting. And I'm going to come in with like a headband and like a, you know, guitar. And I'm going to just come in playing some Mark Nuffler.

and if the AI is going to write, then Mark Knopfler album, the Dyer Straits album that never came out. It's literally going to make five more Dyer Straits albums for me and have Mark Knopfler perform them. And those five albums are going to be better than the ones I love most. And they're going to be customized to me. So it's going to know, I really like Telegraph Road.

I really like Sultons. I really like Walk of Life. And the AI will make for me a concert of Mark Knopfler that's better than anything Mark Knopfler ever wrote. this is going to be insane. Yeah. And this is why he does not care if you make fun of his big dough princess eyes in version one of the metaverse.

And, you know, the fact that there aren't legs now and that the animation is kind of janky. Like he and all of these other scientists who are building the thing that you're talking about, which is so is exactly what's going to happen. Yeah. Don't care what it looks like now. That is meaningless to them. It's sort of like every product manager or coder in the world gets so eard. with managers because they present some,

you know, they're like, here's the, here's the absolutely magical AI that can auto generate a conversation and a video and whatever. And then some manager and ding-dong and middle management will be like, it doesn't look that good. And they're like, that is not the point. You have no idea how much genius and human hours and work when integrating this code.

It will look fine later. But that's not the point right now. And I think that's where we are in the metaverse. That's like the manager who's like, you know, Christopher Columbus lands in, you know, North America. And he's like, I've seen better. You know, like I kind of felt like it's not much different than Spain, you know? Like it's like, we don't even know what's here yet. Can we just get like 10 miles into this?

Like it's looking pretty dope to me. I will say, Nick made an interesting point, though, in talking about this rollout of this AI tool, which is that there's so much ill will. Oh, God. So much ill will toward meta. That the responses are basically just like, no, thank you. of course. And so you wonder, like, are they going to build this magical universe and no one's going to come?

I'm trying to think of, like, the most horrible person in like another industry. Who's the horrible person who shows up your party and then like offers you something that nobody wants? I'm like, eh, maybe not. Like R. Kelly comes. Yeah. Like R. Kelly comes to your party. No. Nobody wants you to.

Nobody wants you here. Yeah. Nobody wants to give you applause. Nobody wants to give you attention, period. That's Zuckerberg's trap. right now is it just so universally hated that people are just going to be looking at any product he does and being like, eh, not interesting. And you can literally create.

Right. And they're not going to make gem in the holograms. They're going to make some like weird, you know, sort of sanitized thing that only some people can play in for 30% cut. Yeah. And it's only going to work on the iPhone. Yeah. Jam is truly outrageous.

Wow. Oh, yeah. Comfort. That's right. I remember that show and I was just like, who watches this stuff? Like, girls, I remember being 12 years old and be like, girls are weird. Jamming the holograms. Latchkey kid, my little butt home get like a bag of chance.

I mean, I want to see the Legion of Doom. I want to watch like the X-Men animated show or something. Like, yeah. We have some superheroes in here. Before we move on to SoftBank, there is a little bit of breaking meta news that I grabbed before I popped on to the stream today, which is that meta has announced evidently a hiring freeze and is warning,

but is warning now of a restructure. Yeah. Now is getting real. Now we're in full recession. It's a recession folks. Exactly. Because it has been,

and I have actually been waiting for something like this because all my homies and media have been lamenting and laying off and talking about how it is an absolute bloodbath in the ad market right now. And so the real test was going to be, will it be an absolute blood

bath in the ad market at Google and Facebook. And it seems that in fact, yeah, perhaps it could be, which is a big deal. Well, the question is, at places where they have so much cash, they don't have to worry about this,

will they take the medicine because they want earnings to look good, right? So here's what's happening. You look at a company like Apple. You look at a company like Google, look at a company like Facebook. They have tons of cash.

This is not going to save so much cash that they couldn't weather the storm. They have so much cash they could weather it. So why would they do it? Well, if they perceive headwit, against the top line, right? People are going to spend a little less on advertising or advertising growth is going to slow. Well, if they get those headwinds, then what they expected their top line revenue instead of it being $12 billion this quarter is going to be $11.5. Okay, great.

So now we let go, we cut a billion dollars in expenses from employees and a billion dollars of marketing expenses, a billion dollars of whatever expenses, offices. Okay, now we're going to be negative $500 million per quarter in expenses. Therefore, the earnings stay the same or maybe even the earnings improve. Yeah. So if your top line growth slows, how do you keep people buying your stock? How do you keep your stock at a certain price? You make the earnings look good.

How do you make the earnings look good? You got to cut costs. So that's what's happening here is they're not making these because they fear they're running out of money or they don't want the employees or they don't want the resources the employees provide. They're like, you know what? We cut 10%. We cut 20%.

Everything is more efficient as we had in the gospel according to Bill Gurley on Tuesday. Yeah. The gospel told us, like, do a riff. Like, and it has to be significant so you can actually get a benefit. Yeah, you got to get the benefit. So this is the beginning. And, you know, they, I don't know why Sundar and Zucker are so, uh, genteel about this, but they've taken six months to warn their employees and terrorize them.

Oh, everybody's got to work harder. We got to perform better. We got to be more conscious of expense. So like, hey, guys, make the cut. Just make the goddamn cuts and stop torturing people about it. Like, if you're going to do the riff, just tell every man. You've cut your bottom 1.5 people. So you got to cut 15%. You got a 200 person team. 30 people got to go. You know what you're doing. You run your department. You have to wake up every day and hit your goals. Hit your goals or better with 15% less people. Let me know who we're letting go. That's it. Yeah. It's been six months of this. There really has to. You're right. And now even the fact that they're doing a freeze, but warning of cuts is the same thing. All you're doing. And this is this gets to Gurley's other point. He was like, I don't like a 10% cut because you don't save enough money to make it worthwhile.

And this is the important second part, you incur a morale. Yes. A morale hit that is unnecessary and you didn't even get anything good out of it. This is just destroying morale internally. And you got to think at Facebook, your options are worth, what are we at? Half now, what they were last year, maybe less. And so your options are worth nothing. You're constantly under threat that you're going to be.

laid off. It's like living on the Dread Pirate Robertship, like I'm most likely kill you in the morning. You're not doing your best work. It's amazing that they managed to put out the like the auto-generate-the-unicorns thing because you've got to feel like they're not that stoked about working there right now. Hey, everybody. I'm here with my pal, Tom Eshbacher. He is the senior sales manager at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. And today, we're going to talk about marketing for startups. And LinkedIn did a great new internal report called, today in startup marketing. Welcome to the program, Tom. Thanks, Jason. We all know organic reach super important. You make great content. You get your likes. You get your shares. You get your comments.

But what people don't know is that you can boost organic and it creates a bit of momentum on your site. Can you unpack that for people? Definitely. So organic is just going to go to the audience who's already following you and then a smaller group of members who are connected to any of those audiences. So what we often encourage is keep an eye on your organic engagement metrics and who are the people and companies and segments that are engaging most frequently with your content, and then amplify that reach via our best in class paid advertising targeting. So what that means and what we've seen, especially for Seed and Series A companies, is by boosting successful organic posts with paid, it results in a 13x lift in unique reach. And that's really meaningful

insights that can help inform your product and go to marketing strategies and open up new audiences for you. You can go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups and get the report for free as well as a hundy, $100 from Tom. Here's the next year to drop. It always was in our industry that if startups weren't hiring, you have this backstop. I can go get an offer from Apple, Google, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb. I can go there. I can get like two offers. Then I can bring it back to my startup boss, you know, Series B company, and ask for more equity, you know, negotiate harder. Now those people who are going to get laid off from Facebook and Google, they're going to be like, I need to get a job.

And they're going to go apply to Google and go and go is like, we're not hiring. And Apple's going to be like, we're not hiring. And they say, well, I'll go work at a startup. And now the startups are saying, we've got six months of runway. And this is when you actually get a recession. It's like, there's a couple of towers that have to fall along this process. Crypto is easy. There's no core value there.

Yeah, totally. It was just, it was always a bubble. It was born in a bubble. The bubble never got filled in. It was just all hot air. So like, okay, it decompresses 90%. Some coins go down 99%. The best coin, Bitcoin goes down by whatever, 60, 70%,

it goes down to 20,000 from 70,000, 19,000, 20,000. Okay, great. We deflate that bubble. Stocks. Okay, which ones we go first? Growth. Great. Boom.

We collapse them. The Bucco Capital tweet. We all love that Bucco Capital, Twitter handle. about Apple? Nick's, that the one you're talking about? Yeah, this is Bucco Capital. After Artie Bucco from the Sopranos, this is Nick's

It's incredible. It's so good. It's so good. Anyway, he's like, yeah. This is one of the towers, right? You start to see Facebook freezing and laying off and then Apple stock, which is literally gold, right? You buy that, not literally, but you buy it instead of gold.

It is a nugget whose value will not go down. And this tweet the other day was like, investors who've been hiding an Apple are about to have a bad time. he says. Yeah. And then he's like, good. Colloquialism for getting screwed. That is incredibly graphic from the film training day.

Horrible. I was wondering where that was from. Anyway, he says, let's get this over with. Flush it. No more tiki tacky BS. No more head in the sand. Can't heal till we're fully broken and there's no hope left. Repent.

Give us our medicine. He's basically like, sell Apple. There's nothing. You cannot, if you refuse here, he goes, what don't people get? If you refuse to relent, you keep trying to hide. The Fed is going to keep destroying. your wealth. Stocks need to go down. Spare us the pain. Speed up the process. Quit trying to fight it. Sell, sell, sell. I mean, Apple was the last place. You could put your money and feel like,

okay, this is one of the last towers, right? So this is the bottoming out process. Yeah. Today. Apple's down six percent today. And Apple said, remember how there was that like they were going to produce more iPhone 14s? Then they walked that back. And we're like, oh, actually we are not going to produce as many iPhone 14s, even as we had initially, I think, predicted because the demand was not there. You had that tweet about discretionary spending the other day. You were like, people can wait. People are waiting on the new iPhone. So this tower, some bricks are coming out. This is the process, right? Like, they want to stop inflation. They raise the rates. They threaten to raise the rates more. And the free money train stops. And here we go. Eventually, pack workers, iPod. I

paid work from home tech workers were like it was like finance people media people tech workers like they finance people they got washed okay media people like journalists obviously they got washed okay tech workers is all that's left they're about to get washed out not all of them but 15% the other ones are still going to make their you know 200 grand a year whatever they're making and get their laundry done or maybe the laundry service is going to be like limited to like one bag a week or something fix and a on the laundry lay yeah exactly but no it's just it's austerity this part of the process almost like how you know were there. I have, I feel a weird sort of relief when, because, you know, like being on being very

online and working in the industry that we do is like being into time machine. Like you, you know what's going to come. Like we see the future. Right. By virtue of people on the ground in different places who are already living that future or because there's so many signals that it is, you know, we're pretty good prognosticators. It's impossible to miss. I feel almost like a bit of relief when the future finally arrives. And I feel like we're there now. Like the recession started this week. You know, the bricks are coming out of the Apple Tower.

Like, okay, now we know we can get through. We've prepped and prepped and prepped and prepped. Yeah. And now it's here and we just got to get through it. The storm is here. You know, it's almost like it's this, you know, and you know, I hope everybody in Florida is okay. I was trying to avoid that exact metaphor. I know.

No, you, this is part of it. You have to weather the storm and you have to make plans for it. And, you know, some houses that were not, you know, built the correct way or they were built in the wrong place, they get washed out. And that's part of the process in this is like companies that were not on stable footing, not on stable foundations will get washed out to see. They're gone. Right.

And that's startups or other companies going away. And, you know, it's brutal when you go through it. But I kind of feel like you do that this is the bottoming out process. We were technically in a recession. We had two quarters of negative growth, it seems. So the question is, how many quarters does a recession last? I think they typically last three to like eight. So we're in the third quarter of this.

And I think it's going to go like four or five quarters. And then we start building back up again. So I, and you can build a great company anytime, as Bill Gurley said. So this is a great time to build a company because now somebody got laid off from Facebook. Somebody left Google. They got reorganized out of Apple, whatever it is, where Apple says, hey, guess what? We're coming back to the office five days a week. You don't like it.

You just voluntarily got laid off and we don't have to give you a severance package. Thanks. Like that's the power move. I was Zuck. I'd be like, yeah, you know what? We're coming back to the office four days a week. If you don't show up, you're out. We're done. And Zuck may do that. Zuck's hardcore. If I was suck, that's what I would do. I'd be like, you know what? There's no COVID anymore. It's an endemic. It's not a pandemic. We're done. Come to the office or you have no job. The end. And then you don't have to pay six

months crazy severance, whatever these tech companies do. And your options are washed. You're good. That's like the hardcore move. I bet you he does it. I bet you he does it. It's just like we're coming back. We're coming back. That's it. If you don't want to come back, it's okay. It's okay, that's what Apple did, right? They said three days a week. They did, yeah. No, I think they're a different. I think Apple's a little older school.

Like, I think we're starting to realize that that Apple has a little bit, got a little bit of 90s management going on. It's like very top down, very hierarchical. Like, I'm not too surprised that they're the company that said come back. A guy who's building the metaverse has less of a leg to stand on with like a new gel in the office, you know? It has like a thousand acres. on Kauai, a thousand acres on Kauai and like 18 acres of lake farm property at Tahoe. Like, it's kind of hard for him to come back if he's living in Tahoe in Hawaii. And by the way, I'm not like doxing him.

He's incredibly public. He's like literally carrying an American flag on Lake Tahoe. He's not very subtle about it. Exactly. He's like literally in a war with the people of Kauai over like their ancient burial grounds and like ancestors land. And he's like, yeah, I bought it. And they're like, but. But you can't buy that piece.

He's like, yeah, I bought it. Dude, read the room. Everybody hate you. Do you have to buy everybody's acreage in Kauai? Like, just buy it and make it part of a natural preserve and, you know, name it after some, you know, ancient, a forefather, a four mother, you know, in Hawaii and be a cool dude. And say he goes to Kauai, like an idiot and just, do you know how the Hawaiian people are about their land and, like, their tradition? I mean, we can't leave Larry Ellison out of this conversation either, right? This is not.

There's plenty of colonizing happening here. Well, when he bought Linai, though, he made it, I think he made this agreement that it would never be developed. So it was almost like he's going to die. He knew this. So when he bought it. Parts of it, I think. He's building like a huge hotel there.

He also, he's building, he's got these two hotels on it now. But he also has all the subsidized housing on it for the people who live there. And so he's like, he did it right. Like people love him there. He's revered, I believe. Where Zuckerberg is like, Anyway. Listen, if you're a founder or an employee at a startup,

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Nope. And you'll have one customer support contact across all your apps, not 20. And you're going to get more done in less time while saving a ton of. of money. And here's the best part. The first app is always free. And O-D-D-O-D-O-O-S-A-N-L-A-N-C-R-E-L-A-N-R-A-L-D-O-O-O-O-O-O-C-T-W-A-L-O-O-W-T-W-E-L-O-W-T-E-O-O-W-E-W-E-O-W-E-E-O-W-E-E-E-O-W-E-E-E-L-E-E-O-E-L-E-E-L-E-E-O-L-E-E-L-E-O-L-E-L-E-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L shows, right? Like watching We crashed and just remembering like kind of reliving the time when SoftBank came in and changed the, with Malibis book, changed the entire industry with this just like, super yacht boatload of cash and now has lost so much. It is confusing the structure. There are two structures. The SoftBank, the corporate and the SoftBank the Vision Foundation.

Right. So there's the Vision Fund, which is the one that rampaged in with all the money and change the entire venture industry and has reported a loss of $21.7 billion in the quarter ending in July. SoftBank's fiscal Q1. And then there's SoftBank, the company, right, just this huge sprawling company. And SoftBank itself posted net losses of $15 billion and $23 billion in the last two quarters, respectively. So you could sort of see why they're laying people off. Yeah. And just so people understand, when we see the people who have the biggest piles of money doing significant cuts, you want to talk about a riff here. We're talking about 30. Okay, Bill Gurley said five to ten's not, you're not going to feel a 15 to 20 you do.

Now we're talking 30 here. These are significant rifts that are going on here, reduction in force. And if the big companies are also doing riffs, I believe Apple's basically done a de facto riff. I don't know how many people left the company because of the three day a week thing, which started in last month, I believe. But you are going to see a lot of people in tech looking for jobs. and when a job description goes up, you might have, instead of like, nobody apply or a bunch

of green people apply or, you know, weak candidates apply or no candidates apply. Now you're going to start to see like people competing for jobs. It's going to be gnarly. 2030 is going to be a bit gnarly. For startups, fantastic. You might have somebody who made their money and got their options at Apple or Facebook and they're like, you know what, I'd like to own some equity and I can work from home instead of going to Apple's office.

Yeah, I don't care. Pay me whatever you want. I already made a couple of million bucks. I'd love to work on a startup. Yeah, I'm equity driven, not cash driven. So the people who used to be equity driven and want to own a big piece of a startup, you know, a couple of points, you know, at the founding of it or something, they were like, I'll take the points and the cash. I want you to match my Apple offer and I want the cash. And I had people come to me like, I raised like a million five and this person wants $400,000 because that's their RSUs at Facebook

or whatever and they hit the jackpot and they got in early. And I'm like, yeah, you can't hire them for that. Like, you're, that's not possible. Like, you don't offer them $150,000. like maybe, you know, like, you're a seat stage company. Who do I hire? I'm like, get creative. And that's when people started hiring in Canada, Uruguay, Ukraine. Like, this is why people got creative. And this is the great thing about founders to get creative.

Now you might be able to hire somebody in San Francisco Bay Area, you know, somebody living out in Utah, whatever, who worked at Apple. And they're like, yeah, I'll take a flyer. So this is going to be great. That now the industry builds back up. And the talent goes to the remaining projects. So now what we're going to see also. Molly is the consolidation of talent. So let's say half of the startups that, let's say,

you know, in a given year, 20% of startups go away. Okay, now it hits 40, right, during this terrible time. Like it accelerates. People can't raise bridge rounds. You get a bunch of companies hit the wall. They can't raise a bridge round. The most talented people from those can't get jobs at Google. They go work at the other 60% of startups. They want to work at a startup, let's say. They prefer being at a small company. Those folks, now you get consolidation. So the stronger, the rich get richer, the strong gets stronger, basic. So the strongest startups get the best talent and they get them at a better price. That means whoever makes it out of this is going to be hard core teams with like great

benches. It would be like taking the NBA and you're like, you know what? Let's go down to 18 teams. Right. And you're like, we just distribute these players. Massive wealth redistribution. Exactly. And now all of a sudden, instead of having one all star or 1.5,

all stars per team, you got three. Now, everybody's a super team. If you went to 10, if you went to 12 teams, six in the eight, six in the West, and you just played tournaments, or let's say eight and eight, you just took the playoff teams, it would be just like getting rid of all the teams that didn't make the playoffs. Just 16 teams, boom. That would be incredible. Incredible. The league would be much better to watch. In fact, Nick was saying this. Nick was saying this exact thing, yeah. It should be two leagues. He's got a whole relegation strategy that's like football, your European football. And next up, actually, Jason, I have to go. Jason's going solo with Lon Harris.

Solo, don't. I'll take it. I got it from here. Okay. Okay, thanks. Okay, have fun. Okay, bye. All right, it is Thursday.

It's Thursday. That means this week in streaming with Mon Harris. Beards looking strong. Strong beard game for those of you on YouTube. I saw Roger Waters last night. It could use a little more form. I'm letting it go a little bit. We put a little hair gel in there, a little product.

Yeah, no, I don't usually do the product. But it needs to be cleaned up a little bit and like straight. It's a little all of it. for the place. I'm not watching Lord of the Rings. You're out. I'm out. I was like, I think I'm going to wait to the end. And then when I have a dry season of nothing to watch, I'm going to binge it and give it a chance. I think that exists. Yeah. I love it, but I do recognize that it is, it there, it has a level of depth for people who love Tolkien that, and I don't think they're doing, they're not going very far in bringing everybody else on board.

Like they are counting on you being pretty invested in this world and its rules and it's how things progress and at least knowing the story of Lord of the Rings pretty well. And I'm finding that the less that you can pick up on all those references and Easter eggs and ideas, the more this show is sort of leaving you cold. This is the challenge, I guess, in today's modern age. You know, I just want to start with House of the Dragon. I love the last episode. I was prepared.

I came in. I was ready to be upset at the recasting of the lead part. And it worked for me. So it's, you know, many spoilers here. And by the way, my wife is watching this. She hates a violent show. She refused to watch Game of Thrones. And now she likes this show, I think, because of the female lead characters.

Yeah, it is, it is less. There is still violence and, gore and it is still upsetting at times. But I feel like it's fetishizing that stuff less. Game of Thrones really came in with that very strong idea of like, this is not like other fantasy. And this is the hardcore, edgy fantasy. This is like, what if all this stuff was gritty and real?

And I feel like, House of the Dragon is like, okay, you love this world and you love these kinds of stories and the dragons, whatever. It's not, it's not, that's not the major selling point this time. The cruelty, the brutality, the sexuality, the sexual. They're downplaying that stuff more in favor of the storytelling and the maneuvering and the politics. It's also a thing I've been enjoying about it. There's a lot less magic.

There's a lot less fantasy. It's a lot more like the politics. It does happen to be this one family that has dragons. So there's that level of, you know. It's not our world. There's dragons. There's seasons that last a really long time. But it's not every episode is, well, there's this magic.

temple they've got to go to or there's oh the faceless men or this god or that god it's very ground level so far in terms of like just people maneuvering around one other palace intrigue is a lot of like the palace intrigue if you will uh in the show i guess the key thing was this high-risk maneuver they decided to replace two characters two female characters uh emma darcy replace millie alcock as Rennara. Mara Targaryen. She was the princess now. Our main character.

And, you know, I wanted to be upset by this because it seemed like, well, they didn't replace the guy. They didn't replace her cousin. But. Matt Smith. They pulled it off, didn't they? I thought it worked really well. Olivia Cook also stepped in for Emily Carey as Allison Hightower, who's currently the queen.

I thought it worked really well. I didn't even notice the queen change. That's so weird. The actresses were so close that I didn't, I was discussing with my wife. And I was like, did they change them? Or there's like some aging or whatever. But Renary's husband also got aged. So they did replace a man as well. Yes. Yes. One person getting replaced. Yeah, they aged up. And I think I really, I like how they did that. It really reinforces not just how much time has passed, but how much has changed in the relationship between these two characters when we, When we last saw them versus when we see them again, we got to see them as childhood friends, and now they've grown up and they are bitter rivals. And I like that it really reinforced that. Like, this is a whole, we're stepping into a whole new world. This was almost like a new pilot in some ways where it's like we got to reset the whole stage.

And I saw some people on social media were a little negative about that. It's like, I don't want to start all over. I just got into this show. I don't want to get into a new show. I like the fact that they started all over and that they had these new actors. it is really effective to jump time to have these new actors jump time. Yeah, I really liked how they sort of pulled it off. And also that you get to see the progression.

I was sure the king was going to be dead by now because he's got leprosy or whatever is going on with him. But no. He's still around and they got to progress his illness, which was really fun for the makeup and design teams. This show is like the greatest hit of the year, I think. I think this will be the show of the year. Am I correct? I look, there's a lot of great reservation dogs just wrapped up its second season on FX, which was amazing. Severance was this year, which is definitely one of my favorite shows. The bear, I really loved the bear. All of those, I think, are great, but none of them have the scale. I mean, right. This way, if you're talking about

the biggest show of the year, the most epic show of the year, then, yeah, I think this is definitely, this is definitely up there. But I don't know, I, I'm holding off on maybe. best so far. Yeah, if I defined best as in most popular. It's certainly a huge hit for HBO. Amongst the most well done. Because you could argue, oh, maybe the performance is in the bear or, you know, I preferred severance because it was unique.

You might have preferences. In terms of the impact, like, yeah, this is definitely delivering for HBO. And there were a lot of question marks around is Game of Thrones still even a viable franchise? I mean, people were really down on that final season. I think there was, it was a big question mark that was very crucial for HBO. They really needed this. And I think this now answers it.

It was a question mark. And now it's an exclamation point. Exactly. It's like, this is the be. And so this is my other question. If it was a question mark, did they say, let's make this self-contained one or two seasons, let's move the story along. Let's just get a big win here.

As opposed to, hey, they could have drawn this out. We could have had Millie Alcock for this season. have done this change next season or in the middle of next season. It feels like they're moving so fast here that this is going to wrap up. I mean, I don't know. He's got that whole fire and blood book that George R. Martin wrote that they're sort of cribbing off of, which is almost written like a history. It's not written like a novel. It's written like a history book about the Targaryen dynasty. So they've got a lot to work with. I think even if they, even if the focus shifts between characters, I think they've got this whole world 200 years before.

the battle, you know, Robert's Rebellion and the story of Game of Thrones. Yeah, I mean, it is moving at a fantastic pace. And I think that makes a good TV. And I could see another production company or I could see another, you know, streamer saying, hey, let's, let's milk this. Well, the other thing that HBO did that's pretty canny is rather than just putting all of their focus on one Game of Thrones follow up, they worked on like eight. they've got, they still got a ton of spinoffs in development. So there was like, there was going to be

one with Naomi Watts where it was going to be about a different, I'm blanking now, but it was a different prequel story. And then there's one about the sea snake before the action of this show. And then there's one of Corlis Valerian. You've met him. So there's one about him as a seafaring adventure. There's one about Princess Nimeria like a thousand years in the past, like one of the folk legends in this era of Westrose. There's the Dunkin-Agg ones, which is a about like a knight and his squire and their adventures. So I think they're throwing everything at the wall, and they're seeing which project looks the best,

like which pilot looks the best, which series is coming together the best, which ones do we like the most? And then the cream rises and the others get scuttled. I like it as an approach. Yeah, I think that's a really smart approach. You put a couple of pokers in the fire, see what gets hot. And this show came out first because this was the one they felt strongest about.

They were getting all these pilots and these scripts in, they were like, this one's good. And then the next one that looks, I think, like the best chance is the John Snow sequel series. So, you know, they're giving themselves time to see what bubbles up and what ideas are kind of coming together the best, which is a pretty smart way to do. I mean, this is getting talked about. It's got a lot of buzz. Obviously, people in your life are probably talking about it. Yeah, it's almost, I mean, at this point, it's doing, it's getting about half of the viewership week to week more. It's getting, it's getting about 29 million views week to week at its height. Game of Thrones was getting 40, 45 million views

week to week. To get that close to season eight Game of Thrones within five or six episodes is stellar. I mean, very good, like a sign that people are very much still into Westeros and eager for more content. It makes me sad that they couldn't figure out how to do this with Sopranos, especially before all the principals started dying. Yeah. It could have been all kinds of interesting spinoffs and whatever. I mean, honestly, I liked all the Saints of Newark more than most, but it definitely felt more less like a standalone movie and more like it should be leading into more of a prequel. Like I would really want to watch a story about, you know, Tony's ancestors fighting for control of Central Newark against Leslie Odom Jr. and his crew. Like,

that sounds great. That sounds great. That would have been a great pilot episode. They should have done a pilot. It was like a movie. And then like we talked about going to there. Okay. So Warner Brothers' discovery is being sued in a class action suit, speaking of HBO. Yes. The suit alleges that WarnerMedia inflated HBO max subscribers by 10 million during the merger. We know this is true. HBO, they basically, they admitted this in their August earnings report. Their first earnings report after the merger.

So the first earnings report of WB Discovery is its own company this year in August. They came out and they said, they explained overall domestic U.S. subscribers, there was a drop. And so they explained, well, this was because HBO Max, Warner Media used to count AT&T wireless customers who were gifted subscriptions to HBO Max as HBO Max subscribers, whether or not they signed up. So if you're an AT&T wireless subscriber and we're like, hey, go to HBO Max, sign up with your AT&T wireless number, will give you six months for free.

even if you never bothered to go to HBO Max and actually complete the sign up process, they counted you as an HBO Max subscriber. It's a little shade. It is definitely shady. It's gray. It's gray. There's a little bit of gray in the black here.

This is really misleading investors. They're going to lose this. They're going to settle this case for sure. And this is always for, here we are on this week in startups and this week in streaming. Just never do this kind of shady stuff with numbers. I know people want to hit numbers. The better thing to do here would be say,

hey, we have access to this many subscribers, and we've converted 16%. And we think we can convert 70% based on hitting these targets. They should have just sent all these people a deep link. If they wanted to Fugazi this, there's a better Fugaziing way. They should have just sent everybody who's on the wireless a link that said, click here to activate your free and then opened a session with them with like a hash without them having to sign up and just start playing House of Dragons. Right. If you click that link, you're automatically in as user 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, whatever. Right.

And then it's a viable. Then it's a subscription. If you watched an episode, right. Yeah. Then you're like, hey, what shows do you like? Then on the back end, it says put your email in so or, you know, put your family's emails in so they can also share this. And then it sends links there.

This shows like a level of buffoonery on the part of the tech team. There's a very simple way to do this. You know, you have some websites. You click the link in the newsletter. You're logged in when you get there, right? So when I'm using Nextdoor, maybe using a real estate site, Redfin or Zillow, they're pretty sophisticated. Like, we don't want to put up a login.

We know we lose two thirds of the people and they have to log in. So what they do is they make the URL unique to you. It lasts for maybe a week in your email. Then that URL turns off. And what's the crime? What's the damage if somebody you forward the email and they logged into your account? Oh, they watch Sopranos. And now your feed has a Sopranos episode.

Watch, it's not a big deal. So dumb. This is dumb. Bad execution. I think the one thing, you know, it's a little, this story got reported yesterday. And I think a lot of people thought they did detective work and figured this out. It's like, no, this is a thing we've known happened. And this happens a lot.

Like a lot of other streamers have done similar things. It's really like the lawsuit named Zazlav and the CEO, the current CFO of Discovery, this is really on Warner Media. This is how Warner Media had been counting it during the AT&T era. They just didn't. as I probably knew and didn't say anything, but it wasn't his call. This was a Warner Media way of counting HBO's max subscribers

to maximize them to make it sound like the numbers were a little bigger than maybe they were. Well, I'll tell you what. It's also 10 million to be moving the needle. Yeah, at this pace, with the Game of Thrones, with the industry, euphoria, and I think HBO hands down is the best streamer right now,

which you're ranking right now. Yeah. If you had to keep three services, for me, it's HBO. Give me one of yours. You have to keep three. I think if you're talking in terms of bang for your buck, like most good quality content for what you pay, HBO Max and Hulu to me are pretty far in a way the best two. And then I put Disney Plus rounds out my third because I have kids and I love the Star Wars franchise. I like the Star Wars show.

You know, I like having that stuff. And they actually have a surprisingly deep, you know, library. Like I just want Avatar on there. So those are your three. Those are your top three. If you could, if this is for Lon, I don't want you thinking about this. Like, it's a journalist or an analyst. No, no, no.

I know. I'm changing your passwords for four down. You can keep three. I mean, those, those are my three. The other, the only other thing I was going to say, those are my three. The only other thing I was going to say is if we're talking about consistency, like they have the most good stuff versus the stuff they release, Apple to me is, I've never, like, Apple's batting averages beyond any, almost any studio I can think of.

Like, almost everything is good. Like, I watched, was it, Tehran was on there? Yeah. It was out in Amazon. No, Tehran is Apple. Yeah. I mean, that was really well done. That was like watching a better version of Homeland.

Not maybe the actors weren't as good, but I was like, this is incredibly well done. They seem to be like, and they're almost like an HBO-ish, but. maybe not as edgy. So you don't get the sex drugs and rock and roll. It's that same. It's the FX. It's the HBO. If a show is on this network, it's a good, it's good.

You can rely on us. Yeah. And like that's for a non-studio to come out and right away develop that level of curation. That like there was wild horses that Gary Oldman's spy show. Olivia Cook, who's in House of the Dragon. She's in that. I just, it didn't even interest me that much of this British spy show.

Gary Olman's in it. terrific. It's just if it's on Apple TV, you can pretty much count on it's going to be worth your time. And that's, that's really, I really value that. So I did want to single single them out. They don't have as nearly as much content as the other competitors. It's a triple. It's cheaper though. But excellent curation. I think Gary Olin to me is how a lot of people feel about Stanley Tucci. Like I can watch Gary Oman makes an omelet and I mean, they're both great. Tucci's great. Like, who is as an actor, an actor doing something incredibly mundane, you'd still watch, you tune in, you click, like literally making a French, teach you how to make a French omelet, like the classic French omelet, very simple thing to do. Oh, I mean, I, like, I, you know, most actor. Like, I love, I love a lot of actors. I would love to watch them make an omel.

Obviously, Nicholas Cage making an omelet would be an event that you would want to see. Michael Shannon making an omelet, who wouldn't want to watch Michael Shannon making an omelet? Helen Mirren making an omelet. would be amazing. It would be amazing. I like to crack the eggs. I use a little butter. Step one, you got to grease the pan.

I use a fork to break the yolks. I don't want the yolks to fight me. Kill them first thing. Yeah, I would definitely, you know who I like is the guy from Bawwock Empire who also did the 70s music show. What's the tall guy's name? Bobby Carnivali. Bobby Carnivali. Yeah, Bobby Carnivali making an omel.

be fantastic. Yeah. I'm thinking about this because I just watched on Netflix, John Favreau and the chef. Chef. Chef. Oh, yeah. The chef show that he does, yeah. It's a chef show.

And, you know, like, I can, John Favro, like, cutting onions and, like, getting instruction on how to cut the onions is interesting. It's a show. Some people have charisma. You know, the charisma thing? Sure. Some people just have. Selina Gomez has an HBO Max show where she cooks with celebrity chefs.

You know, I haven't seen that yet. I want to see that one. Interesting. All right. I know this because I went down the chef rabbit hole the last few days because I'm in downtown LA for 24 hours to see Roger Waters. Incredible show last night. I was in the front row.

Shout out to my friend Mark Jeffrey who got first row seats for us. Wow. Just unbelievable. I mean, I 79 years old puts on a hell of a show is like it's really interesting to watch somebody from the 60s or 70s like a radical. Still keeping up that radical. Yeah. Well, he's very outspoken.

still. Yeah, very outspoken. And he was, I mean, just going to his show, got himself in trouble last week. I got myself in trouble. Like, they were like, you went to see him. He thinks this about that. And I was like, didn't check his feed. Well, he was saying some, some anti-Ukraine stuff. He was taking sort of Russia's side in the Russia-Ukraine business. And then you watch him do the show. He's just a pacifist who doesn't want people murdered because he experienced a lot of pain and suffering in his life and he's just a very hurt person because he saw people suffer and die. And it's like really interesting, like breaking down this issue of the artist and what their experience is in today's lens of like the artist's belief system has to be put against

whatever today's cultural lenses. And I was just saying, how would the wall have been received today? He's also, it's just, it's this bizarre shift. He's from this era where rock stars were supposed to be jerks and difficult? And that was part of it. Like, that was part of the persona was that their iconic class and they had their own... Turning over a table, tracking a hotel room. And I mean, it was a whole generation of these guys. And now we hate that now. Now we want them to be good boys and everybody should be nice to everybody. And like, it's just the culture is shifted so much that it is hard to imagine how a Roger Waters, like, would he even have a career today or would it right away be like, this guy's a jerk. We don't want to.

It would have been like the wall, like, what is, why are you putting us through this, like, you know, painful thing to watch. These songs are too abrasive. This is like, get over. You know, they would just be like, why are you singing about this? Like, can you just, you can't dance to this. I was just sitting in there watching a bunch of old people. You're saying children don't need an education?

Yeah, like, wait, why are they not listening to the teacher? What is it? Is it, is it? What about the teacher? Why should you? And why are you telling the teacher to leave them alone? What is the teacher doing to them? Is it in Florida?

To me, to me, that's the whole shift. It's like rock start. used to be this like elusive and it was like a magical thing. They were from another plate. They weren't like us. You know, it was like you were, you would go to a concert and you're convening with them for like an hour and a half, but then they're going to go back to their rock star world and you have no idea. And today it's Twitter and Twitch. They're everywhere. Which rock star? There's no mystique anymore. All right. Which classic rock star, if they were alive today, on Twitter, which you most want to follow. Wow. That just comes. It comes.

right out to my head. I mean, John Lennon would be banned from Twitter. Yeah. To be banned on Twitter. Day one. He would have gotten himself banned like day one. You want me to take a vaccine? Yeah, right.

You want to like Picks or something? Like he would have gotten in trouble immediately. But that's what you were supposed to be like if you were a rock star back there. He'd be on Twitter on that. He'd be like, live streaming from off bed. This was a message to Donald Trump. They absolutely would have. They absolutely would have.

Build the wall. Wait, no, no, no, no. Uncle John, don't. Yeah. Don't build a wall. All right, listen, speaking of walls being built, I've been really wanting to see this film return to dust.

Have you seen this? No, it played at the Berlin Film Festival, but so far I don't think it's gotten much of an international release. Yeah, I've been hearing about this film. I've also been hearing about the film The Wow. Those are the two films. That's the,

one with Brendan Fraser. I like Aronovsky. I mean, I know he's off the rail sometimes and it's hard to watch his stuff. But this one, The Whale, which was based on a play with Brendan Fraser. Yeah. You know, they give him like an eight minute standing ovation at Khan, which I think he averages like four minutes. Brendan Fraser already a large guy, but he's playing like a 400 pound housebound man. And so he's putting a lot of prosthetics.

And they're saying the perform. I haven't seen the movie. They're saying the performance is incredible. It's earning a lot of comparisons to the wrestler, which is probably my favorite Aronovsky movie. Oh, the one with the wrestlers. I have to watch it again. Yeah.

Yeah, that's pretty amazing. I'm looking forward to that one. Yeah, Retrored to Dust is, you know, it's like a pastoral. It's like a love story about a farmer and his wife over the, but one of those like over the course of decades, like taking in their lives from their courtship when they, I think it's an arranged marriage when they first meet and get married. and then over the course of their whole lives together on this farm. And it's a realistic depiction of, you know, the gritty, tough life of a Chinese farmer.

And so what we're leading into in China right now, the party Congress, which is like the biggest event for the Chinese Communist Party. All the party members get together, ceremonies and celebrations. And they really like it to take place during a time of national pride and people. patriotism and a celebration of the Chinese character in the country of China. And so they, this is all conjecture. This movie returned to dust, played at Berlin, was celebrated, was a hit film in China. It's now on Chinese streaming services, but this week it has been totally pulled. It's gone. And there was social media. There were hashtags about what happened to it, and then those social media hashtags have been banned. Yes. Okay. We know what's going on.

there's obviously something going on. And the theory is that it's, because we're so close to the party Congress that the Chinese Communist Party is like, look, this movie is about how it sucks to live in the countryside and farmers have it really tough. That's not the image we want people to have of China right now. Let's get rid of this thing.

This is like their nomad land, the Francis movement. Right, a bit. It sounds like that. It sounds like demystifying, like taking away humanizing the mystique, taking away the mystery and making it like, look, we romanticize stories about Chinese farmers and the rural life of the peasants or whatever. But this is a more realistic sort of gritty everyday depiction of their life. Did you like No Man Land, by the way?

I did. You know, I thought the Amazon stuff, Nomad Land. I thought the Amazon stuff where they were working at the Amazon warehouse was real weird and felt sort of like artificial. I know Chloe Zhao wanted to shoot in those Amazon warehouses. And that far felt, I felt disconnected from the rest of the movie. But once it became Francis McDormand sort of on her own with the amateur actors, I really liked it.

I liked all that stuff. I wonder if Amazon, you know, in some way participated in this, like allowed them to shoot a factory? They did. Yes. She got permission to shoot inside the Amazon warehouses for those scenes. But I mean, I think that's also why, if you notice, the characters, they're all pretty upbeat about their Amazon jobs. Like, they love the Amazon job.

They wish they could last more along the year. They're like sad when it's over and they've got to go back to the desert because it's a good source of money. Which I think is accurate, like the people who get those jobs. Yeah. I'm not saying it's not. It's, I feel like another filmmaker would probably engage with that more because it's a topic.

Yes. There would be more of a balance. Well, that was the thing I found super interesting was I was thinking about my parents. which one does when you're starting to think about people in their 70s or 80s when you're of a certain age. And I was thinking, well, what if my dad or my mom had to do this, right? And they needed money. And this was an option they found to go work for three months before Christmas, you know, work seven days a week, whatever, 12-hour shifts. And these 70-year-olds packing Christmas toys and whatever for the holiday season and then living, you know, like this very nomadic lifestyle.

like in a parking lot essentially in a campground and I was trying to think of if like the humanity of it you know and it kind of messes with your brain a little bit thinking about the humanity that doesn't it like oh yeah for sure and I mean and I still liked how it didn't it didn't feel like it was being pushed into a narrative it felt like we were following Francis McDormons character and it didn't feel like it was rise and fall this happens than this it's more just like the rhythms and patterns of her life and like a year in the life of this woman. And I really did, I like that sort of rhythm of it. It wasn't like we're going to uplift you at the end and she's going to become, she gets stock options at Amazon and gets a mansion

and a jet. Right. It's, it's like she doesn't take her money and buy Amazon at $2. And it's just, this is a life. It's more like how a chapter in your life is. Like you start somewhere, you end up somewhere else. You may be grown or learned things, but it's not, you know, it's not like, well, everything's resolved happily ever after. And I, you know, I like that. And it, it, it, It added to the lived-in kind of realism of the rest of the movie. I also thought some amazing performances from amateur actors, almost everybody except David Strathair, and he's professional, the guy she starts dating.

All the other people that she's living with who are in the sort of RV little area with her, those are all real nomads who live that lifestyle for real, including the guy she's talking to is like the author of the book about how to live that lifestyle. Yes, yes. That's the real guy. He's telling his real story about his son dying. and how he got to be on the road. And that's such a moving scene to get from a guy who's not even an actor, just telling his life story.

I think this film is going to, I have to watch it again. This film has haunted me since I've seen it. My connection to the tech industry, obviously, if you're in the tech industry, I think this film is not judgmental in any way. It's not attacking Amazon. It's not. No. It's just matter of fact.

It's just like you're saying, they're just like, here is actually what's happening. It felt so authentic. And then these people want to be in this life. lifestyle, they're opting into being this no matter of lifestyle. It's almost like they're at the end of their life. And I often think about the end of my own life and other people's lives. And I think, what is that last 10 years where you're trying to figure out what just happened? You know that? Like, what just happened in my life? The last five years? And then, well, I'm still alive. So maybe I get something out of this last five or 10 years. And what I want to get out of this

five or 10 years is just being with these people and just making some coffee by a campfire. I thought in a way is one of the beautiful films of our time that I don't think people saw it. And I think for a lot of people, they missed it. They were looking for this Amazon. I'm going to make a point at some point. You know, I'm going to make some. I'm going to tell you how to feel about, you know, people working in factories. Or I'm going to tell you how to feel about e-commerce and local stores going away and the Walmartification.

It wasn't a tree state on capitalism. It was a meditation on the end of your life and what you want to get out of it. This film is so powerful. And it's, it's, Chloe Jow's not afraid to, like, give you time to think. It's a, it's a, it's a patient movie. There's, there's space in it. Yes.

And, and so often films, even indie films, even lower budget films, even smaller films, they have that relentlessness of pace that like, this, this, this, this, they're afraid. You're going to look at your phone. You're going to look at your phone. There's that, there's that Miyazaki concept of Ma. Do you know what I'm talking about? No. Miyazaki, the great animator,

Hayo Miyazaki, he talks about, he calls it, it's a Japanese word, Ma, and it means emptiness or like stillness. And he's like, in every movie, he has to figure out how is he adding, it's like Umami, like the fifth taste that it's hard to sort of describe.

It's hard to sort of necessarily describe Ma when you see, but you know it when you see it. It's a moment in a film or a show where it's just, it's characters walking, it's wheat, grass blowing in the breeze, It's rain. It's a moment of quiet and still to allow you to reflect on what you've just seen, what you're watching, and where it maybe is going to go next.

And it invites you to do that exactly that kind of contemplation that you're talking about that I think people, we've trained them to not do during movies that you're supposed to do to get the most out of it. This is the problem. I have a concept at movie theaters. There should be a movie theater. You know, with the collecting of the phones at comedy shows. Right. I have now, I'm lucky enough to, like, one of my dreams came true as a kid. I always loved movies.

I wanted to be a movie reviewer. I had seen Siskel and I Eber when I was like 12, 14 years old. And I told my mom, the first job I ever told her I wanted to have. I think I want to review movies like Siskel and Iber because you get paid to go watch movies and I love movies. This was like a mind-bending, capitalistic thing that I made the connection. And anyway, I have a movie theater in this ski house that I bought. and, you know, I now will find a great movie and I turn my phone off or I put it on the other side of the room. And I've just decided this year I'm going to start leaving the phone out of the room and having no devices because I do find myself pulling out my phone.

And it's very easy to do that like in a Marvel film where you're like, well, I've seen every fight scene possible. Like, wanting to see this or not. This is one of those things about the theatrical experience too. Like when you hear people talk about the theater, they always think of it as avatar. Well, you've got to go see it on the biggest screen. and IMAX and 3D, that's the theatrical experience. But part of the theatrical experience is just that if you're in a quiet, dark room with no distractions, like that's how movies were designed to be watched.

And now we watch them in this very, you know, doing three other things kind of way. I'm no, I'm not blaming other people. I do this too. How do you not? The phone is like ever present. And it's, you can pick this thing up and find the most interesting 30 second video. And that moment, what did you call the moment? Moment of Ma.

Ma. M.A. Ma. Ma. M. So that ma moment, by definition, you have to let kind of sweep over you. Right.

It cannot compete with the TikTok video because the algorithm has picked something to dopamine your brain. And now if a filmmaker puts that in the movie intentionally, we're trained to zone out. Oh, this is a good chance to check my phone. It's like, no, no, no. This is the moment. You miss the mom moment. Now you get drawn into Howl's world.

This is how you learn. This is how spirited away envelopes you. Yes. Yes. It's so lost. I mean, the whole concept of going to a theater and having that experience, I think, is become, it's going to be lost on this generation, but our generation, I think we have the last one to, like, fully embrace that.

We would. My hope is that it becomes like a vinyl record thing, you know, like vinyl records are not the primary. That's not the way most people listen to music. Spotify is much easier and you can just pull it up on Spotify or YouTube. But for officinados, for people who really care. and get into it, there's a vibrant community of people who still collect record players and go to record shops and buy records. My hope is that even when I'm an old man, I'll still be

able to go to a movie theater because there will still be a little vibrant community of people like me who haven't let go of that yet. But most people, I feel like it's going to be on your phone or AR. I'll tell you the thing I miss most about it. When people looked at it as cinema and we would go to the Angelica in New York on Broadway in Houston. We go down there. You've been to it. Yeah. We would go.

I've seen the movie there. Yeah, we would go. And sometimes we go at like six o'clock. We'd look at what movies were available. Right. Because buying tickets, you didn't have the internet. You just go. You'd look at what's available.

People forget. You'd buy a ticket for later that evening. This is how it used to be. You used to go to like they would have six screens. You'd be like, we'll see what we're interested in that's starting next is what we'll see. Yeah. So what we do, what we would do, what we would do is typically we'd meet at the Angelica at

at five o'clock. We pick a movie. Could be at seven, eight, nine, whatever. Okay, now we're going to go have dinner. Let's go. Oh, movies coming quick. We're going to go for some of quick dinner. Oh, we got time. We'll be leisurely about it. But the best part was after the movie, getting a cup of coffee, getting a drink, whatever it was, and breaking down what you just saw. And that was like the whole tradition of it, right? And I think for young people out there, see some of these like seminal great films, turn your phone off and then really have a discussion about what the artist was like intempting to do. And then this is why I really, you know, back to this film being banned to China,

return to dust is where I really want to see it. And I hope that this is my great hope is that like the theater experience can actually be even more coveted where like people come together and they have talks afterwards. I always felt like when I went to Sundance for the first time and I really want to go to Sundance and get a press pass because after each movie, these nerds would go and sit outside and go to the cafe at the Yarrow, have a cup of bad coffee, and we talk about the movie. I kid you not, I watch Napoleon Dynamite, watch, you know, this other film, we go sit, Roger Eber's there, just to come full circle on, like, my dream.

Roger Eber's there, and he's alone, and two of us come walking up. He's like, join me. Whoa. So now we're talking to him, that Elvis Mitchell from the New York Times walks up. Yeah. Remember Elvis Mitchell? Sure, of course. This is like, that's what.

Unbelievable. Film festivals did you really used to be like that. Less so now. I think it's become more of a Comic-Con, like crowded, like it's harder. But yeah, when I first started going to film festivals, it really was like that. You were just, you know, you would be walking down the street and, you'd just pass by. People talking to random groups of people talking with celebrities and reviewers, and it was all, it wasn't that big of the community. But let that sink.

There was a, the celebrity at Sundance was Roger Ebert, because he really thought about the movie the art and what was there. And this is one of the things I love about my friendship with you. In the early arts, I'll tell a very quick story that I go, I know we got to get out here. The very early odds, I went to the Santa Barbara Film Festival to cover it for like my college papers. This would have been like 99 or 2000. And I was watching a movie. It was an adaptation of a Ray Bradbury short story. And then I went to there was a McDonald's down State Street from where the movie was. And I got a little bite to eat before the next screening. And in comes Joe Mantania, the star of the movie, and Ray Bradbury. And they sat right next to me

and McDonald's and ate their meal. And I said to them, hey, Ray Barber. I think Ray Barrier gets a filial fish? I got like a burger or something. I said, hey, I just watched your guys' movie, and it was great. And they were like, hey, thanks, man. I was like, I'm talking to Joe Bantanian and Ray Bradbury and a McDonald's on State Street in Santa Barbara.

Like, that was incredible. It was 20 years ago. And if you're young and you want to make movies, go make art. All right, listen, that's Lon Harris. The amazing Lon Harris. Follow them Twitter.com slash lawns. Get inside.com slash streaming, the newsletter. And you can always play Stump the lawn.

Just go to Twitter.com and you type in, I love this film and this TV show. You could say, I love this album and I love this TV show. You can say, I love this album. I love this type of food and I love this movie. And he will tell you more of what you'll love. He's literally an algorithm. He's a cultural algorithm and a cultural treasure. Thank you, Lon Harris.