This Week in Startups - Tesla + Netflix Q3 earnings, Kevin Hart's VC fund, Twitter ideas, revamping the DCEU | E1591

Episode Date: October 21, 2022

First up, J+M break down Tesla's Q3 earnings with the help of some insightful charts (2:09), before discussing Kevin Hart's VC firm landing JP Morgan as an LP (17:08) and some ideas for Twitter verification. (27:29) Then, Lon Harris joins the show to cover Netflix's Q3 earnings, its coming ad-supported tier, and how he would revamp the DCEU! (37:19) (0:00) J+M tee up today's segments! (2:09) Tesla Q3 earnings breakdown (15:37) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist (17:08) Kevin Hart lands JP Morgan as an LP for Hartbeat Ventures, his VC firm (26:05) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (27:29) Twitter verification ideas (35:52) Blueground - Get up to $1000 off your booking at https://promos.theblueground.com/twist (37:19) Lon Harris joins the show to break down Netflix's Q3 earnings and its plans for an ad-supported tier (1:00:05) Head of DCEU leaves, Lon gives his thoughts on how he would revamp DC to compete with the MCU FOLLOW Lon: https://twitter.com/lons FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1

Hey, everybody, welcome back. Molly and I are here. It is Thursday. It's a big news day. We're going to cover Tesla's Q3 earnings. We talk a little bit about Kevin Hart's new venture firm. He got JP Morgan to pony up for Heartbeat Ventures. Get it.

Heart, Kevin Hartbeat. It's Thursday, Molly. So we all know what that means. We got Lionel Messi, but more important, it's Thursday. We don't have Lionel Messi on the show. By the way, he also is getting into the investing game. but we do have Lon Harris on the show for just the best segment of the week. In this case, we're breaking down Netflix's Q3 earnings report.

Super deep on Netflix's coming ad-supported business. And I don't want to give you any spoilers, but glasses. The glasses went on. Oh, man, glad that might be a J-Trade in here. Who knows? And then we play a new fun game. You're in charge, Lon. What are you going to do at D.C.?

Yes, we put Lon in charge. of the DC Multiverse and said, hey, how would you fix this train wreck? It's got an interesting answer to challenge the MCU dominance in the superhero space. It's a really fun, informative show. It's wonderful. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast.

Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at Vantta. Vanta.com slash twist. Lemon.io. Need to speed up your product development without draining your budget? Hire vetted engineers from Europe at lemon.io. Go to lemon.io slash twist to get 15% off for the first four weeks. And Blue Ground is revolutionizing the rental game with its global network of designer furnished apartments that can be seamlessly booked for a month, a year, or longer.

Get up to $1,000 off your booking with Blueground. Visit promos. Dot the Blueground.com slash twist for more info. Feel at home, free to roam with Blueground. Tesla put up... Big fan of the cars. Big Q3 numbers, but the stock is down over 6% so far on Thursday. It sounded like the vehicle deliveries were up the...

Massively. What was the hit here? There was something. the revenue was down. I mean, I think there was something was like a minor miss. I think there's like some minor miss out of the numbers. But when you look at the numbers, they're truly extraordinary. Revenue up 56% year over year is just insane on a big number.

But that was slightly under, I guess, some expectations. Vehicle deliveries went up to 343,000. That's up 89,000. I don't know what percentage that is. So it was a revenue miss in terms of analyst estimate. Slightly. I was trying to figure out what caused it. Okay, I know, but I'm just trying to figure out.

There was some reason specifically that was given for the fact that even though revenue was up and vehicle deliveries were up, the stock was down and that's apparently what it was. Maybe. Yeah, you don't even know in this market, like sometimes there's shorts covering. Sometimes there's people moving. Sometimes people are locking in wins for the end of the year. It's like a lot of the movements in the market are not making sense. Like when you see and people are, I watch CNBC.

it's hard time. These analysts having a hard time explaining why certain movements are happening. Yeah. I mean, there's always like a pretty idiotic correlation between like, well,

it wasn't what analysts were expecting and therefore the stock was down even though it was an amazing performance. That is an extremely common story and that seems to be what was playing. Could be. Out here. However, I mean,

the fact that what vehicle deliveries were up 89,000 year over year, right? Automotive revenue was up 55% year over year. considering the supply chain issues, that's strong. So this is a website called App Economy. You can follow them on Twitter,

Economy app. They make these, I don't know what they, do you know the name of these charts? I don't know. They're just these beautiful like ribbon, like a ribbon chart. Let's call it a ribbon chart. I like that.

Yeah, it's like a ribbon because it shows, it's almost like a stacked bar chart, but then they rip it apart. It's like a shredded ribbon. I just love these. They're just amazing. And they show you like, they just do such a beautiful job of visualizing things that are in an earnings report that people don't understand like the cost of revenue, the operating,

you know, it's like you see this, you see revenue and then you see it broken down in gross profit, operating profit, net profit, interest, how much they pay in taxes, what the operating expenses are if you can see me on making the ribbon moves. It's how much they spend on R&D. Like, it's just the most informative. Yeah. Sure. It's incredible.

Well, we always talk about building a mental model when we invest in companies and building mental models of companies like when j-trading. And you look at this, you know, the, the ribbon in the middle, this is gray bar. So just visualize a gray bar that says revenue at $21.5 billion. Now, to the right of the bar, they start talking about what's costs, what's profit. So you just break the bar in half. The bottom is cost of revenue, $16 billion or so. and then on top gross profit.

Like we were talking about just yesterday when we were doing some professional development, you got $5.4 billion in gross profit. Okay, now you break that top part, the gross profit bar into two parts. The red, operating expenses, and the operating expenses break down to SGNA, administration kind of stuff,

and then you have R&D, right, research and development. Then you have operating profit. So you break gross profit after, you know, just what is the cost of selling the car, of making the cars. But then it gets an operating profit. So if you put in the operating expenses, SG&A and R&D into it,

okay, now you got an operating profit that goes down to 3.7, right, 5.4 to 3.7. Then you go to the net profit because you have taxes. They got to pay some taxes and they got some other expenses, perhaps interest, a depreciation, whatever it is. So the net profit, 3.3 billion. That's actually the cash. I think that goes into the bank account. This is becoming,

and he always said this, you know, And I guess sometimes people don't take Elonis word. But he always said, like, you know, these factories, if you do start churning out cars, your fixed cost factory, and then, you know, you keep selling cars, the margins could get quite high over time. Remember, I'm talking about that in the model estes, which were a trickle. It could be investments in other things in this net profit, obviously. But they're talking about doing a stock buyback, I guess, which could also be a creative, yeah. So this is a interesting to them.

By the way, one of the notice says it's called a Sanky diagram, Crispin. Samski says it has a name. Sankey, S-A-N-K-E-Y. I like Riven. S-N-K-E-Y. Sanky diagram. Yeah. I'm looking at that right now.

I'm going to call it a Riven chart, but thank you for the actual term. But what is also cool is that to the left of the middle line, the revenue bar, you get this actual breakdown of revenue. Because people always talk about, well, where is it coming from? And then you get this very specific thing that you can pull apart into other super interesting nuggets like Tesla's making over a billion dollars on. energy generation and storage and 1.6 billion dollars from services like what is that? I mean, from a journalistic perspective, it's so interesting to just like dig into, oh, okay, so what's the $300 million from regulatory credits, a little over half a billion from leasing? Like, it's just a, it's, I don't know, it's informative in a way that is that I have not seen before. You very quickly

understands this. By the way, very quickly, the Sankey diagram seems way more complicated than our beautiful ribbon chart here. Well, anyway, just to give you some history on the Sanky, because I always wonder where, what is the origin story of these things? Take a look at this. I'm going to pull up something for you. This is the original Sanky chart. Both the Greeks and the Irish, as you know, Molly, are responsible for a lot of the great innovations we now flourish under in society. And I'm Irish and Greek and Swedish. So shout out to my Irish and Greek heritage there. Sanky charts, Captain Matthew Henry Phineas, Rale. Sanky. Got enough names there, Matt? He created the first. He first created the chart in 1898, representing steam engine efficiency using arrows,

having widths proportional to heat loss. The original charts, black and white, displayed just one type of flow. For example, steam, while using colors for the different type of flows of the diagram, additional variables. Another famous Sanky diagrams

is flow map overlaying a Sanky diagram into geographical map known as the Charles Menards map representing Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812. I'm not sure the one we're showing here what that is.

What do we think that one is, Nick? If we can pull it up. Is that the Steam one? Apparently is the geographical one, I think. Great, awesome. I mean, this is just a very interesting concept. So we all learned something here today. Sanky charts.

And I was online and I found a Sanky diagram generator. You can just talk. and Sanky diaram generator and go ahead and make your own. I'm into these, man. We have to start making our own. I want to make one of these for the Snyderverse, for the DCverse. We should make this for the DCverse, right?

We took all Marvel movies, all DC movies. You stack all Marvel movies, and then you have one way go by ratings and one big go by reviews, Metacritic reviews, and the other way you do proportional to revenue generator or profit loss statements on them. Very interesting way to look at it. But I'm going to get a Sanky on here.

Yeah. So anyway, congratulations. That's only going to get better, I think. All right, this is a really important chart that people are talking about. What you see there is essentially a hardware business that's got incredible margin power. The blue on this chart, if you're looking at it, the $6.8 billion compare is the operating expense. That's selling general and administrative expenses. And then you have the total revenue.

And what is happening here is they've been able to control costs while increased revenue. And as that happens, you become a money printing machine. Now, people didn't believe that because Tesla lost money for so long. You start a car company is like having a money furnace as Elon has referred to it. But once you do get all those factories up and running and you figure out the batteries and you don't spend any money on advertising, you just have the most followers on Twitter, you know, it looks like this business has quite a margin that people

didn't expect. I mean, this is, if you are not watching, this chart is pretty bananas. What we see is that between 2017 and Q3 of 2022 on an annualized basis, cost, you know, doubled, right? Cost to operating expenses, effectively almost doubled from $3.9 to $6.8 billion, but revenue eight-ext. Like, it's the idea that you would keep cost that flat in terms of factories and production and making cars and have your revenue line go up and to the right is actually bananas. I would love to see this for Apple over time. You know, their revenue versus, you know,

their operating expense. It's a very interesting chart to see. So maybe we can pull that up for future. Tap dance a little while we look for that. Well, no, we don't have tap dance. I think just since it's earning seasons, I'll just challenge my producers, you know, yeah, we're not buying everybody Bloomberg terminals for.

Come on, just one. No, but I think we can do this with Y charts. Why charts gave us an account at some point. So thanks to our friends at Y charts. I think Y charts, we might be able to do this. So we should see if we first producers can recreate this chart in Y charts. Like if we look at Tesla and we can recreate this chart. I'm not sure who made this chart, but then we should, we can recreate this chart for them.

We could just do this for every company, right, and see what's going on here, right? Because I guess the other argument here is, well, maybe they should be spending more money. and if they did more advertising, would they sell more cars? Well, obviously, their production constraint. And I don't know if they can spend more money on factories. I mean, my God,

those things are expensive to build, and they built a lot of them. Yeah. Yeah, and a big part of the story, I think, is also exporting and manufacturing in China. So I think very few companies, except for Apple and Tesla have really figured that out at scale. And that seems to be a big part of the story here, too,

from what I gather, from the information I see on Twitter. Great job to the team at, Tesla. Yeah, congrats. All right. And I had asked our producers there, Molly, on the fly, to show us Apple's revenue plotted against their operating expenses in their most recent quarter. And you see a similar story. So the great companies in the world, it seems, Tesla and, you know, here, and thanks to our friends at Y charts for providing us a free account. I probably should pay for it instead of giving this free ad. In fact, let's do that. Why charts free ads? Let's do that. Yeah. What are I doing here? Why charts?

sponsor the show. Anyway, here's your Y chart. 43, what to say there? 43 billion in operating expense. And what's the top line? The top line is 365 billion. Great. And when did it bifurcate?

And you started to see this money printing machine emerge. Yeah, right around, for those of you who are not watching, right around 2005, which ironically was a couple of years before the iPhone introduction. The iPhone was introduced. I always remember this the same year that my son was born, 2007. I think of them as almost the same product in many. anyways. But you start to see, that's when you really, though, just a couple years after that right around 2007, in the middle of that 2005, 2010, is when you really start to see this rocket

takeout. And there was a product, remember, there was a product right before the iPhone, known as the iPod. And I think the iPod was the beginning of Apple having a truly mass market phenomenon. Remember, before that, when you're seeing this very, like a really terrible business from 1985 to 2005, 20 years of like brutality of this like operating versus top line revenue. It was just, you know, barely, you know, a little sliver there. They found a new product category. Consumer electronics. Sony's business. Turns out computers were not a good business, but consumer electronics, a fantastic business. Yep. That's what. Yeah. Like just absurd. So then we have a that layers over the Tesla line that we talked about.

Yeah. So it's up on screen right now. So if you look at, if you're watching us on YouTube, yeah, exactly. You see these red colors that represent Tesla and you start to watch this line, start to follow a pretty similar. Actually, there's even like this identical kind of little, I don't know, mini spike and then a flat, a plateau, but then followed by an immediate takeoff. like these these lines you see you can see nick moving his cursor over it like crazy here showing us this is the line right there that's that is almost identical to the apple line. Hmm that's fascinating.

Yeah. Like that's really impressive. That is a really interesting good job by the way producer Nick. Nice work like that's exactly. Yeah. What we wanted to see and when you chart when you plot those against each other and you see how similar they look. It's pretty fascinating.

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Get your sock to now. Kevin Hart is got a venture firm, didn't know that. He's friendly with a bunch of my friends. Kevin Hart's... You know, I haven't met him yet, but he's friendly with a lot of my friends, as people have heard. Yeah.

And Heartby Ventures took its first outside investment from JP Morgan. Yeah, early stage firm to invest in lifestyle, media, and technology startups focused on inclusion and supporting minority and underrepresented founders. Fantastic. And at an event, at the event, TechCrunch Disrupt, Hart said, quote, This is not a Kevin Hart machine that Kevin Hart stands in front of. And I said, it has to happen and there's no other way. He said, this is a table.

This is a table where we sit and talk. We ideate and we come up with the best possible ideas. That's something I've done very well over the years. I've aligned myself with people who have done it right. And that's how I learned. Fantastic. Great. Yeah.

Interesting. Looks like he's done a massage therapy device called Thermobody. I haven't heard of an electrolyte, beverage, Bright Fox and Social Food Ordering Platform snack pass. A lot of consumer goods there. Hard to make money from those. But with the celebrity behind him, that is, when you put an influencer or celebrity of his stature behind something like those things, those can be a true catalyst as we've seen with Mr. Beast and Kim Kardashian.

So while most VCs would have a hard time making venture returns from those, I think the Kim Kardashian, Mr. Beast, Kevin Hart crowd can. And actually, we should probably point out that, that although this is not in the lineup today, there was also other celebrity VC breaking news. Thanks to Tim Apple for reminding me, because I meant to send this to our group, that Lino Messi is also creating a global holding company

to invest in sports, media, and technology globally. Based in San Francisco, Playtime Sports Tech Holdco LLC. That is evidently the name. Playtime Sports Tech Holdco LLC, which sounds like, you remember that episode in The Simpsons where Homer Simpson decides to start an internet company. And they call it like hyper mega global com or whatever.

Anyway, this celebrity VC thing is a thing. Yeah, I mean, Ashton Coucher did it right because he was actually doing the work and meeting with a lot of startups and got very connected with the angel crowd. You know, he would show up at TechCrunch 50, which I used to co-host with a previous partner over there. And yeah, there have been a lot of folks. who have dabbled in this, most of them don't do well because they can't put the time into it and they pick things that don't have venture margins and they just are not in the categories

like marketplaces, SaaS, fintech where money's made. And their deal flow circle might be friends of theirs and entertainment as opposed to, you know, actual, you know, more coming out of the startup incubator, you know, machine. So you just have to be, I think, careful that these folks are paired with. Just like if I was going to go into entertainment, if I was going to do a reality show, which, you know, I've talked to people about, you know, it's one thing to do a podcast, but if I'm going to do a reality show, hopefully I have some reality partners or a distribution partner who understands that has some domain expertise.

So I think the reverse is probably true here, too. That's what I wonder. Like, is this a case of, is it and or could it be a case of celebrities getting pulled in, you know, to be. become a name for something that they don't, I don't want to be demeaning, totally understand. I don't know, it's sort of like, I feel like the Kim Kardashian PE firm, I get,

and she, they get it. And there's a, there's a precise strategy. The idea that it's just like, it's Lionel Messi, so it'll be like some sports tech stuff is like, is he just the name here? In some cases, you put a name and then an existing team. So remember Carmelo Anthony had a venture fund. And I think what it was was Carmel,

Anthony plus somebody who was a legit person in venture come together and do it. Kevin Durant had something going. Andrea Godalo does. Now, in some cases, like Andre Igui has really started to learn the craft of investing and is doing the meetings and that kind of stuff. Now, with Kevin Durant, I'm not sure he has the time as a full-time player, one of the greatest players in the world, training, all that stuff, to actually go, do all these meetings, et cetera. So like maybe when you retire, it's a different thing. And then a lot of times, a lot of the LPs who do this are doing it to get close to celebrities and power. And so, you know, who knows what dollar amounts being put in or what the motivation of the LP is if they're actually going for returns

or they're going for the halo, right? Or, you know, some getting closer to celebrities kind of thing. So, you know, Iggy is an Ashton Coucher, Delhi, Delavadova, who we know, who, you know, we've done deals with. Like some of those folks are actually doing the meetings, getting to no founders, joining boards of companies, like really doing the job, basically. And they just,

okay, I'm great at sports. Now I'm going to be great at this. That totally makes sense to me because sports gives you a great training. And it's funny, because then you get to something like Playtime Sports Tech,

hold co-LLC. And it just feels like a dressed up family office in some ways. You know, it'll be his main investment vehicle. It's a vehicle. It's not a necessarily a venture firm. It's a venture fund if you raise money I'm dead with this name by the way

I could literally just say this all day Playtime Sports Tech Holdco LLC like come on You gotta be kidding me They just call themselves Playtime One word's good launch play tag No I'm like I will say them all forever I will always say all of them So you know it's

And I guess really the question is if you're a founder What's the harm in taking some money from one of these firms Yeah None What's the harm if they're your lead investor well, are they going to signal to people in your next round to invest? So a celebrity doing your Series A, the whole Series A, that's going to be a negative signal to your Series B.

So just keep that in mind. Yeah. If you get Sequoia or if you go to Launch Accelerator or Y Combinator, these are signals that there is, you know, a lot of discipline around placing these bets. You start going to the celebrity crowd and they place a bet. Could actually work against you if they were the lead. If it's a small amount, everybody knows what you're doing. Yeah, you just, you carved out some time.

Maybe you could ask them for tickets to an event or, you know, they'll come to the office and give an inspiring talk or maybe they'll give you a tweet. They have to provide a lot of value in that way. So just be thoughtful about that, right? What is the signaling for your next round if you're a founder? I always like to think about that myself. That's a great point. Like, I would get excited if I saw that Serena Williams was on somebody's cap table,

but if the entire round had been taken by playtime sports tech, hold co, LLC, I might have different question. So I think in each of this cases is different. So Serena obviously is married to Alexis and Alexis is a full-time VC for, I don't know, five or ten years now. So maybe closer to ten. So, you know, she's obviously understands what venture capital is, how this works. It's not just her lending her brand to another venture firm. She obviously has a deep interest in it and her partner and her are probably talking about every single deal and diligence and sourcing deals, right? So that's where I always like the devil's in the details kind of situation. Some,

like when Carmelo Anthony did his, I never heard of anybody meeting with Carmelo Anthony or Carmelo Anthony tweeting about a startup or, you know, in any way taking interest in the way. Yeah. You saw Ashton Coucher or Iggy or Deloomito take interest in it. Yeah.

Right. I don't see messy showing up on Shark Tank, you know. But that would be a fun watch. Well, congratulations to Kevin Hart and Playtime Cold Code. Playtime Cold Co. Playtime Cold Co. LSC. Yeah.

And also, like you're saying, the private equity thing could be a different angle here too. So I think if they're going to do consumer stuff, like, and it's going to include the celebrity endorsement part, you know, this might fall into more of the Mr. Bees, Kim Kardashian private equity, as you pointed out. So, you know, depending on how you frame it, maybe using the term venture capital and it's more like private equity or influencer brand building. Family office-ish. We'll see over time. Anyway, it remains, it remains a fascinating trend to see BC and in, investing in general, get more and more and more mainstream. It's like yet another data point on this story that like our industry has arrived.

Company formation and entrepreneurship is great for society and it's a fun thing to do. I encourage everybody to start a company, join a fund, become a syndicate member, or otherwise geek out to startups. I mean, it's kind of my life's mission is to like get involved and use entrepreneurship. and company formation as a lens to make life more fun and better for everybody. So more people in the party's good as far as I'm concerned. Bigger tent, agree. Better party. Take it for me.

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And that's why you need lemon.io. How much would you pay, Mom? Yeah. To have a verified account. Let's just assume you weren't famous and you had to pay for a verified account on Twitter. If, you know, verified accounts were available to everybody, just hypothetically, what would you pay a month for that

knowing that, hey, you know, start to solve the spam, brigading, whatever box? Because you'd say, hey, I only want my replies to be other. verified folks. What would you pay per month, do you think? 5, 10, 20. I'll pick three. I feel like that's a tricky question because doesn't that already, that already pretty much exists. No, you cannot buy verification. You can't buy verification. That's true. But in terms of the benefits, so what is the benefit of verification assuming this scenario? I buy it. Let's assume all the good people buy it and,

you know, like you get the first, whatever half of your replies are the verified stuff. And and the bottom half are unverified stuff, or whatever. Verified just becomes a predominant case here. So in order, would you subscribe if you didn't have it, if it made the service better? What would you pay? 5, 10, or 20 a month,

or you wouldn't pay for verification. I don't think that I could imagine wanting to pay for, well, I'd pay like two bucks a month, I guess. Okay. The benefit that you've described is not that clear to me compared to what is already on offer in terms of the controls that exist on Twitter for like controlling your replies

are not looking, you know. Right. Okay. So if you didn't have the verified now, though, and you wanted to be verified. Even if you're not verified, you can still like say, you can only reply to me if I know you.

Right, but verified users move up in the system. Obviously, we are verified users ourselves. So we get a lot more play, right? And we get that verified tab. We can see all the stuff. I'm just curious. So maybe two bucks a month. Yeah.

Yeah. One or two bucks a month maybe. Producer Nick, what would you pay to be a verified user? Would you pay? What would you pay? Nothing. I think verifications are lame. Okay. There you haven't. Producer Rachel, would you pay to be verified?

I'm curious. I also don't think I would want to. I don't think they're lame, but I don't know necessarily. I have this theory, though, that the reason I don't like verification is I think verified people are really salesy. So I trust them less. Like, I don't feel like they're as authentic as non-verified people. Got it.

I don't think they're lame. I also feel like I use Twitter more actually as a news source. and less as a broadcaster. Interestingly, so what you're describing as a benefit, I'm just figuring this out in my head. Like, you're describing a benefit to me assuming that I want to be more of a broadcaster, whereas what I value about Twitter is the ability to get,

like today, you know, Liz Trust resigns. I'm like, oh my God. And I go and I turn on CNBC and I check CNN and like, they're not even talking about it because you ask, whatever. I'm like, Jesus Christ, there's no way for me to get. And the only place I can go and get information from people, in the UK, commentators, breaking news, and the actual humans on the ground with the insights that I can't get anywhere else is Twitter.

But that is not something I need to be verified to get. So the value to me is not in what I can accomplish there. It's in what I can get there. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I would pay for all of our accounts to get verified probably. For business accounts, I'd easily pay 10, 20 bucks, no problem, to get some extra services and verify them.

Just so, yeah. And I'd probably pay $10, $10, $20,000. What are the services, though? I think more metrics, being able to understand your followers more, that would be good too. I had talked about this previously. Like, imagine if you could, with your followers, send a tweet or a DM to just your followers in Palm Springs. Let's say you were going to Palm Springs. You wanted to do a meetup.

And you could do a tweet, hey, Palm Springs friends, I'm DMing you. It's Molly. You follow me. Mm-hmm. you know, I'm going to be in Palm Springs speaking at this conference if you want to join us. Boom, here's the link, right? Or let's say this week in startups

wanted to do that, or let's say launch was looking to meet people in Australia. We're going to do launch Australia. The ability maybe to DM your followers or to tweet just to that subset and understand a little bit about the data. In other words, to target your audience, just like you can do with the mailing list,

you know, like MailChimp, or some of these other convert kit, whatever, there's a bunch of different tools where if you have information about your followers, or you asked them to opt in and tell you it, you could slice and dice your mailing list a little bit better. So imagine that same concept in DMs or in just tweets general. So you tweet and you say, for my New York followers.

And a good segment, right. Yeah, or your followers could say when they, imagine if the, this is another idea I have. Imagine if your followers and they subscribe to you, or they subscribe to me and say, I want Jason's comments about startups, the NBA, personal life, everything else. And so when I tweet, I say,

hey, this is a Knicks tweet or just Rana MacKee knows that because it's got Nix in it. And you could like subscribe to multiple feeds for me essentially, right? Or I want these three things, but not the Nix stuff. Leave it out. So, you know, some more, I think for pro accounts to understand their follower accounts better

because everybody has to use third party tools to do this, right? We invested in one Get Little Bird. There's other ones out there rating six, etc. Just to try to social blade. There's other ones out there to try to understand your Twitter followers. You think that would be good for a business? Would you like that feature? good for business, yes.

Yeah, totally. To your point, they have a lot of other tools to do it. So they would have to be, you know, there would have to be an obvious value add for it. That it's native or that you can, you know. Business. Yeah, absolutely. For business is yes.

This might, the problem here might be that I do not yet think of myself as a business and I should more. Like, you know, a brand. I should build your personal brand, right? Right. Yeah, I mean, if you knew everybody who is interested climate of your followers, right? If you could say to your followers, hey, I've got a,

I'm going to talk about climate here, right? Or I have a climate, because they have groups now. So you start this being service groups. So I was kind of brainstorming around that on a personal account or a business account. How can I reach my followers more effectively? Because right now, you can't DM while your followers. You just blast it out. And unless they are online at that time or the algorithm shows it to,

what I think could solve this too on the other end, and I might be willing to pay a dollar for is the, is the, algorithm building, the custom algorithm. Like, just show me, whether I am online or not, right? Like, it shouldn't be a chance whether I see something when I pop on Twitter. It should be like, I always want my climate stuff. Yeah, you should be able to, I mean, you can hack this together with lists. I mean, that's one of the problems.

It's like they've made like a hodge of tools and really, yeah. When you have spam in the system, when you have multi, people with multiple accounts, it's just kind of hard to get through it. Like, I find the data set that I'm going. going through, I'm sifting through. It's just so cluttered with bad content. It's like, yeah, it's like trying to find a diamond

in like a bunch of garbage. Like somebody threw like 10 diamonds. Twitter to me is like somebody through 10 diamonds into a garbage dumpster. You're just like, I know there's 10 diamonds in here. Why can't I find them? We're some good stuff in this garbage. Yeah.

I don't know. That is not my experience on Twitter. Oh, really? Yeah. No. Well, I guess you curate a good feed. You got it. Right.

And that's not my experience with my replies. Like, it's just not at all. Do you have your replies on? You're like describing a completely different world. And when I hear this talk about bots and spam and whatever, I'm just like, yeah, I don't, I actually don't think. You don't get brigade it anymore? You don't get that kind of, or do you have your replies limited. And I don't see it.

Like, they have enabled me to create settings that allow me not to see it. Like, it's happening probably out there and I'm unaware of it. When you tweet, do you limit who can reply or no? No. Or you just, that's interesting. I mean, I changed the settings that were like, if you haven't followed me, or, you know, I think there's some settings I give you that are somewhat granular, like, if you're a new account or something, something, something. And I don't, I don't see any of the stuff that you're talking about. I just don't. And I think the vast majority of users don't.

Maybe it's because I've just been, you know, so much Ukraine and Bitcoin talk. I just have more brigading right now than other folks. I think so. My replies have just been. Because, like I told you, you're a combatant in the information wars right now. It's not fun. No. I want to be a digital nomad. You want to be a digital nomad. We all want to live that life. Oh my God, it's so great to travel. One of the great joys coming out of the pandemic is that we've kind of reset

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We're going to put it in the show notes, of course. Get that $1,000 off and start living your best life with Blue Ground. Feel at home and be free to roam. It's time for this week in streaming. so much streaming news happening that we brought in our good friend Lon Harris Lonne, welcome to the program.

Thanks for having me. What's in the news? What do we need to cover top of show here before we talk about the greatest show on TV, House of the Dragon? I think we've got to talk about Netflix, right? Like that Netflix bouncing back

sort of their yesterday was the big comeback. They've gained, they're gaining subscribers again we're back in the positive side of the, they're saying that's over. Like, if you listen to Netflix's management, they're saying there was that post-pandemic sort of dip and everybody got terrified. But now we're back in the black and it's going to keep expanding and growing.

And so the setback is past. And so there's a lot of like newfound enthusiasm behind Netflix. And like they're not, we counted them out maybe a little too soon. Reports of Netflix's demise were. Right. Or maybe overstated or premature, yeah, maybe premature, I believe. Let's talk about the numbers. Yeah.

Yeah, what's interesting here, Netflix's up 14% after reporting Q3 earnings and showing a return to subscriber growth before I even get into those numbers, notable that they're showing this return to subscriber growth before even having launched the ad-supported tier. That's not even coming until November. So keep in mind as you hear these numbers that they don't include this new only slightly cheaper tier for lots more ad. They also, they notably, I would just interject, they undercut Disney. Disney already announced its ad plan is going to be, I believe, $8 a month. with ads and then Netflix came out with theirs and it's $7 a month with that. So they're bringing it. It's a full court press at this point.

I do want to talk about that in a minute, that pricing. Because we talked about the pricing and you weren't on. So I do want to come back to that. What happened in the quarter? Here's what Netflix reported for Q3. Revenue up seven was about $7.9 billion, up only 5.9% year over year, but that was still better than expected. they were, they're getting the low expectation bounce.

FCF, free cash flow, grew 36x quarter over quarter to $472 million. Netflix was cash flow negative in Q3 and Q4, 2021. So that's actually the big number, I think, that really helped them with that stock. And Netflix also notably added 2.41 million subscribers versus its previous estimate of just over a million subscribers. So like they two X'd the subscriber number there. Lon, what do you think happened? Like, how? What was the juice there?

Did they cut off a bunch of password errors? Well, right. I mean, I guess. I think that's not, that's sort of been going on in Latin America a little bit, mostly as a test. It's probably not bulk that. It probably is what they're saying that the last few quarters, we were seeing the impact of the end of the pandemic.

So that pandemic surge was collapsing. You also had, I don't think you could overstate the Ukraine-Russia stuff and cutting off all Russian Netflix subscribers was a huge dip. That really hurt them for that quarter. And so I think it's a lot of like the negative stuff that was holding the back kind of went away rather than something massively new and positive happen. I mean, there were positive things. Dahmer, I think is a, you know, like that was a huge show that got out there and sort of got the word out. But I think it's more that they stopped, they stopped losing so many subscribers as opposed to they did something to cause a huge surge in new subscribers. But U.S. and Canada only netted 100,000 new subscribers.

Yeah, it has mostly the international expansion still. They have 223 million total subs. So this is like 1% more subs and 5% more revenue. So this is incredibly slow growth, but there's a pulse. So I guess that's that the market is. kind of thinking is that like it's not over for them. And if you think the advertising, conventional wisdom is like Amazon, Netflix, HBO, they've sort of maxed out.

Like there's maybe growth potential for your in the North American region. Right. Or at least in the in the markets where they've been for a while. Like there are still emerging places where they're growing. But Europe, Canada, US, Australia, these places are relatively locked in, except for the the sort of newcomers or up-and-comers like Paramount Plus maybe still has a chance to grow. So any time that Netflix can still keep adding in the millions,

it's like, oh, that's better than expected because we sort of thought they'd already capped out. But advertising's coming. So that's the really, that's the card that nobody knows. I have changed my position on this. Good. A bit. Well, no, you know, I thought it was very much against the brand.

I talked about that. but I do think a lot of advertisers really want this ad base. And I've been thinking about the global nature of Netflix and looking a little bit, just completely coincidentally, I've been studying a little bit of Twitter's global ad network and how people spend money there, just for the fun of it, taking a look at it. No reasons, really.

But there is something very powerful about having a quarter, almost a quarter billion people available. And I think if you look at YouTube's ascension and the fact that they can offer a billion people around the globe, this Netflix audience, like the high-end Netflix audience,

that's one thing. But the reach of Netflix is not going to change dramatically with a $7 option. I think it's going to change. I don't know. What do we think that's going to add 10% to the user base,

whatever it is? I think there's another card coming. I think they're going to offer a free plan. And I think the free plan is going to be like a limited subset of the of the shows, maybe some time delayed, but I think that they could hit a billion downloads and users for this product if there was some free versions. And I think they're dipping their toe going to get their advertising legs under them,

understand advertising. And then I think there's going to be a free version. It may not be available in the United States. It may be time limited. You can watch 10 shows or maybe it will be like, you can only, watch these certain set of shows, you can't go into the archive, whatever it is. It would make sense to time limit would be because then you would be reducing the way you make money. But imagine a free version of Netflix that was, you know, I don't know,

three months behind the current offering. What would that look like? Putting it out there. I think that's a, I think that makes a lot of sense. What we've seen from the, what they call like fast now, free ad supported. streaming services. People love the free off. Like Pluto TV, all of a sudden, like Nielsen for the very first time in September, Pluto TV now grabbed 1% total of US TV viewing. And that's Paramount's free ad-supported service.

So people love those. And Toobie's, you know, Fox's version has grown very quickly as well. Roe's channel, obviously, had a lot of success. Less so with the, you pay some, and then it offsets more money with ads. Hulu had a little bit of success with that, but that hasn't been an explosive growth category. So I think you're right. There's a lot more potential if you let people have it for nothing,

even if you give them you can only watch season one of The Witcher, you can only watch this movie but not that movie, or however you decide to do it. I actually think that it would have been smarter for Netflix to do that first instead of this ad-supported tier because when this pricing was announced, like I'm not very, I understand that it's cheaper than Disney Plus, but the idea of getting ads for seven bucks,

but no ads for 10 bucks, just doesn't feel like a very great value to me. Like, it's not cheap enough to make it really worth the $3 difference. Yeah, I mean, Netflix now a basic Netflix plan is like 15. So seven versus 15, it's like, you're saving money,

but I still, I agree with you. Like, the $10 a month plan still exists. Like, I'd be fine if you've got, rid of that plan, but you have basic with ads for seven, you have basic

for 10, and then you have the next plan up is 15. Just get rid of the $10.00 plan. That's overthinking it. But if you really, it's overthinking it. And if you really wanted to disrupt, come in over the top with J-Cow's plan

and offer the free ad-supported version. And then all of a sudden, right? Like you blow everybody out of the water. I think that is the ultimate plan, Molly. I think this is, you when you have a culture of no ads and we build stuff people want so much they're willing to pay, it's very hard for the management team to communicate that to their internal team. The internal team is a bunch of rich people, coastal elites, dare I say, who are like, well, why would anybody not pay $10 a month to save one hour a month of commercials?

Because if you're watching an hour of network television, you're talking about 20 minutes of commercials, right? Something in that range. The TV shows were 21, 22 minutes for a half hour of content, 42, 43 minutes, I believe, Lon. Yeah. Anyway, you're looking about, you know, a third of your viewing time, upwards of a third is ads. So let's just put it at per hour. I'm going to just be conservative here and say 15 minutes of ads.

Well, if you're watching. For now, four to five minutes is all they're going to do. They gave a number, yeah. So again, that is for elite people who, uh, value time over money and these elite people who have, let's call it, household income above 100,000 a year, something in that range. Anybody in that group is going to say, well, if I watch two hours of TV a day, or average Americans watch it five hours of videos between TikTok and everything else, TV streamers. So you got five hours a day. Let's just put that at a conservative

30 hours a week. Let's just say 100 hours a month. 100 hours a month means if you're watching network, you're exposing yourself, if you said 25% of that 100 hours, 25 hours of ads a month. Now, let's just say you're a light TV viewer and you're getting just but 10 hours. For 10 bucks a month, to save 10 hours, you're reclaiming a dollar an hour. Now, some people aren't watching the ads. They're multitasking, right? It's pretty easy to do. But there are a number of people who don't have the incremental 10 or 15 bucks to put on

their credit card. So they're not thinking about time arbitrage in the way a rich person. person does or an affluent person or even a modestly affluent person does or a modestly affluent home. That's why it makes no sense to us when we look at the $7 thing or the $9 thing. Who's not making the trade of just paying two bucks a month and having no ads, right? It's almost unfathomable to. Would it either of you pay the lower price and subject yourself to the five, ten minutes of ads an hour? No. And unless they turn up password sharing, exactly. Nobody's going to do it. I just don't, I think that this plan is a loser and I don't

understand why introduce it at all, why not go. And it shows that I think that the culture is stuck in the mud, which we've been talking about. Like, that they have analysis, paralysis, and they can't innovate from within. And it would have been completely earthshaking to do what you're suggesting first. But that would take a boldness and it would take chaos inside the company. So just to give people an idea what happens in big companies, when you have to make a huge pivot like this and do something disruptive, most leaders do not have the ability to say to all their employees, we're doing something super disruptive here.

The end. They say, hey, you know, it took them two years to just get to five minutes of commercials. You know what? We're not growing. We need to get some more people involved. I'm sure they'll all upgrade. No, people make it under $50 grand a year

are not going to upgrade. You're going to be able to show them 20 minutes of ads an hour. And you're going to need to because those ads are not going to be the same ads that the top Netflix users, you know, people buying a Mercedes or going on some crazy first-class holiday. those are really elite valuable advertisers. They will not subject themselves. They'll never pick the free tier.

So anyway, I would look for a completely free tier of all these services coming in a year or two. I would also add, you mentioned account sharing, password sharing. They are talking about that too. That was also part of this Q3 earnings call. They discussed, they have a new plan. They're calling it sub accounts. So the idea is if you live at a different household from somebody but you want to share Netflix, you could add them to your account for $2.99 a month.

A family plan. I would happily do that. And then their entire household is on your plan. So they could have sub accounts for them. And they're making it easy. If somebody, like if I set my Netflix and then Jason and Molly, you guys are added in sub accounts, if you want to then get Netflix yourself, it's very easy to turn your sub account into a new main account.

Perfect. So that's how they're going to try to make this happen. They said that they will also let users. transfer their watching data to a brand new account. A head of this big crowd. Portability is genius. So it doesn't forget like, oh,

you like Ryan Murphy shows, but not John Derive shows, you know, like they want to keep your preference. It is very clever and help take a note, Hulu, innovative to give people an option to have a family account.

Oh my God. Like, my mom can't afford her own Netflix account. I pay for it, right? This is like, this is, I want to support my mom in stupid,

dumb ways like Netflix. Like, let me just add this house in a different town for crying out loud, or Hulu. Yeah. So, I mean, I think- No, I'm having this problem with Hulu because whenever I travel on Hulu-U is so irritating. If you're using an iPad or an iPhone, they're like, do whatever you want. We know that your mobile device is going to have random IPs on it. It's a mobile device.

So if I'm in Austin on a business trip or I go to Tahoe to the ski house and I'm using the iPad, fine. The second I put it on an Apple TV and I'm in the home theater and I, yeah, then it's like, oh, you want to move your region? I'm like, I don't even know what that means. I'm in California. Yeah, no, no, no. But you're three hours away, Tahoe from the Bay Area. So therefore, you're in a new region.

And it's like, okay, sure, switch it. And it's like, you can do that four more times. I'm like, really? So now what do I do? I get a second Hulu account. I'm about to throw Hulu out the window and go with YouTube because my understanding is YouTube doesn't do this to you all the time. Right.

So then when it did break, you know what I started doing? I start taking my iPad out. Kids want to watch it. I can't use Hulu on my Apple TV. So I start. What's the air casting? Not Chromecasting. Oh, Airplane.

Not Chromecasting or Airplay. Airplay. Airplay. So now I'm not like an idiot. I'm opening my phone or my iPad and airplaying to the Apple TV. I'm like, really, Hulu? Like, this is what you're making me do.

You're turning me into a hacker. I mean, this, you know. Of my own service that I pay for. Yeah, it's absurd. I'm just, I'm trying to be a customer here, Hulu. And I'm thinking about throwing in the towel. Just too clear. YouTube, great.

YouTube TV. That's what I hear. I'm going to move. That's what my mom's on and she likes YouTube TV. I just want to talk about this fast thing. It's first time I'm hearing this fast term. Free and supported street. Tier.

Tear. Tear. There you go. Fast. This is amazing. I didn't even know Pluto TV existed. This just shows you the have and have nots in society. Like this thing has got 70 million monthly users or ready to watch Judge Drudy.

viewing in September. I mean, 1% really of all US TV views? According to Nielsen, 1% of all US TV viewing in September was on Pluto TV.

And that's really interesting because they pop up on your like Roku, you know, I have a Roku TV like a lot of people who don't spend tons of money on TVs have.

So all of us who bought TCLs and it was a lot of us are like, you see these services on your Roku homepage basically and you're like, is this legal? Is this real?

And then you start clicking on it for fun and you realize like there's one called Fossum which is free awesome. And it's just like crappy like Shark Nato style movies. Galore. It is so fun. Whatever old stuff they can license. I mean, Amazon set up freebie.

They've had their version of this forever too because they're trying to get in on it as well. And yeah, Fox held on to Tubey, which is another big one. I think another great thing about this is a lot of the time you want to watch something new, hot like a like a big premium peak TV show, but there are sometimes where you want to watch an old movie or some random old TV show you like.

And these services are great for that. Like, I'd watched a bunch of the Hellraiser's because the Hulu had the new one. And then I saw their tweets. There was a random old Clive Barker movie I'd never seen called Rawhead Rex. And I looked it up and the only place to stream it is like to be one of these free services. So like, yeah, they have a lot of like old syndicated crap that is not going to be top 10 most viewed things this week. But, you know, if you just don't mind watch it a few ads, it's there.

And that's where to watch it. It was, wouldn't be worth Netflix licensing it. Yeah. You know what, guys? Fascinating times. You know what, guys? What's that? I just feel like Netflix has an incredible opportunity here.

Jay Trade Alert. I hate to do this out air. I haven't been a J-Trade in a month since the market's been such turmoil. Oh, my God. I just live on the air after this Netflix discussion and then this Pluto success, I think the Netflix team obviously are well aware of this Pluto and this fast trend.

My lord, I think Netflix could have as many people on it or, you know, a similar. We might be thinking about Netflix and these services in a different, in the wrong way. They're not competing with the streamers of old or cable channels. They're actually going to look more like YouTube. So the global reach of YouTube is what I think Netflix is destined to become.

Because if Netflix was available, I just bought 200 shares, it's like 50 grand. I've always wanted to own Netflix. I think they'll be the number two player behind Disney and Warner Bros will round out those top three. So here's what I'm thinking. I think Disney, Netflix, and even Warner Bros. Discovery,

they're all going to wind up in the same place. Paid tiers for affluent homes that don't want ads and that wants them, want the content live. Then they'll have. the mid-tier a little bit cheaper. You get all the most recent stuff, no library delays, but you see a couple of ads, you know, the five, 10-minute ads. And then there's going to be delayed content. You don't get Lord of the Rings this year. You get it next year. So if you want to wait, that's fine, but we're going to pile on the ads. Or you're two weeks behind. And then some number

of people, I don't want to wait two months or whatever. So now, I don't know about Amazon. I don't consider their streaming service, like, hard to under, it's hard to understand, because I think they look at it as a way to keep prime subscribers. But I think it's Warner Brothers Netflix Disney now. And I want to own the whole category. I was going to say your portfolio strategy is cage match. Well, my portfolio strategy is I think there's going to be like three winners, three or four winners here who are going to win so big that all advertising,

the loser here is network television. Because why do I want to set up an antenna? I want to do this on my phone. I want to do it on demand. I don't want to. And I think, you know, if you're, if you were looking at, at us before we, uh,

when we were in our younger years and maybe didn't have as much discretionary, uh, income, we would have all watched just network television instead of paying for the stuff, right? Mm-hmm. And we would have, like,

we used to wait for movies. We didn't do pay preview in our house. So we waited for it to be on network television, right? Like, that was, well, you know,

I had HBO for a few years there, but yeah. We all didn't grow up so elite lawn. Sorry, silver spoon. I know, I know, I know,

a total type of stuff. Yeah. Right. But anyway, I, I just think, you know, there's like, there were those three tiers. You waited for network television if you had no money. You might have had a Campbell subscription and had HBO if you had a little bit of money.

And then you could do pay-per-view if you were loaded. And you're like, yeah, why wouldn't I pay 30 bucks or 40 bucks to watch this? Yeah. I didn't know. I didn't know anybody who did that. I didn't know a single person. We've got that again. You know, now you can pay $20 and watch anything that's in the movie theater at your home.

It's like basically come back. I've done it a couple times. I've done it. Yeah. I mean, you have kids. like in something's there. But you know, it's cheaper than a movie. My kids, my kids, this is, it gives me hope, my kids would rather wait a couple of days

to go to the movies than watch it tonight. Yeah, I love the movie going experience more than the immediacy. I love going to the theater. My kid's been going to the movies. Yeah. It's a real thing. I may have to buy some AMC. There might be another J-TRA.

I was going to say the movies are back. I think the movies I think we've kind of overstated. I think it's cable and broadcast and satellite. That's all going away. I don't think movie theaters are ever fully going away. People might go into the movies. I think there'll be fewer of them.

Especially young people. If it can, the movie can become like the new social event like it used to be. Like, do you ever watch like all the kids are rewatching Seinfeld? You watch, rewatch old Seinfeld? You realize like pretty much all they ever did was go to the movies.

That's like if you were on a date in the 90s, what were you going to do? gonna go see a movie, grab a bite to eat or something. So then if the kids today are reliving the 90s and they are, and then the movie theater is their new social event, then all of a sudden movie theaters, yeah, they could be on the upswing. I also think we're already starting to see this happen. Like they bring Avatar back for a few weeks and it becomes a huge hit again. I think theaters are gonna, it's gonna be like a half and half.

Like here's the theater that's showing Knives Out 2 or the hot new movie. And then there'll be, here's the theater showing. Gremlins to or Back to the Future or Star Wars Marathon or like there's so much stuff you can get people in event eyes going to the theater beyond just hey there's a new you know George Clooney movie out come see that one like I think there's a lot of stuff they could do to especially like the minions you know making it an event everybody dressed up to go to minions you know you kind you know imagine like man of steel two gets announced and then like we're going to bring out man of steel one for an exclusive week with like maybe with some extra clips put a couple of

extra clips in it. Exactly. I would, I would, that's where I'm in. I would have paid several times in a row to see OG Top Gun in the theaters in advance of Top Gun. That's what I mean. That's exactly what I mean. Like when Maverick comes out and is blowing up and everybody loves it, be like, hey, we're going to devote one of our screens to just showing classic Top Gun for the rest of the

movie. We should call some people. Speaking of movies, I'm trying to make the transition here. It's going to be a busy season this fall. My kids are a little excited because Black Panther 2 is coming out. They want to see that. They're into Black Panther. And General Zazlov

continues his reign of terror. He said, did he not, that he needs a Kevin Feige? He needs a Kevin Feigey, which, by the way, just side note, the Kevin Feige shoutouts in the fourth wall of She-Hulk was brilliant. The She-Hulk finale. My daughters loved it. I'll put that aside for a second. What the hell's going on now?

He's done it. He came in like General Zod. He said, Neil before Zod, and then he decapitated DC. What's going on? At this point, like,

they basically, whether he cleaned house or they left on their own, like WB film division is, it's going to be totally different. Like Toby Emery, he was all these big guys who were running the show

over there for many years are gone. Walter Hamad is the one who he exited. We kind of knew. He's been the head of DC films for the past four years. So we cut, so Joker was under his watch and the suicide squad that James Gunn, when he's one of the producers on Black Adam, which comes out on Friday. So he's out.

And he was kind of the last one of that regime that was still sticking around. So they're saying now, instead of having this system where there's Zazlab, and then there's a team at DC Comics, and then there's a team at Warner Brothers Films, and they all have to agree about what the movies are going to be and what the plan is and they're coordinating. They're like, we want to do the marble version, which is. just one guy. There's one guy. He makes all the decisions and basically runs, or gal. It's going to be a guy. One person. Don't kid yourself. It will probably be a guy, but you're all right, Jason. This is not happening. One person who's going to basically shepherd the entire brand. So everything from. A Kevin Berg type. There's a direct quote from like this guy's, I mean, like you said, whether he was fired or left because he knew. There is a literal quote from this AB club article that says Zazlav, a

apparently came into the job with an eye on firing Hamada, seeking to replace him with, well, quote, a Kevin Fige type. Is it Fige or Figee? Fige, I believe it's Figegeyge. Figee. I'm pronouncing me. I'm getting a credit for D. I'm with you.

I think you say FIGI. It's a good E. It sounds better. It does sound better that way. And Paul Figue is already a Figue. So I like a Figee. All right. It's interesting.

They're having a hard time finding. They've already tried to. hire like three people for this job and nobody seems to want. And Joker had two Oscars. Like, what was wrong with Hamada? Why? Why? I think it's more organizational. It's like they don't want film executives and comic book management and all these studio heads and all of them trying to collaborate and come up with one plan they want to do. It's that single report. It's right. You've been able to do with Disney Plus and with the MCU films and with even Marvel comics in some ways is like unify it all. It's like it's one hive mind now. And they can coordinate

better. I just got off the phone with General Zadlov and he's giving me permission to pick the next head. I've picked you. Let me ask you now. Take a moment. You're now in charge of DC Comics. This is a little role playing here because I'm a major shareholder of Warner Brothers, as you know. I love the job. Signed up. Okay. So you're in charge and you're looking at this collection of assets. We've got the Snyderverse. We, We've got the Todd Phillips verse, and we got the R-Pat verse. And then we've got whatever the hell is going on with the arrow and all those shows over at the network nonsense. They're selling off CW, so they're not going to own that anymore.

So which of the, those are three directions, and there's obviously other directions you can go. How are you cleaning up this mess? What is going to be decanonized? What is going to be the core? who is going to be which actors and which characters are your core. I think that what we've learned

over the last few years, and it's very counterintuitive. I think the idea that DC has to do exactly what Marvel did is wrong. I think DC has been kind of going its own way, and it's been working a lot of the time, like not all the time, but like Aquaman, massive billion, 1.2 billion international. Incredibly huge hit.

Joker? not only a massive incredible hit Oscar winning Taking the Golden Lion at Venice Like Todd Phillips is You know he's making this He's joining the elite He's getting mentioned you know along with Nolan now And like he's like an elite film

I got did road trip So I mean I think if you if you look at stuff like that There's there's huge potential for these movies still And I don't really think you need to have One unified franchise I think you could have the R-Pats Matt Reeves Batman verse And that's ongoing

They're going to do a second one, they're doing that penguin show. And there's a rumor recently that Matt Reeves is already having discussions about spin-off villain movies. So before the villains fight Batman, you get a Clayface movie setting up Clayface. You get a Rinald-Razal-Gul movie setting up his world. And so that could be its own franchise. So Multiverse is your vision.

Exactly. Joker, we're already doing Joker 2 with Lady Gaga. People are super excited for another one of those. I don't think you interrupt that. I don't think you recast those people. You put that to the watch. So you say the multiverse is what we're doing. I bring back the Snyderverse.

We do Man of Steel 2. We do Aquaman 2 and 3. We do Wonder Woman 3. We bring those characters back to the people like them. Why would you ditch them? Which is the chaos. Okay. So you want to go full toxic.

You want to basically, you want to double down on just, fan service, and you think there could be three Batman universes concurrently. I got to tell you, I, you know, I host, we do, I do fandom. I'm on a lot of screen junkie shows. If we put anything referencing Batman, Gotham City, Joker in the title, that's a hit video. That's it. People, the, the demand, I don't think the demand for Batman content has ever actually been met. I think you could keep making more Batman stuff, and it would keep being successful.

Yeah. I think that general Zod might be making a bit of a mistake here because if you look at the recent trends around, for example, the reception of some of the Star Wars films and the fact that they canceled their plan to just release one year after year. And the reception to some of the recent Marvel movies, like the new Doctor Strange,

you know, people are like, at some point, it gets old. There is only so much you can milk the same cow, variety diversity matters in the literal sense like you need a lot of different seeds yeah i i mean i also think there is something to the idea that the idea that the idea that the idea that you have to watch everything to keep up with the mc you've got to constantly be watching movies you got it is and and i think that dc could become the alternate that just check in

with the stuff that interests you and if it doesn't you know we're going to need a school curriculum for marvel movies at some point here because i think the different demographics you could have this is the Batman series, but it's very dark and gritty. It's for older people. But then we're going to do Shazam movies for younger people. You know, like you can't. You got a lot more free. Okay, but, okay, but we want Justice League.

We want the tent pole. We want all these characters interacting. So, if you have the Snyderverse and you let him go, that's going to, by default, become the primary universe. in a way that's going to become like the Marvel Cinematic Universe because it has the most established modern characters. So what you're saying is you will have this anchor one that gets 60, 70% of the energy,

but then there's 30% where you tell people, have fun in the Todd Phillips version of the universe, have fun in the R-PAT version of the universe. This is the main universe. Yeah. This is our Wonder Woman. But now what already works that way? Comic books.

That's what comics are a second. what happens when Todd Phillips or is it Matt Reeves who's doing the Matt Reeves is doing the Batman Todd Phillips is doing the Patterson verse because it sounds better and I like Arpad and I'm friendly with him so I'm going with the R-Pad verse

or the Patterson verse. Now what happens when Patterson verse and Phillips verse say we want Wonder Woman but we want your Wonder Woman we want Gal Gadda Gal Gadha. I mean listen

I don't Who gets her? I think we overthink all of this stuff too. I don't think audiences care. I don't care. Just like audiences would be delighted to see like Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, we saw him die. He died in the movie Logan. It was very sad. We all

cried. Spoiler alert for Logan. They're going to bring him back in Deadpool 3. Now granted, you could explain, oh Logan was said in the future, the different universe, but I think when you get right down to it, audiences don't care. They just want to see Wolverine again. They love Wolverine. If Wolverine's back,

they'll accept any explanation. And I think it would be the same thing. I doubt it would happen. But if Gal Gaddaat showed up as Wonder Woman and the Batman 2, I think we'd all go with it. We'd be thrilled. This is a fascinating vision. It's a fascinating vision. Like, happy, people, fun stories, you know, I think you're absolutely right. Like, everybody who's into this sort of fandom thing is really overthinking the fandom thing. And what they're ending up with is a sea of sameness. Like, oh, the same characters over and over, the same story arcs over and over. And people actually do want some variety. Yeah. And I think you get away from every time you do a new like, hey, we're casting this one person and they're

this generation's new this character. All the identity politics and stuff comes out. It's like, no, he's got to be this and they've got to be that. They've got to be this gender. They've got to act like this. This is the vision I've had in my head. And if you allow eight people to be joker at once, you're taking the approach of Shakespeare. You're saying you want to do your version of King Lear. You do yours at Shakespeare in the Park. I'm going to do my own interpretation. Exactly. For a Netflix show or one for kids or one in Tokyo. And that was how Elizabethan drama.

That was totally how Elizabethan drama was too. Christopher Marlowe's Faust is in that theater, but I can go see another guy's Faust in that theater. Yeah, Zodzlov is out here trying to like crown a king to tell us all what to watch for the rest of time. And I think it may be a mistake as a strategy. I like this idea of saying we're pursuing, I want to just say, it shouldn't be a free-for-all.

I'm going to say we're going to pursue three verses at the same time. And we just keep it to that. We have these three verses that are kind of going to Patty Jenkins, Snyder, because I think they kind of... The Wonder Woman films are part of the Snyderverse. But I consider Patty Jenkins such a talent that I think she should be able to do a couple more of the characters. As far as we know, Wonder Woman 3 is still in the books. That's that's happened. They have not canceled it.

We don't know when it's happening. her so good at it that that would she should share credit with Snyder. Because I feel like with the Snyder Jenkins verse, we start calling it. Exactly. Because I feel like I would not be in the Snyder verse if it wasn't for Gall Godot. That's true. Yeah. I would have been out.

I feel like she, I feel like she carries it. I like that. That Wonder Woman movie is definitely one of the best things. I like the Aquaman movie too. I think that's a lot of fun. I love the Aquaman movie. I think it's Aquaman. I think it's Wonder Woman carries Justice League.

then I put Aquaman then I would say Superman then Batman and then Batman all of Margo Robbie's Harley Quinn movies are also Snyderverse collected yeah she's not crazy about them

yeah she's in that verse if you were to rank Molly's top three in that verse I go Wonder Woman number one and I don't care and Aquaman number two which is you know Superman and Batman are how are Superman and Batman not the number one too, but okay, here we are. I do. I have to say, I like Afflex Batman. I don't know if they got the best use

out of him, but I do like him in that. I do like... I don't get him. Yeah, like, for me personally, I like, there are some really good Batman movies and I get that, but I just find that, I find the whole series like a little too depressing, right? Like, I don't want to see the parents die. Too dark. Every time. Like, there's the origin

story every day. It's just a little dark. So I'm with you. It's like Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and then, I don't know, maybe a random. Like, I don't hate, Suicide Squad. Yeah. Tim Apple in the comments brought up John Cena's Peacemaker show

from HBO Max, which is definitely one of the best things from that whole universe. I really like that. I like the Suicide Squad movies. Like, I think they're around. I didn't like that David A

your first one, but that James Gunn's second one was pretty good. Yeah, that was hilarious. Shout out Tim Apple. I didn't watch that one. I want to tell you, I gave up on trying to keep up

with all the Marvel TV series. I didn't finish this Marvel. I didn't finish the, What was the moon night? I didn't like Moon Night very much. Moon Night. I ended up like a She-Hawk. I love She-Hawk.

I love She-Hawk. Maybe because I have this kind of time. I don't have time to get my PhD in Marvel. And I think there is, I think there is something to that idea of freeing people from this expectation that you're going to watch everything. Yeah. That there is power in that, that the idea that you could just follow this one corner of the DC universe that you like. So counter. So maybe.

General Zodzlov needs to think about this. He's being a copycat. Lon Harris has been put in charge of D.C. I mean, for 15 years, they've been, everybody else has been chasing Marvel and nobody else. I feel like we got to come to terms with that may have been a once in a generation lightning in a bottle thing that Feigy was able to do. And it was never going to last forever. And we're already seeing signs that it's not going to last forever.

So to try to recreate this old success, again, you know what? It goes right back to Netflix. It's like, be disruptive. Be bolder. They also were doing a thing that DC is not doing, where early Marvel were bringing in not very famous people and then signing them for like five movie deals. So like Chris Hemsworth was not a huge deal when he became Thor. Right.

They were able to get him for cheap. Tom Hittleston and all these guys, they made them into celebrities. But DC is like, The Rock is black out of. Ben Affleck is Batman. Robert Pattinson's Batman. You know, like, like Joaquin Phoenix is the Joker. They're going for these huge stars and then every new movie is a new mega deal

with that megastar. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the Rock goes half of the Black Adam franchise through seven bucks. You don't get the Rock for, unless he's got a chunk of the movie.

Yeah. I like your, I like this. I think we, I think we work chopped it. I think it should be called the Triverse. I think the DC multiverse. I know.

You're playing too many rules on it. There's already a DC multiverse in the comics. It just, we're doing the DC multiverse. No, but here's the thing. If we do the DC, just hear me out. If we do the D.C. If we do the triverse, just hear me out.

If we do the triverse, now the conversation goes from not, are you D.C. or Marvel? Now it's which one of the D.C. multiverses do you like best? Which one do you most listen? Now we're having a debate. No, no, no, no. I'm into the R-Pap verse. Oh, no. I like the Jenkins, Snyder verse.

No, I'm a Todd Phillips dress. Because I would be a Todd Phillips verse because I like that stuff. And I would be demanding DC make an Aquaman version where he's like in sewage. And it's like some dark stuff. And he's like, he's like got like a dark green piece vibe to him where he's like taking oil tankers and throwing them back on the shore and putting oil on everybody. He just goes like totally rogue Aquaman. This is so much of the fun of comics. And like, we get so caught up in movies that's all got to be linear.

and then what's Annan? And it's like, comics don't care. Anything can happen. Anything. We got to bring back back girl, by the way. I'm very upset about the back girl thing now. I'm getting upset about it. Because in the Triverse, it would happen.

And I'll tell you why. I saw an interview with my guy from Dope Sick. Oh. No. He won the Emmy for it. Michael Keaton. And they're like, hey, Michael Keaton. What's the story with you in this, you know, coming back from the bowl?

multiverse in the thing. And he's like, yeah, I'm an actor. I don't know the politics of any of this, but I was supposed to be in it. I guess I'm not, but maybe I'll be in some other stuff. And he was kind of like, what do you want me to say here?

He's in a very confusing place because they also filmed stuff with him for the flash. She was supposed to be in both the flask. And that's a disaster. That kid's going to jail for when I'm going to him is. Right. So both of those projects are very much like up in the air. I want to see Michael, I want a Michael Keaton as old Batman with a bad knee,

with a bad shoulder, with ice packs on. Just doing his last 10 years as, you know, cartoon Batman Beyond. People have suggested that that would be bringing the young cast of Terry McGinnis as the young Batman and his mentor is Michael Keith. You imagine how great an old Batman with a bad shoulder going out. You know, he gets in a fight.

It's like, oh, geez, man, I got this shoulder issue. Yeah. I mean, like, to me, I could just be like, do the old Batman verse. You don't have to make it link up to everything else. Do three movies about an old Batman. And then that's done. And now you move on to the next story. Love it.

All right. Let's say thank you to Lon. Love it. Thank you, Lon. Thanks, everybody. See you next, Sam. Inspiring as always. Provocative as always. Will you still come on the show now that you're in charge of DC and you got this billion-dollar deal? Don't forget us.

I'll make time. I'll let them know once a week. I got to step out of my Harley Quir. Don't forget the little people. When you go run the DC. I mean, honestly, all right, Lon. Everybody follow Twitter.com slash lawns. And if you want to go to inside.com slash streaming, you can sign up for the newsletter where Lon covers all this on a daily.

Every day. Thank you, my friend. See next week. All right, thanks for listening, everybody. That's what, that's all we got for you today. I think it's plenty to be clear. Tomorrow we will have more news and another okay boomer with producer Rachel because it will be Friday. Is it really Thursday already and tomorrow's Friday?

Oh my. I don't know why you say already. I had one of those mornings where I was like, wait, it's really only Thursday. But it just went by really quick. And you know what? It's going to be November and then it's going to be Thanksgiving and Christmas. And we're going to be sitting here New Year's going to be skiing. Oh, it's already.

I mean, it's just, it's happening so fast this year. As soon as September comes, I'm like, oh crap, it's Christmas. Like literally there's no, there's, it just fast forward. It's like a tesseract straight to holidays. Not stressing, I got a planet. Oh, you figure me out. Okay, we got to go. I am not hosting Thanksgiving this year.

I'm going to travel for Thanksgiving. And then I think I'm going to host Christmas New Year's. So, and speaking of Kevin Hart, I'm actually thinking of going with some friends to see Kevin Hart on New Year's. So that could be fun. Yeah. Invite him on the show. I saw Dave Chappelle and John Mayer won New Year's.

And that was a. wonderful, like, fun way to bring in the new year when the two, they're just like two, I ever, you ever see them like? I went to, no, I haven't, but I'm just thinking I went to like a Wanda Sykes show on New Eve one time. Is New Year's Eve stand up like kind of a thing? I wonder. I think it is because you want to laugh and have fun and, yeah, you know, it's just a nice thing

to do. So, yeah, let us know. What are your New Year's plans? And I hope you have a great New Year's. It's time now. Yeah. All right. See tomorrow.

See tomorrow. See tomorrow. Bye. Bye.