This Week in Startups - $WBD shakeup, streaming earnings, Locket raises $12.5M, Lina Khan/FTC sues Meta | E1526

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

Lon Harris joins the show to break down the chaotic shakeup going on at Warners Bros. Discovery, what's happening with HBO Max, potential new roadmaps for the DCEU, and more. (2:46) Then, J+M break down a new intimate social app called Locket raising $12.5M (44:02) and Lina Khan taking action against Meta. (51:39) (0:00) J+M intro today's topics! (2:46) Lon Harris joins to break down what is going on at Warner Bros. Discovery (14:05) Grammarly - Sign up for a free and get 20% Grammarly Premium at https://grammarly.com/TWIST (15:22) Is streaming subscription revenue a viable business compared to big box office hauls? Is $WBD making a terrible move re: creative relationships? (24:26) Indochino - Get $50 off any purchase of $399 or more by using code TWIST at checkout https://www.indochino.com (25:48) Discovery vs. HBO branding, Roku/Paramount Plus subscriber counts (38:11) Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub - Apply in 5 minutes, no funding required, sign up at https://aka.ms/thisweekinstartups (39:34) Lon's crypto queen series update (44:02) Social app Locket raised a $12.5M early-stage round of funding (51:39) Lina Khan sues Meta over a ~$400M VR acquisition and tries to change the antitrust precedent

All right, everybody, we're back. And today we're kicking it off with Lon Harris because it's Thursday and he's helping us break down a pretty major shakeup in the media space. This was like, you can't, usually it's been a long time since Twitter was talking about just one thing. And that was happening. Yeah, that's happening. And we're talking about Warner Brothers Discovery because we always do this week in streaming on Thursdays, our little segment with Lon. And as you know, I bought some Warner Bros. Discovery discovery because my guy, Discovery CEO David Zazlov, took over. and heads have rolled, products are being canceled, movies are being canceled.

It's very controversial. We're going to have to break down what we think is happening here. And then who is going to win the streaming wars? I mean, we'll touch on a little bit of power amount as well. It's a great, it's a perfectly timely, awesome conversation. And then we're going to break down a little bit of Series A and M&A. We've talked a lot about social media alternatives and these apps. Mostly we've talked about Be Real, but turns out Lockett might be.

creeping up fast from behind. Yes, and Lena Khan, head of the FTC, is making her first move. She's suing meta from buying a very tiny little company, but her methodology, the new methodology she's bringing to antitrust is what is at stake right here. It's going to be a great episode. Stick with us. This week in Startups is brought to you by Grammarly is an all-in-one writing tool that helps you churn out clear and concise communication fast. Go to Grammarly.com slash Twist to sign up for a free account and get 20% off when you sign up for premium. That's G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com slash twist.

Indochino makes custom-fitted suits, shirts, and casual wear at affordable prices. Shop for your next best look or book a virtual style consultation at Indochino.com. Right now, you can get $50 off any purchase of $39 or more by using code Twist at checkout. And the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub helps all founders build a better startup at a lower cost from day one. Open to anyone with an idea, you'll get up to $150,000 in your business. Azure credits, technical advisory, access to mentors and experts, free dev tools, and so much

more. There is no funding requirement, and it only takes minutes to join. Sign up today at a.k.a.m.m.S. slash this week in startups. All right, everybody, it is Thursday, which means we do our this week in streaming segment, Molly, our favorite, favorite, favorite guest, co-host individual human on planet earth is here. Lon Harris. Welcome back to the program. Why are you making it? What a lovely intro.

Well, I don't pay him for the segment. It's true. What delight. And also, what good timing. Thank God we had this plan because the streaming universe has blown up. Twitter is going crazy. The Warner J-Trade that Jason was like

about to make. I made it. Oh, yeah, you made it. I made the J-Trade. Yeah. It's working on. So J-Cal dropped $50,000 on the thing that became the biggest news in the world one day later.

Story of my life. We got a lot to talk about with Lon today. Lots. Oh, with the glasses. Oh, my gosh. Wow. Uh-oh. We're doing accounting on the show today.

Is he going to buy more or is he going to sell? I'm up 4,000. I'm up four large on my Warner Brothers Discovery trade in a week or less. Not investment advice. But what is going on? Yeah, you're the only one feeling good about that right now. What is going on? You have to T us up here.

David Zazlov is my guy. This guy is a wartime CEO. I met with him with Harvey Weinstein as well. When I was doing my reality TV show six years ago, and I was in the meeting with him, this guy controls the room. He's in general. He knows how to make you feel a hundred.

I felt a hundred feet tall. I felt taller than the skyscraper in Manhattan. We were meeting it. And I saw him also speak at another conference when he was doing discovery and talking about how they were taking over the planet. I saw that 12 years ago. This guy's a murderer. What is, I mean, this guy's killing it.

Figuratively. And it looks like a scene from 300 out here right now. So, it's just literally, as Jason's giving this talk about what a great wartime CEO this is going to be, and Zazlov is all about cutting costs. All of a sudden, we find out all kinds of things. One bat girl shelved. Right. They've already made this movie. It's already being shown to test audiences. They spent $90 million on it, not coming out. And then sources apparently told the rap that the conglomerate now, this newly joined behemoth of Warner Brothers and Discovery, which joined in a $43 billion

merger, planned to lay off 70% of the new company's development business, plan to restructure both HBO Max and Discovery Plus, either during the earnings results or soon after, and that the move will quote, again, this is from the wrap, result in a gutting of HBO max, significant layoffs for its executives and staff to minimize redundancies with HBO and a combined streaming service with Discovery Plus. So what this seems to start to mean, we think, is that some HBO originals could go away like Peacemaker, with John Zina, our flag means death with Taika Watiti. So far, the HBO development team behind Game of Thrones Westworld and the really big expensive stuff don't seem to be impacted yet. And then also, and this is just really interesting on top of all of this, Volter critic Catherine Van Aeronk pointed out that some HBO shows are being vanished, are being disappeared off of HBO Max. Yeah, we know vinyl, Mrs. Fletcher, that Catherine Hahn show. I liked Mrs. Fletcher.

That one's gone. And then camping that Lena Dunham show for, I believe, last of just two seasons, appears to be gone. She's insufferable. I'm glad she's gone. But we also, we have some original HBO Max films, like Moonshot, an American pickle, that one with Seth Rogen. Six of those also just appear to be gone. The word is, this is tax. stuff because of the merger, they can still get tax write-offs if they remove some of these films.

Or maybe it's for saving on residuals. It appears to be a cost-saving measure. Great. All right. Uh-huh. We have to separate to this. Art and Commerce. What does Juan say?

Well, there's three things here. We have art, commerce, and then we have the operations of this company. Right, which is merger mechanisms, really. Right. Because none of this is unusual in a merger, which is why mergers are always painful in lots of different ways. Can we start with art? Mm-hmm. This Batgirl film.

Yes. If it's done and you showed it to a test audience, it's done done. It's edited. It's got special effects in it. Yeah. I mean, it's mostly done. Yeah. Okay.

How bad must this film be for it to be canned? I wouldn't say that. I don't think we know that for sure. It apparently got. You know, a rating ratings from those test audiences were in the 60% range, which is not amazing, but we've certainly seen films that get those kinds of tests and then go on to become popular films. It Chapter 1 tested in the same exact range, went on to become a monster hit. So quite literally a monster hit. Yeah, I don't.

Exactly. I don't think this is backgirls terrible. There was that New York Post article came out and said, Backgirl sucks, but they like, they like a headline. They like the saltiest take. We don't know. And the cal, like the pedigree of the film is pretty good. The Bad Boys three directors directed it.

They also recently did Moon Night and Miss Marvel for Disney Plus, which were well regarded. Leslie Grace is terrific. She was in the Heights. But Michael Keaton is in this and they can't do? Ranger is the bad guy. Wait a second. was an anticipated movie. I'm just saying, yes.

And the right wing is like, oh, good, they dumped this woke movie. Right. Because it's a woman of color. It's a Latino woman, Batman, bad girl, exactly. Muslim directors. I'm just saying, like, you have a whole bunch of celebration over on Breitbart about it. Yeah. I mean, for clicks.

If you take what the W. Culture Wars. It's a look. It is a culture war look. And it's a choice to, to, to. try on that look. They also have a Latina-fronted Supergirl movie that's still in the works

that we could hear about what's going on there. And there's the Blue Beetle movie. I have questions. That actor also is Latino. He's a Mexican actor. That's coming out or they got canned? We don't know. The status of those very much up in the air because they're in the same category of these are HBO Max

originals. And that's what seems to be the problem. It seems like the HBO team, Casey Blois, long time team, exactly what you're saying, the West World Game of Thrones developers. That team seems like it's going to be okay. It's this HBO Max originals that are in danger. All right. I'm starting to piece something together here. There are some tax savings that are occurring. Yes. And DC is super important. I said this the other day. I did my little role playing of David Zazlov coming in to meet the DC team.

And he came in and he said, okay, what should, you know, Marvel said this great success and I see DC, you know, I'm the new owner here, I'm in charge, tell me what made Marvel so successful. And they go around the table, all people explain Marvel phases and characters and, you know, how they cast things, how important that was, right, Lon? And they said, well, why aren't we doing that?

And then crickets with this just faca crazy DC strategy of like, there's a flash on or a Batman or a green arrow occurring on this network TV show that sucks. And then there's like the Justice League and that kind of sucks. And then there's a Snyderverse and that's kind of better. It's just too much not coordinated action. It's a management disaster. And he just fires everybody. And lo and behold, here we are. He's firing everybody. Because there is another management issue. And I've said this. I had HBO. Then I had HBO now. Then I had HBO now. Then I had HBO. max. I just want HBO.

I don't need you to put a superlative or a plus or a now or this or that. I don't need HBO 2, 3, 4, 5. It's enough. It's HBO. I know what HBO means to me as a value proposition. You don't have to call it max. So this is dumb to have two different content

teams when we all know HBO made Sopranos, the Wire, Game of Thrones. We know what HBO means. It's the idea of it's HBO and it's the Warner Brothers. So like you're also getting the WB movies, you're also getting that library and the cartoon network. It doesn't mean anything to, it doesn't mean anything to consumers.

That's where the idea came from of the new brand, because it's, it's not just HBO. It's all these other Warner Media holdings are also. So he's cleaning house. So now we're on to the, we're on to the organization structure and the merger. He's got a clean house and get this thing aligned. Sure. This movie is bad, but it also doesn't make sense that he wouldn't release it. know, well, he said it's a 60.

But anyway, so yeah, we don't know. So what they're saying is that it's in this in-between category. Jason Kilar, the left team, the Warner Media team before the merger, their dictate from AT&T, the owners of the company at the time, was you got to compete with Netflix, you got to complete with Disney Plus, beef up the HBO Mac service. That was the goal. And so that was when he's making the decision, pull all Warner Brothers movies from theaters were putting them all on HBO Max opening weekend.

That's the other big part of the Bat Girl part of this is that it was scheduled to be released simultaneously on streaming in movies and he reportedly wants to move away from this. The Bat Girl was always kind of aimed for streaming because that was the other part of this strategy was we're also going to make mid-budget movies just for HBO Max. Never go into theaters just for HBO Max. And that's really what they're rolling back right now. They don't want to do that anymore. Zazlov seems to feel pretty strongly.

if we make a movie, you need to make the money that you would make at the box office. We can't. It's just a lost leader to put it on streaming. To me, that's what we're running up into. Is that a valid strategy?

Is that a valid point from Sazlov? I think so. I mean, I think what we're running into is the reality that stream it, you can't, it's hard to make money developing new expensive projects for a streaming platform.

Got it. We just don't, you don't know how much you can really make per new project from new signups. After a while, you're throwing expensive content at people who are already signed up. And I think that's what he's running into right now. And so it's like, well, we got to spend a lot less

on the content that we're presenting to the people who've already... We probably don't need to spend what we're spending to keep these people who already signed up on HBO Max. So let's massively cut our spend and see if we can hang on to all the subscribers. Listen, I am paying for Grammarly, for both of my companies. Why do I spend the money on having every single employee using Grammarly?

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You're going to get 20% off for being a Twist listener. I'm so excited that they're sponsoring and supporting my podcast because I love the product. Thank you to the team over there. 20% off, G-R-A-M-A-R-L-Y.com slash twist. So, Molly, this also, you got to take into account the COVID, the pandemic, and the shutdown

when you couldn't go to a movie theater. Yeah, that's why people sent this stuff to streaming. And then we see Top Gun Maverick. best film of the year you see the success of Thor there's been other notable I think it did pretty well

yeah things are doing well people want to go out so Molly how much of this minions how much of this has to do with Jurassic World we've seen a we've seen a few movies getting back to this level that we used to be so certainly go back to that

I think that's what this is about right oh I'm sure that's what this is about I think it's the what, you know, in Lon, you tweeted about this. It's sort of this. There's a couple ways to approach this. Like, you could move forward with a new strategy and start that strategy without killing a bunch of stuff that's already basically done. Right.

Like, I get the, they're probably good financial reasons like kill it for a tax write off or something. There's a way to be a wartime CEO that doesn't necessarily alienate so many people this much. or make them so worried about the brand. Like, LaLandra's tweeting, if you take step away and you take away this, like, really high quality, I mean, our perception of HBO because of everything you've said extends to HBO Max in some ways, because it's like the HBO brand is like good stuff. And so here comes this company and they're like, we're killing this and we're killing this and there's some like social justice stuff attached to it that is like kind of icky feeling maybe.

And then on top of that, you're like, but Chip and Joanna Gaines are going to be on there with the makeover shows. And there does seem to be this perception, at least on Twitter, that now we're just going to, like, mergers, ruin everything. We're just going to be flooded with a bunch of shitty Netflix stuff. Yeah, I agree. I think there was probably a gentler way to do this. It definitely seems like he's drawing this weird line in the sand.

Like, Batgirl was like, we could put 40 million more into it and make it look like a theatrical film and release it in theaters, but we don't want to spend that money. we could just put it out as is on HBO Max and just let people know we're not going to do this anymore but now we don't want to do that we want to move forward with this new strategy

so just kill it and I feel like that's a that's a risky thing to sell to fans and to filmmakers we're just going to kill them you know what if you make a movie for us and we might just kill it like it seems profoundly unfair to the people who put effort into this

sure to get this close to the finish line in Canada if it's a 60 right yeah it's unnecessary I would if it was a 30 or 40 if it was an embarrassment and it would damage the Batman brand and they had big plans for Batman maybe

maybe I could see but that would have to be like a real dog of a film right like a laughable right there's no sense that it's that I would struggle with these guys did you guys I don't know if you saw bad boys for life it's terrific I have a hard time believing those guys would turn in a terrible

unwatchable back girl film I mean Sony just released Morbius. If Morbius can come out in theaters, I have a hard time believing backgirls too terrible. But I do. I feel like they're creating this problem, which is if you start making these changes on the heels of canceling things people were excited for, the perception, whether it's true or not, becomes that the new stuff you're doing comes at the expense of the old stuff people like. It might be like a business, you know, assassination move that's smart in the long term. That's what it is.

You know what it is, though? It's a PR-owned goal. Well, it's also, I feel like anytime there's a new creative team coming in, there is also that instinct to like, the stuff your predecessors did is kind of lose-loose for you. Yeah, not my project. If it succeeds, your new strategy looks dumb

because the stuff people were doing before you is working. And if it fails, what are you doing releasing that crap? It's a turkey. And so it's like, what does he really stand to gain perception-wise by releasing? something the old team green lid anyway if he doesn't believe in it. But what does he stand to lose also? Right.

Well, and then you create this like every like hacks fans are now terrified. Like what if season three of hacks doesn't happen? Because that's an HBO Max original. And like you don't want to worry the hacks fans. That's an Emmy winning show. I like that show. And Snowpiercer, they killed. They canceled Snowpiercer.

They're not going to make that anymore. Like people like that show. All the TBSs. I mean, it literally is like, look, if you take away, I mean, it just, it's, The vibe I was getting from Twitter is like, if you're going to take away Snowpiercer and Batgirl and, you know, maybe hacks and you're going to give us Chip and Joanna Gaines, like this is not, this doesn't feel good for this brand that I'm so into. It feels like why. What is Chip and Joanna Gaines? I don't understand. I don't speak French. They're like a HGTV. They're like a HGTV couple that does like Kutty Cottage makeovers in Texas. They do a show called Fixer Upper, one of those home renovation shows where they help people renovate their, their family home. But they got so popular, discovery is actually given them their own cable network. So the Magnolia network on your cable dial is programmed entirely with home renovation, DIY, fix-it kind of content from this couple, like, produced by Chip and Joanna Gaines.

Right. So like good for them, but Snowpiercer? They like own the town of Waco, Texas. They're very big. Oh, I do know about this. They have that cute line in Target. I have the mirror. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And she's also, because Joe Adagate's also host a cooking show called the Magnolia Table. So they're really spitering into a lot of these different, like all the areas that Discovery kind of specializes in. These are the people who bought like they, I'm looking at this thing. They have these like silos or whatever, the Magnolia place. These people seem completely insufferable.

They renovate barns and old buildings. This is the last, this is the couple. This is the couple when they show up at the dinner party, I just go. right to the other side. I got to use the bathroom. I got to make a call. I mean, let me tell you.

I do not want to sit between these two talking about crafts. No offense, my gosh. Yeah. No, are you kidding me? It's like Michaels. I bought the mirror. That's what I bought.

That's what I'm saying. You took, I would have watched Batgirl probably 15 times. And I'm not watching this. Like, I'm just saying it's a perception problem. I think the other thing is, like,

these are very, these are great complimentary, like, top it, you know, like HBO content and Discovery content hits totally different quadrant. So it makes total sense to put them together.

Like, well, you've got this for, you know, old reviews and three reasons to subscribe. You got DC Comics, Cartoon Network, HBO, and these insufferable craft people. The old Yankee workshop. You just don't want to make it the perception that we're losing this stuff to gain. Oh, you got Shark Week. Exactly. It's great.

You wanted to be a little bit of everything for everybody here on whatever this The whole family can enjoy one of these things. I got six swings that bad, right, Molly? Instead of kicking the nerds out of the tent, which is how I feel right now. Like that was a big thing for Disney Plus when they launched. He's going to reverse it. You get Pixar, you get Marvel, you get National Geographic. Like Disney did a really good job of highlighting.

Star Wars. It's not just cartoons. It's this. It's that. It's this. I'm guaranteeing this is getting reversed. Majority chance this gets reversed. The audience always wins.

All of it? Well, then give us back on. going to redo. They're going to, they're going to release back girl. I don't care about back girl, but now I weirdly do. No, the back girl, they're going to release. I want to see this back girl. I want to see this.

I guarantee they release it. It's going to be, this is like a Snyder cut kind of play. The audience is going to revolt. There's going to be some Twitter campaign. Somebody's going to hire some bots. There's already. They're going to release this. Then on Snowpiercer, I don't know.

They could wind up. I don't know. Look, I'm not watching it. I'm just saying. Haxing on. Perception. But CBS also acts, there's a comedy show called Chad. Nassim Paddra.

she used to be on SNL. She plays a teenage boy named Chad. They have a season in the can. They made it, produced, done, but TBS decided no more scripted comedy, so they're just never going to release it. It's sitting on a show. You can't do this to the artist.

If you made it, that's what I'm saying. It's a bad reputational look. Like, if you made it, release it. Don't screw creatives. That will come back to haunt you. Yeah. It's bad from a creator relationship. If you were going to make a show,

You would now hesitate before doing it for Warner because, well, is it going to see the light of day? Yeah. Well, in fairness, though, he is canceling anything with John Cena. So that's good. Because I just, that guy, I had enough of him. Oh, Pace Baker was great. Was it good? Oh, it was really good.

I just saw like the trailer for him. And I was like, I just, I don't know. I got the boys on Amazon. I'm good. So. Interesting parallels, but it's a very different show. I really enjoyed it. Listen, it's been a big summer for everybody.

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And use the promo code twist, so they know I sent you. This is going to become, I think, Zazlov is taking dramatic action early? I like it. Now, do they still own CNN? Is that still part of this? Yes, in fact, we also, another announcement today,

a lot of the CNN library is going to Discovery Plus. So as we're getting all these Magnolia shows are going to HBO Max, CNN films and originals are going to Discovery Plus, so they're going to get the Stanley Tucci travel show, the full Anthony Bourdain

library, CNN film stuff. Smart, smart, smart. Discovery Plus. Well, now, hold on. One thing I'm not understanding is, is all of this under one bundle? So if I pay you $15 for HBO Max, do I get Discovery Plus and everything?

TV. What we will probably hear today during the earnings call some kind of, so far we don't know, nothing's formally been announced about HBO Max and Discovery Plus themselves joining forces. We're still talking about them like two totally separate entities, but I don't know how much longer that's going to last. Would you put everything under HBO or Discovery HBO? Because HBO is the greatest brand of the collection, the most. well respected.

But Discovery is a close second. So what would you do, Molly, Lon? Would you, if you had to pick one to put it under the umbrella, is the umbrella discovery and it has HBO and Cartoon Network? Or would you say it's HBO and it has Discovery and all this other stuff? Which one? Because it's got to be one brand. There has to be one brand going back forward.

It can't be multiple lead brands when I subscribe to something. You got to give me something like Hulu, you know? Yeah, when you put it under HBO Max and then you'd go there and it would be like when you open up Disney and you have the Marvel. portal and this portal. But I think it has to That's what I would do. And it has to be under HBO Max.

That's what I was going to say to you. That actually makes perfect sense to me. Like it's HBO and all the Macs and Max and Max and Mass. I'm all concluded. But now Zazlov spent all this time building Discovery. So maybe he feels a little ego with the Discovery brand. Seems like it. Definitely in the U.S.

The top three are definitely Netflix, Disney Plus HBO Max. Yeah. So you got to go with. You can't get a winner. I feel like it'd be foolish to leave the HBO Max brand on the table when it's more notable, more people have it, more popular than Discovery Plus. If he pushes Discovery Plus down our throats and tries to kill HBO Max, Jake L, you better sell. Yeah, I don't feel like that. Anyway, here's what I like. The Discovery brand is strong if you care about Shark Week and fix it shows,

but the HBO brand is strong on a much broader level. Yeah. Now, D.C. should be given to the creatives at HBO to run. Because they know storytelling and they'll make it serious and interesting. Or should they build a team like the, what is it, Faiagi?

Fagi. Yeah, Kevin Fiji is the Marvel studio. Should they find a Fiji? Or should that be Snyder? No. Or should they just give it to HBO and say, hey, HBO, you know how to do this, build a team in the HBO world?

It's a fascinating question. I mean, I don't know the, I don't know that anybody else could just take what Marvel did and like do a nut. It was very, it was like threading a needle. What Marvel did. I feel like DC's overall strategy isn't terrible and has produced like the Batman did really well. It was really good. Joker did really well. It was really good. Aquaman did really well. It was good. Wonder Woman. Fantastic. They've had hits. So I don't know. Batman with Christian Bell. The only reason you think it's a dog is because of the Snyder, like, bot war.

Like, literally the Snyder-cut bots created this broader umbrella impression that the DC brand is kind of a dog. And sure, it hasn't performed as well as Marvel, but it's not a dog. I would say Justice League is where, I know it's done okay, but the Justice League and the- six movies we just mentioned. Yeah. The original Justice League and Batman versus Superman were very disappointing. Well, they're better, but I mean, Birds of Prey was kind of disappointing. All through all the ones that I mentioned were...

Suicide twice. Right. Yeah. Yeah. All through all the ones I mentioned, there were other examples of ones that didn't hit. So that's what they're missing is they don't have that Marvel consistency where everyone that comes out does a baseline 100 million. Is this because...

Is this because of their casting and directorial, mercurial, quixotic approach to this, which is everybody gets to play the Joker. Everybody gets to play Batman. Everybody gets to make their version of this. Because I do in some ways really appreciate the Joker and, you know, what they did there. And, you know, but I kind of feel like, you know, I want to have my Iron Man. I want to have my Black Widow and I want to just know who's playing that person and just lock into it. I don't know.

I feel very confused with casting. One pipeline. You've got Marvel Studios. It all goes through Kevin Feigy. He's the deciderer. and like even the Disney Plus shows don't have showwriters. They only have headwriters or showrunners. They only have headwriters because Kevin Feigy's the showrunner.

And like all these movies, they say, you know, oh, it's directed by Sam Ramey or Tycho Waititi or Chloe Zhao. It's co-directed by them and Kevin Feigy. Okay. At Warner's, you do not have that. You've got the DC Comics team and they've got DC Films, and then you've got the Warner Brothers team. and these two teams are both making these movies. And sometimes the Warner team is like, we're working with this director,

and they don't want to have involvement from, you know, Christopher Nolan doesn't want people from D.C. looking over his shoulder. So we're giving him final cut. DC, you don't have a say in the movie. You know, like, Marvel doesn't ever have that.

There's no like, hey, I'm going to decide what Thor does this time. Kevin, he knocks on your door and says, no, he's going over to this planet. So this is a, Molly, decision of, you know, do you let people, you know, take their own spin on things and you have decentralized control and decision making or centralized control of decision making? If it's decentralized, you can get these incredible moments like The Joker or, you know,

the Batman or the Christopher Nolan versions of Batman. You get these incredible moments of excellence, which you can also get these things that are just incongruous to the, you know, the great moments. And then we're never going to see Christian Bell and Joaquin Phoenix, you know, and I'm trying to think of who's played these roles the best. Ben Affleck, Jared Letto. I wouldn't want Jared Letter to come in there. Roder Pattinson.

He's like, oh, okay. He's gone. He did pretty good, passing, I think. Now we've got Barry Keegan as our new Joker. All right. All right. So I like where it's going. And this leads to, I guess,

Roku and Paramount Plus did pretty good, right? Yeah, so this is another interesting, like, branding, shoving down our throats that I wasn't sure was going to work when, you know, CBS went from All Access and rolled it all in, I think, right, to Paramount Plus. And Paramount Plus, it seems like, has sort of become low-key indispensable. There was something, actually, that I went to watch the other day, and my brother was like, it's on Paramount Plus, you got to get it. And anyway, now,

Paramount Plus seems to be doing well enough and seems to be having enough can't miss content that it's now launching as a premium subscription within the Roku channel. They'll have this ad-supported essential plan that costs $4.99 a month and the ad-free premium plan for $9.99 a month within Roku. What, Lleon, what's your take on Paramount Plus? What's so valuable here that Roku would make it part of the offering? They had that leg up on, you know, say a Netflix or an Amazon, their Apple, they're not starting from scratch. They've got this vast library they can pull from.

So, you know, they can do a Star Trek Strange New Worlds. They can become a hit that's drawing on this audience of Star Trek fans that was already there. And they're making theatrical films already. So they had the Lost City with Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum. That's now a Paramount Plus exclusive. Sonic the Hedgehog, too. that's now a Paramount Plus exclusive. The jackass movies are on there.

The other big advantage they have is CBS is already a player in the sports world. So whereas a lot of these other services have to go out and start Amazon's like making an NFL deal so they can get sports. All the CBS sports deals now are just Paramount Plus deals as well. So even during the earnings report today, they highlighted Champions League soccer

as like a huge draw in European territories that you can watch these. or even in North America where people are soccer fans, they can just watch all these CBS sports matches right from Paramount Plus right away. So, yeah, I mean, I think they're seeing some success. They've got 64 million subscribers to all the Paramount streaming services worldwide, which also includes

Showtime. That's the other thing to bear it. And they also on Pluto TV, which is one of the bigger free ad-supported streaming services that's been growing. They're at around 70 million monthly active users now. Oh. So is Paramount going to consolidate all of this? Is Showtime going to be under Paramount and be part of like one subscription price?

I feel like eventually. And can that just please start to include Cinemax? I only want to watch one thing on Skinnamax and it's strikeback. That's HBO. And it's so stupid. It is. It's HBO? Cinemax would be under the WB Discovery umbrella.

Strikeback something that's just absorb it for God's right. This year was originally a Cinemax show and they're making a new season of it for HBO Max right now. So yeah. But they don't, not all the Cinemax shows made it to HBO Max for some reason. It must be a rights issue. But showtime is CBS. Did you use overshare? This might be TMI, Molly.

I don't, Strikeback, is this like a Cinemax? I call the channel Skinimax and I will never stop. But Strikeback is a freaking awesome. Anti-terrorist. It was anti-terrorist. I thought this was after midnight situation. It's a weird name. It's a weird name. But no, it is.

amazing. If you just want like a awesome, stupid action, like team show with tons of betrayals and you never know who's going to die. It is the greatest. If you could only have one, Paramount or Netflix, which do you go for, if it included Showtime,

which would you go for, one? I mean, there's a lot. I've been saying with Paramount, there's like only one or two things on there at a time that I like, but I really like them. Like, I love Strange New World. I love evil, which is on there right now

and which is terrific. Interesting. But, I mean, Netflix, Netflix has more stuff. Got it. Not as much of it reaches that point where I'm, like, excited to check it out every week. So I don't know. To be, HBO Max with the collection we talked about for you would be, you would pick that over Netflix. I think right now HBO Max is probably the overall.

You could only have one, Netflix or HBO Max. Oh, it's HBO Max. It's HBO Max. I'm just in, I'm making J-Trades based on your opinion. Just so you know. Mx and Hulu, I think, right now are, they're both, like, ascend it. Like, those are by far, I think, the two strongest right now in terms of the content. And Hulu, of course, is owned by Disney.

It is. Right. So I have my Disney stock. I have my Warner Brothers HBO stock. I don't on Netflix. I don't on Paramount. So just so people know how I'm playing this, I feel like I'm betting on the winners. And I'm not betting on the loser.

I'm not shorting the losers or the also runs. Paramount is pretty close. Like, they're one acquisition away. from a real, like, a real killer offering. Like, if you, if Paramount brought in Showtime, and then they grabbed, like, Lionsgate, now you've got, now you've got a competitive sort of, you know. It's like something, something like that.

I feel like they're one, they're like one new content library way. Like if AMC and Paramount United, unstoppable. If you're running a startup, you know that every little bit of help counts between running your team, building the product, getting compliant, hiring people, studying, customer support, everything. It's overwhelming. I know that. I work with you all every day. But the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub is here to help you. They're going to help you build a better startup from day one, whether you're plugged into Silicon Valley or not.

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ak.m.s slash this week in startups. That's simple. AKA.a.m.s slash this week in startups. As we wrap here, we talked about doing a show Bible and a pilot episode. Yeah. of Ruga.

Is that any pronounce her name? Ruha or Ruga? I would love to get a Ruzha Ignatova, I believe, is how you, that's how I've been saying. As we wrap up here, you've started to investigate this. You've got to research you're working with. There's a BBC reporter named Jamie Bartlett, who's really done the best work, I think, or the most thorough work on this story. He wrote a book called The Missing Crypto Queen that I have read.

Oh, okay, great. So I had, he also made a BBC podcast. I have a researcher, Drew Grant. She's listening to that while I read the book. So we'll share notes after that's done for anything that was in one and not the other. Got it. So based on what you know, is this going to be a great streaming series? I think there's a ton of potential here.

I think what I really like about it and what I think that this hits, so well because I don't know how much you know about her scam. We don't have to get into the deep I know a decent amount. I haven't listened to. I haven't read the book, but I know a decent amount. She's really bringing together two scams in one. It's a multi-level marketing. It's a multi-level marketing scam and it's a crypto scam in one. So the idea is your multi-level marketing, your salespeople, instead of selling knives or workout tapes or skin cream or whatever, they're selling crypto and then they're getting their money from their downstream, like all of the other salespeople working under them, they're getting like 60% of it in cash, 40% of it in the coin that they're selling.

So it's like a double, it's like a double scam. And I think what that gets across so well, it's a great way to explore the entire concept of crypto investment and how it was people who understood it kind of hopefully. hoping to appeal. How do they sell this to people who don't understand it, but we want to take their money anyway? It's incredible. And I think this story is a fascinating look into that world because the book makes it clear. Not only did most of the people buying one coin not really understand crypto, most of the

people she was hiring to sell one coin, didn't understand it either. It was like her and two other people really got what was going on. And nobody else even knows enough to ask the right questions. And that's why I think this is such a fascinating. So this is going to be another one of these situations where there could be multiple people writing the same story because they sold that series to new Regency already. Oh, wow. I didn't even know that. Yeah.

So, I mean, that's obvious. But this is like the Elizabeth Holmes thing. There could be multiple swings at bat here. Sure. So then I was thinking about this. There's the, we're making the real story with the real names about these real people. Right. The other option would be this would not be that hard to fictionalize, not using.

real names, not use real people. Or just use it as a jumping off point, right? Inspired by... Okay, cool. All right. So we'll talk about that offline. But great job. Yeah, that's a conversation we should have is like, do we want to make this, do we want

me to stick to the facts or take this as a jumping off a springboard for a fictional story? Yeah, my gut was with the ladder. Like, it's an interesting springboard. I wonder if there are one or two other crypto stories that you could weave into this. Right. Where, you know, there's like the NFT of like the, I don't know, loosely based on the, the apes and then there's the Satoshi Bitcoin creator and you weave multiple stories of crypto insanity over an arcing series, right?

And is it an open-ended? Are we leaving this for maybe there's a season two? Or are we closing it out because it's a real story and like here's what happens? All discussions that we should have. All right. Well done, Slan. All right. All right.

Well, we'll see you next week. Well done. See you next week. See you guys. At Lonns. All right, everybody. Next up, our series A second. The segment continues with the very popular social app, Lockett getting a decent amount of funding.

And then we talk about M&A. Or not. Lena Khan making her first big move at the FTC, maybe trying to shut down a little bit of M&A in a test case that could reverberate throughout the industry. It's big news. It's big news. Enjoy. All right.

What's going on in Series A and M&A, Molly? So I don't think this is technically a Series A, but I don't care because it's a super interesting raise in a topic bucket that we've been talking about nonstop. Lockett. So we've been talking about the latest in social apps and all this competition. And Lockett is one of these new contenders alongside Be Real and paparazzi that's just been kind of hot lately and just raised $12 million with investors including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Instagram, founder Mike Krieger and Quora CEO Adam DeAngelo. So this is so interesting because not only we've been talking about this,

Rachel and I talked all about Be Real while you were out and kind of like what the kids are doing and who, which app everybody seems to be choosing. And it's mostly been Be Real. So I find it very interesting that these kind of like tech veterans and the Instagram co-founder are actually putting their money into Lockett. And the conceit with this app is that users can take photos. and post them to their friends' homescreens in like a widget. And so whenever a friend takes a new photo, the old one gets replaced.

So if your friends are like really fast, you might miss a post. Or if your friends aren't adopting the app, then you could have the same thing on your home screen for a while. But it also has this 20 friend restriction. And Rachel made us a little video because, of course, she's like using all of these. She's very social to, Rachel. I watch her on the social. I watch her on Twitter. It's getting quite a following, producer Rachel.

because she's hilarious. She's pretty funny, yeah. Path.com had this as well. There's something called the Dunbar number. You can look it up, basically. It was a study done by a professor. Basically, it figured out who the connectors were in the world. People who knew a large number of people by first name is how you do the test.

So if I said to Molly, hey, how many people do you know with the name Mike? List them all. And I had a mic. I can list them all. Some people were just off the charts in terms of how many mics they knew, right? These are people like me or possibly Molly. In fact, they wrote a story about me, the New Yorker called The Connector, which was based on this concept, the Dunbar number.

That was a number that a lot of people in social, and the first wave of social companies were aware of, and that's how they came up with, on Path, you can only have 50 people, and then I think they made it 200. And Path.com was really beautiful. So if you want the technical definition, Dunbar number, by using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates,

he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships. and there were all kinds of tests to kind of prove this theory. And then who, you know, kind of broke through it. And social media, Molly, does help you break this, right? You wind up, who has 150 people in their social networks? Nobody. People have thousands now. Yeah.

And what these apps are trying to do is bring it back down to a manageable number, which is why you have close friends, I think, is the term they use on Instagram, which Instagram and Facebook stole everything from Dave Moran. Actually, even on Twitter now, they have close friends. your circle, actually, they call it. And Google, when they did Google Plus, which was their failed attempt to compete with Facebook, but it was really actually a pretty good product.

They had a concept of circles where you could create circles and share things with just your circles. Now, Twitter's using that same term, which is like your circle on there. Yeah. So this is the same concept, which is... I like to circles. You know, narrow it down so that you can have

a more loosey-goosey discussion, maybe let your hair down a little bit, which is what you say, Molly, you're doing with group chat. Oh, absolutely. Everything now. Everything. I'm sorry to everybody who is waiting for like fun content on Twitter. I just, it's only text right now.

No, but what's, the other thing that I think is very interesting about Lockett is that it's like you can have this kind of passive experience. Like Rachel pointed out that she could see someone who isn't very tech native loving this, because if you put this app and the widget on your phone, it's like one of those digital picture frames. Like new pictures just keep rolling in. And it's kind of this nice, I like the idea that it's sort of a widget-y picture frame that's just on your phone all the time

and it's only people you really care about. So this is a, for those who are watching the video, this is Rachel scrolling through, I guess, the feed of the 20 friends. You can sort of interact, like you can send a reaction

to somebody's picture. It's less about like, Love Me World. I need validation. Right. You know, Kardashian Instagram nonsense or TikTok trying to trend.

Or TikTok where it's fed to you, right? This is like, I actually do want to know what my friends are up to. And that's it. And that's it. I mean, this is one of the things that, you know, I'm trying to do in our life and in our life here on the program is we have the Nodys. We have like the top 100 fans of the show who come every day, watch live. We know their names. We're collecting their emails. We're going to make the Nodie 100. You know, like our 100 super fans just to invite them to come hang out with us and have dim sum or sushi or pizza and whatever and just chill. So you get to know a smaller group of people, but deeper. And it's kind of fun, you know, especially when you have mass market products or followings. Like, we both have six figures worth of followers on Twitter. It's a bit. It's a bit. It's a bit.

bit overwhelming, right? And it's nice to narrow it down. I think that's a great device here for Lockett. It seems like a great idea. The problem with these companies, the challenge, since we're talking about this, is, you know, how quickly is Zuck going to steal this idea and do it better, which is what he is a memory machine? He's not going to do it better, but he's going to do it with a network effect that is going to make it unstoppable, right? It doesn't really not to be better. He'll take five swings. That's true. It has to be just. the same. But he tends to take five swings at bat and then eventually he makes it a little better.

If you think about Instagram filters, there's many more Instagram filters than on I believe Snap, right? He generally, I think, overwhelms people by the fifth version, which he stole, by the way, speaking of stealing, his stealing strategy is stolen from Bill Gates.

That's how much of a thief Zuckerberg is. He couldn't even come up with his own way of absconding from ideas. I like what Bill Gates says. I'm just going to steal. He literally, he's a meta thief. That's hysterical. You know, because he named the company meta, he's a meta thief. And the reason he's such a meta thief is because what Bill Gates used to do is he'd like,

okay, I have the platform windows, build me apps. And they're like, okay, here's Lotus 1 through 3 and Word perfect. He's like, that's interesting. I wonder if I built these in and made Microsoft Office, what that would look like. And he literally built Microsoft Word and Excel and people laughed at how horrible those programs were compared to Word Perfect. And then by version 5. Yeah, it just kept your so right.

It just kept getting better. In version of three or four of Word, it was parody and then it got better. And then it was built into the operating system. And that's why they got that SEC, I'm sorry, the FTC action. DOJ. It was DOJ because they were bundling, this bundling strategy was so good, bundling, another way of just saying stealing your product and putting it in mind, which is what Zuckerberg does. And then forcing you to take the whole. And then you have no choice.

As a consumer, right. And then taking away your previous choice and forcing you into it like they're doing with the TikToks on reels, right? To the point at which people are complaining like, okay, we get it. You're shoving it down our throats. We don't want it. They did that with the browser. And that was where they got themselves in a lot of trouble. And that's why they missed mobile because they just didn't want to do acquisitions or they just lost their aggressive edge. Well, they had the DOJ in their business for a decade.

Yes. Like they couldn't, they were, you know, it cost them employees. is it's just such an interesting. Yes. Sorry. And now we look at meta, and this is a great segue. Yep. When we talk about M&A, we talked about Lena Khan. She's the incredibly young, incredibly brilliant head of the FTC,

and she's taking her first action. She is suing to block Zuck's acquisition of fitness app maker within unlimited. So to be clear, it's a VR fitness app maker. Right. Within the Metaverse, Jim. It's a Metaverse. In the parlance. I'm going to stop saying.

I'm going to stop giving them any credit for Metaverse. That's so irritating also. It's so annoying. Also stolen. So it's stolen and stole the concept of meta. Stole the name meta. From now on new rule, we only say virtual reality. They don't get the rebrand.

They don't get the rebrand. So they entered an agreement in October of 2021, this past October, $400 million to buy this. Totally. significant in terms of the size of this deal. This company had raised money from Emerson Collective. That's Steve Jobs' widow, Lorraine Powell. Lorraine Powell Jobs.

Lorraine Powell Jobs, thank you, was an investor in it. And Lena Khan is saying that this is going to hinder. You're like, wait, what does this do to consumers? This isn't harm consumers. This doesn't consolidate some huge position. She believes that this is going to be anti-competitive in the future. Remember this whole pre-cog concept she was putting out there that, like, in the future, this could cause something? So she's trying to change the lens.

What do you think of this? Does this make any sense to you? Do you think they should be doing this? Do you think this is retribution because they didn't, or like an overreaction because they didn't stop Instagram and WhatsApp? And they're now trying to slow down Facebook. You think it's just because of Facebook's reputation or because of the political stuff? off with Facebook. What are you thinking here? I think it's definitely Facebook's reputation, right? She wouldn't necessarily, I don't think that they would have, I 100% acknowledge and agree with

you that this is a pretty risky way to come out of the gate. Like there were probably, I mean, the FTC has taken other antitrust actions before with sort of limited success or medium success. There might have been a more traditional antitrust path forward here. Even, like it might even have been less risky to try to, I don't know, unwind. You know, there were rumors that they might try to unwind the Instagram acquisition or the WhatsApp acquisition, which it's, you know, it's too late and that would have been incredibly difficult. Obviously, Facebook was very worried about that, which is why they went ahead and like mash those two together so quickly. But there's no question that this was part of the Microsoft strategy that you just mentioned. It's been part of Facebook strategy for a really long time.

It's part of Apple strategy. Every one of these big companies, when they see something that could be a future competitor, goes out and buys it, particularly suck. He goes out and buys it, and he either disappears it or, you know, makes it part of the fold. More often he steals it. And sometimes he just steals it.

Right. Sometimes he buys it and kills the competition in the crib. And there, I am certain that at this point, the Lena Con FTC is thinking, like, well, look, we have, yeah, it's messed up, sorry. She probably feels like the case is boltered by the fact that there were all those documents that the whistleblower released where it was very obvious that they, that Facebook executives identified Instagram and WhatsApp as threats and bought them as a result to put them out of it.

Right, to get rid of them to get them out of the competitive mix. So I'm sure she's thinking, we have a smoking gun of this happening in the past. Okay, I like it. If we can win this, then we set this really big precedent that says like, hey, you can't just go around buying whatever you want to kill it. that said, I still think it's like going to be an uphill climb. I think they basically handed Facebook the perfect antitrust case to battle and it makes Facebook look less predatory because it's like, well, this is a tiny little app and we're giving these entrepreneurs and investors a great win.

But here's, this is the reason why I think Facebook is going to just absolutely get crushed in the next decade because of the stupid mission to try to. bet the farm on VR. Apple and Google would never make an acquisition like this. Why? They want to be the platform

and they don't want to overreach and be the platform and the application layer. Zuckerberg is taking his playbook after everybody watched him do it and kill Zingo's apps and everything else and every partner they've ever had

they've basically stabbed in the back. Whereas Google and Apple are going to say, you know what? Apple and Google could write those like, you know, those briefs, like Friends of the Court briefs, amicus briefs, I guess. They could like do, and I don't know if that is something that exists in the FTC when they do this stuff, but the Amicus brief is going to be like, we're not going to buy these apps. We're going to have an app store where they can fight it out.

And it'll be better for consumers that everybody fights it out in an app store and the best app app wins. And we'll have competition. And Apple's going to just say, like, you know, look at all the high quality stuff we have in our app store, Google will say the same thing. Why would you let them just sweep through the app store and buy the top 20 apps? Yep. And such a stupid strategy by suck. It actually really is a mistake because by buying, the other thing that the FTC has in its corner on this one is that when you buy competition, you start to tread into the easiest of all antitrust complaints,

which is the original test. Does it harm consumers? Does it cost, consumers more. And at the end of the day, if there's only one place to get all your virtual reality stuff and that's meta, then there's going to be a pricing concern, whether that price is, you know, paid in data or in lack of competition. So by trying to remove any competition from the market by buying it, I do think that Facebook, that meta made a huge strategic error here. It's a real stretch by Lena Con and the FTC, but it's not, I don't, it's not impossible that they end up putting a stop to this, and then that will have a massive chilling effect for all kinds of tech companies. Yeah. I mean, who is advising Facebook? Oh, right. He has super voting shares. Nobody.

Right, exactly. He's the king. This is where, like, Cheryl Sandberg and other folks around him were beneficial. Maybe they kept him on the rails. This is just such a stupid decision. You don't need to buy these applications and then have Lena Khan be like, oh, oh, look. Thank you. Thank you for put this. in my lap. Now, I don't think it's the perfect case, but I do see all the pent-up hate and distrust of Facebook and Zuckerberg specifically. You know, he's got no friends. Guys got no friends. Zero friends. Zero friends, Zuck. You know, the people who even worked with him, you know, like they don't stick around him. It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen, you know, like usually in Silicon Valley,

when you make all these friends, they kind of stick around and you make people billionaires. They kind of be friends for a life. You're kind of a squad. And like, doesn't seem to, cultivate a squad of loyal people around him because he's not loyal himself. And this kind of stuff catches up with you. It's no way to live. If you're an entrepreneur watching this, this is like how not to enjoy your life and be a great entrepreneur. You can be successful, but I don't think you're going to enjoy your life when you create this much animosity around how you do business. Suck is the worst of Silicon Valley. Like literally the worst actor in Silicon Valley, I believe, is Zuckerberg. Yeah, I can't really disagree.

but he's uploaded his consciousness and he's mostly robot now so I guess he doesn't care no it's just like you would think somebody who is around him would just say hey schmuck well I think they have and then the ones who used to say that are leaving I mean that's what the thing of maybe what happens when you become a king who's richer than God is people stop telling you the truth and you eventually just weed out the ones who would tell you the truth and you know you have to acknowledge at some point there's probably a different person now than he was then yeah he was very impression in the beginning.

Like, and now he's, I don't think people can get to him. Stupid. I mean, it's, actually, I kind of like the fact that he's doing stupid, making these stupid mistakes. Like putting all this money into VR.

That's going to be a disaster. Making these crazy M&A things when he knows he's under a microscope, stupid. These are stupid decisions. And I think people who are working there are now looking at their options and saying like,

this guy is going to run us off a cliff. He burned like $3 billion dollars last quarter or something like that. on this FACCA VR, you know, uh, mission that nobody believes in. There's nobody who works at Facebook who is passionate about VR. There's nobody there.

Nobody uses it. I hear that all the people on the meta team love working on the, they love working on the Oculus. Like the Oculus team has been the happiest place at Facebook for a long time from what I hear internally. And people really want to be on that team and really want to be. Because how fun is it to be on the team with a $3 billion? nonstop resources.

That's where all the juice is. It's, you know, it's like, you can have whatever you want if you're on the Oculus team. I think it's fun as hell. Like, they love it. So that's the thing that we have to keep in mind is like from the outside. We're like, and internally they're like, this couldn't be more fun. Okay.

Yes. And certainly compared with optimizing the Facebook privacy invading ad tracking machines can't be fun either. So it's like its own version of hell. Right. But purgatory. But here's a thing. the Kool-Aid, you're like, we're building the future. This is it. But to my point, I just don't think

the people who are even there are going home and putting on a VR headset or can't wait on the weekend to do VR. That's the thing. I don't think that anybody enjoys VR. It's just not fun. I mean, there's like only three or four things I can think of that really make VR worth doing. Education. Some of the lightsaber games were like interesting enough for me to try them and then like want to play them one more time. But even if the fidelity gets great, I still don't want to do it. I would do it for getting better at a sport.

Like if you told me, I could go in the simulator and get better at skiing or mountain biking and it would be like an instructor and I would learn certain techniques and I could see it in 360. Perhaps. I think everything is AR. Now, if Zuck is doing the VR and investing all this money

just as a precursor to AR, then maybe it's a brilliant strategy. But I just think he's going to get his s handed to them by Google's Play Store and Apple's App Store. I think there's going to be a lot of fun to be had in VR. I think there's fun to be had in VR now and it's

only going to keep getting better. Would I bet my entire money printing machine on it? Probably not. When's the last time you used it. When my aunt was visiting, because she plays this multiplayer VR game every single night. She's got her like home use. This is the first I've ever heard of this. Hold on.

Yeah. This is somebody over the age of 50 who plays VR every Every night. Every night. What game is she? I don't believe this. It's called like Elvin scroll or I don't want to mix it up with the Elvin ring because it's not that.

Elder Eldon, Elvin, I'm going to ask her. We need to have her on the show. No, no. Every single night. So then I'm in there and I'm like playing and you're like, and I'm like doing the bow and arrow. And there are people like shouting at me, but also being nice. Like they're really nice to each other. Like it's this like friendly community and they like shoot monsters together.

I'm not kidding. Every night. And she was like, did you get the Oculus too? yet? Did you get it yet? Are you going to get the Oculus 2? And then you should really, I think like, I actually think that there, if you imagine if you weren't that, she is not in this category, but if you like weren't that healthy and you, I mean, you could imagine a scenario where it's actually like, boomer popular. Okay. I mean, I think like, I don't, I wouldn't say elder schools. Thank you, Calvin. I just, I'm not ready to like completely, I think there's going to be a future for VR.

I see B.R. I see B. As big as. Zuckerberg needs it to be to justify his investment and I don't want to see them own it but I'm not going to write off the whole I'm not willing to let him poison the whole pill All right fine everybody believes in AR So we have consensus on that

If they make glasses light enough You could all see I can't wait for that Yeah I mean if you were getting your maps And a heads up display like you get in your car Where projects on the screen that's just like a no brainer You can see a thousand applications there And that's going to take like four or five cycles

of those glasses at least for them to be reasonably weighted, which I put it at 2030. You know, it's a 10-year play. 20-32. I could see, I could see in no sooner than 2030 us walking around with air glasses. Now, for VR, I could see some edge cases. Like we had the guy in from Golf Plus, and he said some people were using it all the time. I could see if I was a golfer or I was a skier and I'm going to go to Hokkaido, I would want to do a ski simulation of that mountain if it was really good to just see the different runs and maybe plan it out. I could see doing that. All old people in an old age home should have oculuses put on their faces. They should not be allowed to remove them. And they should be given psychedelics and feel like they're 20 years old again.

It's the loculus. The loculus. It's literally like we're making IP on this show. Slow clap. Slow clap. Oh no. The loculus. Absolutely. It would be like that should be Zuckerberg's market. This is jail now. This is what jail is. It's basically jail. Mm-hmm. It's like in, uh, what's the, the Sylvester Stallone one? And then they lock them up at the end.

Is it demolition man? I don't know. There's like one where they put him in. Uh, running man? That was Honnold when he was in a, uh, but it's like Wally. They did it in Wally. Yeah. Yeah.

That was Steve Jobs trolling. Anyway, this is going to be very interesting on an M&A front. Can't wait. Keep it up. Go Lena Con. There's got to be 20 more on Facebook. cases. All right, here's Lena Kahn's quotes, just so we have them here. Even if it's not a slam-down case, even if there is a risk you might lose, there can be enormous benefits from

taking that risk. I think what we can see is that inter-inaction after inaction after inaction can have severe cost. And that's what we're really trying to reverse. So this is the whole concept of looking to the future and saying, is competition going to be harmed in the future? not does this harm competition today. It's a really hard thing. And it's a different metric for evaluating what antitrust and competition looks like. Previously, it's all been this consumer harm. Does it harm consumers?

And that's been translated into prices. But what the argument that they're making now is, is that consumer harm occurs when there's not enough competition, period. Right. So does this, will this squash competition in the future? So one would say through the same lens that Amazon buying Whole Foods or One Medical is going to potentially do that in the future. And any person with any basic level of creativity or knowing the arc of history could look at any acquisition because you wouldn't acquire it if it didn't have a chance to be successful and say, yes, that's going to create a monster. One medical is going to automatically be given to everybody with Prime. Oh, my God, that's going to reduce competition.

But it might also delight users in lower costs. Exactly. So you can't say that pricing and consumer harm is the metric forever. It's just not. There's so many ways to apply your anti-competitive powers that don't translate into pricing, that you have to come up with a new standard. I think that's what the argument is. Did you want Amazon to buy Whole Foods and One Medical?

I cannot. Are you excited about those or neutral? I was a little bummed about the Whole Foods thing. Why? I didn't want, because I felt like Whole Foods was like a sort of a successful chain that I could feel good about. And I was afraid Amazon was going to corporatize it. And frankly, like, I got super. I stopped shopping in Whole Foods because every time I went there, they were like, load your Amazon app.

And I was like, I don't need Amazon to have my grocery data. Like, I actually felt the data part of it. I was like, that's irritating. But I'm kind of like that. And now how do you feel about it? Now I don't use Whole Foods. Oh, you don't? Interesting.

Yeah, I just don't use it. I was excited for both these acquisitions because I love Amazon. And I was like, if you can make Amazon Prime work better and put more stuff into it and it's seamless, great. Now, I haven't seen that actually happen yet. Like, Whole Foods, the Whole Foods Amazon integration is not well integrated. It doesn't matter. We talked about this before. So I'm kind of bummed about that.

I really just want to, when I'm in the Amazon app, there should just be a Whole Foods logo. When I click it, it should just put all the Whole Foods stuff. the Amazon interface and have it work just like Prime does, but I guess it doesn't. And then instead they have the Amazon Fresh thing, which might not be WholeFood. I'm super confused about Amazon Fresh. Exactly. It's like they put Whole Foods under Amazon Fresh. No, I have no clue what they're doing with Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh.

And so I just have opted out of all of it. And I have no, I do not believe for a second that Amazon is going to do anything cool with one medical that's going to benefit consumers outside of like people. who work at Amazon. They're just a big silo decentralized organization and one medical is going to be one medical, but it's not going to be some awesome integration with Amazon. I think they're going to 10x one medical. I think they're 10x the number of locations and they're going to let you get Amazon Prime with one medical as an upsell for an extra 100 bucks. I mean, I would love that and I would do that in a freaking nanosecond, but I don't, I think that's five to 10 years away at best.

Okay. We'll see. I mean, we'll see. That's my over under, wait, my over. under five years five years before one medical is um integrated into prime this is an very interesting instance in which amazon runs my life in every other way but they literally ruined whole foods for me completely and now when you go into the store it's so depressing is it just all delivery shoppers like it has none of that you are never going to meet a cute guy at the buffet ever again like that's just over it's all just kind of a sad weird amazon locker with delivery shoppers i got hit on once at the uh whole foods i didn't realized I was being hit on, but I was like, I was at the fish counter or something.

And they're like, oh, you know, what do you think of this or whatever? I was like, I don't know. I'm just getting this. And how do you make that? And I was like, all of a sudden I'm in a conversation. And I was like, oh, it's whole food. That's what's happening. It's literally like kind of a dating scene. Used to be. Now it's just, now it's just delivery people. Is it Gen X Tinder? Is whole, is whole foods in real life? It was. It was. It used to be. Really? And now it's ruined.

It's ruined. I was married by this time, but that's an interesting thing. So what is the Gen Z, Rachel, IRL dating scene? Like where, what retail experience winds up being a dating scene? Is it like? Oh, gosh, that's a hard one. I feel like just the bar. There's the bar.

No, outside of a bar. I said like a retail look. Is there like, you know what? Actually. Is that spin class as if you go to. No. I actually think it might be, no, like, co-working spots. Oh, of course.

Definitely. I love that. Yeah, definitely co-working. Okay, sure. Co-working. Yeah, or hipster coffee. I can see that, but co-working, that's genius. Co-working is so gene.

Hey, what are you working on? Oh, did you eat yet? Yeah. I mean, and look, Rivka. It was built in. Like the love was built into the product. Beer, there was beer, there was the good stuff. All right, thanks for listening, everybody.

And make sure to tune in tomorrow because we have a super interesting interview with Alex Skrill from Nutrisense. Yes, they enable continuous glucose monitoring with a coach to help you lose weight. I used it. It really did help me understand why I was gaining so much goddamn weight. And it helped me lose weight. And I'm an investor in the company. So I'm really excited to have Alex from Nutrisense on.

They're absolutely crushing it. This is going to be a big investment for me, I think. It's super interesting. And it's just so interesting because we've been having this ongoing conversation about preventative health care solutions. We're really building like, we're building story arcs here. Yes. I'm just saying we have a body of work on preventative care that's really fascinating. The Landby, we had that episode, com.com, FitBod. We're really thinking about preventative health care and individuals taking control of their health care as opposed to just handing it over to some doctors or,

you know, insurance companies. You got to take control of it, right? Have some agency. Tomorrow, I'm going to do the nose solo because Molly's. going to get a little well-earned vacation. Enjoy yourself, sister. I will, but I miss you guys already. All right, bye. Send us photos. Bye-bye.

We'll see you tomorrow.