Janice Min on Hollywood’s Crisis; Reed Duchscher on the Creator Boom

What does it really mean to be a neighbor? It's just everyday people, you know, it's just people who are retired. They have a couple hours in the afternoon, so they're gonna do patrols and it's people who are, you know, real estate agents. You know, driving around like trying to attract how ice is moving and alert neighbors when things are not safe. The rise of mutual aid in times of crisis. That's this week on Explain It To Me. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.

From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That's me. I'm also Chief Correspondent at Business Insider. Today we are getting two very different but overlapping looks at the state of Hollywood and entertainment and Where things are going. First up, a chat with Janice Minn, the CEO of the Anklar, the excellent entertainment trade pub. She co founded about four years ago.

I wanted to talk to her about her business and how the transformation from we have some newsletters to we have lots of products and lots of revenue streams is going. But I also wanted to talk to Janice to get a vibe check on Hollywood, which she has been covering for decades. So

Yes, we talk about the latest maneuvering with Paramount and Netflix and Warners, but we're really talking about the way the people in her industry actually feel. Her answers are glum and bracing. You should listen to them. And then I talked to Reed Duxer, the founder of Knight. It's a talent agency built specifically to work with the next generation of talent, all of which is coming from the internet.

Duxer is best known as the guy who helped turn Mr. Beast into a giant business, and now he works with other big YouTube slash Twitch names like Hai Sinat and Hassan Piker. This is partly a conversation about how to build a digital version of traditional town agencies like CAA. And those agencies, by the way, are doing their own digital work these days. And it's partly a conversation about how the digital platforms like YouTube and TikTok actually work.

Which ones help you build an audience? Which ones can help you turn that audience into money? So that's a lot in One Free Podcast. You're welcome.

Let's get right to it. Here's me talking to the anklers, Janice. Janice Minn, you're the CEO of the Anchor. Welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me, Peter. What am I two things I like to do on this podcast are talk to people who really know how Hollywood works. And talk to people who are building their own indie media businesses. So we got both in one interview. Thanks for joining us.

Oh my god, my pleasure. We have news to discuss. Uh I want to talk to you about how the anklers going, but I I want to talk to you about the the state of Hollywood. This morning, we're recording this on Tuesday. We have news that yes, Warner Brothers is formally gonna entertain an offer from Paramount and that has to get done over the next week and then Netflix can respond to the Paramount offer. If I had to make you bet right now, today, February seventeenth.

Who is Warner Brothers gonna go with eventually on this deal? Not who's gonna win the deal, not who's gonna own Warner Brothers in a year, because that's a regulatory question we can't answer quite yet. But who do you think the Warner Brothers board is going to decide to sell to, Paramount or Netflix? Doesn't it really depend if if Netflix decides they're going to step it up and

So far it seems like they will, but I think they've also proven, you you know, you and I both know Netflix is also a pretty ruthless company. Like Season two isn't working out for it's not driving as many subscribers as season one. Your show is canceled. Like uh they uh you know the read hastings famous you know keeper test you aren't performing well you're out and at some point you know you look at the share price of their stock and

Shareholders are not loving this. They're not loving this pursuit of Warner Brothers. At some point they will cut it off. And as much as it's been fun to say, you know, quote unquote fun for them, I think, like go take the picture of the of uh Greg Peters, um, Ted Serranos and David Zasloff walking on the Warner Brothers slot. Um, I do think that Even Ted testifying in Congress in front of Congress last week.

beginning to feel not fun, less fun. And I feel like at some point they're a very pragmatic company. They will not end up in what I would call a Disney Fox situation, um, where another buy another bidder can bid them up to a point and at that point and with Fox it was Comcast. And push them into a place where they overpay and the whole thing kind of never really

um can be justified to shareholders. Yeah, I was surprised at that that Netflix hearing. It seemed I mean Ted Sranos has not done many of many of those. It seemed Like he was a little bit under prep I mean, he certainly had prepped for it, but There was a document that you could get on deadline.com from the Heritage Foundation, which said, here's basically all the ways we're going to attack Netflix.

Which I could read. You didn't seem like he'd read it. But but leaving that aside, there there's a conventional wisdom, I think, among the smart set, you were in the smart set, that Netflix would really like this deal and that Paramount has to have this deal. Do you agree with that? I do agree with that because if you're David Ellison and you've assembled

probably the most expensive leadership team in history. Um, and it's a you you know, um people who are unkind would say it's a little bit of a clown car of top executives. They are prepping to have Werner Brothers. They David Ellison was not prepping to have the seventh biggest studio or seventh, you know, seventh biggest streamer. I mean, in the end, if he doesn't have that.

you're kind of left holding the bag that nobody wanted and it's paramount and oh God, like then what? Like how do you win? You are holding the thing that Sherry Redstone was desperately trying to get rid of. Well that let's let's just back up a little'cause I think that's important context here is I mean this battle is so interesting to me because Warner Brothers is such a stinker, so much debt that they are being forced to sell, basically, right? They had no other outcome.

Paramount was such a stinker that Sherry Redstone couldn't get the stink off of her fast enough, right? And there was basically in the end one bitter. And that one bitter is now the one bitter for the your well, one of two bitters for the other thing. And so Um, I think when we we get caught up in the excitement that these are huge prizes right now, but they're just these like debt stuff. uh slow moving beasts that need to have someone who has an emotional attachment to them in some ways.

for them to make sense as a buyer. And you should be concerned if there aren't other buyers, uh other bidders fighting you. I mean, this I was I always say this about when Rupert Murdoch and Jeff Buchus decide they're selling. you should be really taking that as a signal. If those guys who at the time were running the media world say, We're topping out, and that was six years ago, Uh the flip side is, well, maybe you just need a a brave young man backed by his father's fortune.

the fourth or fifth largest fortune, depending when we count it, to to turn things around. So maybe that will happen. The other vibe check I wanted to get from you is is how the town thinks about this. Um because I still feel, again, from the other coast,

is that Hollywood is more concerned about Netflix buying Warner Brothers than they are the Ellisons buying Warner Brothers. And I know there's an argument for category three. C which is no one should buy Warner Brothers and it should be left alone. That seems unlikely. Um if you poll people in your neighborhood and at at lunch d w who are what is the least bad outcome people are are rooting for?

Boy, I mean it's really like a I think for most people it's sort of a Sophie's choice. I mean, th there are no There are sort of two potential bad outcomes here. I think people on the plus side for David Ellison, people love I you know, he loves movies. Like that that that's sort of the the I love movies. You guys make movies. I'm gonna make more movies. Obviously you should work with me.

No, I know. And it's a little simplistic. It's like me love movies. You love movies. I mean, it's not like a sophisticated business argument, but what they like in that is that Um you know, everyone here has dollar signs spinning in their eyes. Like, you know, everyone's looking for the next uh deal for themselves. So they like that that could perhaps

indicate that David Ellison will pay and maybe even overpay for what you are making. And that's exciting, that it'll create a big buyer in the market. Um I think the flip side of that is remember Los Angeles, Hollywood isn't Not a particularly pro-Trump industry. I don't think they like a lot of the things that they are seeing happening in at Paramount right now. I mean, just was it yesterday, the um, the situation that happened with Stephen Colbert and

uh the repres the Senate representative uh Canada. James Talarico. James Talarico running for Senate. Yep. Yep. And having that guest potentially it sounds like be uh censored off the show. Um they certainly don't like what n pr necessarily happen with happening with CBS news. Fundamentally, though, people here, it does come down to your bottom line. The industry is struggling. People are having a hard time having the careers they had 10 years ago. So

People like the idea of a of a of a buyer with deep pockets, even if it's daddy's money or whatever. A buyer And they don't believe the Ted Serrandos argument, which is, yes, we know we've been saying that movies should move out of theaters and into home and streaming and that's what makes sense. But now that we own a movie company

We've changed our our idea on that and we think m big movies should go to the theaters. And by the way, no one ever talks about this, but we're gonna leave HBO alone for the most part is sort of the signal. So everyone who loves HBO, don't worry about it. We're not gonna touch it. Everyone comes over there. That that does not seem like a resonant argument.

Yeah. What's so funny, and I you know this, like Netflix was sort of the you know, had had been demonized for the first its first ten years in LA for having uh changed the economics of how people are um make money, right? It's now it was now cost plus deals instead of any back end and it kind of generally depressed the market overall for what you could make. Um, you know, you you could it's selling a show.

Tw a twenty-five episode season at CBS used to be the gold standard. And then now it became a twenty percent over budget deal at Netflix. And um, but the fact is they won. And I think people after um You know, after all the studios realize like, oh, it's about profits and not about subscriber numbers and how they hide all those numbers. Um it Netflix won. They make they make a ton of money. They're the biggest buyer in town. Uh and so I think people generally

like Netflix now. I mean, I think they recognize that n there was a disruption coming to the industry. And if not Netflix, someone else would have come in and and have done it. And I think what people like about the leadership team is they actually seem to like movies and television, right? They're not they're not in the Jeff Bezos business.

of needing to sell you goods off this and do this, you know, things that are that are uh ancillary or that are larger actually than their entertainment ambitions. They just love entertainment. So I do think people like that. I I also think people like the idea of

in the Netflix plan of um the other part, the discovery, the unsexy part, the cable television, the CNN of Warner Brothers having its own life too. And I I think we can't overstate how important that is. I think there's Uh for people who are really invested in the news here, the thought of CNN falling you know coming under Barry Weiss.

Not great. Yeah. So just to underline this, I think people who listen to the show uh get it, but but Paramount wants to buy the whole thing, or at least the whole thing. And Netflix wants to buy the studio an HBO and CNN and the remaining parts of Warner Brothers would be its own standalone company.

Who knows what becomes of those assets once that thing is spun off? You know, if you're concerned about the future of CNN uh today under Warner Brothers or tomorrow under Paramount, we've got no idea what its life is gonna be like once it's a standalone company. Yeah. And um I you know, I think that we're so used to at this point sort of Well, I think for ten ten years now um we've been like

You've heard you know, it's the boy who cried wolf, democracy's dying, and you know, all these comments. And um, but I think people are actually starting to get a little shaken by what they're seeing now. And some of it became very personal to Hollywood, Jimmy Kimmel. um, you know, some of uh some shows that aren't getting made anymore because they be they're too quote unquote complicated in this moment. Um so I I think when that kind of turn to um

s I guess censorship, you know, has become very apparent. I think that becomes scary and it will limit ultimately those sort of decisions limit the creative funnel for people. Cause there are there are decisions being made that will never be put in a PowerPoint. But or be said in a meeting that like, no, we're not gonna do your kind of show. Like because, you know, for reasons X, Y, and Z. Right. We don't need to say out loud why we're not gonna do it. We're just not taking on that show.

And you know, and that's why we're gonna have Rush Hour Four, right? Directed by Brett Ratner, because Trump has personally made that request. I I do think there's a lot of unease that we're having Ted Serandos and David Ellison. have to go repeatedly to the White House, kiss the ring, have these meetings. It we're looking at a process that is not is certainly far beyond an era when You know. Um, Jeff Buchus sold Warner Brothers to ATT.

Um, speaking of an unease, constant stream of stories about AI and Hollywood. And a lot of it is little literally about someone tweeted this thing out. How do you feel about it? It's uh was it uh uh Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise in an AI generated video? ByteDance has their own version of Sora and they're getting takedown requests. Um how much how much of the AI is going to doom our business discussion is actually happening versus being written about? Yeah.

said before, I think that the thing with AI right now in Hollywood, everyone's lying just a little bit, right? Like Studios are lying about how much they're using it. Um the companies are they're using it more or less? Using it more. Companies are lying about the capability of their product.

Um, and I think for creative people, they're lying about the fact that they're not using it. I I dare you to find a screenwriter who is staring at a blank page and not talking to Claude or Chat GPT at the same time. That said, I think what we're seeing right now, and we did a piece, one of our writers, Eric Barmack, who writes about AI, did a piece about how Hollywood basically has stop store two when it's tracked.

And if you look at the download numbers of Sora two, the engagement uh with Sora two, like it fell off a cliff at uh in the fourth quarter. What's what's the thesis? How did Hollywood stop and it's in his tracks? Hollywood mobilized around copyright um with lawyers.

Um, as you if you recall when Storage Two came out, they did like, oh my bad, you know, you have to opt in to not have to not have your copyrighted material used. And Um and so they were able to whether it was going to be user behavior regardless or if the studios actually played a role in this. I do think it was it's probably a combination of both. But as um one of the people Eric spoke to was very clear like

We're just in this age of like novelty internet products. Like that came up and people played with it and they're like, okay. n you know, up the ante for me someone else. Like it just didn't quite catch on. Yeah, I played I played with Sora so much that I got rate limited multiple times, which was very embarrassing.

Um, and I loved it, but to me it seemed quite evident that it's a novelty app and in and unless people were gonna do amazing things with it, there was no need to use it once you'd made your fifth video of your coworker eating something funny. Right. It's interesting. Eric also made the point that Hollywood, when you think about the Disney Sora two deal that was announced, um, and I there's part of me that believes that was announced the time it was because

Disney's looking at the battle going on for Warner Brothers and saying, wait, wait, wait, we need a headline too. I mean, I think that the some of sometimes these announcements are that cynically constructed. But Eric makes the point that Hollywood typically comes into new technology. at the wrong time. And he he mentioned, of course, Fox in MySpace. Um

And uh, you know, AOL AOL and Time Warner of the history, you know, famously. And so I think we viewed it as the time as like, ooh, Disney's getting in on something, but it could also be interpreted as oh, Sora too needs needs this. They need some kind of boost from a the biggest, you know, one of the biggest entertainment players in the world. Um, but in terms of job loss today or or near term.

Clearly AI is being used in visual effects. Then that was already a challenged industry to begin with. Um, is anyone making the positive case or like this actually could help our business in some way? We just haven't identified it yet. So I I have been people have been sending me I have a friend who's been sending me uh LinkedIn posts that are showing up in his feed and it is so grim. It's people largely who have worked in VFX. And they are

putting on LinkedIn like this full on bleed out. Like I will be homeless beginning next Thursday if I don't have work. And they work they had to had a career in the VFX industry. And Um they're not being hi it doesn't appear they're being hyperbolic. And um and so

Uh, jobs are being lost. It is true. And I think the case that people are making where Oh, well, actually it's all gonna be a silver lining is that um production will become less expensive, enabling more people to make what creative endeavors they would like to make. And you see like um you know, like Amazon Studios, they now

Uh, have someone, Albert Chang, who used to be on the, you know, proper film and TV side as one might call it, the traditional film and TV side, now working on enabling AI assisted production. I mean That and that's just a name we know who's doing this. I guarantee at every single studio, every single streamer, they are all completely doing this. And I we when you look at the Oscar race this year, for example, if you recall last year,

uh with the brutalist. And um Adrian Brody's voice was made more Hungarian accented uh through some one of the plat through some technology. And this year it is crickets and even the Academy, the most precious, you know, legacy protecting institution in Hollywood, uh has not come out in a really firm way about AI. And if they defin they basically have a don't ask, don't tell policy. And you can guarantee

I well, I wouldn't put money in it, but I would say with some certainty that every single Best Picture nominee has used AI in its production process. It just you just can't. You can't not use that now. Like you also use computers and Google, like obviously. You know, like once you used Microsoft Word and that was amazing. And and and so it's the evolution of technology and that means the disappearance of

a category of jobs. What is the story someone like me in New York is missing about your town or your industry? What is what is the story no one is quite telling correctly right today? Uh so I think that um I think you know, you live in New York and er and you've had a

the worst winter of your life and you look at LA and you think it's sunny and amazing and people are happy. People are having a hard time here. And when you look at the unemployment rate of Los Angeles, it is, I believe, 35% higher, uh maybe 33.5% higher than the national average. So you are seeing sort of a I mean I think Th this makes me sound like a MAGA person and I am very much not. But you're seeing sort of a city that is so big and sprawling with a kind of rudderless feeling where

Well, who is going to stop this? Like you have an industry that is disappearing, um, and you have but you have yet you have leadership in the in these In this industry that's like, well, but you know, filming in Bulgaria is a lot cheaper or Budapest. So forget, you know, sh I'm not like who

Who am I to try to save jobs in Los Angeles? So I think there's an essential conflict there here between the workers who are kind of dreamy, who love this place, who moved here, were able to have middle class incomes. buy homes and you're seeing this sort of Like you're f you know, there is definitely a Detroit vibe that is underway if things don't

Course correct. And you know, I was I was talking to the CEO of a big PR firm in New York the other day, and he said like his firm is very much looking at um You know. You're they're looking at Los Angeles and thinking the floor is falling out this year because no other industry has come in to bolster it. So it would it's like um remember when Silicon Beach was going to be a thing and tech companies were going to move in?

That never happened. And um turns out it's very hard to replicate Silicon Valley anywhere but Silicon Valley. Everyone's tried it. Correct. Uh but yeah, no, d uh uh Detroit vibes, that's a very stark way of putting it. There I I Uh just as an aside, the journal I thought did a very nice piece about sort of the hollowing out of middle class work in Hollywood maybe a year ago. And the kind of

They called it a a horror movie. The Hollywood makes horror movies, now it's living one. Because it's the Wall Street Journal. So you to to to register to to make a comment, I think you have to be a subscriber. And the delight people uh had in watching in their minds Hollywood get its just deserves and clearly it's a lot of MAGA and political sort of

uh oriented stuff, but th the idea that you would celebrate a town's struggles is was I I shouldn't be shocked, but I was still shocked to see it. Well, I mean even even People I know, right? Like you when when you hear what writers were making and who were on a hit show and you compare it it's everything's a comp, right? So then uh people can't help but compare themselves. So

If you're a journalist and you saw what Hollywood writers were making, you know, you're like, oh, just desserts, you know. And if you look at the Palisades burning down, people today are like, well, they're rich. Who cares? They can figure that out.

And w this is sort of the coarsening of our conversation overall in the world, but also this you can't fight this culture war and not have an end result at some point. And that's where we are. And I think What I also want to say about Hollywood right now, I think You're seeing this paralysis. Like so Hollywood used to be like, you know, a place that had a lot of protests, spoke out.

Um, was always, you know, fighting the so-called man. And it is pretty much crickets now, because everyone is scared. And I was so kind of. struck by the fact when you saw the Grammys and you have these musicians who um are you know, b uh getting up on stage, Billy Eilish, uh Bad Bunny, like d just really sticking it to

The president and ICE and the administration. And you compare that with the Golden Globes where it was like, Oh my God, sponsored by polymarket and no one's saying anything. It felt sort of like this hellish landscape of what and the ratings are down of what Hollywood co is becoming. And when you think about how to capture young people, it is very often

you know, who are the pipeline for everything. When you think about young people, um, you know, they love this culture of rebellion and revolt and speaking out. And Holly you know, and I I worry also about Hollywood containing itself so much to the point that it

kind of stop speaking to the audience. You're seeing that with the creator economy coming in. You're seeing that with people like Ben Misalis of Midas Touch, who are coming in and just saying things in a way that Hollywood is ha is still continuing to have a very controlled of controlled conversation. And you know it's something when like the loudest voice in the room on this issue is Jane Fonda, who's in her 80s, right? And who you would very much expect to be at the forefront of this.

And just uh I think that, you know, fear is just uh fear is a very unhealthy attribute in any environment. Oh man. Um you speak truth. Um

I wanna find a a a slick way of of turning this into a positive podcast. But uh you're speaking truth. Let's let's talk about something positive, which is you building a business. The Ankler. How many years into it are you? Four. We just had our fourth birthday. F and f I think right after you launched, um, you you came and talked to me on what was then called Recoded Media. We got into your origin story.

You and Richard Rutchfield were the we're the we're the oldest people in Y Combinator. Oh my God. You got Yeah, still I I think we still probably hold the record. You got advice from Mark Andreessen about how to build your own business. So you're four years in. How is it going? It's going extremely well. I think probably some of the things I would think about this year around the business.

Um, and we've expanded a lot. We have great, great journalists working for us. Um, and I think when we started, it was like everyone was like, Oh my god, newsletters, it's so exciting. Uh, this is the future. And I think we're probably seeing The we're probably in peak newsletter right now. Like

You know, oh God, everyone has a newsletter. American Eagle has a newsletter on Substack. Yay. I mean, like this is this is a good thing. It's like saying you had an app in two thousand nine. Yes. Exactly. Like not so exciting. Or maybe saying you had a MySpace when when Rupert Murdoch got a MySpace. Um And so uh so then we you know, so I think you'll see us like we're doing, we are really thinking this how we expand out. Um, we're we have we've succeeded in what most people um

you know, robust newsletter audience. So what is packed? Yeah. So walk me through the business. So last year you said you guys were looking at ten million dollars and it was going to be divided up between a third from subscriptions, third from events, third from media sponsorships. Um, how did that pan out and and what are you projecting for this year? Um let's see. I it

It panned out. Um, I would not I would not dare to predict this year yet. We have our budget and I hope we make it. I think we're we're looking some of it like again All of a lot of it depends on what shakes out with this With this Warner Brothers situation, because now it's not that you only have, you know, remember, we have two we we we are supported by sponsorship too. So you have

um three big sponsorship players locked up, right? And that makes spending really cautious both in them in terms of them buying movies and shows but also the sponsorships that to spell it up. That is the studios promoting their stuff to your readers. Generally around awards. generally around awards. So that uh, you know, we're we're being very cautious about how that is going to play out for us this year. Um so we are very mindful of building our

You know, thinking about entertainment's very different from when you and I first spoke about the angler. Like Entertainment is not film and television. And I'm very mindful of never turning this into, you know, what I call colonial Williamsburg, like pretending that that's still the main driving force of all entertainment.

Like we we have s we see many inputs now into the entertainment industry, whether that you know, creator economy and Natalie Jarve, who I know you know, does a like, like and subscribe, which is an excellent creator economy newsletter for us. Today she's even writing about sort of the shift in television where television's now gonna be video podcast basically that costs five thousand dollars an episode. Like

Like these changes are coming fast and furious and we're we are definitely staying ahead of the curve. Microdramas, there are there's a portion of our audience that absolutely hates every time we talk about I I have a question a moment. That's a something bit my colleagues at Business Insider write about all the time. And I know that this is one of those things that's big in Asia.

And people assume or believe or hope that will happen here. And sometimes those things translate and they move across the the ocean and sometimes they don't. Are there Americans consuming microdramas in meaningful numbers? Okay.

There there are Americans consuming microdramas. It's mostly women and uh and you know all the crazy, like, you know, billionaire werewolf romance. Like it's all crazy. And so it really, I think one of the tests for Hollywood is Does Hollywood over professionalize them where they lose the essence that makes them sticky to um to the audience. And, you know, TikToks in this in microdramas now buzzfeed, which, you know, why not? Right. And um so

That that'll be one of the big tests. Um, but also for us, like we realize I'm very mindful that nobody reads anymore. No one has any attention. Like Richard Rushfield today has a newsletter coming out about the goldfish. Everyone's a goldfish now. Like no one can remember a thing. And so um, you know, we've made a big move into video. We hired Jennifer Lasky to run video for us as our executive producer. Um, you know, we kind of ignored social or didn't didn't put our

didn't make that a huge focus. We realize now that obviously we'll double down much more into social and events. I mean it's like spell out why it's important for you to be in social, right? Your audience I assume is mostly professional. Right. Or or pro Sumer, right? People who have a who are willing to pay to learn more about what's happening in Hollywood. So yeah. Um why does it matter that you're on social media? I I I just feel

And I'm sure there's lots of data to bear it out. Like the social platforms haven't collapsed, right? Like I think that was. There was a period of time where people thought like, oh, it's coming. Oh my God, like X is dead. When in fact X is actually on the, you know, swinging upwards and things like that that maybe people don't like to hear, but are actually true. And Instagram is a huge driver to news outlets now, which I you've probably found yourself. And

Um so I just I feel like we are constantly competing in like everyone's everyone's just living in a feed now. You're in the, you know, your whole life is one feed and you know it's Epstein, it's puppies, it's rescued animals or at least mine is and um and then more Epstein and like People that is

You know, you're not going to be able to do it. So even though you're reaching professional, sober adults, you still want to show up in feeds because not everyone has heard of you and maybe not everyone is subscribing to you and you need to be there. It's building the funnel, right? Like you wanna just

build the funnel and eventually get everyone to convert into paid, right? I think also like when you when we think about our subscribers, I mean, ever when Paramount goes and lays off 3,000 people. We will see that in our subscriber roles. Right. And so it's so we have to these are um resources we have to constantly replenish. So the other thing, and I just want to go back to events, you know, we're this small but mighty presence.

And we have been leaned on. We're programming at NAB show again for them this year on a business of entertainment track. We'll be programming with a partner at Cannes Film Festival, at Cannes Lion. And so We like that we can retain these high level of relationships here or the credibility with an industry and be able to um frankly, you know, m monetize those for us on someone on bigger stages. If you were starting last question, if you were starting this business today, um, instead of

four or five years ago. Would you start it again as a newsletter slash substack product? Or would you say, you know what, we've we've the newsletter time is over, it was a fine MVP time, but we need to do something else instead? Um I Uh let's that's a really good question, Peter. I would absolutely start with a newsletter product because it is still like, you know, for example, like California Post is out here, right?

I don't I don't go to a newsstand and buy the California Post. You can't even find a newsstand in Los Angeles, but I am getting the page six Hollywood newsletter, which is pretty good, right? So suddenly that's like in my in my life, right? And so it is, you know, and I've just spent some time slagging newsletters, but it is a very direct way

to reach an audience where an audience decides right away, I like you or I don't. Right. And you probably do the same thing I do. Like you've fallen out of love with a lot of newsletters. So you just hit delete, delete, delete, delete. Like like deleting probably 250 newsletters a day that you used to open. And um and that so I think when you can find a connection with an audience where they're not doing that, like that

huge and it does mean something. It means something to know your audience and understand what they're responding to and um make them feel um I don't know, warmly towards you, I guess. Makes sense. Janisman, I feel warmly towards you via the internet. Thanks for doing this. Um, we will get together in real life soon. I look forward to it.

Thanks again to Janice Men, and if you like that one, I'd suggest you go back and listen to the one we did back in October 22, where Janice talks a lot about the glory days of print magazines. Yep, they had glory days. In a minute, I'll be talking with reduction. Digital talent agent, but first a word from our sponsor. McDonald's är stolt sponsor av melodifestivalen. Så tillåt oss att presentera ett av våra bidrag- Festivalmenyn. Sour Cream Onion Company, 4 Pepperschicken.

Festivalmaten finns på McDonald's. Before Minnesota, Illinois basically wrote a playbook on how to fight back against Trump's ice crackdown. Governor J.B. Pritzker told everyone in the state to take action when Ice came to town. Pull out your phones. Film everything. They're shooting moms in the face. Yeah. So peaceful protest seems like the least you could do and what we should be encouraging people to do. They they've they you know, they've shot somebody here in Chicago.

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I'm here with Reed Duxher. He is the founder and CEO of Knight. uh which is a management company that manages some of the biggest names on the internet. Um Reed is probably best known as the guy who helped Mr Beast become Mr Beast. He's no longer working with him. He is working at lots of other high profile creators, uh Kai Sanat, Hassan Piker, among others. Welcome to the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me on. Longtime listener. Excited we could finally do this. Yeah, it's always good to talk to someone who actually does this stuff for a living. Um I wanna talk to you about you've just raised a bunch of money. I wanna talk to you about your business. Um and I wanna talk to you about sort of the state of the internet for creators these days, but

Let's do the the very quick tour of of how you got here. You wanted to be a sports agent working with NFL players. Um how did you end up working with YouTubers and live streamers instead? Yeah, the abbreviated version is that I did want to be an NFL sports agent. So when I graduated college, I started representing my friends. Some of them went on to play in the Canadian Football League, some of them went on to play in the NFL.

And instead of getting certified as a contract advisor with the NFL, I ended up stumbling upon YouTube in 2014. There's this creator named Dude Perfect. That was making videos early on. Now everyone kind of knows who they are, but in 2013, 2014, they were starting off their careers.

They were some of YouTube's favorite creators back then. They were like the the the guys they did stunts and they were family friendly and they could put them in front of advertisers. I remember they were uh would always trot them out in front of with their brand cast thing. Yeah, still to this day. I mean they're they're one of the darlings of YouTube. I would say their top five channel

Um, on the ecosystem, they've also raised a substantial amount of capital. But that that got my start in the creator ecosystem. I left that sports agency, moved to Dallas, Texas, started night in 2015, and I've been doing it ever since. I I didn't at that time I didn't really know what this would turn into. I think the interesting thing for me was that I thought creators would continue to build companies and production companies on top of YouTube. And if I could be part of that paradigm shift.

I could sit in a pretty interesting position and I couldn't get into the mailrooms at UTACA WME. Like I'm from a farm in North Dakota. I have no connection to this Hollywood city at all. And so I the only real option I had was just to do it myself.

And and what did you see an obvious connection parallel between uh Uh a high profile athlete and a YouTuber, streamer, are there sort of obvious things that that connect them? Are they radically different? Or did you get enough exposure to to sports agency to even make that connection?

Yeah, I would say the creators are much more entrepreneurial in nature. They've star they've had to start their own businesses, whether that was in their basement making YouTube videos or just picking up a camera and filming something. And so the the mindset is very different. They've had to do everything themselves. You know, I think athletes are they're equally challenging to work with.

uh it's just very different. You know, I I liked gravitating towards individuals that wanted to build businesses, wanna and you know, Mr. Beast being a really good example of that. You know, I think that's the the fundamental difference. If you're playing in the NFL You're in season. Really eight months out of the year. And then if you go on to play in the Super Bowl or deep into the playoffs, your offseason is only two and a half months.

And in those two and a half months, they don't want to do anything but focus on the next season. So it's very challenging to get anything done for my year and a half when I worked as a sports agent. I was thinking from the outside, oh, these are both sort of groups of people that have kind of

a timer on their career, right? You can only be in the NFL for X number of years, probably three or four years on average. You know, someone like Tom Brady who goes to forty is is really an anomaly. And I would think for internet creators there would be a similar sort of like There's a limited amount of time where I'm gonna be able to make money, meaningful money doing this and I've got to go, go, go.

Yeah, I th I think that's a fair assessment, but that we are seeing a lot of creators now that I believe will have long careers. Like you mentioned Hassan Pikert. early on, I would imagine Hassan will be making maybe he won't Twitch stream 10 years from now, but he'll have some sort of his own show talking about politics for probably the next 35 years.

So I want to zoom out and talk about the the state of of the internet broadly for creators. You you talked to my my colleagues at Business Insider and you said there might not be a next Mr. Beast. Um we're moving to a a a niche world.

Why do you think there won't be another Mr. Beast? Some some singular person that dominates a ton of attention, at least from one segment of the audience. Yeah, I think there's a few things that I've seen shift over the last couple of years. One is that the platforms Don't want to incentivize people to break through. Like the the algorithms on TikTok and YouTube and Instagram now put you in this little lane of content that they they know you care about and they keep feeding you that content.

where pre COVID, you know, we would go on TikTok and a lot of people would see Addison Ray videos, Charlie DiMilio videos, uh Cabby Lane videos. They it was getting fed to the whole ecosystem of consumer that was on TikTok. Now, if you go on TikTok, you see your very s like small lane of content that interests you. For me, like my for you page is a lot of podcast clips, sports clips, and different things. I don't see anything outside of that.

And so that's one challenge with these creators really breaking through. I think the the platforms would rather have the the middle tier of creators with five to ten million followers, they would rather have that enormous than have a few people break through. And then I think so you think this is intentional on on the part of the platforms to sort of not have

hugely powerful creators. I mean, I understand wanting to carve up their you know, how to how to tune an algorithm so it gives me exactly what I want and you exactly what I want. That's what all the platforms want to do. That's different than saying we don't want another

uh Jimmy Donaldson, Mr. Beast where he's got enormous power. But that seems to be what you're suggesting. I'm suggesting both. I I think that you want the algorithms to be as as good as possible at at h keeping high session time. And so if you feed people exactly what they want, the session time goes up. But then I think the the other situation

You know, we've seen adpocalypses happen. We've seen PewDiePie affect the advertising rate of all of YouTube by saying something and then ATT and these people pull out of the ads on YouTube. That is like an existential threat that I don't think they want happening. And when you have individuals that have a lot of power and leverage over platforms, those things can happen. And so I think them pushing down and widening out is really what I've seen over the last two years.

Um and you know, Mr. Beast does have a lot of power over the YouTube platform. He can demand certain products get made and certain things happen. Yeah, I think it could happen in the future that someone breaks out through YouTube Shorts. I just think it's gonna be way more rare than it has been in the past. Let's talk about how the individual platforms work. We don't need to go through each one, but but if

If you're work someone you're working with, where are you telling them to go? Which platform are you telling them to go make money on? Which platform are you telling them to go find an audience on? And sh those should be the same, but I think they're probably not. Yeah, they they were much different a year and a half ago. Now everyone has short form content, which really acts as the the top of the the spear in distribution because everyone is everyone is doing TikTok.

Yeah, it well no I mean it in terms of Short form content is easy to get high amount of impressions on. It gets fed to a lot of people. Things can go viral. It doesn't matter if you have two followers or 200,000 followers. A video that is good and has high retention can go viral on TikTok. And so I think for me

We would always tell people like use TikTok as a discoverability mechanism, but now we have reels and YouTube shorts and everyone, every platform has copied that short form meta. And so I think discoverability is actually really good across every social platform.

But where you make money is substantially different. I think YouTube is still the gold standard for monetizing a creator's career. And I've talked about this a bunch, but spell it out. I mean, there's one very obvious reason, right? Is that they actually share ad repetition. Yeah, the well the and and long form videos because you can run multiple ad units within a fourteen minute video. You actually can

go on your side of the dashboard and you can place ads wherever you want them. It doesn't mean your fill rate is gonna be a hundred percent, but you can place ads every minute, every two minutes, every three minutes. So they're giving you an opportunity to make a lot to make money, period. And they're also

Going to share the money that you make with you, which still doesn't really happen on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat. I mean, they they'll all have sort of like You know, uh little programs that that hinted, but no one no one is routinely sharing.

half of every dollar they make and add revenue with the creators, except for YouTube. Yeah, and I and I I don't want to glaze them too hard, but YouTube has been at the forefront of allowing creators to make money for the last decade and all their alternative monetization things that they come out with. uh are in that favor of the creator. Like they to me have been very creator first in how they've just handled the platform and the products they launch.

Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat has not figured that out. And also none of them have really figured out long form video. Facebook Watch, they tried. E IGTV, they tried. It just it hasn't worked as well as YouTube has done it. So YouTube is YouTube is in particular is really pushing people to make longer stuff.

that fits in with the fact that people are consuming tons of YouTube on T V, that's very conscious on the part of what the platform wants, but they're also pushing with with their TikTok clone, right? YouTube shorts. So how does How does it work if you're trying to make money or find people on YouTube? And on the one hand, they're pushing you to do long stuff, on the other hand, they really much want you to feed YouTube short.

You you have to have a balance as a creator. And I and I'm I I do mean it when I tell creators this, like short form YouTube shorts is a good discoverability metric of getting your content seen by a wide variety of people. When you make long form videos, You have to have a high click through rate and a high retention for that video to get seen as well. But it's harder to break through with a long form video. It's much easier to break through the noise with a short form video.

But they just don't monetize remotely as well as the long form videos. And so, you know, YouTube has always pushed creators to make long videos. They make more money because of the revenue split. YouTube now has thirteen percent of connected TV viewership. That's by design, they've been pushing that for a long time. And I saw this on the back end of all the data on YouTube three years ago where connected TV viewership for creators that were making

tw fifteen plus minute videos that were made for a TV audience, their viewership on connected TVs was just slowly creeping up over the years. And now some of those creators, thirty to forty percent of their their viewership is on a connected TV.

So but how do you balance that, right? If you're making something that's supposed to be fifteen or twenty minutes long, I guess you could always hope that you can find something that could be turned into a YouTube short clip, but it seems like they're really different products. Two native two native videos. What what you post is a long form video.

Maybe if you're Theo Vaughn or a podcast, there may be clips that you can post out from that long form video. But the majority of creators, they have to have two different strategies. You make a long form video and then you have all your creative ideas that make native short form videos.

That sounds exhausting. Yeah, it's a hard career. I don't know. It's not for everyone. Uh I I've talked to people, and I think you've talked about this as well, sort of a uh uh a thought that maybe people should be spending less time making short form video. I guess presumably because it mon it there's it's just much harder to make money doing that. And, you know, we mentioned Hassan Piker and Kai Sanat as two of your big uh two of your big clients.

Those are people who are full-time Twitch live streamers. They are making content for six, seven, eight hours at a pop. Um, but very few people can actually do that successfully. I'm trying to figure out how Yeah, you can't tell everyone go be a Twitch live streamer, can you? No, it's very hard. To to be on live eight hours a day like Hassan or Asmin is ver very challenging. The I think that the difference with like a Kai or a Hassan or an Asmin is the internet creates the clips for them.

And so when you go on TikTok and YouTube shorts, you'll see a lot of Kai or Hassan content that is just organically clipped by the, let's just say, the ecosystem of the internet. So literally there's people uh they're fans or they wanna make money or both, or they say, I'm gonna take this free content that Hassan Pikers made, I'm gonna edit it myself and turn that into a clip that could that could At least generate attention for Hassan Piker and maybe money for me.

Yeah. And and we don't take those down. You know, I think if if um they're they're directly ripped off of the stream, we've usually let them be up. Like we We we are better off allowing the internet to make amazing videos reclipped of the content that Kai and Hassan are making on Twitch than us to put in a ton of effort to do it. And it's worked in the favor of Kai. I mean, a lot of people see him for the first time through a clip that we didn't make. It was just the internet doing it.

It's the internet doing free labor and promotion for you. Yeah. And well they do make money. Um there you can monetize short form clips. It's the the relative RPM or CPM of those videos is way lower than on a long form video, but these clippers are making a decent amount of money just by reclipping content.

Um, and so are there any platforms that people are overlooking today that you think are sort of sneakily interesting for an aspiring creator? I still think Twitch is so underutilized and monetized. I understand the the difficulty of of live streaming and being on. And I think there's a there's a lot of cons about Twitch where if you're not live, you can't gain viewership. It is very much a when you're on and you're live.

You can have viewers, and when you're gone, it's gone. It's not like YouTube where you get residual viewership from a video on demand. But I still feel like Twitch needs to continue to expand into other offerings outside of gaming and IRL. And I don't think a lot of creators take advantage of it. We're thankfully now seeing people like Justin Bieber and other celebrities stream on Twitch.

And we're seeing the internet organically clip that content of them. I just still feel like there's a lot of ground to be gained. on Twitch. It's not as noisy as all the other platforms are. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I did an interview with Dan Clancy who runs Twitch last year. And and one of the takeaways or one of the pr perceptions I got was maybe just live streaming, people who want to consume live streams are

always gonna be sort of a a a relatively niche audience. People who wanna spend their time that way. And the fact that during the pandemic you saw Facebook and YouTube sort of go after Twitch and try to build their own live stream businesses and basically have walked away from it maybe is an indicator that this stuff just doesn't have that huge of an audience. Yeah, you're probably right. The audience is fourteen to twenty-five year olds.

And it it hasn't grown. But I but if you just go back in time, YouTube ten years ago is predominantly kids. And they they've done a good job of of widening out the content verticals where you have outdoor channels, you have fishing channels, you have makeup and hair, hair care channels. Like it's it's widened out. My parents now can go on YouTube and find content that they enjoy.

Live live is a little more challenging. I just think that Twitch still very much is like only an ecosystem of IRL and gaming channels and they need to figure out how they widen out. And they also they bleed a lot of viewers over to YouTube because if you're Hassan, your stream is then posted on YouTube. It's not posted on Twitch as a video on demand. Right. And so they lose a lot of those viewers just bleeding out because there's no V O D mechanism.

So you think Twitch oughta build their own YouTube essentially? Or some version of platform that allows people to watch the stream clip or the stream VODs. And right now you can do it. It's just they do a ri it's really hard to find. Like if you're a fan of Hassan, there's no for you page. that says, hey, this is his stream from yesterday. You should watch it. Do you think that's a do you think that is a technology slash competence question? Or do you think it's a strategy question for them?

I think it's a strategy question. I think they're like, let's just continue to win live streaming. We have a built-in community of people who care about live streaming. Why try and compete with YouTube? I just think that uh Twitch is a a company has been pretty flat in terms of revenue and and viewership over the last five years. They're gonna have to do something to continue to grow or else this business is just a to me just continues to be flat.

Flat, but still useful for your clients who are successful at it. Those two things can exist at the same time. Yeah. Let's talk about your business a little bit. Um how many folks how many folks are you repping today?

The company manages around two hundred and seventy-five talent, mostly internet native, some athletes, some musicians, but very deeply embedded in YouTube and Twitch. And how many employees do you need to manage all that? We have a hundred and thirty full time people right now. Wow. So it's almost two to one.

Yeah, and that and that's across the the podcast network, the management company, and the experiential marketing agency that we bought, but a the large concentration of people here on the management business. So when someone signs with Knight, what is the main thing you are providing for them? We've done a really good job of helping them build a larger production entity so they can make better videos, y usually a higher amount of videos on a monthly basis if they want to.

The the monetization usually happens by brand deals and we've just done that. There's really no entertainment services. I think that most of our clients think YouTube is the end game. Like a lot I think the early days of YouTube, everyone wanted to be a Hollywood actor or actress. It doesn't feel like that anymore. A lot of the YouTubers

Like if you're big on YouTube, you stay on YouTube and you're you're like I control my IP, I control all my assets, I have creative freedom and control. Why do I want to go chase HBO Amazon. The fact that Markiplier had the number one or not the number one, had a had a huge hit movie. uh a couple weeks ago did much better than Melania. Um was really the first time we've seen a YouTuber sort of cross over that way.

Um, does that mean there's more to come or does that just show you, look, YouTube's been around for twenty years? This is the first time you've ever seen a YouTube star. have a hit movie that should tell you that this is gonna continue to be the third time. So the first time was Talk to Me by Raka Raka. It was distributed by A twenty four. It was two YouTubers that lived in Australia that directed and wrote Talk to Me.

Obviously, went on to go to Sundance. A24 got it. And I think it did 94 million in box office on a$3 million budget. That was the first time. Thank you for the fact. The second time was Sam and Colby, who's a client of ours. They distributed a YouTube documentary in Cinemark last year on like a fifty thousand dollar budget, ended up doing three point it was like three point nine over the weekend in the box office.

So it did incredibly well for them. And then now Iron Lung with Markiplier, which was a project that he really built out in the open. Uh all his fans knew he was doing it. He had been talking about it for a long time. He brought them along the journey and it performed really well. I don't think that's gonna stop. It's just vi you know, this is it's very challenging to make films. And for YouTubers this is very new for them.

I think it'll happen more. I just don't know how many creators are gonna play in that game. And and and want to be in that game. Yeah, or or even want to be in it. You know, I think it's like it's challenging. It's it's difficult to get the theater's heads around it. Um some of them will independently distribute, but a lot of times you have to go get a deal done with Sony or A twenty four or whoever that is. They just post videos on YouTube and continue to make money.

So, you know, I th I actually no, I forgot about one. Ryan's World, uh, Ryan's Toys Review actually tried to do a film in theaters and it did not perform well. So I think there's been four. Mhm. I I don't anticipate this happening that often, but I do think creators like Marka Plier that have big brands will figure out how to continue to utilize the theatrical system. Yeah, and there were other attempts to sort of like br bring someone from YouTube to Nickelodeon or uh

you know, uh give'em a late night NBC talk show. It just the audience at that time was not moving over to those platforms, but there does seem to be now at least some track record to say you can at least get them to a movie theater. Yeah, Lily Singh didn't have a lot of um

luck with the show crossing over. We're now seeing Netflix with Mark Rober and Salish Matter and a few others that I know they're gonna announce like that's gonna happen more. So let's let's see like how how some of this does. Beast games I think has been widely successful For Amazon. I just don't know how many creators out there care enough to go do shows with streaming services. We'll be right back with Reduxer, but first a word from our sponsor. And we're back.

So from afar, I was assuming that your core business is generating helping these folks generate revenue, which means essentially going out and securing ad deals for them or helping them steer through which ad deals they should or shouldn't take. Is that a fair summary of the the core of what you guys do is? A as a core, talent is at the center. Talent management is the center of our business.

We have a venture studio that co founded Feastables with Mr. Beast, co founded Tone with Kai Sonat, Respin with Halle Berry. And so we've had a lot of success. in the venture studio. And that was always kind of the thought is like if you can represent the kids that have built distribution on the internet, you can eventually build products and services with them. And our packaging business wasn't distributing and putting and packaging movies and films.

our our packaging business was building companies and owning equity. And so I think you have the management company, you have the venture studio, and then we have our brand arm that has experiential and a and a few other things. And so, you know, I think like for me, we've always just been like, how do we continue to be at the center of internet culture?

I think it's a it's a place where we wanna live. We don't really chase Hollywood, we kinda just chase like What we want to be in the crevices of the internet. But Hollywood wants it really the agencies, the Hollywood agencies, the CAAs and William Morris's that you couldn't get into the mail room of they are in this business now. You're you're competing against them. Are they your primary competition when you're

when you're trying to keep Kai Sonat or the next Kai S or sign the next Kai Sonat. I mean we work with the agencies like Kai, you know, has an agent, helps on the the acting side'cause Kai does want to get into acting eventually. So I'd I would say the agencies have been helpful. They're helpful on the music touring side, they're helpful on the comedy touring side for us.

You know, I just think it's a representing a digital creator is a different muscle. You know, I think it's something that they're trying to get used to, of like how do we provide value? You know, there's some management.

essentially they should be dealing with the same the same issues, no? I think that there's employees at play. They have production managers. They have editors. You need to help them hire. Like I I don't know what Timothy Chalamet's team looks like, but I would imagine he just has an assistant. Uh whereas like, you know, we have a lot of creators that have thirty, forty, fifty employees.

And so you kinda have to help them build that infrastructure. Also, how you find talent is just fundamentally very different. When you walk through our office, everyone has high screen time. They're like doom scrolling on their phones looking for the next people.

When you walk into a traditional management company in Hollywood, they're reading scripts. Mm-hmm. Uh it's just a it's a very different mindset. Like we're like be products of the internet. They are products of the Hollywood system that has existed for seventy five years.

You know, I think they're they're both figuring out how to coexist now, but the agencies have just been a little late to the game. And how do you handle that tension I was talking about at the beginning, the idea that like I'm I'm an up and coming YouTuber or Twitch streamer? I'd like to say that I'm gonna build this business for a decade, but it just doesn't seem feasible that I'm gonna be doing this in my thirties or however old I'll be then. Um, how do you balance Helping someone sort of

build as long a career as they can with maximizing what they can bring in. I think the biggest challenge for a lot of these creators, especially the ones that started in YouTube making content that was predominantly for kids and family, is as as you get older, you either Have to age up with your audience. And I think someone like Logan Paul has done that very well, where he's fully aged up.

um as he's gotten older and his audience has followed him. But you have a lot of creators who choose to continue making kids' content and they just hope that every f couple of years new seven, eight, nine year olds come into the system and find out who they are. That's been a big challenge for a lot of our creators. Is like, do you age up or do you consistently make the same amount of content?

But we've now like um I mean typical gamer, let's as a a good example. He was one of the first clients I ever signed eleven years ago. He was a really small live streamer on Twitch and YouTube, but now is still one of the biggest Fortnite creators in the world. and he has created his own UEFN, which is a UGC

uh map building company within Fortnite. And so his business is still making content, but he has one of the biggest Fortnite map building companies in the world right now. And so we've figured out how to like build separate businesses for them where the the majority of their revenue isn't just predominantly from content. And he's a good example of that. And I think, you know, the next fifteen years, I would imagine he'll continue to push harder and harder into UGC video game content.

And then and then on your end, how do you handle the tension of I'm gonna help build your business, build equity for you, help you diversify? And at some point you're gonna turn around and go, Well, I thanks for helping build this business. I'm gonna take it now and go on my own, which is essentially what what Jimmy Donaldson and Mr. Beast did a couple of years ago. It's it's built into your your business risk, right?

It's a little bit of the blessing and the curse is like if we do a very good job and the companies get large enough, usually like we get replaced by an internal team. I d I don't know how many people Jimmy has now, but I think it's closing in on four hundred. And so like

You know, ma a manager's job is much different. Like when I met Mr. Beast, it was just him and his mother, and then I came in as the manager. Like when we when I stopped managing him, he had three hundred and twenty five full time people. So the j the job was just very different. And and even for me, like we still did the brand deals, but a lot of our focus was on feastables. We had like built this chocolate company. And so him and I had transitioned to just focusing on that business.

But yeah, if we do a good job, you almost take yourself out. So that would be a good problem to have. I just think it's part of the problem that exists if you help someone build a lot of infrastructure and teams. We haven't really seen a lot of people do it. There's like very few at this point. Jim Jimmy is an anomaly in this industry. I'm not sure I don't wanna say someone will never come up through the system because I think when Jimmy and I started building this thing,

Everyone said there would never be another PewDiePie or someone of that magnitude, and we proved them wrong pretty quickly. And so I would imagine someone will eventually knock off Jimmy, but it probably won't be from getting popular making YouTube long form videos. It'll be some other mechanism. Let's end this with one project one prediction for twenty twenty six. You can pick a piece of talent, you can pick a platform. What what's a

trend, surprise, prediction you think we're gonna see this year? Yeah, I mean I I hear a lot of talk about AI, so I'll stick there. I don't twenty twenty six, I don't think AI fundamentally changes

any way that we make watch content. I I don't think AI movies are coming anytime soon. I don't think AI animation is coming t anytime soon. I know this is a big worry of this town, especially I'm I am just still such a bear and am not optimistic about anything going on in AI as it relates to content and media.

Do you think that's because the AI isn't good enough to make it now? Not even close. Do you th do you can you see okay, it's uh me me my business and my client's business is fine now, but maybe three years, five years from now, that's when we have to worry about it? Yeah, I think adoption takes way longer than people think. Um, who who knows like how good this is gonna get?

I just over the next two to three years, I am very low likelihood that this is gonna affect what we do. You know, I think animation maybe will be the first and hopefully the animation studios figure out how to utilize the the the platforms that allow them to make things cheaper.

But I I think I I see a lot of this like doom and gloom of AI in content and media and I just don't feel that at all. I think we're still so far away. I think humans still want to watch humans. Yeah. Humans still want to watch human content. I I there's so many AI c uh channels on YouTube right now and people just don't watch them. They still want to watch Hasan talk about politics. They don't care about this AI influencer talking about the news.

I'm taking that as as positive news for twenty twenty six. I think it's positive. I think people are freaking out about something that's not that big of a threat. And you know, OpenAI launched Sora. It's gone. It's gone. Uh it didn't work. It was an experiment. I Once again the reduxer for the chat. Thanks again to Janice Minn for her chat. Thanks to Charlotte Silver for her excellent time with me. Thanks to you guys for listening. See ya soon.