Welcome to another episode of Strictly Business, the podcast in which we speak with some of the brightest minds working in the media business today. I'm Andrew Wallenstein with Variety. Have you heard of skibbety toilet? If you're a card carrying member of Generation Alpha, of course you have. But to anyone older, that absurd sounding phrase may mean absolutely nothing. Well,
get ready for that to change. This strange internet phenomenon is about to go mainstream if everything goes according to the best laid plans of my next guest, who knows a thing or two about building big franchises. He's Adam Goodman, a film industry veteran who has shepherded intellectual property like The Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to global success.
Skibbety toilet presents him a whole different challenge, which we'll talk to him about right after this, and we're back with Adam Goodman, co founder of Invisible Narratives, a company that melds the best practices of the creator economy with traditional entertainment, which he knows well from his days at Top Jobs, Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks. SKG. Thanks for coming in, Adam.
Thank you so much for having me. So, you know, because the median age of Mike podcast is probably slightly higher than fourteen years old, we got to do some level setting on Skimbity Toilet. We got to explain this phenomenon before we get into your best laid plans. As I said, what is this ip?
Skimmity Toilet is IP, and that's the best way to describe it. It started as a meme. Our creator. We have a visionary creator, a filmmaker named Boom, and Boom was making for many years Transformers pre Viz videos that he was posting to his YouTube account and he was encouraged to start posting something original of his own, and he started with this crazy, wild, very random meme that really started with a viral song and a guy whose head popped out of a toilet. This was February of
twenty twenty three. Boom had about a million subscribers on his channel. Cut to June of twenty twenty four, and we're looking at almost forty three million subscribers on this franchise right now. So it started as a really wacky, crazy, fun inspired thing and is now turned into something that has episodes and lore and Cliffhangers and about twenty other channels that are making daily content in the skibbity toilet multiverse.
Now that's a great here, but we've got to unpack this on a number of fronts. First of all, when you're talking about forty three million subscribers, you know, at our Variety Intelligence Platform unit, we did some number crunching. We looked at the data. I mean, first of all, forty three million subscribers, we're talking about seventeen billion views. That's like second only to mister Beast. I think it's
like quadruple what Marvel is doing. I mean from a data perspective, we're talking about elite at least on YouTube, and we're also talking about this is something that's a gaming phenomenon. This is top of the level.
Of what you can expect from a digital creator, right, So this is unprecedented. I mean, you can't plan for this. The fact of the matter is years ago I worked on a cartoon about a sponge named Bob, and if somebody had pitched me that idea, I obviously didn't create SpongeBob, but I was lucky enough to work on it. I would have thought that was a crazy sill the idea
or turtles that were mutants and ninjas and teenagers. So these things when you see them, they don't make sense until you do see them, and then when you squint, the whole world sort of opens.
Up to you. Also, what's remarkable is, you know you referred to this as a meme and in the beginning at least, and you know, memes come and go, and at first, this thing, you know, I'm gonna actually have our podcast listeners take a listen to this audio. And I do this with some hesitation, because, dear listeners, once I play this, this may this may destroy your brain and never leave your head ever again. But with that warning, take a listen.
What is going on on stimyt, what is going on on.
St okay For those with functioning brains, Welcome back to the podcast. You know memes Hawk to a Girl is a meme, right, but this is like this meme became a dense, mythologically driven series. This is like Hawk to a Girl turned into like a six season HBO series. How on Earth did what was once a silly song becomes something that is so much richer and taken very very seriously among its fan base. Well, it starts with our creator.
Boom is someone who is a massive student of cinema and television and animation and franchise, and we encouraged him, and the encouragement comes from his, you know, massive, massive audience to tell stories and to look at this as though he's building something that could be the next Transformers
or could be a Marvel's universe. There are so many channels that started doing this, and initially it was referred to as brain rot and a lot of kids kind of looked at this, and there's a real kind of separation in dichotomy between those who get it and those who have turned off on it. And our mission has been to convert the unconverted, to really kind of surprise them and to defy and to subvert their expectations that
they're storytelling. And there's characters and there's myth, and there's law, and there's a building blocks to a massive business that's being put in place here, all laid on the foundation of storytelling, and we really have just started to scratch the surface of it. Where this franchise goes is nobody's this guy's the limit for it at this point, but we believe it could be something that's generational and that's what's so excited amount it.
And yet at the same time that I'm trying to convey that people take this, the fans, young fans take this deeply seriously, Like I still have to convey how deeply absurd the animation is. I mean, on the one hand, you have like a alien race with toilets for bodies with heads coming out of them, fighting a race with you know, TVs and cameras and speakers for heads, these you know, dueling sets of appliances, and a violent war for I don't know, shelf space at cost go. I
don't know what they're fighting about. It's completely absurd. So you know you have been around IP of all kinds. What is it about this that is resonating because I have no idea.
Well, I think it's hard to know exactly. And I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I am the key demo for this, or or or I built this by design. My business partner in this venture is Boom, the creator and the filmmaker Michael Bay. We've heard of him, and years ago, when I was at DreamWorks, we bought the rights to Transformers, and everybody thought that that was a really silly idea to make a movie
about a toy from the eighties. In fact, I think there were articles that came out that said, what's next a movie about Legos, which turned out Okay. I think this is the same kind of thing. I think if you look at this and you try to and you try to assess this through our point of view, it doesn't make any sense when you look at it through the lens of something that's fresh, that resonates with an audience that's not built on your parents or your grandparents' ip.
This is something that Jen Alfa feels like they found. They discovered, it's something that they take a lot.
Of ownership in.
And for us, we look at this and we say, okay, if you squint, yes, there's a toilet in it. But the reality is is that what do we spend more time looking at television's cameras? Toilets we don't look at, but we obviously have our interaction with them. So these are things that we are interacting with on an every single day basis. The fact that the creator has turned these into kind of mechanized warriors is something that is just awesome and you've never seen it before, and that's
what makes it so great. And it's weird and peculiar and it's fresh, and they get it and we don't, and that's what makes it super cool.
So you keep mentioning Boom, we should mention Boom's real name is Alexi Jersimov. He is from Georgia, that is the from overseas, Georgia, not Atlanta, Georgia. Twenty six years old. How did you get to him?
What?
You know?
Who is?
He had talk to me about the process of, you know, hooking up with this guy.
He's an animator. He works on an animation platform that is very primitive actually compared to unreal owned some of the engines that other animators are working on.
But he's a beast.
This kid can imagine things and execute on things on a level that is unheard of before. He is doing shots that make Michael's headspin. Michael and he have a terrific collaboration and work very closely with each other, talking about episodes, talking about art, talking about action, talking about sound design, talking about where this franchise goes. Wow, He's very capable to hold his own in conversation with Michael, and then some and Michael and I are students to him.
I mean, we're not trying to go in and teach
him what the movie business is. This is a whole new medium for us as well, and we're really trying to define what I always refer to as our tradigital strategy, which is taking the best of traditional in terms of the business practices which have all been but perfected over one hundred and some years of filmmaking, but the nimbleness of UGC and the opportunity for a filmmaker or a designer or an animator like him to make something, to post it to an audience, to get an immediate feedback
loop from that audience to know what's working, and even more interesting, allowing that IP to be shared and so that other creators can take advantage of it. And that's one of the things that is really different than anything that we've worked with before. Typically, we issue takedowns and we're ready to, you know, kind of make sure that nobody is messing with something that we know that we want to control. In this case, we've taken a very
different approach to this. We want creators to play with our IP. We want to make sure that people are doing things obviously within reason, so long as it kind of follows a certain guideline for us. But it is something that we believe is kind of the internets, and we want to make sure that people have the ability to play with that and to enjoy it, which is what it's really exciting.
So talk about that change in approach, because I mean, that is very counter to the way it used to be, and there does seem to be a lot of copycatting out there. Aren't you afraid to let this lose complete control, especially in the age of AI where this could really get out of control.
Well, yeah, I mean, look, there's thankfully we have great protections in terms of copyrights and trademarks, which gives us a lot of you know, a lot of leverage in terms of who we allow to work on this property and who we don't. There are probably about twenty channels that are doing really quality episodes of skivity toilet channels on YouTube, channels on YouTube, and of those, there may be even like sixty or seventy that are doing less
frequent updates and content. The less frequent we're fine with. We don't, you know, we don't really pay attention to we celebrate them. But the twenty that are doing really credible content, we consider them part of our alliance. It's the toilets versus the alliance. The alliance are the good guys, and the alliance is what we're building into this network of other channels that are making content for us. Boom
is able to look at those scripts beforehand. Boom is able to address any creative concerns to make sure it's following the same kind of narrative that we're looking after. But we want to help those channels. We want to help those channels build, and we want to help those channels be able to continue doing what we're doing because
he can't post every single day and YouTube. The algorithm posts, you know, and the more people that are posting, the more that it helps, the discovery for it, the more people that are introduced to it, and so that alliance is something that we've been building. Again, it's super counterintuitive to anything I've been involved with before, but it's been working because we're living in a world where the content is now free, So it's all the other businesses that
we're able to monetize around it. So knowing that the content is free, the business is around it for whether it's roadblocks or consumer products or life lissing. Those are businesses that we're really trying to encourage to, you know, to make sure that that content is serving up those other businesses.
Well, now let's talk about those other businesses, because I think what got a lot of people's eyebrows up was you know, obviously, people see that main YouTube business, They see this tremendous traffic, and people wonder like, okay, maybe he's just you know, building a business entirely on YouTube, and he's you know, keeping the control there. Maybe he's going to move off platform at some point, who knows. Then the deal with Bonkers gets announced, the deal with
your company and Michael Bay. Okay, the merchandise piece of this comes into view. But then we see Michael Bay and your name, and we're starting to think, okay, movies, TV, other things got to be coming. So what business is starting with merchandise? Starting with you know, Comic CON's coming, Halloween is coming. We feel like there's movement towards the mainstream here, So explain the other businesses and what we could see coming down the pipe.
Well, to be clear, this is the mainstream. True YouTube is about his mainstream as it gets.
The conventional old school.
Yeah, well so traditional, we'll call it. Sure, this lends itself very well. I will say that Michael and Jeffrey Becroft, who's his longtime production designer and a colleague of his that's worked with him on all of his movies, have been working very closely with Alexi to design art, to start to really professionalize the kind of back engine of this, to make sure that if we ever decide to go film or television, that this is kind of lifted beyond
just the resources that creators have on the Internet. We are absolutely in talks right now both on the television side and the earliest comer stations right now on the film side. But it's not a be all, end all for us, you know. We want to make sure that we are able to support all the other businesses that have been built in this fly flywheel that Invisible Narratives has helped to create for Boom and the other ip that we work with. But film and television is a flex.
It looks cool. It helps to kind of fuel the consumer product business, which is obviously a really important thing. It helps buyers at Walmart or Target to know that there's going to be media and ads spent against this thing. But we're pretty successful just on YouTube as it is right now. So if we stay in this world, we're okay. And if we move into more traditional then that would just be for Michael and I pretty awesome and for Boom, our creator kind of a lifelong dream of his.
Okay. Before we revisit that, though, how important is this merchandise piece, because that feels like the first piece of these business this is and it feels like that's what's coming this fall.
Yeah, I mean, there's two thesiss that my company has. One is that we believe that IP is not going to come from rebooting The Fall Guy or looking at television shows that were frankly old when I was a kid, right. IP is going to come from TikTok and YouTube for
where the audience is actually at right now. So our business is solely focused on trying to find those things, discover those things, nurture those things, and bring traditional resources, creative resources, or business resources to those creators so that we can essentially build out the next generation of blockbusters that are organic to young people in their lives. The second is that kids don't want to pay for content.
They want to pay for stuff, and stuff is something that is really important for them and Bonkers what we've seen and we looked at all the traditional toy companies and new toy companies, Bonkers gets it. They understand that when kids are walking through the aisles of or target right now, the toys that stick out to them are not things that were their parents or their grandparents' favorites.
They're things that they actually recognize. So YouTube, whether it's Lanky Box or af Mau or Ryan's World or whatever it is, these are the things that kids are really leaning into. And so the toy program that launches this fall with Bonkers is going to be sick and what comes over the next twelve months, even after this, the design of where this is going is something that we believe can be as robust as some of the toy businesses that Michael was involved with prior to Skivity Toilet
and could be something years from now. That's pretty significant.
So could you tell us what kind of toys we could expect?
Well, everything now from mystery packs to role play to vehicles to.
You know, you name it.
There's really not a category anything that you would expect to see for Transformers or a Marvel toy or anything like that. Obviously, not everything comes online in the fall, but all the designs at this point because the franchise has everything. It has weapons, it has role play, it has characters, it has action figures, it has puzzles, it has games, it has publishing.
It really has all the.
Things that you're looking for in a mega hit so far. And that's a testament to the imagination of our creator.
Yes, however, then I wonder whether, especially given the title, given the I don't know if you call it the protagonist, but the toilet main character, is that all that going
to fly at Walmart? Is the violence gonna fly? I just wonder, especially when you're you know, you're looking at some of the press this has gotten, especially globally when there's talk about, you know, the moral panic, and you know, there's been headlines about like where they've actually talked about a skibbity toilet syndrome where kids, I mean, it's hard to take this stuff, si, I know where you know, kids have trouble potty training because of skibbity toilet and
they're afraid, you know, heads are going to pop out of toilets, Like, could this stuff actually create a problem for introducing this to a mass market? It's beloved so clearly.
I you know, I am not a retail expert that you know, we'll see the proof when you know, it starts rolling out at this point. But what I what I believe is we are seeing a very significant audience from episode to episode that's not growing significantly at this point just simply because it's so significant, But it's not dipping. We are seeing like real consistency in terms of who
this audience is. And I think again, part of the you know, part of the thing that you and I or all of my friends or any of my kids, even in my own house look at sometimes and think this is weird and obscure is exactly the thing that makes it awesome. It's the thing that makes it unique and interesting and cool. And yeah, there's a toilet, but the toilet is the toilets are a small part of
this franchise. And if you, as I said earlier, if you take the toilets out of it and you look at it, it's no different than Optimists and Bumblebee and Megatron. These are giant mechanized warriors that are having gigantic, dynamic battles and you know, terrific action.
We'll be right back with Adam Goodman and more on skibbity toilet, and we are back with Adam Goodman. Stephen Colbert had a little fun with Joe Biden and imagining what it might be like to well have a listen to what he did with this internet craze and the current president.
And of course for the very online skibbity Biden Biden.
Give me, give me evined, guit evided, give me these, give me evin that hiders like what tron.
Trump Trump is, use Hitler's Likewhitler's like what Trump is?
Useless language, giv d give.
Me Now, if you don't understand that video, your grandchildren will explain it and you still won't understand.
So, Adam, when you hear something like that, does that sort of uh give you a sense that it's kind of like priming the older audience for accepting what could be a household name for even people who are not in the target audience, that will give them a sense of what could be something that their kids or grandkids are soon going to be asking for.
Or does that No, we have such a long way to get from where we are right now with our audience to Stephen Colbert's audience at this point.
But that's okay.
There's a lot of audience that there's younger audience that we need to accept in, and there's slightly older audience that we need to convert to being less wary of the brain rot and more aware of the episodes, the storytelling and the narrative that's being leaned into this at this point.
So you said that, you know, there's sort of the earliest conversations going on about taking this property to film or TV. Why isn't it essential? I mean, can you really make the same amount of money on digital platforms on just YouTube? What about also the other digital platforms. I mean, it's certainly got a presence on TikTok. What is your general approach here in terms of monetization, because I would have, oh no, you gotta have the you know, a cinematic universe for this.
Yeah.
No.
I mean, look, there have been very successful businesses that have been wholly organic to the digital space. If you look at what Ryan did with his toy business, this is a business that has done solidly nine figures worth of toy sales alone over the last number.
Of years Ryan meaning Ryan's World.
Yeah, and eventually Ryan switched over to Nickelodeon, but its main driver was his YouTube channel. So going traditional is fantastic, and our design for it is something that we aspire
to make something that is really awesome. I look at what fortiesh and Netflix did with our Cane and that was a terrific series in something that you look at and again as a video game person, it seems obvious now, but at the time, none of these things are obvious, and we do believe that we can do something that is really like, really cool and more anime and more sophisticated than what the YouTube channels do every single day, just because of resources that are there. But the business
is so beyond YouTube. Roadblocks is something that our licensee, our license partners who are using Skibty and Roadblocks are doing such a phenomenal amount of hours spent with our IP. And so what's incredible about this IP is that some kids are finding it through YouTube, and some kids are finding it through Roadblocks and don't even really know all
that much about the YouTube channel of its own. They're learning the characters and they're modeling it, they're twinning with their characters, they're talking to their friends about it.
So there's a whole other.
World that Michael and I have learned about over the last few years of being in this business that is as significant as anything that we've ever been involved with in our entire careers. And film and television will only give us escape velocity and allow us to do amazing things and to develop this out that years from now it be still has real relevance. But if we don't do film and television, it's still something that has, you know,
incredible business opportunities. For The key is right now is that when you're working with traditional partners, which is fantastic, but number one, you're always subject to mother may I, Mother, may I do another season? Mother may I, you know, do a new toy line?
Mother may I?
You know?
And and so right now we have a lot of control over this ip and in giving our creator the ability to do things that typically once they go into a partnership with a film or TV studio, they may be firewalled.
From some of their imagination at that point. Okay, it's just in terms of I kind of liken it to an organ transplant. I just wonder whether once you take this property out of YouTube, whether that's sort of underground appeal that I feel like it has could somehow be lost. He himself, Alexi Boom has talked about not wanting for it to feel corporate, and with all due respect to yourself to Michael Bay, does the association you guys bring, does that risk it turning corporate?
I mean, I don't think that any of the properties that Michael and I have been involved with are necessarily thought of as being corporate. They're commercial, they're blockbusters. There are things that you know, again Michael, not me. I was only lucky enough to be the executive on those things. But I think with vision, this becomes something you know, imagine. Again, this is kind of crazy to think about because we're
thinking through the lens of everything that we've seen. But if you thought about this more of a John Wick District nine version, where it's a hybrid of live action and you know, incredible you know, visual effects and animation, something like this and some of the art that we are developing and seeing right now can be so badass and so spectacular and so different than what anything that you've looked at and yes, you may look at this thing at first and kind of blink your eyes at
this and say it's not for me, but our hope and the challenge is this is to make sure.
That it's awesome.
What we won't do is make something just to make it that would be a money grab and that we're not interested in doing because the business is doing so well for us right now. But if we find a partner in this that really believes that there is opportunity for this to grow and to really see the storytelling grow and for this to be what we hope this can be, then film and TV seems like a natural extension for us.
I mean, you say live action, and we should note this thing barely has dialogue. I mean, there's been over seventy episodes. I guess you know there are multiple minutes. It's hard for me to even imagine like actors in it, Like is Glenn Powell going to show up and you know, audition with a toilet over his head?
I just like it.
Boggles the mind here. I mean, I actually wonder whether it's international appeal is the fact that there is no dialogue. It's just sort of translatable. Do you feel like that's part of the appeal.
It's it's it absolutely. I mean, our international numbers are staggering for this. I would age we have a massive US audience to it, but it peals in comparison to the rest of the globe. At this point, I'm certain that it feels localized in every region it plays simply because there is a little dialogue in this. But the great thing about where we're going with this is we've been slowly putting dialogue into the episodes and the audience is reacting great to it.
Well. I can't wait for the theme park rydes that I think will be the cherry on top. Thank you so much for coming in, Adam. This has been a really interesting conversation. I can't wait to see what you do with this next. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. And now for a bonus segment. You may not have heard of skibbety toilet before, but you may have heard the word skibbety or riz phantom tax yeah sigma.
Now to the untrained ear, these words may sound like total gibberish, but when I heard them come out of the mouths of my next guess, I learned there something of a second language among Generation Z and Alpha, and they're known as brain rot. Think of it as online subculture where skibbety toilet is just one of many, many,
really really stupid memes. And because my Generation X mind is too old and feeble to comprehend any of this, I am joined by my own sixteen year old son Max and his best pal Eli to help me make sense of it all. Thanks for joining me in studio, gentlemen.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, thank you.
Let's just start real simple here and no pressure. But you're here basically as representatives of everyone on earth, like eighteen and under. What does skibbity mean?
It really has no meaning at all, but really, yeah, there's no meaning behind skibvity. Well, it comes from a meme before the skibbity toilet meme, so like the skivvity
toilet is like an animated show. And then it comes from a previous meme in which it's like some a Bulgarian song and like a fat guy like a belly dance, like a song, fat guy dancing like shaking his belly, and it's like a Bulgarian song, and it's like it sounds like the song is saying skibbty, like it's completely gibberish, like, but that's where the word is taken from, and then they made the serious off of that.
So but but what are we what are we old people supposed to take to the fact that the language is gibberish and means nothing, like, what's the point of saying it?
Then there are brain rot terms that have meaning, but the term skibbety has no true definition and is more of just like a filler word to throw in when you're talking about brain rot.
Right, So then let's get to a word that you mentioned, phantom tax, Like, right, what does that mean?
So this comes from the popular streamer Kaisinat and he has a friend named Phantom who likes to take his food while he's streaming and take a few bites of his food. And people kind of took that and started calling it the phantom tax.
Uh huh, Yeah, that makes sense. But like skibbity is, there's no like etymological meaning or anything. It's it's just complete gibberish and it's completely meaningless.
Okay, I'm starting to understand why this is called brain rot because these words really I mean, well, first of all, like, should we actually be concerned for the state of your brains, Like is this a medical condition?
No, not our brains, but the young generations.
Yeah, the young one.
Oh so you as like we should at at sixteen, you're sort of like the bottom end of generation ZE, but you're worried about the alphas.
Well, we're fine, Like we think like this stuff is funny because they think it's funny and they take it like seriously.
But brain rot and just like like TikTok in general, has a lot of like negative side effects. For example, it messes with attention spans and also memory consuming like hours of just short form videos with no meaning behind them does negatively impact a memory, especially in younger kids who are consuming it like all day long.
Okay, so there is actual reason for concern here. Is there any part of brain rot that is like redeemable, Like like what about Riz? I mean, you know, riz seems to be something that's like that seems to be something.
Cool, like yeah, I mean that that has a meaning. It comes from charisma. It's just it's short for that, right, It's just like your play like how much he can you attract women?
Yeah, which begs the question, I mean, do you guys have riz?
Oh yeah, a lot of riz.
Is that measurable?
It's hard to measure, but it can be done.
Do I have riz?
I mean you have a wife and kids, so I guess.
So if I have a wife and kid, that meets you had to wife? Is a verb too?
Yeah, yeah, it's it's actually multiple parts of speech.
Yeah, a lot.
Like a lot of these brain rot terms.
Are it can be noun verb interesting? Yeah, okay, Well what about brain rot in general? Do you think it's going to be like a lasting media phenomenon that will grow as the generation that made it popular grows with it, Like it'll soon be like a television aesthetic.
I think brain rot will definitely evolve into like other things, not just like skibbity toilet like on TikTok. At least there's definitely like trends that appear every now and then of like different types of brain rot like subgroups. Right, Like RIZ was probably one of the first ones to come up, and that was like many years ago, like twenty twenty two, maybe twenty twenty three. Skibbity toylets more recent, you know, phantom text too, Like it kind of like
it grows over time. But I think it'll probably just stay as like a TikTok joke brain rock terms.
Yes, I would also say it's worth noting that I think the word brain rot has sort of migrated as a definition, Like I think I think it originally meant like just that specific set of stupid, weird memes that were created by Jen Alfha, like skimby toilet and stuff like that. I think, like, like, do you agree, do you think people use it as just meme culture in general now as like anything stupid on TikTok?
Yeah, why don't you think adults get brain rot? Like why don't they understand it and kind of freaked out by it?
They didn't make it? Yeah, I can't blame them. It's really weird.
Even us as gen z don't really get it because we didn't really come up with it.
The younger generation did, so we don't. We don't think it's like funny. We just think it's funny that they think it's funny. So I mean we're laughing at them. Yeah, they're laughing at the brain rot like they think it's funny. We're laughing at them, like we're making a joke.
Like I've tried to talk to my little sister about brain rot, right, I asked her if she if she knew about skibbity toilet, and she told me that she dabbles in skibbity toilet from time to time, and she was pretty serious about it. It didn't seem like a joke to her, and she couldn't really tell that I was joking, which is a little it's a little scary, I think.
But yeah, I mean, like I guess that sort of talks to the point of like just the scope of it. Because like if you I don't know about you, but you can tell me your experience. But if you ask like any nine or ten year old or like somebody around that age range, like chances are they know what skimmity toy it is. I'd say like seventy percent of children that age know what you're talking about.
It's not as if like other forms of entertainment, they're gone, right usual TV shows, movies, whatnot. It's not like we could waive all that goodbye and brain row takes over everything exactly.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's it will be hard for brain rot, for the entertainment industry to sort of market brain rot to the general public if they want to. But I mean they've made a ton of stupid things, like they made Five Nights at freddy That's a movie now like that started out?
Is like that comes from a video game with like an actual storyline like that. There's substance to that.
No, but it's it's it's a younger like gen X isn't playing five Nuts at Freddy's And they made it into a movie.
But what can you really like mark it off of brain ro I mean there's no meaning, there's no story behind.
Yeah, it will be hard to market that.
But you realize that, you know, not too long ago they had these kinds of conversations about like how are they going to turn the Transformers or Lego into a movie? And look at it now, so you never know. While we're on this subject, Max, we should point out this is not your first time on this podcast. Five years ago, at the tender age of eleven, you came on to discuss your impressions of virtual reality technology and you express
some optimism for the development of this market. Let's take a listen.
I think I'll probably do more because it's going to be more updated and more improved, and you can do more things, and it's probably going to be like, you know, like everyone's going to be into it. It's going to be like right now, VR is like the biggest thing, and it has used to grow and more people use it.
So yeah, first of all, ain't puberty a kick? Second, it's awesome that Eli is here too, because you guys often played VR games together remotely over the years. So I want to hear you both comments on how you feel today about the state of VR as an entertainment device versus when you first started years ago. Do you feel that sense of optimism still.
I feel optimistic still, but I don't think it exactly met my expectations that I set when I was eleven. I don't think VR has gotten substantially bigger as I as I said five years ago, but I still play it from time to time. I often I've had, like, you know, several two week three week phases, Yeah, phases where I play like super diligently.
I'd have to agree with Max. I think, like at the age that he spoke on that podcast, like, I definitely had much higher hopes for VR. I thought it was going to get a lot bigger, like technologically, but it hasn't. I haven't seen a lot of change and it definitely hasn't gone that much bigger. The Apple Vision Pro did have some pretty cool like features and stuff, and it's definitely an interesting piece of technology, but I think VR has a long way to go before it gets a lot bigger.
Well, we'll just have to check in again in another five years, and then another five years till eventually you inherit the Strictly Business podcast from me and are asking your own child about what he thinks of the next generation of devices. Sorry, like you're gonna have to get your own podcast, but I'm confident that you will. Yeah, and I thank you both for joining me today.
Thank you, Thank you.
Thanks for listening.
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