The guys, @mrbenja and @the_real_theo_harvey, are back at it again with another banger episode. In this episode, some local updates from Russel Brunson and Dr.Benjamin Hardy, Alex Hormozi going in on Skool and community, Influencer vs Old Media; how do they differ? Overall thoughts on the Blue Eye Samurai from Netflix, and many more!
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Show vs. Business is your weekly take on Pop Culture from two very different perspectives. Your hosts Theo and Mr. Benja provide all the relevant info to get your week started right.
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Follow us on Instagram - https://instagram.com/show_vs_business
Follow us on Twitter - https://twitter.com/showvsbusiness
Like us on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/ShowVsBusiness
Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuwni8la5WRGj25uqjbRwdQ/featured
Follow Theo on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@therealtheoharvey
Follow Mr.Benja on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BenjaminJohnsonakaMrBenja
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The guys, @mrbenja and @the_real_theo_harvey, are back at it again with another banger episode. In this episode, some local updates from Russel Brunson and Dr.Benjamin Hardy, Alex Hormozi going in on Skool and community, Influencer vs Old Media; how do they differ? Overall thoughts on the Blue Eye Samurai from Netflix, and many more!
----------
Show vs. Business is your weekly take on Pop Culture from two very different perspectives. Your hosts Theo and Mr. Benja provide all the relevant info to get your week started right.
----------
Follow us on Instagram - https://instagram.com/show_vs_business
Follow us on Twitter - https://twitter.com/showvsbusiness
Like us on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/ShowVsBusiness
Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuwni8la5WRGj25uqjbRwdQ/featured
Follow Theo on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@therealtheoharvey
Follow Mr.Benja on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BenjaminJohnsonakaMrBenja
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Theo Harvey: This is show versus business where pop culture meets pop money with your host, the real Theo Harvey and Mr. Benja. So Mr. Benja, what's been going on? Man,
Mr.Benja: it's been wild. And we are officially in 2024, getting the 2024 new year flow on. We have met. It sounds like we're in the future. If you watch stuff like the old Terminator movie, they talk about things going down in 2029.
We're about to start hitting that era, man. And we got some interesting ones. Some things you might want to talk about. We might not. People are calling people out again, not just Kat Williams, but everybody's jumping on it. Stephen A. Smith, the business bully. Your boy Alex Hormozy is out here putting investments into community and not into social media as much.
We got Elon Musk talking noise. As usual with the X, the everything app we've been watching some things. I went ahead and watched a blue eyed samurai. You told me to check that out and star Wars and Disney plus I just dropped, but you're apparently still on it. We got to talk about that. Maybe all kinds of stuff going on, man.
AI versus intellectual property people. Why aren't they? Why aren't they messing with the intellectual property laws at a corporate level? It only appears like regular people are crying about it. And there's always some influencer doing something out there. So a lot going on this week.
Theo Harvey: How are you feeling?
I'm feeling good, man. This is the second week. We just finished the second week in January. So I'm on my 10x is easier than 2x tip. Got my one sheet. With Dr. Benjamin Hardy with my goals on the way before we film this podcast, I was telling you a little bit about putting my daughter on to we did our goal setting what last week, last weekend, and We talked about goal setting and preparing for that.
And I was listening to the podcast, Dr. Benjamin Hardy's podcast in the car with her from lunch. And, I said, Hey, this is exactly what I was telling you. Why we do the things we do. And she was just like, she's. Preteen. So 11, 12 years old, about to be 12. So she rolls her eyes, but man, yeah, she grown man.
So I'm putting seeds in it right now, man. These seeds, I may not see for years, decades even, but I'm sure it's going to come sprout up one day. She might have a podcast of her own and she'll talk about Dr. Benjamin Hardy. So there you go, man. This is one of those things. You just plant the seed and just let it ride.
So yeah, I was telling her about, So I'm super hype. Like I almost got down on myself this week, Mr. Benji. Cause I was like, man, I don't think I got a lot done. And then I did my weekly review. I was a banger. I was like, dang, I did all this. It was like one of those things where he's, Oh, wow. Close. I closed some deals, I moved forward with some of my funnels.
I spent some time, my kids, I did everything. I pretty much put. On the thing to do. But in a moment, there was moments where I was just resting and I was like, I'm a joker right now. I'm watching too much TV. But then when you reflect back on a whole weekend, you're like, wow, I did get a lot done. You just don't realize that until you put it context.
And now I see the power of, focus on the. Gain, not the gap. And so look at the positive momentum you gained last week. And that gave me energy. Oh, wow. So I'm super excited that we're going to do even more next week. And so I think that's, I think I cracked the code. I keep you posted over the next several weeks and months, but I'm super excited about what's possible
Mr.Benja: here.
I like how that sounds, man. And I know what you're talking about. It's that I don't want to say defeatist, but you feel like, man, did I even make a dent? Did I do anything? And what's all this for? Why do I feel like this? I don't know. Maybe that's just me, but I'm like. I was getting this little down feeling, right?
And then then I jumped online and one of my friends randomly pops on Instagram and says, Hey, I like that podcast you did about such and such. And I was like. This guy was like the head of one of the big video game organizations out there. And he's all connected to people, comes from Harvard.
And he gave me this shout out. And I was like, you know what? If that guy gave me a shout out, cool, man I'm feeling better. So I started latching on just recently to this new thing. I'm calling it, other people have used this phrase, but I'm calling it like the next logical step. Like when you're in the middle of doing something.
If you're iterating properly, you've got, at least for me, it works when I don't feel I've got everything done. But I'm working in the middle of something and then I'm like, okay, let me close this off and tomorrow I'll come back and add this piece and it starts giving you a little bit of hope for the next day.
Like it's incomplete. You're not done. You don't feel good about it not being done, but you feel good about the process and knowing that there's something coming. Tomorrow or the next week or on the next cycle, but you can just feel good about that. Oh man, we're going to save this one for the sequel.
And by the time the sequel comes out, that'll be good. So it's like this constantly moving goal. You know what I mean?
Theo Harvey: Absolutely. I think one moment me and my My marketing lead, we working on a project in marketing. And I was like, we did this a year ago. It didn't go too well. We were struggling, but that's, Oh, we need to get this done a day.
So we just scrambled, got this thing up and running from a marketing play standpoint. And we did it. And it was like, wow, all those skills we learned that was painful a year ago, it was like a snap now. And this blew my mind is almost What's the term? Like maybe Ironman, you build on what you already know, but you forget that you really moved far until you go back to it again.
You're like, Oh, this is easy now. So it's and then even at the beginning of the year, I set this on my Thursday night live with one of my entrepreneur that speak to you on a weekly basis. Shout out Thursday night live with Theo and I. G. Check it out. Bars. What we talked about was, I'm super excited because now when I said beginning year, from scratch.
Okay. Wow. I'm a new person. I'm a new man. We're going to get this going. But then you realize, wait a minute, I've gained all these skills from last year. So you start compressing everything. Oh, I already know how to do this. I just need to add this little piece to it. Oh, I've done this before. And you forgot, you don't start from zero.
Sometimes I always Oh, my ground zero again. New year was almost like, Oh, I just do more what I did before, but better now that no more have more context, have different viewpoints. Now, when I go back to that thing, I was like, Oh, why was I struggling with that? It's not that hard anymore.
And so that to me is amazing. So I definitely, highly recommend everyone just relish the game, man. If you don't, then. It's just changing my life because that's giving me energy and fuel to do more. And then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, just really relish the game and record the game because if you don't record the game, you're going to forget that you did it and then you're going to get frustrated.
So anyway, that's my two cents, but I know exactly what you're talking about. The next logical step and moving forward and getting an energy for the next day and kind of added to it. So I love it. Yeah,
Mr.Benja: definitely. I don't know if if you ever had a run in with this concept of, show me something today.
Today concept. We had that at one of my previous companies. All of a sudden, it was just like, hey, big dog manager person. Hive in the company wants to see this. Okay, when? And it's everybody just does the spit take huh? Spits out all their water. What? And the whole thing is just yeah, let's stop what we're doing.
Laser light focus on this one thing. They wanted a demo of a certain piece of the game. It's Hey, listen, I don't care what else happens. Just show me this today. And. It's amazing how that today thing can just, everything else just goes out the window and you can really focus and get stuff done. So in my journaling, we're talking about Benjamin Hardy.
One of the things I did at the beginning of the year was updated my journaling. So now I have this concept of today. So I start the day I'm writing out my ideas, thoughts, goals, aspirations, whatever you want to call them on one side of the paper. And at the very top, I started using that space above the date.
I just write in today and then something's got to happen. It's like, all right, I'm going to put together a website for, and I was like, you know what? I don't even feel like paying for a website. Let me just throw up a blogger website. And, but it was done today, it was a free one from blogger.
I created that and I was like, that's cool. Oh, they added this and this today started dumping stuff on it. I was like I'm supposed to go to video and screw video. I'm going to record the podcast today. And it was just like that, that just one word and that at the top of my journal entry for the day, it just said, today, this, we're going in this direction.
So it's just a very interesting and freeing actually, it actually frees me of a lot of responsibility because I'm like, okay, all that other stuff to decide, nothing's going to burn down and explode in the span of 24 hours, I can do this today.
Theo Harvey: And Dr. Benjamin Hardy talks about that all the time, just the compressing timeframes.
And so let's say you have a 10 year goal. Can you get done in a year? Let's say your year goes, can you get it done in 90 days? Yeah, 90 day goes, can you get it done in a week? And so if you can start compressing, and to your point, your mind looks, finds what it's searching for. So if you start looking for ways to compress that time frame, you'll find it.
And it's amazing if you just put like that today helps you filter. That's your floor, right? That's your filter now. And so now you're like, hey, I have to get this done today. So what does that mean? Doesn't mean there's different ways you could do it. You could, like you say, you could build a big old website, set all this up, go to WordPress, or you can find any blog.
That's fine. That's today. Yeah, today. So I love that, man. The way to raise your floor on the timing mechanism of when you get your things done. And that's what I'm learning to. I want to compress that time frame because there's a lot of things I want to do. And man, we could talk about this for hours.
Mr Benja. We could really good real
Mr.Benja: quick. And this is gonna lead into the next part. Really quick. The. The idea of who not how we were talking about whether the who is chat GPT or a person or just whatever, not necessarily you doing the whole thing being the point. That's important. But I remember I called somebody and said, Hey, listen, what would you think about?
The normal requirements were, as is as we expected, but you call them and say, Hey, would you be okay with the site being like this or the logo being this way and this and that, and then later on we can, and they were like, yeah, sure. I don't care about such and such. The thing I really want is X, Y, and Z.
And I was like, good. Cause I can get you that today. It was just, it's like when you start bringing in other people and making sure that their requirements are met too, because I didn't realize how much I was thinking about, I'm always thinking about the end user, like coming from video games the person liked to play it this way, will they turn off the game and, there's this unknown user out there who's playing the game that you're trying to think about, but in a lot of these social situations, I can just call them and be like, Hey What about this?
That's not great, but I can get it to you today. Oh, cool. Yeah, sure. I'll take that. What about next week? We'll get to that later, but I can get you this today. Sure. That other person is going to take, four days just to evaluate and Today, bro. I got you. So that's my word of the day today.
You
Theo Harvey: gotta say just like that. Put a bass in your voice. Say it with your chest. Today.
Mr.Benja: Speaking of today, I learned that Alex Hormozy. I don't know if you knew about this one. Let me ask you this. Did you know Alex Hormozy is investing in school? Putting in a stake. You sent me his tweet, but I didn't know that he was actually putting in money to this thing.
Theo Harvey: Let's first define what school is. It's not your typical public school that we went to elementary all the way to high school. This is pro basically a community that was built by a platform built by Sam ovens. A big time. I would say what internet. Entrepreneur slash guru. He created this platform.
How does Sam ovens become known into the community? You probably know better than I do. Sam ovens started
Mr.Benja: this company called consulting. com. He wouldn't spend all his money to get consulting. com and basically what he found that he he came from software development in some sense and he found that he was really he's very focused, just quiet programmer type individual.
And he would come into a situation and say why are you doing that? I was, yeah, you don't need to do that. Why are you doing this? What, don't do that. And he was just, he was that laser light focus guy. Speaking of 80 20, dude was the 4%, damn the other 96%. But he took so many people into millionaire status, multi millionaire status.
Who are just regular Joe's and they're like, why are you charging all this money? And he's yeah, cause I got a playbook that basically will get rid of all that nonsense and get you where you need to be. Danielle Leslie was actually how I found out about him. I don't know if you know her.
She's she teaches courses on how to teach courses. Okay. So she blew up the entire course world with her courses and was really good at it. She actually worked for Skillshare at one point and yeah, Sam ovens, found her and was like, you suck. And she was like, what are you talking about?
What do you know? He's I knew you should do this. And yeah, he took her to like humongous status. And I was like, Holy crap, she blew up. Sam Lovins did that with consulting. com. So now he figured out that he was moving so fast that his community was better than his Consulting dot com thing. And he was like, you know what?
I can sell this whole consulting. com thing and work on building community. Because if that's getting me this much money, imagine how much money you can get other people. And he shifted his 4 percent into this thing now called school, which is basically a community platform. You can think of it as a forum, extended version of discord Kajabi, it's got elements of all this community and.
Selling. Maybe you could explain a little bit
Theo Harvey: too. Yeah. The way I understood it to the gap in the pro was the Facebook groups, right? You were one of the fundamental guys that kind of, I knew about Facebook groups really from you, but it was a big thing that blew up, pre pandemic, even where people would just get together and communicate and have engagements around different type of shared Likes and hobbies and things of that nature.
Like we have one based on comment books, right? Go figure. Who would have thunk? But yeah, so with Sam Evans saw the problem was that it was too limiting, right? Facebook. Restrictions notwithstanding, but it was just more around just around communication and sharing where he saw opportunities to gamify, communities to get people up to different levels that excited about sharing, keeping people more engaged.
On the day to day with new content and having course capabilities, like you said, teachable. You're familiar with that platform as well, having components of that. And then he just recently added a paywall so people can start getting compensated for creating these type of communities.
And so I think he gave it away almost free for a long time and got all these guys. He's coaching consultant gurus out there starting with it. Ryan Pineda, the first time I heard about it was really from Ryan Pineda. When I took his course, he put a lot of his courses on there and then he started his whole program was built around school.
And and when I was in there, I realized, Oh, this is how this works. So yes, you have a rapper names brand there, but he's got community moderators. But what's important is because they gamify. The platform so well, people are incentivized to comment, share, provide insight. And so they can go up different levels and obviously with different levels, gets different access to Ryan, maybe with some free content things like that.
So I saw Ryan Pineda do it. And then another guru that we both talked about previously, Dan Henry, he recently went all in on his school platforms, all his. Courses are there now. And now he's gotten this community that he's built pretty rapidly to about 1200 people. Less than three months or so.
And so that is what, Alex Hermosi probably saw when he approached Sam Evans about investing. And we talked about Hermosi many times on this platform, but Hermosi is, on his path to be a billionaire came out, Jim launched Yeah. And then really started building out a platform around providing basically a free game to folks about how to build scalable businesses, right?
He's got the 100 million offers and the 100 million leads. He's got some other books coming down the pipeline. Yeah, so to your point, you got Sam ovens who came from this world, built the software piece, built a product that seems to be working well. It's growing pretty aggressively and you got.
This guru that just came out of nowhere, blew up the Internet. It's got almost, a million followers across all the platforms. Homo Mosey and his wife, Layla. And now they're combining forces. So Mr. Benja, what does that look like when you have these two entities coming together? Where do you think this is going?
Mr.Benja: I don't know how Hormozy plays into this, but I don't know if this is even a legitimate fact here, but this some private equity guy, says on Twitter, Alex and Layla Hormozy just acquired a stake in school. And blah, blah, blah. I'm sure it was an eight figure investment. Was it? I don't know.
Six figure investment. I don't know. Seven. I don't know. But the traffic that Alex and Layla get from all that they've been doing, I don't know how well that plays into acquisition. com. It's great traffic. It's great attention. The two books, a hundred million dollar offers and a hundred million dollar leads.
Those are phenomenal in terms of traffic, but. Implementing all that traffic in a way to push behind school, which automatically leads all these people into building communities. And that whole pricing model of, Hey, let me pay into something monthly and get that recurring revenue.
That's surely attractive to what he's got going on with acquisition. com. So there's speculation there, but I think that's a good match for both of them. Sam ovens, much more quiet type. Shove off a lot of the marketing and influencer kind of side. He's listen, I'm just focused on making school.
My thing who, not how, Hey, Alex, you're my who let's go. And then Alex is Hey, once again, how do I do this? And how do I, where do I funnel all this traffic to and where can we put them? And Hey, community's working out great. So I don't know, it just seems like
Theo Harvey: a match. And if you listen to Alex Hermoses, his big focus has been obviously, he came from education companies and he came from the gym world.
And or more like retail, small mom and pop shops. And so a lot of the portfolio from my understanding is like the retail, like a photography shop, a gym shop, that he invested tons, dentist, private equity. Basically, he's getting a percentage of the company and he's going to get it, on the back end when they sell it or they, get acquired by someone bigger, later on, but this is interesting.
So he's going all in on the education platform, and I'm sure this is probably they probably pitch Sam moments, probably multiple times until they finally figured out what makes sense because I figured this is a big well for them because to your point, he's a content creator. He can probably put a lot of his stuff on there, right?
If he ever decides to do that. But I think that's too small potatoes for him. I think he's thinking that this could be the gateway. So let's say if he gets portfolio companies, they automatically get a school access, right? And they can create their own kind of programs, no matter what you do, you can create a.
a course on what you do, right? And that, I think that's the vision now. And even my thing, I'm trying to create a course around what we do in the healthcare space. No one's doing it right. And it's hard to do, but if you crack that code, man, you really have a stable customer because Russell Brunson talked about this.
You inflect them with your philosophies and once the people had. Bought into your philosophies, they're a buyer for life at that point. And so the education component I see as why Alex went all in on something like school, especially if they build a platform that keeps people engaged for the long term.
Cause that's the hardest part about community, Mr. Benja,
Mr.Benja: right? Yeah. And I'll I'll read it a little bit from his tweet. Definitely part of his strategy because big announcement. This is Alex Ramos. He's tweet here. Big announcement. I just made the largest investment of my life in the school dot com platform with millions of users.
Blah, blah, blah. Talks about school. And then he says, I've been looking for an opportunity to make starting a business accessible to everyone. And after, after four years, I finally found it. School is that opportunity. So then he goes on to push school a little bit and says, if that sounds interesting, we've got something big coming.
It involves business. Competition, money, prizes, and most importantly, you, it's like nothing you've ever seen before. You're going to love it. More details to follow. So as always putting a little bit of a, carrot underneath the glass, it's like, Hey, you want to come get this carrot and letting you getting you a little hype for the next thing, but it definitely tunes into his idea that.
He's not selling anything at the very low end. He wants to build like an incubator almost. So a farm, a farm league, that's the phrase I was looking for earlier. So start this little farm league of businesses. Once he finds out who can build up and pop off, he's you know what? You've already got you in the pipeline.
You're in the school communities. We've got this and this, I've got competition, money prizes between all of you.
Theo Harvey: Yeah. Let's go. Yeah. To your point, it's just. Better lead flow. For lack of a better term that's, if you're an investor, what you're looking for is more businesses to potentially buy.
So the content was one aspect of it. So basically he said, it has nothing to sell you. And he's getting all this game for free. And then, he put a filter out there. If 3 million in revenue, we'll talk. So obviously the quality is probably dipping now that lead flow.
Yeah, they made 3 million, but it doesn't have the other things that they need. So now I need to know more about their numbers. And the best way to do that is to actually be on a platform or have access to a platform that gives you numbers. That's probably what his angle is. He, he wants better quality lead flow to invest in, if they, he'll see the numbers.
Oh, look at this guy. He's growing, a hundred percent month on month. What do you want? I don't know what he's doing, but he figured it out. What do you want or the other way is reverse engineer what they did, right? And figure out how to help his portfolio companies.
Mr.Benja: Yeah. Yeah. It all seems to work out.
Yeah, it's funny, man. I'm just watching these people make these moves and seeing what's happening. Speaking of which a lot is changing and let me ask you this. Did you see the, some of these influencer moves that are being made right now? I think we referenced Joe Rogan a little bit last time. I can't remember, but Joe Rogan was talking ish to CNN, like how does CNN claim they're doing X, Y, and Z?
Man, I get 10 million views off of 45 minutes of a, he just starts going off. He's cNN, they only get a couple of thousand and they've been doing this for years. They got this big infrastructure. I'm in a room. What you got? Obviously that wasn't Joe Rogan's voice. That was my voice of Joe Rogan's attitude.
Theo Harvey: Very similar though, but that's pretty good.
Mr.Benja: Yeah. But yeah, regardless of what you think of Joe Rogan or anybody like this, the fact of calling out traditional media like this. There's a, there's, it's a not an upheaval, but there's a slow tilt happening in some way. So a lot of money's getting shifted.
A lot of the ways attention's moving around. It's getting shifted. I don't know. And you sent me some stuff too. What are you thinking about with the whole influencer situation right now?
Theo Harvey: I think is. You said influencer situation. I think the better way to define it would be influencer versus old media.
So that's what the urban is fighting against with seeing in the old media. So one of the stories that came out recently have you heard of a guy named Pat McAfee? I didn't know who this guy was to literally like. Late last year. So this is an ex-football player and not really one of the ones that did, something serious in football, like a line quarterback or receiver.
He was a punter . I think everyone knows that football punters don't get a lot of play in the NFL, he played sure then retired, then went on to get massive success on YouTube as a sports commentator. Think in the lines of barstool sports, right? Just very outrageous in your face.
Kind of guy. He wears a black T tank top, has a weird haircut. It just blew up to fame and part of that fame. He was able to get high profile folks on like Aaron Rogers, the top one of the top quarterbacks in the NFL right now. And so Now, I'd say this is a backdrop to the old media story. So at the time, ESPN, they had some layoffs recently.
If you don't know, ESPN is supposed to be the worldwide leader in sports. They were leading the conversations and having sports talk shows. You heard of Stephen A. Smith. I'm sure these big bombastic sports folks who have all kinds of opinion, but nothing about what's really going on the court or in the field, but you know about contracts about this, about that.
So it's, yeah. That was the driving force for ESPN for years. We do the recent cuts backs, as we know, ESPN is part of Disney. It's not the same anymore. And so Disney just said, Hey, we need to figure out how we're going to grow. And what they did for the first time ever, usually where you find talent, they just.
Hey, there's some money, you're going to be with us. You under our umbrella, you're an employee. This is the first time they ever did a licensee deal for pack McAfee show. And it just was amazing. He came in to see ESPN is basically making 85 million for the next five years for.
So
Mr.Benja: he's doing, let me make sure we were clear on this licensing. He's still doing basically his same show, but it's branded with like ESPN and shows up on ESPN. The outlet turns into ESPN for a while and then
Theo Harvey: yeah, so if I go into too many details around like exactly how the licensing deal is structured, but I do know that he's pretty much doing the same show that he did on YouTube.
But the fact is now he is under the, so ESPN is a distribution channel. I think he still has it on YouTube, but ESPN is like the main distribution channel. And because, he's part of the ESPN umbrella, he can show up on other ESPN shows like for instance, college game day, which is one of the key marquee shows that highlights college football, which is a growing sport.
One of the few, be honest with you, and I can tell you what's going on there too in a second, but so he is a key growth engine. So ESPN thought to grow into new spaces. And one of those spaces is young men. Who are looking to gamble is going all in on gambling and sports. We know that's a big thing, and so they need the audience to stay because that you remember, that's why is being was trying to buy barstool sports.
Remember, that was one of the big reasons they were, they wanted that college bro. Part of the ESPN umbrella so they can sell them because they have a new app ESPN bet as sports betting It's gonna be huge. So or it is huge.
Mr.Benja: Yeah, what's the name of the app that everybody likes to bet with?
Theo Harvey: I don't know. There's so many there's a yeah fan. No fan duel is more like dealing with them, you know What's it called? Fancy league. But yeah, there's a lot of them out there now. So a lot of guys, young guys, I know betting on football and stuff like that. And that's DraftKings. DraftKings.
Another one. Yep. Yep. FanDuel, DraftKings. They're all around the same, but real betting on sport sports is now a thing. And now they need the audience to drive traffic to these apps and these platforms. So make a long story short, Rodgers on. And recently, and basically they were hinting at one of the prized employees of Disney Jimmy Kimmel and incinerated that he was in cahoots with Jeffrey Epstein, who, as is person not Grada due to some of the unfortunate things
Mr.Benja: he did.
Subject strange, just section of humanity, anything connected with Epstein,
Theo Harvey: just a straight we don't get into those conspiracy theories, but yeah, go look it up. There's some names that were dropped. So everybody thinks anyone that list is. Basically, it cahoots with the shenanigans that Jeffrey M.
Sting got into. So we're not going to reiterate what those were but make a long story short, Jimmy Kimmel did not like that. It went off on, Pat McAfee and, Aaron Rodgers, of course, and Pat McAfee did a meal copa and said, Hey, I'm sorry. We will never do this again.
Aaron Rodgers will not show up on the show, but don't you know, Aaron Rodgers showed up the next damn day and double down on what he said about Jimmy Kimmel. And so now ESPN is between a rock and a hard place. On saying how, they can't really cancel this guy, because this, they brought him in for attention and he's doing exactly what he's supposed to do.
Draw attention to ESPN, but it wasn't the attention that ESPN wants. So I say this, Mr Benja is. New is old media ready for new media or is this the same tale that we've seen over and over again where these Influencers come on board to old media and flame out pretty rapidly because they can't come together See, I'm
Mr.Benja: what I wonder is like over time I think the biggest mind switch for me was back when AOL bought Time Warner and I was thinking wow, you mean the guys who Stuff all of my magazines with these stupid freebie discs.
I actually had a collection of those discs. It was like in the hundreds. It was stupid, but I collected those AOL discs at one point. I should have kept the collection. Could have sold it on eBay. But I, but AOL was this internet portal. They had all this money coming in and they went and bought Time Warner.
And I was like, wait a minute, you can do that? You could be a small upstart company and just have so much money flowing in that your stock rises and you can use your stock power and control in the market and all the attention you're getting to take over one of these bigger, older, established companies.
It just didn't seem right in my head at the time. I didn't understand it, but I was like, yeah, I guess this is how things can rock and roll and you can get down with it. And. While that played out in its own way, it's got me thinking of the way things happen now, where you can start to have companies like, What if DraftKing and Barstool or whoever gets big enough and they start taking away large chunks of old media?
Or what if old media says, Hey, listen, we'll do a deal where basically you buy our name, like you've seen those deals before where it's yeah, we're basically going to merge, be acquired by, or we're going to acquire some other company and we'll just transfer the name over as name recognition.
But we'll be out this new online entity. So you asked me what I thought about influencers in the new media versus the old traditional media. I think there's just going to be some bumpy transitions like that. Like whose name takes over is the name going to be ESPN two or maybe ESPN two becomes DraftKings, or just something like that.
What happens to these entities, the naming, the branding, when you merge a company, it's you've got two redundant positions, director of marketing, who's going to be the director of marketing now, and they fight it out. So I don't know. It's going to be really interesting, but you can't deny there will be some deaths on the battlefield, by the way like we're talking with, Joe Rogan and the podcast space that we were talking about how Stitcher just up and disappeared because they got bought by Sirius dismantled for pieces And then just let's stitcher.
What are you talking about? I don't know what that is. And everybody's oh man, we love stitcher It's no, you love Sirius XM. Come get with us. It's like really did you just do that?
Theo Harvey: I think that New media is going to win out. Let's be honest. I'm looking at my kids.
They don't know anything. It's hard for them every once in a while. It's hard for them to watch though, like a whole movie, a TV show because they're so used to the short form that they see on YouTube or the shorts they see on YouTube shorts. They're not on TikTok yet. I'm just like, Oh God, don't want them on that.
So now this is, my kids are what? 12 and eight, but I'm saying this to say that this next generation, even kids a little bit older than them, they even saying they just don't see, they don't know anything about old media. They don't know how to turn a channel. They don't know what ABC is NBC to them.
They don't even know what MTV is that to them is irrelevant. It's just a show. They know a brand show and so white brand entity. And so I'm saying this to say that, I see what is PN has. The ESPN is a brand to us. That's we know what it is. We grew up on it. But for these newer generations, they don't know what that is, but they know pack McAfee.
So if ESPN can't get this to work. I think Pat McAfee is still going to be fine. He's winning in that. And he, and he may become bigger than he is being one day, but ESPN desperately needs us to work with Pat McAfee because if they can figure that out, then they can merge to your point.
I think there'll be a merge or something where the old me and newbie get together. And so they can still draw their attention. The ESPN can be a truly streaming platform and can get the college bros and other ones who want to gamble and do other things for the future. But ESPN as a static cable station is irrelevant.
So I would just say that, to your point, and CNN, we know CNN is on his last legs. Let's be honest, right? This presidential election so far has been a snooze. I put that prediction out there last week. I said, the election, the presidential campaign is a, what's it?
A show and you need a star. There's no star yet. Now the hope is Trump can revitalize the stardom for this. Campaign, but if he can't reignite, Oh, CNN is going to have some big trouble. Cause they, for every four years, it's their Olympics, man. This is where they make their money. If they can't get people to watch things like this and get people excited about the day to day grind of the news, they will die out and new media will win.
We talked about David. I know we were talking about sports or moving over to politics. Cause it's very similar. We talked about David, Pat, David was it Patrick, David. Yeah. Patrick David, excuse me. He is go all in on political. You see that? And he's actually political and other folks are seeing him as a rising star, which is like, what?
This dude is a rising star in the politics conversation. And so I say that to say, it's like, he's new media and they're going, people are trusting him more than they trust CNN. Remember they used to have James old Jones, that deep voice. This is senior, just like that authority, right?
That just, how dare you question what we say to you is just this is that those days are gone, man. And so I say, all I can say is I think new media went out. This is probably the last gasp of old me of trying to figure this out. And and I think the influences are realizing like Mr.
Beast, I'm sure people tried to owe me to try to probably co opt him for many times. He said, nah, dog. And I think more and more of these influencers, they're going to say, you know what? Cause I think Pat McAfee is realizing that too. It's I don't need his pain. He didn't. That's why he got 85 million from him, but now he's realizing, Oh, 85 million comes with some stipulations.
I don't know about this. So anyway, that's just my two cents on Mr Benja.
Mr.Benja: Oh, no, totally. In, in that respect, definitely. Old media as a technology, as a platform, like Cape going to cable that dies, I'm never siding against technology that dies. I guess I was. Referring more to the transition of technology, a brand to the new technologies.
So how does that happen? Still not sure. As I said, that's on the battlefield. Entire industries are going to be fractured. We'll see what happens. I'm not sure.
Theo Harvey: Mr. Benja can I switch things up a little bit?
Mr.Benja: Oh, go ahead. Can I ask you this? Yes. Oh God. Oh, I know where this is going. I
Theo Harvey: think you do.
You think you do. Can I ask you this? Speaking of new media versus old media. What do you think about Blue Eyes Samurai? Oh, coming in hard. See, I know you didn't know I was going to talk about coming in hard on anime, even though they're not from Japan, Mr. Benjamin, we didn't talk about this in the run notes.
So I know I'm throwing this out at you, but you put that in there. I, it came back to me. So I just want to put this little two tidbits out there. Cause that, what'd you think of that anime, man? What'd you think of it?
Mr.Benja: It was good. It was good. I watched the whole thing. I liked it. And yes, there's a butt coming, but first of all, I did actually classify it as anime, regardless of where it got sourced from.
Technically, technically it's not. The boondocks
Theo Harvey: canceled. Don't get canceled. What
Mr.Benja: was that one? Afro Samurai, that's classified as anime. The boondocks was classified as American urban anime or whatever, basically the stuff gets classified as anime. It's like somebody in Ireland is doing rap, it's not like it's rap is a black music form and it, which it is and everything, but it's not like we go over there and say, Hey, you can't call that rap.
It's anime, anime rap. Let me clear that up first. I didn't, I have problems with characters that I kinda have issues with. At a certain point, at a certain point, I'm like, Okay, you're the blue eyed samurai, but you're a little bit of a scumbag. It's calm down. But that's
Theo Harvey: the point!
Mr.Benja: Yes.
Theo Harvey: That, you know that's the point. You're you are a character, but that's the point. Okay. CC. Dude, see Mr. Benja, oh man I'm just in shock, Mr. Benja. This thing was fire, man. This thing was fire, man. This was a, I came in hot and I was like mesmerized. How good this was. What made you watch it?
I heard reviews, man, podcast guy, I'm watching stuff, I was like, okay, holidays is when I tried things I normally would. And I had time. I binged that thing so quick, man. I was like, man, this is great. Mr. Benjamin, but that's the whole point. She was a scumbag. Cause two things, number one.
Blue eyes symbolize that she was a monster by her own people and the fact that what created her was probably, a sense of violence. And so that was number one, but samurai oxymoron samurai is honorable. She was battling those two sides of herself to become. And then at the end, not spoiler, but she's trying to become more honorable and remember her.
I forgot the the, her her assistant, but, he pretty much said, you're not a samurai one moment. And then that's when she started to become a little bit more honorable. And I think that's the battle within her. The blue eye is trying to take the evil blue eye devil trying to take over the samurai.
And so that's, what's powerful about that character, even though, to your point, They are a scumbag, but that's the point,
Mr.Benja: right? As I said, it wasn't bad, but
why are you giving me the fingers?
Theo Harvey: Fire, man. That's the flames, brother. Look, I know you watch a lot of stuff all the time. The action scenes, you know how they filmed it, right? They actually did the. Live action. I think we talked about this live action performances first and then they animated.
So the gravity, the real world physics look realistic. This is potentially actually happen. And so that's why the action seems look more fluid and all that. But the storyline I like, and I like the fact that it wasn't just about her. Everybody had an arc, right? Like the main characters, there was an arc to the to the the princess, right?
And what she wanted to become. And I love that part where she just stood up, she says, she said, I know what I want to be. I want to be great. Flames, I was like, oh, it's character arc. So it just, everybody has their own arc, man. And that to me was like amazing. So say anyway, man, and then also, man, they always had the fire song, the kill bill song battle without honor or humanity.
When she was training, that just gets me hype, man. When you see someone the fight montage and training montage. So anyway I just want to throw that in there. I know that was a surprise attack on you. What we're going to talk about, but Mr. Bidger, fire.
Mr.Benja: I'm glad you liked it, man. It was, as I said, I finished watching it.
It wasn't bad. I'm not in the comments flaming it, but it just wasn't like. Great. And I thought the lead was scumbag ish, it's just so you hated it. For anyone listening, he's over here writing in the notes. I hated it, but he loved it. Terrible. That's gonna, that's going to be my legacy now.
I hate it.
Theo Harvey: When it goes on to win Emmys and awards. Look, man, it's a little raw though. There's a little too much sex in there for me, for anime, but it, but the raw, they went there, man, and it was very adult, but loved it, man. It was just everything I, and then the fact that there's a, a bigger story here.
I want to get into that and also the history of feudal Japan and what that meant. I thought that was. Very powerful. We don't really get stories. I guess we do in some aspects, but it was really powerful. And nah, man, like I said, I glad you watched it. I got another recommendation.
Go check out slow horses. See if you like that on Apple TV. There it is
Mr.Benja: slow horses. All right. We'll see if it's better than a C.
Theo Harvey: Let me just put this, I'll give you a premise of it real quick and we'll get to the next thing. Imagine if James Bond got old and they give a F.
Mr.Benja: Interesting. I like the premise. There you go. All
Theo Harvey: right. Comedy. That's all I gotta say. Comedy.
Mr.Benja: Nice. Let me ask you this talking about new media and everything, what do you think about Elon Musk and Lindy Akirino's latest proclamation about X officially being pushed as the Everything app and it's going to be video first?
How does this even feel to you? What do you care? It's pushing the landscape and or is it just a flailing attempt
Theo Harvey: X going to give it to you going to give it to you. It's another thing that, they're trying to do to stay relevant in this space. I guess it could work.
But the thing I'm amazed about before we even, talk about that is that. All the, sentiments of his demise is premature. It seems like Twitter and X is still thriving, man. I'm still seeing people post. I'm still seeing influences influence on there. And it's is this thing, dying or not?
Mr.Benja: Influence is going to influence,
Theo Harvey: but on Twitter, there was toss of threads people saying threads is the Twitter killer YouTube, the other channels, but it's if you have a platform there, you're still there. Regardless of what's happening with Elon, letting free speech, go wild or attacking people or, doing all this other stuff.
It's I can't believe what people say anymore about things because I don't see the reality of what people are still seeing value in Twitter. So that's Mr. Benja as a design game designer, who thinks about product and usability. Does that mean that this product is unkillable? Cause it's that good.
Mr.Benja: It's not unkillable because of that good. You just don't need. As many people flood flooding, flooding to these things as you would expect, you've got X being a subscription based service, first of all. So that's going to be able to float it a little bit. You remember Elon Musk literally did his 80 20 thing and fired 80 percent of the staff.
I was wondering if he was sitting around saying, Hey, let's do an 80, 20, 80 percent gone. I was, I actually believe he was sitting around doing that. But yeah, you've got, aside from ad revenue, you've got a lot of people that are turning into subscribers. I was let me tell us a little story real quick.
So I was on threads and trying to start up some conversations, some talks and bouncing around, and I was thinking to myself, huh. This is a cool app. I love threads and that's where I'm doing my front facing content. That's where I go first, but then I was like, let me copy this over and paste it in the X.
Copy something over, put it next, format it a little bit for that audience. And I was looking through and I was like, wow, it's actually functionally pretty good. Things were working quickly. I was hopping around here and there and check this out. I tapped on someone's. X tweet tapped on someone's tapped on someone's tweet.
And it took me to a video and all of a sudden I was like in Tik TOK, but it had all the comments there. And right when I saw somebody I could tap on there, I could tap on their profile and it went back to the Twitter kind of profile and I saw all the things they were saying. So I didn't have to watch all their videos, but anytime I saw a video, it just all of a sudden took me into the Tik TOK style and I'm watching that.
And then every so often I see a Twitter space come by and I'm like, you know what? I've been scrolling long enough. Let me just tap on this Twitter space and listen to this clubhouse style discussion and go about my business. And it's. It's starting to come together in little subtle ways and every once in a while I try something like I tried to download a video a little download video button came up I tapped on it and said hey, I would let you download the video But you got to be a subscriber and I was like oh here it comes.
So I actually have I actually have not, I don't want to say hope because people are going to say, you hope Ilan wins. I hate you, I, I think that this is going to do better than people are assuming
Theo Harvey: wow. Hot take really hot take. I didn't know it could do all that now. So it looks like they're really working on improving the product, which is always good.
And the biggest thing was I was going to do advertising or subscription, but because. The big controversy, remember last year, late last year was Elon Musk was basically calling out old media about advertising. You say I don't want you on my platform and so many words. So now they have to go all in those subscriptions X does.
And so to your point, if they do things like that, make it easy to find folks, understand who they are. If you're an influencer and they, you can do all that. And it's in a seamless. And give people to, know and trust you pretty easily in one platform. That's a powerful thing. But, we'll see.
I know people still do it. Still using it. And they swear by it. A lot of folks don't. Right? And Don Lemon uses it. He's gonna, yeah, it wasn't that the big news to came out of that, that they're going to pay all these if old media style folks to have their own kind of TV talk show or something on Twitter on X going forward.
Yeah like we mentioned,
Mr.Benja: Who was it? Tulsi Gabbard, Jim Rome Don Lemon, all are part of this new production, whatever is happening behind the scenes. I'm not exactly sure, but they've got their own way of putting out content through X. As a X first as a platform, which is interesting. Don't know how that's going to play out,
Theo Harvey: but we'll see.
I don't either. But I, like I said, in, in YouTube, I trust, I see everybody's on YouTube. And even though I think people realize YouTube, if nothing else has been the game for over a decade, at least what when did it start officially? I can't recall about 15 years, if you can grow on YouTube, it's like the standard now.
Standards can be broken. So we'll see what Twitter can do. If it can do both it's dominated short form communication, even though threads is threatening it. And then it's also got YouTube it's do some video style short form, which tick tock dominates, but they, it's Hey, you don't want to. If you're old, you don't want to do both. Just come to Twitter. So we'll see. I don't know. It could work, but it's a lot, man. It's, I don't think the young folks are immersed in Tik TOK. And I just don't think them, they're going to go over to Twitter.
And then also the people who are on YouTube, that's such a big asset. It's just hard to change an asset over to, to to what you would call it to, to Twitter or X. So it's going to be one of those things that, you know, unless, I don't know. They do something different, but I'm glad the product has improved.
So I'm going to go check it out.
Mr.Benja: Yeah. It, it feels different if you hop around and yes, it's got the AI component to it too, which you have to subscribe for. So interesting stuff there. What's the AI component do? There's just an AI button and you can ask it things. I don't know much more past that, because if you tap on it, it has to, it asks you to be a subscriber.
And I'm like, Oh, okay. I don't know what that's about.
Theo Harvey: I don't know the subscription thing. Yeah. We'll see. I don't know. It's going to be tough, man,
Mr.Benja: but it's got a, it's got a money distribution plan that was put forth. There was a chart somewhere and I couldn't find it, but basically the creator.
Revenue split is bigger than Twitch, bigger than Facebook, Instagram, all the other platforms, bigger than YouTube, even via sliver. So everybody talked about how much money YouTube was giving out in terms of a revenue split. This could be a thing for people. If they find their audiences on X, then they get paid X dollars.
We'll see what happens with it.
Theo Harvey: Yeah. So I'm looking at this advertising account for nearly 90 percent of Twitter's 5 billion in annual revenue in 2021. Now that was a couple of years ago, but I'm sure it's still in the 80%. So that's a long way to go to make up for subscriptions.
But Hey, Milan is pretty much funding this. And to your point, we mix investments and people you create, I think that's powerful. You create a product and that's why me and my business partner talked about, you just add more value to it, man. It just becomes more and more valuable.
So it just becomes like a no brainer to just buy it. So they're going to get you Mr. Benji. They are, you already hit two, two paywalls already on, on Twitter. You got one more and you're going to buy that thing.
Mr.Benja: Yeah, I still, I'm still mad that I had to buy a metal subscription.
Theo Harvey: Oh, I saw the X, I saw the little blue check Mark on threads.
Yeah,
Mr.Benja: I'm a jabroni for that one. But I'm not going to rant about that now. Before the pod, we were talking a little bit about star Wars. I think you got a little rant on this.
Theo Harvey: Man. Yeah. So Star Wars, man. Did you hear that Star Wars is finally going to film a new Star Wars movies this year?
That's wonderful. Great. But Mr. Benja, can you believe they did the most laziest ass thing they could ever done? The movie they're announcing is basically the Mandalorian Goku. I can't believe this, Mr. Benja. They going double down, triple down on a movie at full fledge, two hours. I got paid. To watch a TV show in the movie theater, they're bringing everybody back.
John Favreau, they're bringing back your buddy. The great Dave Filoni to write it, man. But does this seem like some franchises on a bleeding edge or something? Great. I don't know, Mr. Benjamin, what is star Wars now? Are we going all in the Filoni verse? Is this what people really want to see in the movie theater?
Because I don't think they're watching the TV. What makes you think they're going to watch it in the movies? I just don't feel that, that greatness. We don't even have a great villain yet. And that's what makes Star Wars great in the first place with Darth Vader. So my rant is about how I'm very disappointed and where Star Wars is going.
It just seems travesty that we haven't had a movie since 2019. And that movie sucked so bad that I was the first Star Wars moves. I didn't watch at least twice. Oh, man, it was so terrible. So I'm just saying, Mr. Benja did Star Wars has needs to get his act together. They're losing their older fan base, the newer fan base.
All they know is a plush toy. Called Baby Yoda, and that's it. They don't care about anybody, anything about these characters. And it's so sad to see Star Wars just die on the vine like that. Cathy, Captain Kennedy's gotta leave, man. She's done. I'm sorry. That's what I got hot take
Mr.Benja: on a platter.
Theo Harvey: Oh, anything else, Mr. Bench on your side?
Mr.Benja: No, man, I'm probably gonna jump online, start calling people out. Since that seems to be the thing in 2024, I'm going to be cat Williams. Just start calling everybody out. You'll
Theo Harvey: call me that Theo, that real Theo Harvey, man. I tell you, man, he just stole my whole thing.
He's on IG now. I was on IG before him.
Mr.Benja: Maybe I'll do a Marvel version. Start calling out all the characters. If you could do
Theo Harvey: it in the style of Kat Williams man, that was that
Mr.Benja: thing at 15 million views. King pin. I saw him wearing a Hawaiian shirt. How he gonna come F with me? I'm Cat Williams. He wearing a Hawaiian shirt.
Theo Harvey: I told King Ping, no. He can't touch his body.
King Ping go for the body.
Mr.Benja: First step is a Hawaiian shirt. Next step is a Hawaiian dress. Don't make me put you down. Sorry.
Theo Harvey: No, we go for days. We go for days on that. So everyone. Wow. Mr. Benja is always wonderful. Great. Talk to you. So everyone, if you like this content, please like subscribe and comment show versus business.
We are on X Twitter. So go check that out YouTube and Instagram. Listen to iTunes, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Go check out our website at show versus business. Mr. Benja. Have a great one. Peace.