The guys, @mrbenja and @the_real_theo_harvey, discuss the hottest stories for this week. World Wrestling Entertainment or WWE, is moving to Netflix, Pokemon vs Palworld, Rob Dyrdek And His Control of MTV, and Disney is in trouble, AGAIN!
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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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The guys, @mrbenja and @the_real_theo_harvey, discuss the hottest stories for this week. World Wrestling Entertainment or WWE, is moving to Netflix, Pokemon vs Palworld, Rob Dyrdek And His Control of MTV, and Disney is in trouble, AGAIN!
----------
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 hosts, the real Theo Harvey and Mr. Binja all the information. So Mr. Binja, what is going on this week? What you got going on,
Mr.Benja: man? Let me tell you, the week was interesting, man. I just, some things we uncovered. I know I've been talking to you, interesting things going on in our lives, but.
For what the people want to know, Netflix got WWE Raw thing. We grew up on the thing. We all got hyped about it's going to Netflix. This is one of those changing landscape kind of discussions, and that's what everything seems to be centered around changing landscape. I don't know if you have a theme for the show, but that might be it.
We've got Disney. Messing up again. It's it seems like slowly over time. We keep coming up with these Disney and messing up stories We might need to make that a whole little sub field of this sub genre Disney is effing up and then people will know what they're getting into The game industry is out of control.
It's like they're bringing in more Stuff they have more games more awards more shows people are Giving it all this acclaim, but it's making less money, all these layoffs. We're talking about tens of thousands of people getting laid off over time. And we thought 2022 was like a record year. 2023 beat that.
And then 2024 is hold my beer. I'm going to start out in January with some layoffs. It's crazy. It's a lot going on in the industry and we're not sure what's going to happen. You got Pokemon getting copied basically. And. With all these proliferation of tools and AI, it's easier than ever to make a game and make a copy.
Now what's going to happen with gaming? And, looking back at all this, you and I got caught up in this one story about how Rob Dyrdek controlled MTV for about 15 years. Which is crazy. And when you think about it, it's wait a minute, how does this even happen? And that kind of leads us into MTV's problems with just existing as a network and that no one cares about and their last little struggle.
It's very fascinating stuff, man. And what's, what happens after MTV was after the MTV generation, the Mr. Beast generation, I don't know. We got stuff.
Theo Harvey: Oh, man. I love it. Mr. Benja, man. This is awesome. Man, this has been an interesting week, man. When you think about changing landscapes and what's happening.
Mr. Benja, I've been deep diving on school. I know we talked about school previously. This is the new platform that a lot of these gurus, internet gurus are going to build up their communities. And I know we talked about last time about how Hermosi invested it heavily and he's creating this thing called school games.
I've been deep diving with another guru, Dan Henry and his little community that he's building up. Obviously Ryan, the first I heard about was under Ryan. Bonita's wealthy investor, which is mostly focused on real estate community. But man, it's fascinating, man. I've see the benefit of what school is doing that.
I've been kind of part of Dan Henry's process and what he's doing and everything. Okay. It's a way for these gurus, man. And I broke this down a little bit in my mind. It's a way for these gurus to create. We already knew it, but recurrent revenue, right? Because they have to, you have to pay every month as they're part of the community.
But the challenge they have to realize is, now that you're in that recurrent revenue opportunity, you gotta create so much value, man. Because Churn is real. As Netflix. As any streaming service, man. And it's so funny, because it's like literally yes, you can have ways to keep people engaged with this gamification piece.
Basically, you create point system and people get certain points by replying back or communicating with each other. You get higher on the leaderboard, right? And you get different tiers and different tiers typically unlock different type of courses or training or something like that. So that helps people keep engaged, right?
Then you have to have a community manager that's constantly telling folks about new opportunities. New trainees are coming up and you have Dan, the man himself, Dan Henry topping up every so often with comments and stories. And someone had me laughing. I was on one of his one of his Dan Henry's monthly webinars.
A weekly webinar. Excuse me. He's doing it weekly. The guy said, I was in your mastermind. I spent 25, 000 to be in your mastermind. I didn't get as much of your attention until the school community said, I didn't even talk to you. And now, Dan is like accessible, accessible me, via text messaging or popping over his webinars because he realized he has to put so much value into it.
This community, if he wants to keep it growing and thriving, it's like a garden really. And so it's just fascinating to me, like how the shift has changed, and Alex Ramosi has seen it too. It's like the community is so key and how you draw long term revenue opportunities. So it'd be curious to see, because the challenge I'm seeing with Dan Henry too, this FYI is just what I'm seeing with a lot of groups.
They have that shiny car syndrome. One minute he's got this offer and the next thing he's got another offer. It's now he's building this AI engine and next he's got this other system. It's Whoa, what are you doing, man? And because they just so used to. Thinking up something and making money off of it, right?
So I'm curious to see if that doesn't break down the community, right? Because he's just always off. And there was a little one of his webinars, there's one little tiff between him and his COO. And they said, yeah we dropped this One offer out there and a take up rate for code traffic was like 7 percent and Dan was like what that's huge because the average So basically you hit code traffic and people take your offer Typically average is like three to four percent, or you know getting that is pretty good.
They were doing seven percent And his COO is yeah, I've been trying to tell you, Dan, but you've been off in La Land trying to figure out this AI bot. So I'm just laughing. I was like, so we'll see, man. I just curious to see where this all goes because everybody's moved from the Facebook groups into this, like the school community and trying to build these vibrant communities.
Getting all these people hyped up and try to create their own communities. So we'll see Mr. Benja. I think, your theory of these private internet kind of communities is going to live and thrive here in 2024. So I'm just curious to see how these internet Googlers will
Mr.Benja: survive.
It's not, and seeing this going back from the day when we used to be on the the bulletin boards back in, in college, I first started getting on the bulletin boards. Even before that, I guess I was in the. Before that. Yeah. Even before that I was on the, I was on the CompuServe forums.
What'd you know about that? The alt. net groups.
Theo Harvey: Yes. I wasn't heavily into those forms. Like probably you were, it was like it really, I started really getting heavily when the internet came, and we could send emails and stuff like emails mostly. That's when I got into it, but yeah, man, I wasn't really on those forms like that back in the day.
Those alt forms and all that, so
Mr.Benja: Yeah, it's like nobody was checking for him and you had to have a password to get in. So you're talking to somebody and he looks around to the left and right. He's Hey hey, listen, go to this website and it, trust me. Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista, yep.
Ashg, they weren't picking up on certain websites that didn't want to be found. If there were websites that just, so it wasn't like a dark web, it was just a, in the shade web, there's no sunlight on it and you would just go to these websites, log in with the password and you'd have this form there and people would just drop everything like, Hey, I got the new outcast album.
Boom, Hey, I got that. And the thing was, you started into these communities and people would just. They were being so real because there was no concept of people connecting back to you. It was just like, they were just some name on a server somewhere. And if somebody did have the tools to hack you, it was so rare that it was like.
Yeah, whatever. No one cared, and nobody wanted to endanger the community anyway, so it didn't happen very often. Now stuff like that is left up to 4chan and other places. But yeah. Yeah, but seeing those, seeing that community vibe, just this group of people who just want to be on the internet.
And play around with something seeing that evolve and come back now from like discord and all this stuff. It's very fast. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I
Theo Harvey: agree. Mr. business. When you were talking, it's it's just all looping over again and again, because, I was just thinking about a messenger.
Remember that back in the day and how the. That one to one communication. That's pretty much how Zup, got his inspiration partly for Facebook. So yeah, man, this is all, what's, what is that? Battlestar Galactica. Do you remember watching that at all back in the day? Yeah, they said, this has all been there before, this is that repeat cycle of the five Cylons will come back again and again.
This is that cyclical nature of things, which is fascinating to me as well. The only other story I got is man, Mr. Benja, have you ever spent a long time with eight, nine and 10 year olds?
Mr.Benja: Yes, I have actually not terribly recently, but yes,
Theo Harvey: that is a weird age. You're not quite a teenager, that selling teenager just I know everything, but did not look kid anymore.
So it's how do you have your communication skills at that age? So I say that to say I'm teaching, I'm coaching my son's basketball team at the Y. And so I do it like once a year. And it's just, fascinating to me, just okay talk to these young boys.
You're like, okay, what, how should I keep my vocabulary? Do they understand? Am I talking too logically? It's just fascinating to me how to talk to kids at that age. Cause they, especially this generation, cause they have a lot of knowledge. That we didn't have because the internet, right?
So they're always on YouTube or something and the YouTubers will say some context. And then they go down a rabbit hole and they learn like my son was going down a rabbit hole. What'd he say the other day about the he knew the history of Martin Luther King, right? He gave me this, Oh yeah.
And the Montgomery bus boycott. And this is what happened. I was like, how do you know this? You only, you're only eight, I didn't know that stuff until I was like 20, it's but anyway, so it's just fascinating. So just it's fun, man. Just playing with kids and just seeing how this generation with the influence of the internet and how to communicate and how they do things that, like playing basketball, you haven't given references around, around memes and things like that more so than the basketball play, the basketball teams and plays. So it's just I'm curious to see, I don't know what is that? Gen Z. I think he's just, I don't know what that's called. Jim alpha. I think that's what he's called.
His generation that's pre at 10 year, 10 year age, younger, alpha, so they're going to be, I have no clue, man. So it's just fascinating to see where these kids evolved to over time. What was your experience with just curious, what was your experience with younger kids and dealing with them?
Mr.Benja: Oh man, it was before they all had cell phones, so it wasn't as crazy as I said, I have a, I came in like between two family generations, so I have A group of family members that are older than me and would like automatically exclude me from stuff because Hey, Benjamin, he's a little younger.
I'm like, yeah, what you talking about? And then I have the generation that's just below me. And that's what happened. So I ended up like babysitting a lot of these younger ones that are a little younger than me. And Yeah, it was just a, it was just a interesting time. I think I introduced like how my family to video games.
Man, we don't play video games unless it's NBA jam, Madden or some racing game. I'm like, Hey, look what you know about out of this world. Out of this world. What is that? It's what you know about Tetris attack and like what Tetris attack? . So you had to introduce him to all this stuff.
Yeah, that was my experience. Basically. I love it.
Theo Harvey: I love it. What's been going on with you man this week?
Mr.Benja: I've been doing the podcast most every night of the week. That's my thing. If I can, if I could hit three, no, that, that's my I don't have a schedule for it. So in the evening, I'll jump on if I do at least three a week.
Then I've hit my quota. I don't even call it a quota. I just say most nights of the week doing a week nights. I'm there. And I started to realize something. Cause I've done podcasts through AMP. I've done podcasts on the, I've done the vlog. I got AMP, what's AMP? I don't know about, I don't know what it is anymore, but Amazon sent me a W 2 about it.
So I'm, I got nothing bad to
Theo Harvey: I ain't got nothing bad to say about it. You got declared as income now. Thanks. Thanks Amazon. I'm
Mr.Benja: Proud of that. Yes. The defunct Amazon amp. But yeah I was trying out a lot of formats and I did the Kickstarter the year before I was like racking my brain.
I'm like, man, I did the Kickstarter, got the equipment, set up a little studio, tried a bunch of different things out. Nothing was really clicking. In a way that I could do it continuously until just recently, and that's to kill all video, do it live do these theme based shows basically. And it was the concept was so different to me.
I changed the format of it and called it Creativity Threads Life. And it's just been flowing for me. So in doing this, I've gotten some great insights on entertainment. Just in general, entertainment, education, and the way I'm putting out media. I was like, I have to do it this way or that way. Can I do both?
And that usually doesn't work out. I've got some things figured out. For those of you who don't know, if you're ever putting out a product, it's usually either an education product or an entertainment product or something that like enlightens or inspires, you know? So you have the enlightening, the educational and the entertainment.
You can throw in different fractions of that. Anyway you want, but that's usually how they try to roll out content in one of those three. And so people are always saying, Hey, make edutainment, make a fighting game with the U S presidents and teach them about presidents. And it's dude, just get out.
And they'll come with something bogus. Why can't you teach kids how to, how come they know all this stuff about Fortnite, but don't know anything about, George Washington Carver, make a George Washington Carver game. And it fails and they're all mad and don't understand why.
Same reason why you don't watch. Yeah, like the History Channel all the time, I do. But it's the same kind of edutainment thing.
Theo Harvey: And yeah, I watch on YouTube crash course. You ever seen those? That's pretty good series on YouTube. Yeah, but go ahead.
Mr.Benja: But yeah even with school Sam Evans, he was saying how school was very, it was dry until one of his guys was like, I don't know if you heard how that came about, but he was talking to one of his guys and the guy was like, we need to gamify this.
And Sam Evans used to be a gamer, and he was like We're keeping games out of this. I'm laser light focused on the education. He's yeah, I know, but it's dry. It sucks. It's what do you have in mind? It's let me throw some hooks in there. Some gaming elements and get people interested in applying, leveling up and et cetera.
And he's okay, let's see how it goes. And it worked out enough to get a lot of people's attention. So it's kind of part of the product now. And I think I'm figuring something out with the way I present content. That doesn't have that rift of when I'm talking to people and I started getting educational, they're like, Hey man, shut the up.
All right. And then if I start, some rambling, entertainment talk, they're like, Hey man, that guy is great. Bring him over. I'm like, all right, cool. But that, that hurts, eats at my soul and I'm finally starting to, I'm finally starting to reconcile those two.
Theo Harvey: So you so you're becoming, he's integrated, he's achieved a new level, you combine the two parts of yourself.
And I think, you know what, the best You know, content has to be a little bit of both, right? It's like you say it, you do something that's insightful that people, I haven't thought of it like that, but it's memorable and it's entertaining. And I think, those are makes for the best content, right?
Some of the stuff I've done, I've seen that's gone. When, when the stuff is more drier or, I'm reading from a script, that's that, that content's not doing too well. But if I'm loosey goosey and just, top my head, goofing off a little bit, it's okay.
That content looks like, and I think the camera doesn't lie, right? It just knows if you're being genuine and stuff. And Yeah, man. Kudos to you, brother. Yeah, definitely, man. Trying to put that I'm going to try something this week with the team like you just I'm going live and we're going to go and go all in, go try to integrate the business side with the personal side a little bit more.
And so we'll see how that
Mr.Benja: does. Who does, who does that? Even if you don't like him, Joe Rogan is just entertaining to listen to. Oh, yeah.
Theo Harvey: And it's
Mr.Benja: Yeah. If you haven't tried listening to his show, I don't know if you have or not a
Theo Harvey: couple episodes. Bits and pizzas, yeah.
Just bits, whatever. I never listened to a whole three hour episode, to
Mr.Benja: be honest with you. Yeah. Try one. His first was Elon Musk. The one where Elon Musk took a smoke. The one with no, Jamie Foxx. That's a good one because they're comedy together. They start talking about Hollywood parties and everything.
Yeah. It's just entertaining and you're getting information out of it. So it's, yes. Yeah. It's hard to do. Yeah. And we're going to talk about Marvel and Disney but they don't do it well either.
Theo Harvey: Not at all. Not at all.
Mr.Benja: All right. Yeah. Yeah, but hey, the whole thing about entertainment, sports entertainment, actually, that's gonna, that was on my mind and you saw it too, and we both saw it, and we hit each other up in the messages, but the big news that Netflix is getting WWE Raw.
Oh, my God.
Theo Harvey: Which is the best bra, which, let me ask you something. What's the best. Wrestling move. For me, it's got to be a cross between the Stone Cold Stunner and the DDT because they happen so fast. You don't even know you're hitting them, both of them. The Stone Cold Stunner, you get kicked in the stomach.
You're like, oh no! And then the DDT, when he just turns his back on you, you think you're walking, he's walking away, but no, he's got you! So it's those are like the two funniest ones, man, for me. What about you, Mr. Finch? Just as we digress.
Mr.Benja: The stunner is really good, man, because you get to kick him, and then when you do the drop on the chin, it's like they get to bounce up in the air and fly out the ring or whatever they're going to do.
So It's comedy when the person sells it, right? For me, the one that came to mind was the Goldberg Spear. He just runs, it's like tackles you, he falls it up with the the, what's he call it? The hammer? The jackhammer? Yeah, I think, but the spear is just funny to me. I don't know.
Theo Harvey: Yeah, man, and then what's the undercover undercover, the undertaker's one, what's the one where he just puts his hand up?
What's that called? The,
Mr.Benja: He's got his choke slam.
Theo Harvey: Yeah, it just possessed, when he puts those eyes like this and he's just looking at you, I was like, man, anyway, we digress, but I think that's what Netflix put on the streaming community. If
Mr.Benja: you can find videos of Booker T's, oh God, I forgot the name of it.
He had a special move. Not the one where he does the spin of Rooney, not the one where he does break dancing and then does the kick. He had this crazy. Flipping spinning move off the top rope that was so dangerous that you didn't see it like except once a year and when he did that, it was over.
Theo Harvey: Oh,
Mr.Benja: man. I forgot. I forgot what he called it. Something like the Harlem hurricane or the Harlem drunk man on a rope. I don't know.
Theo Harvey: I love it. I love it. I love it, man. So Netflix put that on the streaming industry boy. They went hard in the. Paint. I don't think anybody saw this coming, Mr. Benja.
There was hints that they were going to get into sports. We had talked about this. I think I talked about this previously about the whole F1 series they created in this whole, reality slash TV shows around like tennis and F1 formula racing and golf. And so now they're actually, now it's debatable if WWE, has E for reason that means that's entertainment role wrestling entertainment if it's really live sports, but this is huge.
Mr. Benja. Real quick before we get into that, this was couched in the Netflix earnings. We talked about streaming wars here. We declared it in the last year began this year that Netflix has one further. Solidifying them, they basically added 13. 1 million subscribers in Q4.
That was from October to December of last year. They're around 260 million total subs. I think the only one closest is Disney, and they're, Disney's still, I think, almost 200 or so. Now we'll see after they combine Hulu, but that's a whole nother conversation. Everything's working for Netflix right now.
The the password crackdown that, we were complaining about that seems to be working. They're looking now to increase what they call our poo average revenue per user. You can deep dive into the gaming focus, with some of the things that they're doing with grant that auto popping up all of a sudden, so now you can play on Netflix.
They're creating a store. So some of their, prop properties like stranger things, you can buy t shirts and merch from there and and just the push of the advertisement. So basically more people, they paid less in a streaming fee, a monthly fee, but guess what?
They get more money. For customers who do the advertising tip because they get more money from advertisers. So netflix is just cranking all cylinders and then they announced this this wwe deal. Mr Benja. What does that do for you? Are you are you going to turn out?
Are you going to turn back in to netflix now with this wwe
Mr.Benja: offer? So when you're talking about churn, one of the things that these companies have always done to keep people from churning is to layer their shows back to back. So as you end one show, another show starts up and Disney was trying this heavy with the model, a lot of the Marvel and star Wars shows, it's Hey the Mandalorian's ending.
Hey, look, we got Falcon and winter soldier. And it's Oh yeah, let me hold on for another month or two. And that was the whole part of the whole idea to keep that recurring revenue stream by having these shows back to back to back. But that's hoping that you're still invested in these characters.
You're still invested in the properties. If I don't like Star Wars, but I like Marvel, then I might just dip out when the next Star Wars show happens like I do. But I like Star Wars, but they're fixing that with the WWE, I think in something that's a little more regular, a little more, it's it's common for people to always tune in.
And if some, if that becomes someone's nature where they're like, woo, wrestling's on, then, you can go in and just watch a week, talk about it throughout the week and next week. Talk about it again, and that's big for a streaming network. You, I, cause I'd only thought about this in the network sense for so long, but now it's Oh yeah, I can kill churn.
If I get something that, that a family or a group of friends or somebody at work, just, I always talk to them about, raw when it comes on every Monday. I always talk to my coworkers, friends, family, whoever. So if I get in the habit of doing that, I might never leave Netflix.
Theo Harvey: No, good point.
We don't really talk about them too much, but it's such a small streamer, but Paramount plus has been the forefront of this streaming sports. We talked about it, the NFL game that they streamed. Everybody was mad about. But probably did wonders for their bottom line.
I think they, they had I think they said they had, I don't know if this is real or not 20 million, subscribers signed up now, whether they all stay, that's a whole nother issue. And Paramount plus typically only has what, maybe 30 million subscribers overall. And I think they paid a hundred million dollars for that playoff game between Kansas city and man, who was the other team?
I forgot. They lost so fast, Kansas city beat them, but anyway. This is a streaming NFL playoff game and then they peacock. If you didn't know a lot of the WWE monthly kind of world rumbles and different championship things are showing up on the, on pair paramount and excuse me on a peacock. Yeah.
Free. They just, the Dubai one they had, it was just on Peacock and you could watch it. And so it was like, wow. So I think that's been helping in numbers. So Peacock, if you didn't know, quietly was one of the most watched. It was the most the greatest growth streamer in Q4.
That, but it's so small, it's nowhere near 260 million subscribers, but I just goes to show you that wrestling, I say all I have to say is that wrestling keeps people on the platform and keeps you growing. And so it makes sense that and who's part of this deal, Mr.
Benja, are you, do you know you heard of a guy named Ari Emanuel? Oh yeah. That guy. Yeah, he owns the rights. This company is called TKO. He owns the rights to wrestling and some other sports franchises. And he brokered this deal with Netflix. And it's just fascinating that, he is in the mix with these big brands.
So real quick, let me write, read this real quick. So Netflix announced that it's taking steps toward live sports. The platform has acquired exclusive U. S. rights to WWE Monday Night Raw. That's it, we, they have a Friday, what they have the next series. So I think next and all these other things are still going to stay on Peacock.
But it's just for Monday night raw and Mr. Benjamin Monday, not raw. Let's be honest. That has a special place in our hearts.
Mr.Benja: That and Thursday thunder. Thursday
Theo Harvey: Thunder. Oh, snap. But Monday Night Raw, man, just memories of staying up all night just at the Tallahassee Convention Center to see that Monday Night Raw with Booker T and having to sign Booker T as my daddy.
Booker
Mr.Benja: T is my daddy. Yeah, that was the sign I put up. So
Theo Harvey: anyway, we digress. We'll tell that story another time. But anyway, they're going to get the exclusive rights to Monday Night Raw, and it will be for the next 10 years. Netflix is paying 5 billion dollars, about 500 million annually, and they have a option so they can they can stop after 5 years, or extend the content for another 10 years.
Pretty fascinating, Mr. Ben Jones this deal that Netflix has brokered, and what they want to
Mr.Benja: do. Yeah, so how is this whole sports plus streaming thing going, or Recurring entertainment plus streaming thing going just in general. I know we talked about Amazon and some of the NFL shows. We talked a little bit about Peacock.
Now we're talking about Netflix. How's this whole thing playing out?
Theo Harvey: Like I said, Netflix sports strategy was to remain focused on sports that Jason content they have a series called the quarterback or Patrick Mahone's and other quarterbacks. It's kind of day in the life of what they do and Beckham series.
But, the big deal was like MLS, Amazon. Excuse me, Apple. Remember they did that big deal with Messi when he came over, and he basically got like a percentage of everything that showed up for the ML Major League Soccer, which is here at U. S. base, and they had one of the top soccer sports stars show up.
Major League Baseball shows up on Amazon, shows up on, on Apple TV, and then of course NBA, right? They're slowly trying, NBA circling, what they're going to do. They have the streaming services are looking for NBA games, right? To put on their streaming platform.
So that's one of the reasons why what they call the in game tournament popped up here. It's like a small little two week kind of tournament they created just to maybe sell off to a streamer on the side, right? Here's a little package, here you go, you don't get the whole 82 games, but you get this little tournament game.
We just came up with. And so I think that's what sports, these sports rights, because think about it. NFL is definitely, they have only 17 games and to create, and then only so many playoff games. And for one playoff game, it costs. Peacock, 100 million to acquire that one game. And then that Thursday night game, remember we talked or that Friday, a black Friday game, you remember, we talked about that.
That was like that part of that Thursday night package. I think Amazon spent like a couple of billion for that package. So the streamers realize, Sports is that last bastion of, live entertainment that people will be willing to pay for. And don't even get me started. Maybe we'll do a whole sports conversation, but don't get started on a betting concept, that they introduced.
Mr.Benja: Yes. And we talked a little bit about, we talked a little bit about what is it called? Draft Kings and, the guys of Barstool Sports and all that whole.
Theo Harvey: Yep. And yeah, so that sports is definitely becoming the kind of like the big push for streamers and everybody wants a piece of it.
Yeah, that's what we're seeing going forward.
Mr.Benja: Nice. Nice. And Disney doesn't have any sports, right?
Theo Harvey: They're part of ABC, right? ABC, ESPN, that whole thing. And the rumor was that Disney was going to spin off ESPN. I don't think that's happening, man. They need the content. And, but I don't know if they're going to compete.
Cause Amazon which got big pockets, Apple, Netflix. They're gunning for NBA packages, right? And a little type of sport. So we'll see if Disney will keep, the Mouse House will keep. Oh, real quick part of this deal, Mr. Benja, The Rock, Dwayne, The Rock Johnson he gets to officially own his name.
That's awesome. Yeah. He's part of the board of the group TKO that. Ownership rights into this process. And so he now is a part owner in the WWE. So with that part of that package, he gets to keep the rights to his name, The Rock, which was obviously a property, a character that was created by the WWE.
He now officially owns it. And so now we're probably going to see him referring to himself as The Rock again. I hope he gets all his catchphrases back to part of that package. So that means, what the rock is cooking at a board meeting. I'll, I would love to hear that. I would love to hear it.
Mr.Benja: Nice. Talk smack about some Disney jabronis right quick. Turn that song sideways. Hey yeah. So Disney, man God, I don't want to spend long on this, but so I was on Disney plus, and then I was on Hulu, got off both of those and I was like, you know what, I could just get back on Disney plus. And then they gave me the option for Disney plus and Hulu bundle.
And I was like okay, here we go. So I signed up for the bundle and they screwed up my Hulu account. So now my original Hulu account is gone. My watch history is gone. I had, all the watch later set up and I forgot where I was and like, I'm watching shows again. I'm like, wait a minute.
I've seen this. See if I would have had Hulu, it would have told me, but it messed up my account and I can't get it back. And then all the Hulu shows are under Disney plus. Now I can't go to hulu. com. It says my account is broken or something and I go, I have to go to Disney dot Disney plus. com and search for Hulu content.
And the searching is horrible. It's just bad. Like I searched in. It's so annoying. I think whoever developed that front end must be really good at PowerPoint macros because the way they were able to put together a complete front end using PowerPoint was, it's just, it's incredible. It's incredible what Disney has done with PowerPoint because
Theo Harvey: it was.
It was funny. Can see my screen here, but okay. It was still a little bit. So there is like this, what's watching. And so previously I was under here, my kids with the little princess Tiana. And so I try to watch echo and even show up on my screen. So I had to actually create a whole new profile and lock it.
So that, Disney is all about, protecting the kids. They have a password protected. I can watch that mature stuff. And I get what Disney's doing, they want to put all umbrella. We talked about this, right? In certain areas under Disney plus and other parts of the country, we had Hulu shows like Tom and Pammy popping up on Disney plus.
And so this is just an extension of that, but yeah, it's fascinating to me of how Disney is trying to roll out this integration clumsy a little bit here in the U S but it definitely was necessary. But yeah it's weird. Now, I be honest, I have no clue if I have Hulu. And Disney plus to figure that out.
Am I paying two subscription services or what? Yeah, I asked.
Mr.Benja: Yeah. And as I said, I can't log into my Hulu account because it says something's wrong. And then I go into Disney and they're like, oh, yeah, we've got you got a Hulu account. We got you right here. But I don't know what they did with my old account because they used the same.
Email address, not the same logins, but things got weird, man. Things got weird. And I just didn't like it. And I went to threads with this and a whole bunch of people were just like, Oh man, Disney plus sucks. And you get messed up if you try to use your spectrum package with that. Cause that's yeah,
Theo Harvey: I saw that.
Yeah. They popped me up to say, Oh yeah, we got Disney plus. And this is another thing the streamers are doing, right? This whole bundling thing, right? Putting Disney plus part cable packages now and all this other crap. So streaming is being added to cable and people like not liking that at all. Yeah, I saw that.
So that's, thanks for posting this about someone. Pissed off about Disney plus comes with the spectrum and is messing up your D plus experience. I love it.
Mr.Benja: Yeah, man people can't log in and having issues with Even trying to adjust their account because it sends them to spectrum and when you go to spectrum They're like, hey go log into disney plus and it's like I just came from there.
Yeah I will say
Theo Harvey: this i'm familiar with this kind of shenanigans because I was part of Yeah, i'm serious. I'm part of the problem because you remember it was AT& T. Remember AT& T at one time had own HBO. And so I think I got an HBO, it was like direct TV plus or something. I still have it, be honest with you.
That's how I watch all my live stuff. And you subscribe to direct TV and then you get HBO part of that process. So now. Now HBO is, it's called max now and you're under and it ATT is of its own, time Warner anymore. So it's weird. I said, I just said direct plus.
So every time I log into max, sometimes they'll pop out. I still log into my. Direct TV, which is still under AT& T, log in. So it's just Oh, and I forgot it's called Max now. So it's like not even HBO anymore. So it's just, yeah, man. I think guys, we're going to be going through this for the next couple of years or all these, that's what happens.
Consolidation is happening. All these old passwords and lingering stuff, it's all going to be combined and we're going to be missing stuff. And so it's going to be weird.
Mr.Benja: Yeah. Let me tell you. So I can't, gosh, it's so weird, man. I was just about to explain just another bad story, but in short, I'm sitting down using my VPN, which is tied to the same city that I'm in.
But by the way, we have a, my VPN has a server in the same area. So shouldn't be too much of a problem. My VPN stuttered for a second. It was just like, hold on. Okay, we've reconnected, man. I went back to my Disney plus window and it was like, excuse me, sir. There's a problem with this account.
I'm like, Oh gosh, please. No. And so for a week, I couldn't log in with my computer. I could only log in through my devices that I had already logged in on. And then at some point it was just like, all right, we thought you were doing some funny business. And I'm like, look, man, y'all need to go somewhere.
Y'all busted. I do this on Netflix. I do this on Netflix and they're good. They're like, yeah, cool, man. We understand who you are. We got you. Yeah. Yeah.
Theo Harvey: Tech company versus legacy media. They understand
Mr.Benja: basics. Yeah. Real quick though, while we're there, let's run down their little their movie slate real quick.
Cause people were talking, Grace was talking about the, this whole slate of things coming out in 2024 for Disney grace from beyond the trailer. They have no star Wars movies, no avatar, no theme park movies, only one Marvel movie, one live action adaptation, one Pixar movie. And one Disney animation movie.
And that's only like what seven, they used to have a, you used to get at least a movie a month, a major one, but now this is like seven. And not even seven, I'm sorry. It's just not a lot. And
Theo Harvey: Yeah. I would agree, Mr. Benjamin. No, I was just going to agree with you. It's I think the other three were, there's four.
And to know the three Fox movies that they inherited. That's right. Yeah.
Mr.Benja: Yeah. But on the Marvel show slate, we don't have much on there in terms of the TV series. We do have the one movie we were talking about is Deadpool three. So hopefully that'll pull in some good numbers, but we've got X Men 97, Echo, Agatha and Eyes of Wakanda.
Not terrible, it's not like the, not the big thing that we're used to. And in terms of Star Wars, we got the Acolyte coming. Bad Batch Season 3, which not much talk about that anymore. Tales of the Jedi Season 2, and no movies once again. No movies till 2026 when we get the Rey movie, which I, God I hope it doesn't.
Oh God, I'm sorry, I was having flashbacks of the great fan based wars of 2017. So Wednesday,
Theo Harvey: so that's not the same as the Dave Filoni movie, right? With the Mandalorian and Goku, remember? I don't know, I don't
Mr.Benja: know the date on, I don't know the date on the Goku movie. Okay.
Theo Harvey: Look, my two cents on it.
Look, when you look at this, what Marvel slate, you got to basically animations, X Men 97 eyes of Wakanda. And then echo was basically burned off, one, one night, I started watching it. It's okay. By what I expected so I'm gonna watch the rest and see what, I think I like the fight scenes, but I don't know.
That's, not too much excitement there. And then Star Wars like you said, two more animations, Bad Batch and Tales of the Jedi, right? And Bad Batch, we watched, me and the kids did watch it, just fell out on it. So we might have to check it back in, but yeah, there's a lot of animation carrying us for this next year, man.
It's don't look good, man. Don't look good at all. I don't know, man. It's just yeah I don't know what Disney's doing. And then the I think I know the Pixar one. That's like a sequel inside out too. Yeah. And then a Disney animation. Or is it, I think it's slash live action adaption adaptation is the Mufasa, which is a prequel to the Lion King.
So it's huh, nothing. Yeah, it's nothing that's, really setting the world on fire. I don't think the only one may be X Men Pulp 3, right? Because it'd be like the first like R rated and there's rumors. We're not going to get into that. So we don't do the spoiler take care, but there's rumors that it's going to be similar to Spider Man no way home.
So whatever that means, that's, it's supposed to be on that level of, nostalgia shenanigans. So whatever that means, if you got Hugh Jackman coming back as Wolverine, do the math folks.
Mr.Benja: And think back to what they did In Deadpool 2, they got some pops from the audience. If you remember those scenes, they had a few scenes.
Yeah. Yeah. I said pops from the audio wrestling.
Theo Harvey: I don't know, man. Look, I trust Ryan Reynolds. He's going to make Deadpool. He owns that property. He made it a thing. I trust that it's going to be interesting. And but I don't know, man, we'll see superhero movies are down right now.
So maybe this is a good rest period until 2025. And maybe people be like, okay, I'm feeding it for, my Superman, Rebirth, right? Coming from James Gunn or some other, Marvel movie or something. So I will see, or will people move on? I don't know, but another, or something else take over.
Mr.Benja: Yeah, we shall see. Hopefully, I don't know, man, things are so strange and there's even strangeness going on in the game industry and we don't have to spend much time here. But Matt. What's his name? Matthew Ball released this tremendous yet troubled state of gaming in 2024 report. And it goes deep in a lot of the money in gaming that is not turning out for a good gaming industry.
So there's a lot spent on, on development. And a lot of people are apparently spending a lot of time with these games. A lot of people are playing them, but revenues are down. Layoffs are happening at a tremendous rate. It's like Microsoft is acts and fools acts. Activision's acting, acting fools. What was that other big one?
Riot games was acting fools. And one thing that wasn't mentioned here was also the amount of social problems within the industry that are coming to light, like a lot of the burnout the mental health issues of people who work in the industry for so long, the the lawsuits from for different reasons, so what's going on with games, geez, man, it's, that industry is having issues.
Theo Harvey: Mr. Benton, I have to ask you as one who came from the industry and no longer works in the industry. Is it, were you the canary in the coal mine? Did you, when you read that article, did a lot of those points were something that you saw coming?
Amen. I don't think, I don't think you were pushed out, but I was more, push and pull, right? I think it was more you had other, bigger callings to get into. But. Yeah, I'm sure you saw some of these seeds like bubbling underneath the ground. Yeah, but that's fire and that's seeds from trees growing up.
Yeah.
Mr.Benja: No, it's while I was definitely in the industry, like all the time, I was wondering, how does this play out? How do all of these pieces move around the board and find a stable ground? And they've made it clear that they do not want to turn into Hollywood and they do not want to be Hollywood's pawn.
That's why there hasn't been as much crossover. It's why don't they have more games featuring Hollywood actors? And it's they don't like Hollywood. They don't like the way they operate. They don't like getting pushed around. And, it's
Theo Harvey: yeah, let's be honest. The video game industry is way bigger than Hollywood now.
So it's not even close. Let's be honest. So the video game doesn't have to kowtow to Hollywood,
Mr.Benja: right? No, they'll get something going on and be like, Hey let's get this this famous actor. How much does he want? 10 million, 10 million. Nah, man, let's get let's get Harris from accounting.
Harris can do it.
Theo Harvey: No, Tony Baker doing it right. He's the voice actor extraordinaire. Get him to do everybody's voice. Give him to the rock
Mr.Benja: and the motion capture,
Theo Harvey: Troy Baker, excuse me, not Tony. That's another guy, Troy Baker, excuse me.
Mr.Benja: Yeah, man. No, even the motion capture, I got to direct the motion capture shoot and it was like, they come in high.
I'm a Hollywood actor. We're like, yeah, whatever, man. They were all, okay. We're just here to work. It's that's right. Have a ham sandwich. Or a cucumber sandwich. We catered them in. It's great. Yeah, I'll tell you about that story.
Theo Harvey: Get over there. Yeah. We're gonna have us show versus business uncut, guys.
We'll go into that more deeper.
Mr.Benja: Uncut. Gotta tell some secrets. And real quick even along with that, one other thing that's troubling is the amount of copying and not just intellectual property, but copying and, reformatting of technology. If somebody makes a world of Warcraft, it's someone's going to turn around and make a, Realm of Rockcraft, and you're like, Realm of Rockcraft?
What is this? And you're just gonna siphon off all the people I don't know maybe a certain collapse is coming, forthcoming, I don't know. I don't wanna, I don't wanna say that, but, it's I don't know, you, you didn't, you said you hadn't heard about the PAL world thing, have you?
Theo Harvey: No. You want to tell everybody a little bit about that and what's going on with that whole scenario?
Mr.Benja: Yeah. So Pokemon has been making these games for a while, the Pokemon company. And they pretty much been the same thing. They've done Pokemon snap, Pokemon red and blue. They always have the same, it's pretty much the same game over and they'll do little They'll basically slap Pokemon on something else.
I think the biggest new game that they came out with was Pokemon Go a little while ago. And even that was underwhelming in terms of what people thought Pokemon could do. They're like, dude, take it big, man. Go real big with it. And they never did. So then this Japanese company comes out and makes this thing called Pal World.
Where you don't have Pokémons, you have little Pals. And you go around connecting, collecting these Pals that are amazingly similar to existing Pokémon. And it's just comedy how, it's like they didn't even try. They're just like why try when we can just make similar characters? This one character they have called Sparket.
Sparket. It's obviously a Pikachu. It's got the lightning looking tail and it's yellow and black and it actually doesn't, it actually frowns instead of smiling. So I guess that's the big difference, but you're like, come on, man, be for real.
Theo Harvey: This reminds me, remember coming to America McDonald's, we're not McDonald's, we're McDowell's, they had the big Mac. We had the royal cheese, just like the big, that was it. The big Mac that, so basically you keep the same letters. Just move a violin, right? And yeah, man, this is, yeah, sound sparks to that.
And to your point, AI tools, technology is making this a lot easier. And when you talked about layoffs too, man, there's a lot, we talked about this, I think last week, there's a lot of layoffs and just in tech in general, because I do feel like AI has become more and more powerful. As a matter of fact even in the influencer world, what's his name?
Dan Henry was mentioning he's getting rid of all his setters. So setters are basically people who set up appointments so you can sell them later. And he's using AI to remind people about their time to meet with a salesperson. So like I AI artificial intelligence. Easier ways to copy tools is prevalent in just all industries.
And the gaming industry seemed is rampant for that. And letting people go and then also copying, hit movie hits game seems like it's going to be something par for the course going forward.
Mr.Benja: Yeah. There's a, there's an AI engine for developing chunks of code, and then there's another AI engine that checks code for completeness.
So now what they just do is. Have you seen the HTML thing where you take a picture of a website or something and send it to the site and it says, can you make this in JavaScript? And it goes through, looks at the picture and recreates that entire website in JavaScript and says, yeah, here's how you would do it in JavaScript.
And then you can take the code checker and say, Hey, I need to code check this to make sure it's legit. And it fixes the code that the other AI thing just made. So I just basically, I can basically recreate a website in less than an hour instead of going and finding a guy, paying him, having the back and forth on what the website should look like and do it with AI.
I kid you
Theo Harvey: not. Mr. Benja please send that to me in show versus business uncut, please send it to me now. I would just say this yeah, there was an AI tool that did that initially. I think they stopped doing that, but you could literally copy any website, just, recreate it. But yeah, it sounds like that a, I, that, that tool is the best way to go about it.
And then, and these tools are proliferating. There's more and more tools all the time. We use Opus clips sometimes for our stuff for video editing and that's becoming a big thing, a tool set too. So yeah, man, this is going to be big time over the next couple of years.
Mr.Benja: Definitely. Definitely. But before we get out of here I want to, I got to bring it back, man. Your boy Rob Dyrdek, do you remember that guy?
Theo Harvey: Vaguely. I remember his mess on MTV with Dicklessness. I think that was a thing.
Mr.Benja: Yeah, Rob Dyrdek had Fantasy Factory Robin Bigg, which was him and Big Black.
He's a skateboarder who was interestingly always into business from when he was young. Like he was making 300, 000. A year at 21 years old as a skateboarder, which was unheard of just because he had hung around all these skaters and skateboarding as crazy as it tries to be ended up getting pretty, pretty narrow, there's pretty limited area of what you could do in skateboarding.
It's start skating, get a sponsor, take some photos and videos, put out some DVDs. Maybe a shoe company comes around and you get a deal with them or some shirts and it was pretty like, okay, that's what you do. Rob started blowing that out the water. He's Hey man, we're going to do all kinds of stuff.
We're going to, we're going to start wearing different clothes. We're going to start looking different. We're going to start talking to different people, start showing up in music videos and what are you doing? You're a skateboarder. What do you, this is silly, man. You're supposed to be about the skate.
He's Hey. I'm making 300, 000 a year at 21. You can shut the hell up. Yeah this video is fascinating and here's the stat I want to lead with. But he's basically, he was basically 60 percent of MTV for how many years? Or he basically controlled MTV for a long time, but at the peak, it was basically all Rob Dyrdek, 60 percent at least.
Theo Harvey: Amazing. Amazing. And thanks for sending the YouTube video just and, maybe we'll put in the show notes or something, but this is a fascinating read for any influencer who's trying to figure out how they can take the influence to the next level. I think the thing, you forget was that you're right.
He was already a kind of like a pseudo businessman before he got into the content game, but. So first his passion was his sport, but then he found ways to make money by becoming like a shoe designer, he's doing okay, but it wasn't until he really got into the content game that everything blew up.
Early 2000 skateboarder, a shoe designer, but then when he transitioned to movies, the TV shows and his collaboration with DC shoe company, it blew up because he saw what band Magor did with Jackass. He was selling. Bam Magor was also a skateboarder. We sold three times the number of skateboards than Tony Hawk, who was the god when it comes to skateboarding, right?
And so he's I want to be like that. So he negotiated a higher, less upfront pay that typically people give, but higher royalties on the back end. So basically anything he sold, he would get more money for. And, but, he wouldn't get the big upfront payment. And so that allowed him to bet on himself and go all in on content.
And I think that's what took him to the next level, right? Becoming more popular, which is similar to the story we see influencers do all the time. What's, maybe we're talking a little bit about Mr. Beast, but that content led the way from showing up in the TV, the movie Gumball 3000, to connecting with Rob, Big Black and they create the Rob and Big TV show, which was huge.
Did you ever watch that show? I remember it. I just aged out.
Mr.Benja: I actually did. It was dumb late night or even early, early Saturday morning entertainment. It's like when you have a certain dynamic between two people that just works. It's it was just, I can't describe it because there was such a good back and forth between these two characters.
And then watching the shenanigans they went into, like a security guard for a skateboarder. The skateboarder is running up for a trick and the other security guard comes out. And because he's security for the skateboarder, one security guard go push over another security guard and it's hey, that's dangerous.
This man's doing a extremely dangerous stunt. And if you were to interrupt him, he could hurt himself and it'd be a whole litigation. It's And it's funny because they both switched sides from trying to be a serious guy to the funny guy. And it was wild. It was, it's funny.
Theo Harvey: So he cracked, yeah, he did. He figured out to make content work for him to your point, between, here's Rob, a small white guy to a big, it was big black guy, right?
Security guard, right? And so that content allow him to help DC sell tons of shoes and tons of merch. I think you said it went from an 80 million company to a 500 million company. just from Deer Deck alone. And Deer Deck was able to get up to from 35, 000 episodes, 150, 000 per episode, roughly about 1.
5 million for all three seasons. But it wasn't until he got to the big money, when he got into the fancy factory, where he basically, it was his own fantasy, right? He produced that show. He was allowed to sell his own toys and merch on the show. And he also created his own kind of brand integration deal with Chevrolet and Microsoft and other big brands to advertise on the show, help pay for the show, but also he did deals on the back end with them for his own businesses.
So that's what allowed him to make millions, multi millions of dollars, man. And the ridiculousness was a part of that. And that became the next generation of what America's Funniest Home Videos. And because they could put it on anytime and it did about the same 3 a. m. to. 3 p. m. MTV just said this is a cheap thing to produce.
Nothing else is working, so let's get more of it. And Rob just got money over money. Fascinating story, man. I was
Mr.Benja: just amazed. Yeah. Shout out to Patrick CC, a YouTuber who put that together. Yeah. And it's just another sign of the changing times, man. Him and Mr. Beast. We'll see if Mr. Beast makes the new MTV.
He's a new Rob Dyrdek of this era. I don't know, but the that's all I got.
Theo Harvey: Man, I love it, Mr. Benja. Everyone, thank you for listening. Please subscribe at Show vs. Business on X, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. Listen to us at Spotify, iTunes, wherever you listen to podcasts. Go check out us at our website, Show vs.
Business. Mr. Benja, have a good one, man. You too,
Mr.Benja: my man. Peace.