Episode 8. The Most Interesting Pivot: Thom Woodley on Verticals

He wrote the Dos Equis "Most Interesting Man in the World" campaign. Now he's one of the most interesting people writing verticals.

Thom Woodley has spent twenty years showing up early — to scripted web series, to interactive mobile, to branded content, and now to micro drama. In 2006, he created The Berg, one of the first scripted online sitcoms. He wrote hundreds of episodes for Episode Interactive. He ran branded content at CollegeHumor/Dropout. He was the first writer signed to the WGA's New Media Caucus. 

In this episode, Thom and Pauline get into the consultancy he co-founded, Hudson Vertical (https://hudsonvertical.com/), which now sits at the intersection of apps, brands, streamers, and investors trying to figure out where this space is going. They talk about why an advertising background may be better training for vertical writing than traditional Hollywood. They unpack burnout as spiritual misalignment, not overwork. They reframe disappointment as just an appointment that didn't happen.

And then comes the sea change: Thom shares why he was wrong about AI in verticals — and what shifted in the last few months that's made him a hesitant futurist.
In this conversation:

Why being early to every new medium has been Thom's accidental specialty
What the Dos Equis campaign taught him about writing for a three-second scroll
How Hudson Vertical works with apps, brands, and investors entering the space
The honest reversal on AI: why he no longer thinks audiences won't watch (or pay) for AI-generated shows
Burnout, stoicism, and the Buddhist case against expectation
His clearest advice for anyone hesitating to take a vertical leap

Connect with Thom Woodley:
Hudson Vertical: https://hudsonvertical.com/
Whether you're considering the jump yourself or trying to understand where this industry is actually going, this is a conversation worth your full attention.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Vertical Reach Podcast. This is where storytelling meets strategy. I'm Pauline Gray, and each week I sit down with the creators, innovators, and voices shaping the world of vertical storytellers. Let's know stories that connect. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the current episode of the Vertical Reach Podcast. Today we have Tom Woodley in the chair, who's amazing, a real trailblazer in the micro drama vertical space. The vertical reach as a theory, as a concept, is that moment when you extend upward, physically or professionally. Normally use in athletics to describe how high, for example, a basketball player can jump, which of course occurs after years and years of training. But in our context, the vertical reach is really about what exists above you, what you want to achieve or attain when staying at the same levels no longer enough and using the methods that we use to achieve that level of current achievement just no longer fit the current business model or mold of the economy. Vertical reach in our context is about the act of rising to meet what's higher with your body, your work, or your ambitions. This podcast is about people who didn't just pivot careers, they changed altitude altogether. This season, focusing on filmmakers and creators entering the vertical micro drama space, really is part I've been finding as a part of a large integration or personal reinvention. My goal is to document real-time transitions, not to really deliver some polished hindsight or how to do this particular thing in a particular way. And today in the guest story, I have Tom Woodley. And of course, Tom, jump in here at any moment to kind of tweak or expand my description of your bio and your background.

SPEAKER_02 1:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Tom is a New York-based creator, writer, and really a pioneer in digital entertainment. He's one of the first people to really do the whole sort of scripted online sitcom in 2006 with the Berg, which is amazing, you know.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

Which is dating me that you just dropped a year. That's literally 20 years ago, but that's okay.

unknown 2:17

I put it in there.

SPEAKER_01 2:19

He also made and sold web series to IFC, Michael Eisner, Mark Cuban, as well as numerous spec pilots and micro-budget features. And of course, he's well awarded in advertising, copywriting, and creative director space. I'm sure we all know the iconic ads for those ecties, you know, the most interesting man in the world campaign, Tom Shepard with that. He was the executive career director of College Humor Dropout, where he also ran branded content. He started in Vertical in early 2010s, designing the story system and writing hundreds of episodes for the seminal episode interactive app, as well as writing for mobile games like James Bond's World of Espionage. He was head of content for early vertical series app Rizzle. He was the first writer and creator signed to the WGA under its new media caucus and helped found the IAWTV Streaming Awards and just saying, spoke to Congress with the WGA about net neutrality.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Yeah, spoiler alert though, didn't it didn't work. Eventually we lost that fight, but we we tried, you know.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

Okay, okay. Well we can tap on that and sort of how now in 2026 we can maybe revisit that as the industry and the space has really expanded and become a bigger player in the entertainment industry space. He deeply dove into micro dramas in 2023. He's written for many different apps and Invent producers. He's worked with Flareflow, Vertical, Ulta, N Short, and Viglu. And currently he has a consultancy called Hudson Vertical, working with apps to create, write, and produce shows with brands who want to partner with apps to make branded content and with clients looking to get into the space. Potential investors, founders, streamers, YouTube slabs, et cetera, exploring how to do micro drama. So let's take a moment, perhaps, and Tom, why don't you kind of expand a bit on Hudson vertical and kind of where you are with that and sort of the blending of the traditional advertising experience you have with things like the Dost Ecki's work and now moving in with brands as well. And then we'll shift into my more sort of standard questions for my guests. How does that sound?

SPEAKER_00 4:38

Great. Yeah. I mean, as you said, it's kind of a it's kind of a pretty varied bio. I don't, I've I've had a couple careers in in my adult life here. And uh, but I was I always came at this from a storytelling perspective. That's what I was first. I was all I was a playwright, you know, I actually got into this hoping to write musicals back in the day. And so that's where I started from this world of playwriting, screenwriting, storytelling, and falling into advertising was an accident. I quite literally had a temp job at an ad agency the same year that I created The Berg, and they had just sold the idea for Doseki's most interesting man in the world, and now they needed an in-house writer who had comedy experience and who was also very cheap and entered me into that. But so I, you know, advertising is one of those things that I had no desire to get into, but I found I was pretty good at and paid very well. And sometimes in life, you know, in the creative fields, in the arts, whatever, you just have to take those little turns when they come to you. So I did that. I did that at the agency level for for quite some time. But I always was itchy to get back into full-time content creation, full-time writing and producing, especially. And I and I guess if there's one thing I've sort of specialized in in my weird career, it's been early entry into new media, right? And so whether that is the web series space, literally pretty much the year that YouTube launched, or uh, like you mentioned, episode interactive. There were very few, if any, kind of like choose your own adventure mobile games there and working through that. Or I had some early experiments in the scripted podcast space, et cetera, et cetera. And for me, verticals just kind of fit in there. Um, I can talk about the vertical world for hours. I won't. You asked about Hudson Vertical specifically. Yeah, I had I had segued from sort of producing to writing verticals, a little bit of both. And a guy I know last year, Andrew Beck, who had has been uh independent producer, film feature producer, uh, you know, worked for many, many years with the Weinstein Company, Spyglass, et cetera, had reached out to me and we ended up partnering up and yeah, formed this consultancy because we were just realizing there is so much opportunity in this space. And for me, it's like I I don't know if I suffer from this or I am blessed by this, and probably most days it's a little bit of both, but I I have just a million things going on at any one time, a million things I could be doing and brilliant ideas. They're mostly not all brilliant, but you know, in the moment they might seem brilliant of things I could be doing. But in the vertical space, this last year, it really has seemed wow, no, this is actually one of those times where the more you try to do, the better it's going to turn out, right? And the more plates you keep spinning and balls in the air, they will feed off of each other. And that's really been true. And so, you know, what we set ourselves up to do is consult for anyone at any end of this business who wanted to get in. And sort of right away, I got uh kind of sucked up into working directly with the apps, like Flareflow, like we mentioned, and you know, creating shows and IP for them, but also at, you know, at the same time, consulting for people who are not on the app side, right? And so what that means specifically is that as clients, have clients who are sort of legacy streamers, right? Maybe not the biggest streamers that, you know, the top five that you're thinking of, but some other streamers who are looking at how to get into the space, clients who are brands and prospective clients who are brands, trying to figure out how to, yeah, how to bridge that branded content and advertising experience. I should also say I the the time I was an executive at College Humor, I primarily focused on running the branded content and advertising divisions there, which is what kept College Humor alive and afloat before it transitioned to dropout its subscription service, which was the best move that it could ever have made. And Sam and the team have been doing brilliant things over there since then. But yeah, so I have that deep advertising and story experience. And I looked around this space and I realized, hey, I might be one of like five or six people in the US who have anything close to like this combination of experience, right? I've made things myself on this micro budget level. I think the first vertical I did, it was like a hundred-minute show for $50,000, something like that, you know.

SPEAKER_01 8:54

A small car.

SPEAKER_00 8:55

Yeah, literally. You know, it it's my rent here in New York City for a shockingly small number of months. The uh no, but you know, I've written a ton. I have literally done verticals before, which very few people in the US had done. And I have the advertising background and and the and the brand and content background. So yeah, and the other thing um that Hudson Vertical was kind of formed to do is you know pull together investors. And so that's kind of the big exciting thing that's happening now is you know, figuring out how people are going to invest in this space. And I can talk a lot about that without going into specifics, but because that's a kind of an exciting thing on the horizon for us. But yeah, that's that's Hudson and Vertical.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

Amazing, amazing. So I really want to hear more about the investing side and just opportunities in that area. But if we circle back on that, I was gonna ask you a couple sort of my sort of standard questions. Okay. So I'm curious for you, was there a seminal moment when you realized that your horizontal growth in the advertising space had kind of capped out as it stood, and you decided that you're gonna reach higher differently? Or is it more maybe of like an evolution where you kind of osmosis kind of observed the market, or did you have a bing bing light bulb or something?

SPEAKER_00 10:16

Well, first of all, I have to say I love this conceit that you have here with this, and I love the concept of the vertical reach. And I hadn't fully put it together, but but I I think that's brilliant. I think the way you're you're talking about this is really brilliant. So kudos on that. It's very funny because for me, I I think it it was an evolution in some respects. Like I never, I never had both feet in advertising emotionally, right? And I got a lot of I got a lot of flack from that from like my my fellow advertising people because to me, advertising was a job, right? And it was a job that could be exciting at times, and I could get to go to set and go on some fun shoots and so forth, but it wasn't like, but I was a filmmaker, man. Like, so you know, like I I separated the art and the craft of it, and I was successful at advertising, but I was not as successful as I think you could be. And to really, really be like one of the top people in advertising, I think you have to fully drink your own, you have to brew and then drink your own Kool-Aid, right? You have to fully buy into the concept that like advertising really creates culture. And look, in some ways it does. Like I've worked on campaigns, like for instance, the most interesting man that, yeah, that added a lot to culture. Maybe one in a hundred campaigns like does something like that. Maybe it doesn't, it's not the driver of culture that it was like in the 60s through the early 2000s for sure. But so it was an evolution in that it was more like I am going to give myself permission to leave this day job life and and go into a different day job life. And that's going to come with considerable risk, and it did. But actually, one of the reasons I love your vertical reach concept here is two years ago, well, two and a half years ago now, I got laid off. Uh and I look, I've I've been laid off a few times in my life, usually, you know, a couple of times at an agency, like when they consolidate business and they lose clients, and it just happens, right? You like they have to downsize. But I took after Rizzle kind of Rizzle was this vertical app that I was the head of content for, and it had a lot of flaws. It wasn't ready really for the market, but I had a blast, you know, making shows on there and working on it and really liked it. And then after they decided they were gonna reconstitute and they were gonna focus in India and they weren't gonna have like an American operation anymore. And I, you know, my wife and I were given the opportunity to move to India, but we opted out of that. And so instead I took a job being a creative director in-house at a brand, thinking, okay, you know, I'm in my 40s. This is like the right move. We're gonna have a kid, you know. So, okay, fine. What's that? Or W241K. Exactly. Back to that world where it's like, yeah, I know where the insurance is coming from, and like literally a nine to five. The difference is in advertising at an agency, you're working 60 to 80 hour weeks regularly, you know. On the brand side, it's like 40-hour week tops, you know. So I'm like, great, fine. But it there it was it was not interesting to me in any way, if I'm being honest. There was no room for growth, no room at this particular company for redefinition. And I'm a someone who likes to build. I like to, I like to dream. That's a cliche, but I like to dream, I like to build, I like to be part of that. And the energy wasn't right. And ultimately they laid me off, and probably because my enthusiasm was, I mean, it had to lay lay a bunch of people off, but my enthusiasm, I probably found myself on the list because I wasn't a fit. Like my enthusiasm for this corner of the corporate world was not correct, right? And I don't mind admitting that now, although there's always this weird thing about being downsized, right? About how you hate to admit it, especially like on LinkedIn where it's a constant like posture positioning thing. But at the time, my first thought was, okay, I need to go in. And this is sort of when AI was really starting to hit, right? This is 2023. And I was like, I have to go in now and learn new skills. And I almost released a podcast and I ultimately didn't, but I I very similar thing, which I was called called Upsize, right? The upsize podcast, where it's like for people who have been downsized but have upsized themselves in the process. They have learned new skills, they have redefined themselves, which is very similar to what you're talking about here. So I think that's the moment, and that basically marks the moment where I shortly after that got back into verticals and uh and started producing them here. I mean, it was a rough couple years of of like not having like stability in that sense. And now I'm I'm working a ton and there's and there's stability in in this um and a lot of work. Uh, you know, there was a little bit of time where it's like, oh, this is this is very, very risky. So it wasn't that I guess you don't mean horizontal in terms of the aspect ratio. You just mean in terms of the growth. Yeah, the growth. Yeah. And that and that was about it. It's like that was a very definite time when I was like, okay, you know what? I I've officially aged out of the advertising world where it's like if you are not you are not running the shop by age 40, then increasingly you don't have anywhere to go. Right. And there's options, but but gosh, I will say that like that's like a solid half of my network of advertising people is like they are unemployed or underemployed, you know, if not more so. So yeah, that that moment for sure, I was like, this cannot be all there is. Like working is important, but you know, ultimately getting back and telling stories, even if, by the way, these are stories that would not be my first choice to tell, right? Like billionaire and werewolf stories are not my jam necessarily creatively, but just the act of actively writing for a screen, you know, is and and dreaming about what could be in this new media. That is, you know, I that is a thousand times more interesting. And uh I have the energy for it in a way that I never had the energy for, you know, something that uh that was completely just, you know. Sometimes we make choices in life that are like on paper, oh, this is the right choice, right? Like this is the thing that I need to do. Yes, exactly. And then deep down we know, no, this is not the right choice, but I have to do it anyway, you know.

SPEAKER_01 16:06

So that's what that's maybe screaming in the background.

SPEAKER_00 16:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:09

I totally understand that. It's funny to imagine the energy thing because on my side, also, as we discussed in the past, I also have an advertising, marketing onset production background. And like your colleagues, I also experienced sort of a step down in the the quantity of work coming in, especially here in Los Angeles. You know, it's been a very drastic reduction. And as far as the part about laying being laid off or being downsized, I lived in England for several years, and the term for being laid off in England is is called being made redundant. Yes, yes. As the Brits are very literal oft it, I always thought, what a f what what an interestingly accurate term. Yeah, yeah, I've always liked that. Redundancy means there are too many of you. Oh, you're repeating yourself.

unknown 17:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:08

You know, repeating you. You have no unique value that the other is not represented with someone else. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:14

You're merely a duplicate, essentially. And so perhaps similar to you, on the energy side, I found myself asking myself, what or will I have the energy to execute in this next chapter?

SPEAKER_02 17:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:31

And as I started asking myself those questions, on a spiritual level, the vertical world sort of unfolded in front of me. Okay. And all of a sudden, I felt energy again. I felt a desire to explore and investigate and learn and that sort of invigoration I had when I was a PA, you know, running around trying to sort out the walkies and or when I f or just timing shots. And you know, all of a sudden I realized if I listened to another podcast the other day and it talked about what burnout is. And burnout essentially is not working too hard and too much. It's ultimately a misalignment between your spirit and what you're working too hard on. And I thought, I was like, yeah, I was so misaligned in certain ways. So I would burning out.

SPEAKER_00 18:24

I don't know if how much that resonates with your experience, but you know, I as you're saying that, I I have a similar definition that I constantly revisit upon myself because I am the type of person who get really emotionally invested if I let myself. And sometimes I have to div like when I'm working on something creative, I have to, and it may be this is the truth for m all or most artists, like I have to actively like divest myself from some of the emotional attachment to things and and outcomes, right? Especially outcomes. It's like the stoic philosophy is like I can control the work, I can control the effort I put into it, I can control the time I put into it to a certain degree. I cannot control the outcome, and that's fine. But I I suffered for a long time, and of course still do, with you know, disappointment over failures and things not working. And then one day I just sort of like dissected that word, disappointment. Okay. So it's like I had an appointment in my mind, right? Of something that was I was supposed to get to and something that didn't happen. And that's it. It's just a meeting that didn't happen. It doesn't mean it's never going to happen. Or maybe it was maybe it's not meant to happen, and that's a fun. But it's like once I reframe that as like, oh, it's an appointment. It's just like a a moment in time that I missed. Well, there's plenty of more moments in time. So I don't know. Like that's one of those things that I think like the the more you dissect why those things feel bad when they happen from an objective point of view, then I think the easier it is to to grow.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

Absolutely. Um, I'm a Buddhist, and when I learned one of the things I've learned in Buddhism is that the number one leading cause of disappointment is expectation. Now I really focus and I struggle deeply to really focus on wanting the best possible outcome for whatever it is and not attaching what I think it should be or look like exactly for my personal life manual that I've written in in in detail. And kind of just releasing, like you said, you know, the sort of Socratic or Platonic method of the attachment part, you know. And um and that's that's what it's um it's a constant daily battle, you know. I'm constant, you know. But I'm I'm getting better. And I'm curious though, more sort of circling back to sort of the work day-to-day aspect of it, what do you find carried over from your previous work in advertising to your current work at the consultancy and in the vertical space? Are there certain parallels, certain similarities, certain client interaction protocols?

SPEAKER_00 20:56

Or yeah, I mean, I think advertising, well, look, in in some ways, going through the advertising world prepares you for lots of different for pretty much any career. Like I feel like advertising is one of those careers that you can go into it knowing nothing, like be dropped into the fire, and you will be very stupid for a while in your job, but then eventually you'll like you'll pick up. And one of the things that I think you really I should say, two things that I think you really learn in advertising that I don't know where else you would learn them is the ability to pitch to to clients, right? So the ability to, whether that is pitching yourself or pitching a product, or even thinking of yourself as a product, right? It's something I've always sort of struggled with. Uh because I don't do a lot of social media about myself. I never have. I I always sort of like obliquely want to. And it I think the people who really succeed at that are people who just they give they give zero F's about uh about you know what I mean. Like they they don't they do not care about thinking about themselves as a product and they are able to make that distinction in separation, you know? And really, and I've always had that thing. It's like, oh, I can. I can pitch this product like nothing. Like that, that's fine pitching myself as a person, like a little harder. But so that's one thing. Like being able to have comfort in front of clients, understand uh, or and by clients, I really just mean anyone who is making a decision about the thing that you were trying to make, the creative work that you were trying to make, and really putting yourself in the perspective of not what I want to do, but like what do they need? What does the the people who are paying for this need out of this situation? I think that's something that you you learn, you cannot survive in advertising less you learn that. And then, you know, the the other piece I think is just thinking about things in a short, just in terms of the content sense, right? Like in a in a short, compact way. And you know, I used to kind of half make fun of advertising or explain why I thought it was easy by saying it's just the shortest, stupidest road between two points, you know, like you have the product and the person who needs to buy the product. And it's like, it really is, you know, like what is what is the simplest way to get them to buy it? And and there's been times when like I would get a brief from a strategist. I my discipline in advertising was, you know, primarily as a as a copywriter, right? I mean, I did the creative director path, but I started out, you know, from the copy perspective. And no, I there's been a number of times where it's like, you know, the the brief will say something like, you know, get people to understand that Pringles is the cracker of fun. And then like my tagline would be like, I try all of these like brilliant, clever things. And then on the last slide, I'd have like, all right, here's another direction we can go. Pringles, it's the cracker of fun. And they'd be like, brilliant. How did you know? Control C, control V. Are we really? Yeah. So those, those kind of things, just like understanding like, and then I think that's helped with vertical definitively for many reasons. I mean, obviously it's a it's a format in which you have a minute per episode, right? But also you have three seconds to stop the initial scroll and just thinking about like that, like what's going to do that? And you have the the essentially what boils down to a CTA at the end of every episode. Like, how are you going to get people to buy the next thing? I mean, I think that people coming from advertising have probably almost in some ways have better training for writing verticals than people coming from like traditional Hollywood, in a way. And then there's also just the fact that the verticals industry is so dependent on advertising. Like literally, the episodes that we are writing are ads. They are used as ads. And so yeah, that's kind of the I think both I think both of those things are my understanding of it and my lack of frustration with what I might otherwise find frustrating about verticals is probably because of the advertising experience.

SPEAKER_01 24:41

Love it, love it. Um so now as you made this shift, what felt risky and what felt inevitable? What kept you up at night and what was like, you know, this is happening, and this the train has left the station.

SPEAKER_00 24:52

I mean, the if you're talking about the shift from like, yeah, like that I did a couple years ago from a what ultimately was not that long of a contract, but you know, like the idea of of having like a full-time job in a brand. And I'm by the way, I'm not saying that I wouldn't do that again. I think if there was like an entertainment company, like a streamer or something like that, that my skills were right for, then I would absolutely take an executive role again. But the the shift into getting back like full-time into away from advertising in general and branding and marketing and and towards something that had more content creation and and storytelling at its core. The immediate concern was like the mundane pedestrian stuff, right? I live in New York City. I have three children in a couple, I don't know when you're posting this, but in a couple of weeks it will be four, you know. So yeah. So I have one at one in college, like one going to her first year of college and film school, and one in high school, and then a three-year-old, and then one in utero. So there's a lot going on. And I live in Manhattan, and you know, my my wife is also in the entertainment business, which means like that's not the way it's supposed to work, right? Like the way it's supposed to work is is that one person is in the entertainment business and the other person has like a real job. Yeah. They're like a doctor or a lawyer or in finance or something like that. My wife's a producer on the feature side, which is it's also really tough right now. And so just that aspect of how can I justify, you know, leaving a job? And in this case, they they did the pushing for me by downsizing me, which is great, but in retrospect, but I was really mad at first about that. It's like, how dare you uh reject me and my my abilities or not see what I can do. But ultimately, I I think it was it's been the best thing for for my career and and and my life, and I'm making more money at this now than I was at that job. So ultimately, it's it's a risk because life, especially again, Manhattan, but LA is the same. Like life is very expensive right now, only getting more expensive. And especially as like it's one thing to do something like this in your 20s, but as as like I'm in my 40s, and it's like, okay, ultimately, like these are supposed to be the years when like we are at the height of our like, you know, adult yeah. Yeah, we're peaking. We're at like our crest. Like it's our we still have most of our brains left. And and but we're supposed to also have like, you know, an infallible bank account right now, which I'm like a couple years of underwork and then that went away, right? And so all of those things is is just sort of like, what is this dumb? Like, should I go, should I do a complete career shift? Like something that has nothing to do with creativity, right? And I explored some things and I was just like, I I actually don't know what that could be. I I think I felt differently in my 20s when it's like, oh, I could do anything. I could do anything in the world. Like there's still time, and but once you get into your 40s, I think especially, it's like, hey, there's not time. Like I could go be a therapist or something like that, but I have to go to school. Like by the time I I finish everything that would, you know, all the training to do something that I'm actually interested in and uh and would make money, it's like I'd be like 50, you know? And like and what's that? Yes, yeah, for sure. Seriously. And uh anyway, so that kept me up at night. And just the general uncertainty of our industry still keeps me up. Like where all the stuff is going, like I embraced it because I had to, but it's sort of it's all so much of a giant question mark. You know, it's like, are verticals going to be around a year from now, six months from now? I don't know. Yeah, I think so. I I put a lot of energy into solving that question. I don't know what they're gonna do if I'm gonna do if they don't, if they disappear, if they if they flame out. I gave a presentation a couple months ago to a room full of like brand managers and ad buyers and CMOs and things like that. And I was I was one speaker among many, and I was the only one speaking about verticals there. And they all watched like really intently, and then there was a QA session, and the first question asked was, okay, but isn't this just a trend? Isn't this just going to go away? You know? And I had to sit and think about that. And I said, you know, I to be fair, I don't know, right? It's very possible. However, I can also remember people asking me or telling me that same thing 20 years ago about YouTube, you know, that, oh, yeah, this is just the internet.

SPEAKER_01 29:05

The internet, this is the internet.

SPEAKER_00 29:07

Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:09

Yeah. I got dial up and good.

SPEAKER_00 29:10

Yeah. You know. Yeah. Or I remember like when I was a kid and like playing video games and like friends of mine who were like really into video games and their parents being like, that's never gonna be a job. What are you doing? You know, yeah. Then now with the the AI shift and everything like that, it's it's it's a whole new level of expansion, but also existential quandary about it. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:31

So let me ask you two more questions, then I'll let you continue striving and vertically with reaching up. Um, what do you see? I know you mentioned the the consultancy. What is your next swipe up?

SPEAKER_00 29:41

So I should say, like, I'm I'm really enjoying creating shows for apps right now. And I should say I think I am a hesitant futurist. Like I'm not a pessimist about technology and about AI in the in the same way that I think a lot of people are. And I should caveat that and say, like, I got into entertainment like for the people of it and for the humanity of it, right? Like I, like I said, the theater, like that's what I wanted to do. And write for dialogue delivered by humans and for an audience that was sitting in a darkened space for two hours, whether that was a play or a movie, right? Like that's what I wanted to do.

SPEAKER_01 30:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:20

Yeah. Yeah. Coming to in a world, in a land. Yeah. I think being a purist about these things only gets you so far. Like I remember, like, I I love David Lynch, the, you know, the director David Lynch, and and at one point he had said something about like where he like cursed out the idea of watching a movie on your on your phone. And of course, like, yeah, like, all right, this is a guy in his 70s. And by the way, who's had a completely blessed life in terms of like a filmmaker, and from artist to filmmaker with obviously bumps in the road, but that was a man who could do anything he wanted in the space, right? So it's like, all right, on one hand, yes, anything you say, David, like I'm gonna, I'm gonna listen to it. And like, on the other hand, it's like most of us don't get that luxury, right? Most of us don't get the carte blanche to do. And I think sometimes the people who like the Yorgos Lanthemos of the world and like the or like the Christopher Nolans or the people making Game of Thrones who were like, oh, your TV should be like this kind of TV to watch our show. It's like, yeah, but come on, dude. Like, again, the more, the more precious we are about these things, ultimately, like that doesn't, that doesn't help most of us. And for me, it was just like, what do what do I want more? Do I want to like stick to my guns and be a cinephile purist and um and uh never do anything again, you know? Or do I want to keep working and make things? And and you know, I I have this argument with my daughter frequently because she is a freshman film major cinephile purist at Emerson. And so she's like, I hate I AI, and I I know a lot of actually people of her generation do, and they're actually anti-social media. And by the way, like I'm all for that. I like seeing this concept of like bringing back like very, very inexpensively made indie films shot on the phone that are just like human stories. Like, I welcome that. I would love to make some of those. But anyway, to get back around to your question, I I think verticals is the first format that AI will completely take over. And and I and I think that there's reasons for this. So talking to apps, at at a lot of them, and Flareflow was one that made the switch to AI first, right? Or at least uh got headlines and a fair amount of flack for saying they were going to make the switch to AI first. Now, in reality, they're still doing live production and AI. But what I'm learning talking to a number of different apps is that the AI stuff is working. And this was a this was a big question mark I had. And I know it was working in China. I know in China people were watching AI-produced shows at a great scale, and they were also paying for them, right? Although keep in mind in China the verticals market is different, a lot more of it is ad supported than it is here. But my priors at first were like, I don't know how much people are going to watch AI shows. And then my prior was like, well, okay, maybe they'll watch them, but I really, really don't think like Americans are going to pay for them, right? Well, lo and behold, I no longer think that anymore. In the last month, I've really seen a sea change in terms of the quality, like the visual quality of these things. And it's getting to the point where I, someone who has spent hours and hours and hours and hours and hours working through and thinking through AI, have a difficult time sometimes figuring out if the shot is AI, right? Like it's to that point, right? But also, not even that, I think there's a sizable amount of there's a sizable audience who doesn't, who can't tell either way. And there's a sizable audience who does not care. They do not care if it's AI.

SPEAKER_01 33:36

Don't care.

SPEAKER_00 33:36

I think so. I I think we hear a lot about like the backlash about people who really care because that's from a perspective of like we're in the entertainment industry, and like, yeah, I don't want gaffers and makeup artists to lose their job, right? No, of course not. So those people care, right? But your average like Nancy in Nebraska who's sitting and watching these things, no, as long as the people are beautiful and it has the same and the thing is with AI, the people can be more beautiful. And by the way, if Nancy you'd like them to be, actually. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And and you know, I've had a couple shows that it's like we wrote the script, the script, you know, internally tested well, and then handed over to a director. And for some reason, whether it is the something goes weird in production, the budget's too low, they cast actors who are like, they're fine, or they just don't click with the audience or whatever, and the script and the the show just doesn't perform well. So from business perspective, I was like, hey, if AI performs even a quarter as good as the live production stuff does, they're all gonna make that switch.

SPEAKER_01 34:36

I would say response to adjusting the change. You can quote unquote reshoot an AI project to match the, I imagine to match the metrics and the feedback.

SPEAKER_00 34:47

Absolutely. Well, yeah, we don't yeah, we don't like that that Tom played the boss. Okay, Pauline's gonna play the boss now. That's it. You know, like they just switch it out.

SPEAKER_01 34:56

We don't like an ending.

SPEAKER_00 34:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:58

And I also can imagine sort of the multiple sort of choose your own adventure and I'm dating myself now, you know, by using that term, but multiple.

SPEAKER_00 35:07

No, but that's where that's where it's going to go. I think that or that's one capacity where where it could go. We're not there yet. It can't be immediate. But I do think that that like look, I think the model that a lot of apps are are exploring, like wisely so, is wait a minute, why do we need to produce 60 episodes all at once? Well, when you're doing a live production, you do, right? Because it's like you we have these actors for a week. We need to amortize production. Location, we're shooting all the kitchen shots. Exactly. Uh well now it's like we can produce 10.

SPEAKER_01 35:36

And uh on live production, you're saying, okay, we're shooting out the kitchen today. We're gonna go shoot the bedroom, and then we're gonna redress the kitchen, shooting the bedroom as the dining room.

SPEAKER_00 35:45

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 35:45

And then we're gonna keep moving, we're gonna shoot 10 locations in this one location in the next six days, and that's a machine, and that's how we do it.

SPEAKER_00 35:52

Yeah.

unknown 35:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:53

So in in in the AI world, like the a lot more apps are suddenly saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, let's do 10 episodes and test it, or let's do 20 episodes and see if it's going to be a success. Because we know that like one out of every 20 shows might be a hit, right? So for the same amount of money, like we can make so that's it just makes sense, you know? And I think the combination of who this audience is, like they're not looking for the most nuanced storytelling to begin with, let's be honest, right? And they're mostly watching on a phone, which is like if you're gonna pick a screen where like AI is not going to bother you, that's the one, right? Like blown up on a cinema screen, different story, but like, right? I just think it makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 36:34

4K, 8K, 1K, 2K, who cares?

SPEAKER_00 36:37

It's right here. Right. And and then the other thing is if if these shows are one quarter as successful as like a live production, then this is going this way. I was wrong. They are as, if not more, successful. And that is in terms of making money. These shows are now making money at a higher rate than the originals, than the live production for all the reasons above. And they cost a tenth of the cost. And again, I think I think what some apps are doing really smartly is they are taking the shows and structures that are that have proven to work, like like going through the list of like the top 100 verticals of all time and taking that structure and saying, what if this was in space? What if this was in medieval? What if we put this thing onto it? And and coming up with something they couldn't have shot before for live production, but that is really, really visual and something that people have not seen on their phones before done that that way. So I think it's actually AI. I'm not mad about AI. As much as I want, as much as I would, you know, I am frustrated for other people who are going to lose work over this. And that does suck. And I do want to say, like, I I recognize how verticals have been giving everyone work, but I just think like, put on your business hat and it's hard to argue with why they're doing this, you know?

SPEAKER_01 37:47

Absolutely. I always say, you know, because I on the producing side and the cruise side, I'm gonna split. And I say, you know, the first question any producer ever asks, and maybe the only question a producer ever asks, is but do we actually need it?

SPEAKER_00 38:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:03

And can we get by without it? Yeah. It could be any catering. No one knows we actually need it.

SPEAKER_00 38:09

Yeah, it could be the onset medic or the safety officer, as we found out with some of these vertical shoots. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 38:14

Everything must be justified. I know um I'll take one minute of your time for that person who is whether it's in the film industry, a different part of their life, who is antsy and not quite sure if when they can, should take a vertical leap in their own life. How would you quickly encourage them to dip their toe in the water or just take a leap forward or leap upward? Like what's that sort of like encouragement you give to that person who's hesitating to make a shift in their lives?

SPEAKER_00 38:47

Look, I think hesitation is natural and responsible, right? Like there's this Chris Pratt quote which pisses me off, which is I intentionally made no plan B. And like I had a plan A and like I was gonna be a successful movie star, and I just threw myself at it. And, you know, I had no plan. I forget his exact quote. And I'm like, yes, okay, great, dude. And for every one of you who's done that successfully, there's thousands who have failed and hate their life or, you know, are doing one thing or the other. And it's like, I don't buy that. I think that you should have a plan B. And like it's all it's totally fair to, and I used to teach kids like film school and actors and all the stuff, like a business of new media course and all the stuff. And I would talk about that. I would talk about part of where we're going is constant adaptation. Like, I don't know if everyone has noticed this or not, but the speed of these changes are just quickening. Like it's going faster and faster. Yeah, like I was at a I was at a dinner for an AI studio thing last night, and like we were just talking about the the we have to relearn tools every week if we want to keep up with AI. Like literally. And it's just gonna keep going faster and faster. As people, we tend to like learn a set of tools and skills when we're young and then fetishize them. You know, it's like g give a man a hammer when he's 20, and then he doesn't understand why he needs to use an electric camera when he's 40, right? Like that's the so the problem. Yeah, yeah. So I the problem is like, no, we're we're past that point now. And it's like we we all have to constantly be reinventing ourselves. Like, you know, I are there some careers where reinvention is not necessary, probably. But like, you know, one of my friends from high school is in the like the mortgage lending business, and he has to operate like a social media content stream to get business. Do you know what I mean? Like so that he can beat out the other mortgage lenders in his little county, you know? It's just the a manner of thinking that we that you have to it adapt unless you've somehow like magically cornered some niche or some industry which is never gonna change and people always need, in which case, call me up, let me know what that is, because maybe I want to get involved in that. Yeah, no, I I would say like if you've reached that point where you're like, okay, what I'm doing sucks. It's not, you know, if if it's not satisfying you like artistically, then that's okay. I think you can still do art as a hobby, and I think there's no shame in that. I did that for many years. I might do that again in the future. I don't know. But I think there's no no shame and there shouldn't be a shame, and nor should we be compelled to make all of our hobbies, to monetize all our hobbies and all our artistic pursuits. I'm against that. I have to do it sometimes, but I'm against it. So I wouldn't make the leap solely for that reason. The reason I would make the leap is like if it's not satisfying you in a combination of like financially or giving you the stability that you need, if it is draining you spiritually every day, which was candidly my experience, right? Like, you know, I I'm not, I don't want to sit in like 10 meetings a day, you know, even with people I love. But if I'm working on something that I love, I will, right? But there are, you know, people who are built for that and people who are not. If if something is causing you more pain in your life than it is giving, it's a cost-benefit thing. So I think if if you're hesitant to make the leap, it it really comes down to why are you hesitant? What are you afraid of losing? You know? And again, just kind of stoically stepping outside of that and being like, you know, my fear is just my fear. What am I afraid of? Okay. I'm afraid of not having stability. Okay. For me, it was like, what happens if I do take a risk and I am not in a couple years able to make enough money doing this? Am I going to be homeless on the street? And I looked at like, probably not, right? Like, I have a little bit of money in my bank account. I have a father who still has a house. So you know what I mean? Like, I if you have family and friends and like a roof over your head, then you're you're better off than most people in the world, like in terms of like risks you could take, right? So there's not going to be a better time to take this risk. It's only going to be harder after this point. So it's either I do it now or I do it never. And thinking through that way is what moved me into that, but also just necessity. Like I think I think I applied for like a thousand, you know, corporate creative jobs in like the year after I got downsized and got called back to a couple, got hired for none. You know, so I'm just like, all right, that's a sign. I think that's a sign right there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:09

Wow. Okay. Thank you so much, Tom. This has been amazing, very insightful. And in the show notes, we're gonna list all the different ways we can reach out and connect with you. Um let's just say to my audience, you know, if you're building something new or becoming someone new, this is the vertical reach. And please just keep swiping up. Thank you so much, guys. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Vertical Reach Podcast. If you enjoyed the conversation, make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. If it sparked something for you, please share a 12 storyteller. Until next time, let's callstories.com.