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

22:39So I think there's an essential conflict here between the workers who are kind of dreamy, who love this place, who moved here, We're able to have middle class incomes, buy homes, and you're seeing this sort of like, you know, there is definitely a Detroit vibe that is underway if things don't course correct. And, you know, I was talking to the CEO of a big PR firm in New York the other day, and he said, like, his firm is very much looking at, you know, they're looking at Los Angeles and thinking the floor is falling out this year because no other industry has come in to bolster it. So it's like, remember when Silicon Beach was going to be a thing and tech companies were going to move in?

23:25That never happened.

23:26Peter Kafka:and um turns out it's very hard to replicate silicon valley anywhere but silicon valley everyone's tried it correct uh but yeah no detroit vibes that's a very stark way of putting it there just as an aside the journal i thought did a very nice piece about sort of the hollowing out of middle-class work in hollywood maybe a year ago and i think they called it they called it a horror movie the hollywood makes horror movies now it's living one the comments under it were astounding because it's the Wall Street Journal. So to register, to make a comment, I think you have to be a subscriber. And the delight people had in watching, in their minds, Hollywood get its just deserves.

24:06Peter Kafka:And clearly it's a lot of MAGA and political sort of oriented stuff. But the idea that you would celebrate a town's struggles was, I shouldn't be shocked, but I was still shocked to see it. Well, I mean, even people I know, right? Like when you hear what writers were making and who were on a hit show and you compare it, everything's a comp, right? So then people can't help but compare themselves. So if you're a journalist and you saw what Hollywood writers were making, you know, you're like, oh, just desserts, you know. And if you look at the Palisades burning down, people today are like, well, they're rich.

24:43Who cares? They can figure that out. And this is sort of the coarsening of our conversation overall in the world. But also this you can't fight this culture war and not have an end result at some point. And that's where we are. And I think what I also want to say about Hollywood right now, I think you're seeing this paralysis. Like so Hollywood used to be like, you know, a place that had a lot of protests, spoke out, was always, you know, fighting the so-called man. And it is pretty much crickets now because everyone is scared. And I was so kind of struck by the fact when you saw the Grammys and you have these musicians who are, you know, getting up on stage, Billie Eilish, Bad Bunny, like just really sticking it to the president and ICE and the administration.

25:34And you compare that with the Golden Globes where it was like, oh, my God, sponsored by Polymarket. No one's saying anything. It felt sort of like this hellish landscape of what and the ratings are down of what Hollywood is becoming. And when you think about how to capture young people, it is very often, you know, who are the pipeline for everything. When you think about young people, you know, they love this culture of rebellion and revolt and speaking out. And I worry also about Hollywood containing itself so much to the point that it kind of stops speaking to the audience. You're seeing that with the creator economy coming in.

26:11You're seeing that with people like Ben Mizales of Midas Touch who are coming in and just saying things in a way that Hollywood is still continuing to have a very controlled conversation. And you know it's something when like the loudest voice in the room on this issue is Jane Fonda, who's in her 80s, right? and who you would very much expect to be at the forefront of this. And just, I think that, you know, fear is just a, fear is a very unhealthy attribute in any environment.

26:42Peter Kafka:Oh, man. You speak truth. I want to find a slick way of turning this into a positive podcast, but you're speaking truth. Let's talk about something positive, which is you building a business, the Ankler. How many years into it are you? Four. We just had our fourth birthday. And I think right after you launched, you came and talked to me on what was then called Recode Media. We got into your origin story. You and Richard Rushfield were the oldest people in Y Combinator. Oh, my God. Yeah, still, I think we still probably hold the record. You got advice from Marc Andreessen about how to build your own business.

27:21Peter Kafka:So you're four years in. How is it going? It's going extremely well. I think probably some of the things I would think about this year around the business. And we've expanded a lot. We have great, great journalists working for us. And I think when we started, it was like, everyone was like, oh, my God, newsletters. It's so exciting. This is the future. And I think we're probably seeing the, we're probably in peak newsletter right now. Like, you know, oh, God, everyone has a newsletter. American Eagle has a newsletter on Substack. Yay. I mean, like this is like saying you had an app in 2009. Yes, exactly.

27:58Like not so exciting. Or maybe saying you had a MySpace when when Rupert Murdoch got a MySpace. And so so then we, you know, so I think you'll see us like we're doing. We are really thinking this how we expand out where we have. We've succeeded in what most people are now trying to do, which is build this, you know, robust newsletter audience. Yeah.

28:23Peter Kafka:So walk me through the business. So last year you said you guys were looking at$10 million and was going to be divided up between third from subscriptions, third from events, third from media sponsorships. How did that pan out? And what are you projecting for this year? um let's see i it it panned out um i would not i would not dare to predict this year yet we have our budget and i hope we make it i think we're we're looking some of it like again all a lot of it depends on what shakes out with this with this warner brother situation because now it's not that you only have you know remember we have two we we are supported by sponsorship too so you have three big sponsorship players locked up, right?

29:06And that makes spending really cautious, both in terms of them buying movies and shows, but also -

29:11Peter Kafka:The sponsorships, that's to spell it up, that is the studios promoting their stuff to your readers. Film and television, yep. Generally around awards. Generally around awards. So that, you know, we're being very cautious about how that is going to play out for us this year. So we are very mindful of building our, you know, thinking about entertainment's very different from when you and I first spoke about the Angler. Like, entertainment is not film and television. And I'm very mindful of never turning this into, you know, what I call Colonial Williamsburg. Like, pretending that that's still the main driving force of all entertainment.

29:50Like we have we see many inputs now into the entertainment industry, whether that's, you know, creator economy and Natalie Jarby, who I know, you know, does a like and subscribe, which is an excellent creator economy newsletter for us today. She's even writing about sort of the shift in television where television is now going to be video podcast, basically, that costs five thousand dollars an episode like like these changes are coming fast and furious. And we are definitely staying ahead of the curve. Microdramas, there's a portion of our audience that absolutely hates every time we talk about that.

30:24Peter Kafka:I have a question. That's something my colleagues at Business Insider write about all the time. And I know that this is one of those things that's big in Asia. And people assume or believe or hope that will happen here. And sometimes those things translate and they move across the ocean and sometimes they don't. Are there Americans consuming microdramas in meaningful numbers? Okay. There are Americans consuming micro dramas. It's mostly women. And, and, you know, all the crazy, like, you know, billionaire werewolf romance, like, it's all crazy. And so it really, I think one of the tests for Hollywood is, does Hollywood over professionalize them, where they lose the essence that makes them sticky to, to the audience?

31:07And, you know, tick tocks in this in micro dramas now buzzfeed, which, you know, why not? Right. And so that, that That'll be one of the big tests. But also for us, like we realize I'm very mindful that nobody reads anymore. No one has any attention. Like Richard Rushfield today has a newsletter coming out about the goldfish. Everyone's a goldfish now. Like no one can remember a thing. And so, you know, we've made a big move into video. We hired Jennifer Lasky to run video for us as our executive producer. You know, we kind of ignored social or didn't make that a huge focus. We realize now that obviously we'll double down much more into social and events.

31:49Peter Kafka:I mean, like spell out why it's important for you to be in social, right? Your audience, I assume, is mostly professional, right? Or prosumer, right? People who have a who are willing to pay to learn more about what's happening in Hollywood. So why does it matter that you're on social media? I just feel and I'm sure there's lots of data to bear it out. Like the social platforms haven't collapsed. Right. Like, I think that was there was a period of time where people thought like, oh, it's coming. Oh, my God. Like, X is dead. When, in fact, X is actually on the, you know, swinging upwards and things like that, that maybe people don't like to hear but are actually true.

32:25And Instagram is a huge driver to news outlets now, which you've probably found yourself. And so I just I feel like we are constantly competing in like everyone's everyone's just living in a feed now. You're in the, you know, your whole life is one feed and, you know, it's Epstein, it's puppies, it's rescued animals, or at least mine is.

32:46Peter Kafka:And and then more Epstein and like people that is, you know, even though you're reaching professional, sober adults, you still want to show up in feeds because not everyone has heard of you and maybe not everyone is subscribing to you. You need to be there. It's building the funnel, right? Like you want to just build the funnel and eventually get everyone to convert into paid. I think also when we think about our subscribers, when Paramount goes and lays off 3 ,000 people, we will see that in our subscriber roles. These are resources we have to constantly replenish. So the other thing, and I just want to go back to events, you know, we're this small but mighty presence and we have been leaned on.

33:30We're programming at NAB show again for them this year on a business of entertainment track. We'll be programming with a partner at Cannes Film Festival, at Cannes Lion. And so we like that we can retain these high level relationships here, the credibility with an industry and be able to, frankly, you know, monetize those for us on someone on bigger stages.

33:53Peter Kafka:If you were starting, last question, if you were starting this business today, instead of four or five years ago, would you start it again as a newsletter slash substack product? Or would you say, you know what, we've, we've, the newsletter time is over. It was a fine MVP time, but we need to do something else instead. Um, let's, that's a really good question, Peter. I would absolutely start with a newsletter product because it is still like, you know, for example, like California post is out here, right? I don't, I don't go to a newsstand and buy the California post. You can't even find a newsstand in Los Angeles, but I am getting the page six Hollywood newsletter, which is pretty good.

34:30Right. So suddenly that's like in my, in my life. Right. And so it is, you know, and I've just spent some times slagging newsletters, but it is a very direct way to reach an audience where an audience decides right away, I like you or I don't. Right. And you probably do the same thing I do. Like you've fallen out of love with a lot of newsletters. So you just hit delete, delete, delete, delete, like, like deleting probably 250 newsletters a day that you used to open. And, um, and that, so I think when you can find a connection with an audience where they're not doing that, like, That's huge. And it does mean something.

35:07It means something to know your audience and understand what they're responding to and make them feel, I don't know, warmly towards you, I guess.

35:18Peter Kafka:Makes sense. Janice Min, I feel warmly towards you via the Internet. Thanks for doing this. We will get together in real life soon. I look forward to it. Thanks again to Janice Min. And if you like that one, I suggest you go back and listen to the one we did back in October 22, where Janice talks a lot about the glory days of print magazines. Yep, they had glory days. In a minute, I'll be talking to Reid Duxer, the digital talent agent, but first a word from our sponsor.

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38:36Peter Kafka:I'm here with Reid Duxcher. He is the founder and CEO of Knight, which is a management company that manages some of the biggest names on the internet. Reid is probably best known as the guy who helped Mr. Beast become Mr. Beast. He's no longer working with him. He is working with lots of other high profile creators, Kai Sanat, Hassan Piker, among others. Welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Long time listener. Excited we could finally do this. Yeah, it's always good to talk to someone who actually does this stuff for a living. I want to talk to you about, you just raised a bunch of money.

39:07Peter Kafka:I want to talk to you about your business. And I want to talk to you about sort of the state of the internet for creators these days. But let's do the very quick tour of how you got here. You wanted to be a sports agent working with NFL players. How did you end up working with YouTubers and live streamers instead? Yeah, the abbreviated version is that I did want to be an NFL sports agent. So when I graduated college, I started representing my friends. Some of them went on to play in the Canadian Football League. Some of them went on to play in the NFL. And instead of getting certified as a contract advisor with the NFL, I ended up stumbling upon YouTube in 2014.

39:43There's this creator named Dude Perfect that was making videos early on. Now everyone kind of knows who they are, but in 2013, 2014, they were starting off their careers. They were some of YouTube's favorite

39:54Peter Kafka:creators back then. They were like, they did stunts and they were family friendly and they could put them in front of advertisers. I remember they would always trot them out in front of their brand cast things. Yeah, still to this day. I mean, they're one of the darlings of YouTube. I would say their top five channel on the ecosystem. They've also raised a substantial amount of capital. But that got my start in the creator ecosystem. I left that sports agency, moved to Dallas, Texas, started night in 2015. And I've been doing it ever since. At that time, I didn't really know what this would turn into.

40:28I think the interesting thing for me was that I thought creators would continue to build companies and production companies on top of YouTube. And if I could be part of that paradigm shift, I could sit in a pretty interesting position. And I couldn't get into the mail rooms at UTA, CAA, WME. Like I'm from a farm in North Dakota. I have no connection to this Hollywood city at all. And so the only real option I had was just to do it myself.

40:52Peter Kafka:And what did you see an obvious connection parallel between a a high profile athlete and a YouTuber streamer? Are there sort of obvious things that connect them? Are they radically different? Or did you get enough exposure to sports agency to even make that connection? Yeah, I would say the creators are much more entrepreneurial in nature. They've had to start their own businesses, whether that was in their basement, making YouTube videos, or just picking up a camera and filming something. And so the mindset is very different. They've had to do everything themselves. And I think athletes are, they're equally challenging to work with.

41:28It's just very different. You know, I liked gravitating towards individuals that wanted to build businesses, wanted, you know, Mr. Beast being a really good example of that. You know, I think that's the fundamental difference. If you're playing in the NFL, you're in season really eight months out of the year. And then if you go on to play in the Super Bowl or deep into the playoffs, your off season is only two and a half months. And in those two and a half months, they don't want to do anything but focus on the next season. So it's very challenging to get anything done for my year and a half when I worked as a sports agent.

42:00Peter Kafka:I was thinking from the outside, oh, these are both sort of groups of people that have kind of a timer on their career, right? You can only be in the NFL for X number of years, probably three or four years on average. You know, someone like Tom Brady, who goes to 40, is really an anomaly. And I would think for internet creators, there would be a similar sort of like there's a limited amount of time where I'm going to be able to make money, meaningful money doing this. And I've got to go, go, go. Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment, but we are seeing a lot of creators now that I believe will have long careers.

42:36Like you mentioned Hassan Piker early on, I would imagine Hassan will be making, maybe he won't Twitch stream 10 years from now, but he'll have some sort of his own show talking about politics for probably the next 35 years.

42:50Peter Kafka:So I want to zoom out and talk about the state of the internet broadly for creators. You talked to my colleagues at Business Insider and you said there might not be a next Mr. Beast. We're moving to a niche world. Why do you think there won't be another Mr. Beast, some singular person that dominates a ton of attention, at least from one segment of the audience? Yeah, I think there's a few things that I've seen shift over the last couple of years. One is that the platforms don't want to incentivize people to break through like the algorithms on TikTok and YouTube and Instagram now put you in this little lane of content that they know you care about and they keep feeding you that content.

43:31Where pre-COVID, you know, we would go on TikTok and a lot of people would see Addison Rae videos, Charlie D 'Amelio videos, Cabby Lane videos. It was getting fed to the whole ecosystem of consumer that was on TikTok. now if you go on tiktok you see your very like small lane of content that interests you for me like my for you page is a lot of podcast clips sports clips and different things i don't see anything outside of that and so that's one challenge with these creators really breaking through i think the the platforms would rather have the the middle tier of creators with five to ten million followers they would rather have that enormous than have a few people break through

44:12Peter Kafka:And so you think this is intentional on the part of the platforms to sort of not have hugely powerful creators? I mean, I understand wanting to carve up their, you know, how to tune an algorithm so it gives me exactly what I want and you exactly what I want. That's what all the platforms want to do. That's different than saying we don't want another Jimmy Donaldson, Mr. Beast, where he's got enormous power. But that seems to be what you're suggesting. I'm suggesting both. I think that you want the algorithms to be as good as possible at keeping high session time. And so if you feed people exactly what they want, the session time goes up.

44:48But then I think the other situation, you know, we've seen adpocalypse has happened. We've seen PewDiePie affect the advertising rate of all of YouTube by saying something. And then AT &T and these people pull out of the ads on YouTube. That is like an existential threat that I don't think they want happening. And when you have individuals that have a lot of power and leverage over platforms, those things can happen. And so I think them pushing down and widening out is really what I've seen over the last two years. And, you know, Mr. Beast does have a lot of power over the YouTube platform. He can demand certain products get made and certain things happen.

45:23You know, I think it could happen in the future that someone breaks out through YouTube shorts. I just think it's going to be way more rare than it has been in the past.

45:30Peter Kafka:Let's talk about how the individual platforms work. We don't need to go through each one, but if someone you're working with, where are you telling them to go? Which platform are you telling them to go make money on? Which platform are you telling them to go find an audience on? And those should be the same, but I think they're probably not. They were much different a year and a half ago. Now everyone has short form content, which really acts as the top of the spear in distribution. Everyone is doing TikTok. Yeah, well, I mean, in terms of short form content is easy to get high amount of impressions on.

46:04It gets fed to a lot of people. Things can go viral. It doesn't matter if you have two followers or 200 ,000 followers, a video that is good and has high retention can go viral on TikTok. And so I think for me, we would always tell people like use TikTok as a discoverability mechanism. But now we have reels and YouTube shorts and everyone, every platform has copied that short form meta. And so I think discoverability is actually really good across every social platform. But where you make money is substantially different. I think YouTube is still the gold standard for monetizing a creator's career.

46:38Peter Kafka:And I've talked about this a bunch, but spell it out. I mean, there's one very obvious reason, right? Is that they actually share ad revenue. Yeah. Well, and long form videos, because you can run multiple ad units within a 14 minute video. You actually can go on your side of the dashboard and you can place ads wherever you want them. It doesn't mean your fill rate is going to be 100 percent, but you can place ads every minute, every two minutes, every three. So they're giving you an opportunity to make a lot to make money, period. And they're also going to share the money that you make with you, which still doesn't really happen on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat.

47:10Peter Kafka:chat. I mean, they, they'll all have sort of like, you know, uh, little programs that, that hinted, but no one, no one is routinely sharing half of every dollar they make in ad revenue with the creators except for YouTube. Yeah. And I don't want to glaze them too hard, but YouTube has been at the forefront of allowing creators to make money for the last decade and all their alternative monetization things that they come out with, uh, are in that favor of the creator. Like they, They, to me, have been very creator first in how they've just handled the platform and the products they launch. Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat has not figured that out.

47:46And also none of them have really figured out long form video. Facebook Watch, they tried. IGTV, they tried. It hasn't worked as well as YouTube has done it.

47:56Peter Kafka:So YouTube is YouTube in particular is really pushing people to make longer stuff that fits in with the fact that people are consuming tons of YouTube on TV. that's very conscious on the part of what the platform wants, but they're also pushing with their TikTok clone, YouTube shorts. So how does it work if you're trying to make money or find people on YouTube? And on the one hand, they're pushing you to do long stuff. On the other hand, they really much want you to feed YouTube shorts. You have to have a balance as a creator. And I do mean it when I tell creators this, like short form YouTube shorts is a good discoverability metric of getting your content seen by a wide variety of people.

48:36When you make long form videos, you have to have a high click-through rate and a high retention for that video to get seen as well. But it's harder to break through with a long form video. It's much easier to break through the noise with a short form video, but they just don't monetize remotely as well as the long form videos. And so YouTube has always pushed creators to make long videos. They make more money because of the revenue split. YouTube now has 13 % of connected TV viewership. that's by design. They've been pushing that for a long time. And I saw this on the back end of all the data on YouTube three years ago where connected TV viewership for creators that were making 15 plus minute videos that were made for a TV audience, their viewership on connected TVs was just slowly creeping up over the years.

49:23And now some of those creators, 30 to 40 % of their viewership is on a connected TV.

49:28Peter Kafka:So, but how do you balance that, right? If you're making something that's supposed to be 15 or 20 minutes long, I guess you could always hope that you can find something that could be turned into a YouTube short clip. But it seems like they're really different products. Two native videos. What you post is a long form video. Maybe if you're Theo Vaughn or a podcast, there may be clips that you can post out from that long form video. But the majority of creators, they have to have two different strategies. You make a long form video and then you have all your creative ideas that make native short form videos.

50:00That sounds exhausting. Yeah, it's a hard career. I don't know. It's not for everyone.

50:05Peter Kafka:I've talked to people, and I think you've talked about this as well, sort of a thought that maybe people should be spending less time making short form video, I guess, presumably because it's just harder to make money doing that. And, you know, we mentioned Hasan Piker and Kai Sinat as two of your big clients. those are people who are full-time twitch live streamers they are making content for six seven eight hours at a pop um but very few people can actually do that successfully i'm trying to figure out how you know you can't tell everyone go be a twitch live streamer can you no it's very hard to be on live eight hours a day like hasan or asmin is very challenging i think that the difference with like a Kai or a Hassan or an Asmin is the internet creates the clips for them.

50:58And so when you go on TikTok and YouTube shorts, you'll see a lot of Kai or Hassan content that is just organically clipped by the, let's just say the ecosystem of the internet. So literally there's

51:09Peter Kafka:people that are fans or they want to make money or both. And they say, I'm going to take this free content that Hassan Piker's made. I'm going to edit it myself and turn that into a clip that could that could at least generate attention for hassan piker and maybe money for me yeah and and we don't take those down you know i think if if um they're directly ripped off of the stream we've usually let them be up like we we are better off allowing the internet to make amazing videos reclipped of the content that kai and hassan are making on twitch than us to put in a ton of effort to do it and it's worked in the favor of kai i mean a lot of people see him for the first time through a clip that we didn't make.

51:44It was just the internet doing it.

51:46Peter Kafka:It's the internet doing free labor and promotion for you. Yeah. And well, they do make money. Um, there you can monetize short form clips. It's the, the relative RPM or CPM of those videos is way lower than on a long form video, but these clippers are making a decent amount of money just by reclipping content. Um, and so are there any platforms that people are overlooking today that you think are sort of sneakily interesting for an aspiring creator? I still think Twitch is so underutilized and monetized. I understand the difficulty of live streaming and being on. And I think there's a lot of cons about Twitch where if you're not live, you can't gain viewership.

52:26It is very much a when you're on and you're live, you can have viewers. And when you're gone, it's gone. It's not like YouTube where you get residual viewership from a video on demand. But I still feel like Twitch needs to continue to expand into other offerings outside of gaming and IRL. And I don't think a lot of creators take advantage of it. We're thankfully now seeing people like Justin Bieber and other celebrities stream on Twitch. And we're seeing the internet organically clip that content of them. I just still feel like there's a lot of ground to be gained on Twitch. It's not as noisy as all the other platforms are.

53:01Peter Kafka:Yeah, I did an interview with Dan Clancy who runs Twitch last year. And one of the takeaways or one of the perceptions I got was maybe just live streaming. People who want to consume live streams are always going to be sort of a relatively niche audience, people who want to spend their time that way. And the fact that during the pandemic, you saw Facebook and YouTube sort of go after Twitch and try to build their own live stream businesses and basically have walked away from it, maybe is an indicator that this stuff just doesn't have that huge of an audience. Yeah, you're probably right. The audience is 14 to 25 year olds and it hasn't grown but but if you just go back in time youtube 10 years ago is predominantly kids and they've done a good job of widening out the content verticals where you have outdoor channels you have fishing channels you have makeup and hair hair care channels like it's it's widened out my parents now can go on youtube and find content that they enjoy live is a little more challenging i just think that twitch still very much is like only an ecosystem of irl and gaming channels and they need to figure out how they widen out and they also they bleed a lot of viewers over to youtube because if you're hasan your stream is then posted on youtube it's not posted on twitch as a video on demand right and so they lose a lot of those viewers just bleeding out because there's no vod mechanism so you think twitch ought to build their own youtube essentially or some version they need to build some type of platform that allows people to watch the stream clip or the stream VODs.

54:33And right now you can do it. It's just, they do a, it's really hard to find. Like if you're a fan of Hassan, there's no for you page that says, hey, this is his stream from yesterday. You should watch it.

54:43Peter Kafka:Do you think that's a, do you think that is a technology slash competence question? Or do you think it's a strategy question for them? I think it's a strategy question. I think they're like, let's just continue to win live streaming. We have a built-in community of people who care about live streaming. Why try and compete with YouTube? I just think that Twitch as a company has been pretty flat in terms of revenue and viewership over the last five years. They're going to have to do something to continue to grow or else this business is just to me just continues to be flat. Flat, but still useful for your clients who are successful at it.

55:17Peter Kafka:Those two things can exist at the same time. Yeah. Let's talk about your business a little bit. How many folks are you repping today? the company manages around 275 talent mostly internet native some athletes some musicians but very deeply embedded in youtube and twitch and how many employees do you need to manage all that we have 130 full-time people right now wow so it's almost two to one yeah and that and that's across the the podcast network the management company and the experiential marketing agency that we bought but the large concentration of people here on the management business so when someone signs with night, what is the main thing you are providing for them?

55:57We've done a really good job of helping them build a larger production entity so they can make better videos, usually a higher amount of videos on a monthly basis if they want to. The monetization usually happens by brand deals. And we've just done that. There's really no entertainment services. I think that most of our clients think YouTube is the end game. Like a lot. I think the early days of YouTube, everyone wanted to be a Hollywood actor or actress it doesn't feel like that anymore a lot of the youtubers like if you're big on youtube you stay on youtube and you're like you want to control my ip i control my assets i have creative freedom and control why do i want to go chase hbo amazon the fact the fact that markiplier had the number

56:40Peter Kafka:one or not the number one had a huge hit movie uh a couple weeks ago did much better than melania was really the first time we've seen a YouTuber sort of cross over that way. Does that mean there's more to come or does that just show you, look, YouTube's been around for 20 years. This is the first time you've ever seen a YouTube star have a hit movie that should tell you that this is going to get a career. Yeah, actually the third time. So the first time was Talk to Me by Rockarocka. It was distributed by A24. It was two YouTubers that lived in Australia that directed and wrote Talk to Me. Obviously went on to go to Sundance.

57:16824 got it and i think it did 94 million in box office on a three million dollar budget that was the first time thank you for the second time was sam and colby who's a client of ours they distributed a youtube documentary in cinemark last year on like a fifty thousand dollar budget ended up doing three point it was like 3.9 over the weekend in the box office so it did incredibly well for them and then now iron lung with markiplier which was a project that he really built out in the open uh all his fans knew he was doing it he had been talking about it for a long time he brought them along the journey and it performed really well i don't think that's gonna stop it's just you know this is it's very challenging to make films and for youtubers this is very new for them i think it'll happen more i just don't know how many creators are going to play in that game and and want to be in that game yeah or or even want to be in it you know i think it's like it's challenging it's it's difficult to get the theater's heads around it um some of them will independently distribute but a lot of times you have to go get a deal done with sony or a24 or whoever that is they just post videos on youtube and continue to make money so you know i actually know i forgot about one ryan's world uh ryan's toys review actually tried to do a film in theaters and it did not perform well so i think there's been four i i don't anticipate this happening that often but i do think creators like markiplier that have big brands will figure out how to continue to utilize

58:39Peter Kafka:the theatrical system yeah and there were other attempts to sort of like bring someone from YouTube to Nickelodeon or, you know, give them a late night NBC talk show. Just the audience at that time was not moving over to those platforms. But there does seem to be now at least some track record. So you can at least get them to a movie theater. Yeah. Lilly Singh didn't have a lot of luck with the show crossing over. We're now seeing Netflix with Mark Rober and Salish Matter and a few others that I know they're going to announce like that's going to happen more. So let's see how some of this does.

59:11Beast Games, I think, has been widely successful for Amazon. I just don't know how many creators out there care enough to go do shows with streaming services.

59:21Peter Kafka:We'll be right back with Reed Duxer, but first, a word from our sponsor.

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1:01:12Peter Kafka:and we're back so from afar i was assuming that your core business is generating helping these folks generate revenue which means essentially going out and securing ad deals for them or helping them steer through which ad deals they should or shouldn't take is that a fair summary of the core of what you guys do is as a core talent is at the center talent management is the center of our business. We have a venture studio that co-founded Feastables with Mr. Beast, co-founded Tone with Kai Sanat, Reespin with Halle Berry. And so we've had a lot of success in the venture studio. And that was always kind of the thought is like, if you can represent the kids that have built distribution on the internet, you can eventually build products and services with them.

1:01:53And our packaging business wasn't distributing and putting in packaging movies and films. Our packaging business was building companies and owning equity. And so I think you have the management company, you have the venture studio, and then we have our brand arm that has experiential and a few other things. And so, you know, I think like for me, we've always just been like, how do we continue to be at the center of Internet culture? I think it's a place where we want to live. We don't really chase Hollywood. We kind of just chase like what we want to be in the crevices of the Internet.

1:02:21Peter Kafka:But Hollywood wants it. Really, the agencies, the Hollywood agencies, the CAAs and William Morris's that you couldn't get into the mailroom of. They are in this business now. You're competing against them. Are they your primary competition when you're trying to keep Kai Sinat or sign the next Kai Sinat? I mean, we work with the agencies. Like Kai has an agent, helps on the acting side because Kai does want to get into acting eventually. So I would say the agencies have been helpful. They're helpful on the music touring side. They're helpful on the comedy touring side for us. I just think representing a digital creator is a different muscle.

1:02:57I think it's something that they're trying to get used to of like, how do we provide value? You know, there's some management. What is different about it?

1:03:03Peter Kafka:It seems like it's repping someone who's a popular YouTuber and someone who's an up-and-coming actor. Essentially, they should be dealing with the same issues, no? I think that there's employees at play. They have production managers. They have editors. You need to help them hire. Like, I don't know what Timothee Chalamet's team looks like, but I would imagine he just as an assistant. Whereas, like, you know, we have a lot of creators that have 30, 40, 50 employees. And so you kind of have to help them build that infrastructure. also how you find talent is just fundamentally very different when you walk through our office everyone has high screen time they're like doom scrolling on their phones looking for the next people when you walk into a traditional management company in hollywood they're reading scripts it's just a it's a very different mindset like we're like be products of the internet they are products of the hollywood system that has existed for 75 years you know i think they're they're both figuring out how to coexist now but the agencies have just been a little late to the game and how How do you handle that tension I was talking about at the beginning?

1:04:00Peter Kafka:The idea that like I'm I'm an up and coming YouTuber or Twitch streamer. I'd like to say that I'm going to build this business for a decade, but it just doesn't seem feasible that I'm going to be doing this in my 30s or however old I'll be then. How do you balance helping someone sort of build as long a career as they can with maximizing what they can? Yeah, I think the biggest challenge for a lot of these creators, especially the ones that started in YouTube making content that was predominantly for kids and family is as you get older, you either have to age up with your audience. And I think someone like Logan Paul has done that very well, where he's fully aged up as he's gotten older and his audience has followed him.

1:04:40But you have a lot of creators who choose to continue making kids content. And they just hope that every couple of years, new seven, eight, nine-year-olds come into the system and find out who they are. That's been a big challenge for a lot of our creators is like, do you age up or do you consistently make the same amount of content? But we've now like, um, I mean, typical gamer is a good example. He was one of the first clients I ever signed 11 years ago. He was a really small live streamer on Twitch and YouTube, but now is still one of the biggest Fortnite creators in the world. And he has created his own UEFN, which is a UGC, a map building company within Fortnite.

1:05:16And so his business is still making content, but he has one of the biggest Fortnite map building companies in the world right now. And so we figured out how to like build separate businesses for them where the majority of their revenue isn't just predominantly from content. And he's a good example of that. And I think, you know, the next 15 years, I would imagine he'll continue to push harder and harder into UGC video game content.

1:05:40Peter Kafka:And then on your end, how do you handle the tension of I'm going to help build your business, build equity for you, help you diversify. And at some point you're going to turn around and go, well, thanks for helping build this business. I'm going to take it now and go on my own, which is essentially what Jimmy Donaldson and Mr. Beast did a couple of years ago. It's built into your business risk, right? It's a little bit of the blessing and the curse is like if we do a very good job and the companies get large enough, usually like we get replaced by an internal team. I don't know how many people Jimmy has now, but I think it's closing in on 400.

1:06:14And so like, you know, a manager's job is much different. Like when I met Mr. Beast, it was just him and his mother. And then I came in as the manager. When we, when I stopped managing him, he had 325 full-time people. So the job was just very different. And, and even for me, like we still did the brand deals, but a lot of our focus was on feastables. We had like built this chocolate company. And so him and I had transitioned to just focusing on that business. But yeah, if we do a good job, you almost take yourself out. so that would be a good problem to have i just think it's part of the problem that exists if you help someone build a lot of infrastructure and teams we haven't really seen a lot of people do it there's like very few at this point jimmy is an anomaly in this industry i'm not sure i don't want to say someone will never come up through the system because i think when jimmy and i started building this thing everyone said there would never be another pewdiepie or someone of that magnitude and we prove them wrong pretty quickly.

1:07:13And so I would imagine someone will eventually knock off Jimmy, but it probably won't be from getting popular, making YouTube long form videos. It'll be some other mechanism.

1:07:21Peter Kafka:Let's end this with one project, one prediction for 2026. You can pick a piece of talent. You can pick a platform. What's a trend surprise prediction you think we're going to see this year? Yeah. I mean, I hear a lot of talk about AI, So I'll stick there. I don't 2026. I don't think AI fundamentally changes any way that we make watch content. I don't think AI movies are coming anytime soon. I don't think AI animation is coming anytime soon. I know this is a big worry of this town, especially I'm I'm just still such a bear and I'm not optimistic about anything going on in AI as it relates to content media.

1:08:01Peter Kafka:Do you think that's because the AI isn't good enough to make it now? Not even close. Yeah. Can you see, okay, my business and my client's business is fine now, but maybe three years, five years from now, that's when we have to worry about it? Yeah, I think adoption takes way longer than people think. Who knows how good this is going to get? I just, over the next two to three years, I am very low likelihood that this is going to affect what we do. I think animation maybe will be the first and hopefully the animation studios figure out how to utilize the platforms that allow them to make things cheaper.

1:08:37But I think I see a lot of this like doom and gloom of AI in content and media. And I just don't feel that at all. I think we're still so far away. I think humans still want to watch humans. Yeah, humans still want to watch human content. I there's so many AI channels on YouTube right now, and people just don't watch them. They still want to watch us on talk about politics. They don't care about this AI influencer talking about the news.

1:09:01Peter Kafka:I'm taking that as positive news for 2026. I think it's positive. I think people are freaking out about something that's not that big of a threat. And, you know, OpenAI launched Sora. It's gone. It didn't work. It was an experiment. I don't think it's coming back. We're going to leave it there, Reid. This is great. Yeah, awesome. Talk to you. Thanks again to Reid Duxer for the chat. Thanks again to Janice Min for her chat. Thanks to Charlotte Silver for her excellent timely production work. Thanks to you guys for listening. See you soon.

1:09:40Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.