Inside the Tech Powering 500K+ Audio Drama Creators | Pocket FM on Lightwork

0:00The era of AI entertainment, it's going to be insane.

0:03Josh Machiz: Eight years ago, Rohan Nayak bet that people would binge fiction with their ears in serialized audio dramas an episode at a time. First in India, then in the United States. I believe the end game is going to be a billion creators producing a billion stories for a billion people. He co-founded Pocket FM in 2018 after Credit Suisse and Paytm and now runs its parent company, Pocket Entertainment. Anyone, literally anyone in the world can create studio quality entertainment at their home. The company has recently crossed$500 million in ARR with more than 550 ,000 creators publishing. Rohan Nayak, welcome to Lightwork.

0:41Josh Machiz: To kick things off, I think what would be really helpful framing is it feels like we're in this moment where there's just so much discussion around AI and productivity, AI and coding, but largely not as much as I would have expected on AI and entertainment. And we sort of found an expert on that in this room. So I have a ton of questions for you even just on what happens to the space when the cost of creation goes to zero, how you all be able to scale that level of personalization. But before we get into all of that, I think for viewers who are just less familiar with Pocket FM, what is it? How do you use it?

1:12Josh Machiz: Tell us a little more. Pocket FM is, think of it like Netflix for audio only dramas. so in audio dramas are these bingeable serialized audio fiction stories um you know you have these six to eight minute short episodes these episodes have really strong hooks ends on a cliffhanger these are designed for mobile entertainment this is not designed for television where you are you have a setup and it becomes boring it's designed for you know quick payoff there's so many cliffhangers because you have to design these shows for low attention spans today because i mean if you If you watch television content, I mean, at least I nowadays keep forwarding because it just keeps.

1:54Josh Machiz: Sometimes I watch a whole shows in like 20, you know, 20 second TikTok. Exactly. So when you try to build an audio entertainment category for mobile, we really had to re-engineer the episodes in the sense that really fast paced, engaging, ends on cliffhanger. So that's what audio dramas are. and audio dramas, if you think about it, is the only 24-7 entertainment medium available to any user today. So you can listen to it anytime, anywhere. It's so much so that our average engagement time per user is 155 minutes. 155, oh wow. Per user. Users listen to it every day. I got some record for consumer.

2:35Yeah, that's crazy. That's like you're constantly listening. Yeah, I mean, if you really think about it, you have community, you have household chores, and you're at work and then before sleeping. So the interesting thing is 38 % of our engagement time is at work. Really? Yeah. Like people have their headphones in and they're listening to micro dramas while getting like work done. Yeah. They're listening to audio dramas. And even before sleeping is a very interesting one. A lot of users tell me that before they go to bed, they don't want to look at screen. And it sometimes just, you know, makes them not go to bed.

3:07I mean, if you're trying to just relax and ease into watching a screen, just doesn't feel natural.

3:13Josh Machiz: Yeah, actually one of my hot takes in the space has been I have been sort of like vehemently opposed to this idea that we're going to all watch and exist in the world through these Apple Vision Pros when in reality, I think as a consumer, to your point, for me, I find myself translating articles into audio format or listening to way more audio just because I'm trying to move away from being stuck to a screen and then this feels like a transition. I guess that maybe funnels into my next question just broadly in the entertainment space, there's just been a lot of evolution, right? We've gone from linear to TV to streaming to creator economy.

3:47Josh Machiz: Where do you see this spreading in that evolution? If you think about the three big eras, we started with linear TV. And in linear TV, there were a few networks and they decide what is put on and you just have to watch it. And then came along streaming or on-demand where now there was this explosion of content in on-demand streaming. And it democratized consumption. Now you have so many options. You can watch what you like. And that democratized consumption in a really big way. And then you had social media-led entertainment, which democratized distribution in the sense that if there's any creator who has a great text, image, video, they can reach out to millions of users and make a living out of it.

4:36I believe the era of AI entertainment, it's going to be insane. It's going to be bigger than all these three veils combined. And the reason behind that, I believe, is because for the first time, anyone, literally anyone in the world can create studio quality entertainment at their home. they don't need a budget they don't need studios they don't need a big team and it's democratizing high quality entertainment i believe anyone can now make an audio drama a movie a tv show what i mean i would love to have my own movie right i mean and but if i think about making my own movie i'm like it just takes millions of dollars you know you need a big setup and that's what's going to change to think about what's going to happen you know if you really think about these really high quality stories or legendary IPs, there have been so few of them.

5:29Human creativity is limitless, but why do we see such, you know, such few shows or few IPs which are amazing like Harry Potter or The Rings, Game of Thrones, but there should be like 100 ,000 of these. But I feel as high quality content had not been democratized, we just didn't see these creative geniuses all around the world get access to this. Now, now it's going to, I feel that in the era of unlimited high quality content and content, which will then eventually become hyper-personalized. So it's going to be really interesting what the next few years are going to be in AI entertainment. So let me see if I understand this.

6:09So you're saying that because the cost of creation has kind of gone to mere zero, right? That you can now make so many more things that maybe for the average creator, this creates all this opportunity to be more creative and create more like a Harry Potter or a Lord of the Rings. But, you know, maybe it starts on pocket. Exactly. If you think about, you know, maybe 10 years back, it used to be so hard to record a high quality video. You had to have these really expensive, expensive equipments to record a high quality video but the smartphones it the cost to record a video just you know crashed and that gave rise of to these big platforms of like instagram youtube tiktok so that's exactly what's going to happen here the cost to create high quality content as it's crashing down the second order impact of that is anyone can do anything so that's what that's what exactly happening and and yeah i mean i believe that and that's my maybe my naive personal dream i'm a big fan of anime and you know and i'm huge fan of anime and i believe animes are the best stories in the world and and what's your favorite series you have a recommendation one piece okay all is one and uh and and what i'm gonna say is that i i'm i'm very sure that one of these legendary ibeasts will originate on pocket just because we have more than 500 000 creators today there will be millions of creators tomorrow and this with this level of i mean if you think about harnessing the creativity of human civilization, of course we'll get more legendary IBs.

7:49Josh Machiz: It's interesting that you lay this out because obviously, I even think about I don't know if it's extreme to go all the way back here, but the ways that writing and the printing press unlock just so much more intelligence for us as a society. I wonder if there's ways that this unlocks collective creativity in many ways. As you outlined, I've seen it even in the platform shift from you know, social media platforms, but specifically to TikTok in the way that, and short form media, and that it sort of created, to your point, a whole population of people who have now access to building audiences. And I think this is sort of like another build on top of that.

8:28Josh Machiz: I guess I'm curious, do you view or have thoughts on any second order effects of this? What becomes, you know, the important thing for humans today when, you know, AI can do a lot of that output and the execution part. Does storytelling become really scarce? How do you view all of that? I believe, I think ideas are still scarce in the sense that, I mean, I believe that humans will be the soul of the show and AI will execute it for you in the sense that AI will structure story arcs, AI will help you design characters, character progression, plot progression, and even write the episode for you. But when it comes to that unique insight, that creative spark, which really makes the show an outlier or really makes the show a blockbuster or a hit, is still an idea.

9:22It could be as easy an idea as someone who gets a scar on his forehead and his mother's love saves him from an evil sort of force. That unique idea is what matters. And I still believe that's still the bottleneck for Sony IPs. But again, so billions of humans, you would find these creative sparks somewhere in the world. And we're seeing that we're seeing such crazy storytelling entrepreneurs producing content on the platform. It could be anyone. And you could be, you know, we have seen really interesting examples of former, you know, delivery partners, correctional officers, teachers who are creative geniuses.

10:06But life pushed them in a different direction. But then when they realized this, this is something which they can do, they can create their own stories, create their own worlds. They're just shining now. They've left whatever they used to do and doing this full time. So interesting. You're finding all these people that have those stories inside them, but they just maybe didn't know how to get them out. How do you work with the creators on your platform to maybe support them and show them the kind of love that platforms have done historically? Everyone from the way Netflix works with their creators to the way Instagram and Facebook work with theirs.

10:41We have really elaborate creator programs and even creator educational sort of materials because storytelling is an art. And, you know, there are just so many different components to make a great story. how do you plan story arcs, how do you design characters? Of course, a lot of that has become easier now with AI, where you can actually, I mean, I usually tell people that the fictional writing tool that we've built is the best editor for you. Imagine if every writer on the planet had a great editor who can brainstorm with you, critique your work, give you really good, valuable feedbacks. So, of course, we have a lot of these great creator programs, and we're also launching uh now created events where you know we'll send um host something in in los angeles and la and i'm really excited for that we just call all of our creators into one place then design it in a way that people get to learn from each other um but very interesting thing that i i feel that that that you know we saw in pocket is that most of our successful creators are power listeners on the platform.

11:49So they would listen to a show for months, for years, study these shows. And then at some point, I can make their own. Yeah. At some point, you're like, yeah, you and I can do this, you know?

11:59Josh Machiz: Yeah. I mean, now you're like getting me hooked. I'm like, oh, should I play around with this? And be not just like a consumer, but a creator on this platform. But Tandorly, what does that look like? How do I start becoming a creator on Pocket FM? Yeah. I mean, if you want to write, it's on the app. You just click. I mean, there's a right section on the app. You go in, you have an idea. We have a fiction writing tool called Sherpa. So you put in the idea, whatever that vague idea could be. And Sherpa will brainstorm with you, trying to just probe you with questions. How are you thinking about this?

12:32Are you thinking about the world? And once it has some level of plan, it will design a story arc, a spine of the story. It'll break down that story arc into episodes. and yeah, you can just click a button and the show will go live on the platform.

12:46Josh Machiz: That's interesting because I think a lot of people tend to have questions about the balance between consumption and creation on platforms. Historically, it sounds like, you know, you have 1 % of people were actually creating, 9 % remixing and then the rest 90 % consuming. Are you seeing that dynamic? It sounds like you're actually sort of ushering a very different sort of new paradigm where people are both creating it did see me i think in the last 12 months we have seen a crazy inflection in the number of hours being produced on the platform just for context we used to have around 25 000 hours being uploaded every month uh so every year and now it's 2.6 million hours of ai content the creation has exploded and yeah you're right exactly a lot of people want to try out everyone has stories if you think about it sure i mean if you have to make a youtube channel or TikTok channel, you still have to think a lot.

13:43You'll be like, hey, what do I do? What's my niche? Yes, joys. All of us have them. I mean, I would like to believe I have a few good ones and I've written 100 shows on the platform, but none of them have done well. That's a different story.

13:55Josh Machiz: But I love that you're still writing though. Yeah, I love it. I love it. I mean, I just feel that, you know, it's great to be in a situation where you can just create your own world. But that dynamic is changing. I believe what's going to happen is they're going to be billion billion creators creating stories and that's going to lead to hyper personalization of stories i'll explain if you think about more streaming platforms today you have a few shows for a lot of people like i like space fiction i don't see any movie being launched in space fiction it's been a year maybe the last one was project hail mary which i really loved yeah that's one of the best ones right i mean i read the book as well but if you think about the number of tropes and entertainment on a lot of themes there is so many but entertainment unlike social media is doesn't have that huge volume of content like if i like if i like a tennis video on instagram i get flooded with so many different tennis videos because there's a lot of supply of tennis videos but if you if i like space fiction there's no supply of space fiction content so what i believe will happen why i'm saying there'll be a billion creators because there's so many different niches And historically, producing content for these niches didn't make sense because there's ROI, you have to spend a lot of money.

15:15But let's say someone likes vampire cross space fiction. It's a niche, but maybe a million people would like it or maybe 100 ,000 people would like it. So that's what we'll see more and more that these really crazy concepts will start coming around. There are a lot of those fun crossovers on the app. What are some of your favorite of the dramas that have been made that maybe surprised you and are ones that you wouldn't have expected but wound up being really big hits? The biggest one is there's a show called My Vampire System. Yes. It's a vampire show. And vampire draws science fiction in a way.

15:53And I mean, if someone would have like, you know, in Hollywood, looked at it, they would have been like. Right. They wouldn't have greenlit that. They would never have greenlit that. But users should vote for what they like. Users should tell us or anyone what a hit is. And that show has now made over$90 million. That's community validation. That's incredible.

16:15Josh Machiz: On that, though, I think historically, at least in the market, I've heard a lot of pushback against microdramas because of retention, not necessarily being strongest, often have from monetization or users are vanishing. and it sounds like you're not seeing that. Why do you think that is? And what sort of retention numbers are you seeing? I think one thing I've realized in microdramas, and I'm talking about the video microdrama at this moment, that the reason there's high churn and the retention rates are lower for a lot of the other, a lot of microdrama platforms is because most platforms, probably all of them, have the same shows.

16:52They have billionaire stories, Rack's Illiches, they have some revisions. It's kind of all the same trope. All the same. So what really happened, very interesting data point. So let's say if platform A launches one microtrama, platform B would change 40 % of it and launch within a week. Platform C wouldn't change another 40, another question to whatever. So they're all derivatives of the same show. So there's no value. I mean, it is the same content. If 20 platforms have the same shows, why would you have attention? This didn't happen in the streaming era, right? You have multiple streaming platforms who come up with really unique, differentiated IP.

17:31And all of these platforms are different from each other. But in microdrama, all of them are optimizing for social media ads, performance marketing. I call them marketing arbitrage platforms because they market on meta. Meta makes a lot of money. And then, you know, users come in and they pay for a show and then churn. But in Pocket FM or audio drama, what we realized was our bar for content is very high. So when you think, when I talk about a hit on PocketFM, an average hit or a blogbuster on the platform has 40 % retention till 500 episodes.

18:11Josh Machiz: 500, wow. Wow. So on and out, it's a lot. I mean, it is so engaging. It's so great that 40 % retain and 500 episodes is a lot. Yeah. It's a lot of content. So these shows are really high quality. Why can't you even get people to stay for 40 % for like one minute? Yeah, that's the trick. You know, the first minute, first minute is so important. And after that, if the users fall in love with the characters, it becomes a part of their daily life. It's all character love. Character affinity is the single most underrated thing in entertainment. We just make someone fall in love with the character, what they stand for, their principles.

18:48So, yeah, I mean, that's one of the reasons the quality of content that we have on the platform is really great.

18:54Josh Machiz: I think one of the critiques that I've often heard with anything AI and entertainment is just broadly the idea that everyone's just going to create slop or everything's going to be a recycling of everything. Are you seeing that or are you seeing something different play out with Pocket FM? There's going to be content which is recycled. If it's a UGC or user-generated content platform, you're going to see a lot of similar shows as well. But it's more about a design of algorithms. algorithms so algorithm is designed in a way to promote differentiated content or unique content eventually the shows that do really well on pocket fm are the ones which are very unique because users are smart they're not going to pay for a show which which they've listened to 100 times yeah so they want to they're looking for these unique interesting shows that can intrigue them so as a result even with ai like the shows that do really well on on our platform are the outliers.

19:48Outliers like MimePire system, which you would not have thought about ever. So yeah, there is a lot of AI slob. I mean, I would not call it AI slob, but there's a lot of content which creators produce. And of course, not all of them are great.

20:01Josh Machiz: I think what's really interesting is while you are enabling the creation tools as well, you're also actually very focused on the delivery experience and mechanism for consumers, which I actually don't think a lot of platforms focus on to your point as a consumer of a lot of online content my frustration has been you like one video about you know one show and then all of a sudden you're only fed and and so it sounds like there's also actually like equally a importance on the user experience on the consumption and that makes this a much more powerful ecosystem it has to be user focused i mean everything it's a flywheel and creators and consumers i mean if if consumers see a lot of like low quality content like a churn which just breaks the flywheel of more consumers bring in more creators more creators more hits more consumers and so on we have worked a lot on the algorithms that drive discovery and personalization of audio dramas on the platform the most the the hardest part now has been with so many shows being produced on the platform how do you personalize and recommend the right show how do you how do you find the blockbuster out of these 2.6 million hours of content.

21:13This is where we have been doing a lot of work. So the first step, if any of us creates a show, there's an LLM as a judge now. So because of our fiction writing stack, we are really good at, I mean, we've gotten good at identifying patterns, which gives us enough confidence that the show is not going to work. If there's narrative discoherence, there's no narrative coherence. There is just a lot of different characters being introduced in the first episode without any reason. It is so many different patterns that we are now uncovered from our data that we know that LLM as a judge can at the outset tell us that, hey, these shows will not do well.

21:53So you don't distribute these shows to a lot of listeners. So there is a lot of work that is going behind how do you find the blockbuster with limited data, with so much supply? How do you find blockbusters? That's a very hard problem to solve. Is it similar to the way, you know, I don't know, TikTok works where, you know, it's set to a small set of people. And if those people seem to enjoy it, does it continue or is it working in a different way? It is a continuous propagation. So we show it to 50 listeners, 100 listeners. if we get good signals from there we we sort of you know show that show to thousand listeners ten thousand listeners a hundred thousand listeners and so on but it's a continuous propagation algorithm but the one thing about tiktok which makes it easy is that you can just swipe up you don't like something you swipe up but in pocket fm you just can't swipe up it's not a 15 second uh audio so it's you have to be right more often than wrong so we just have to be a little bit more aggressive in making sure our user gets the right show.

22:57You've done such a good job on the app of like making that serialized activity that I think is pretty unique to you guys. How do you view maybe competitors in this phase? I mean, like recently, of course, Instagram started adding the serialized thing to playlists and there are quite a few micro drama players. But who do you really view as like primary competition, especially as you guys have exploded in growth? There are a lot of competitors. I mean, pretty much everyone in entertainment is going to be a competitor.

23:27Josh Machiz: You're fighting for attention. You're fighting for attention. You know, if you think about it, our engagement time is 155 minutes per day. So it's really competing with everyone across the spectrum. So anyone who, you know, who's an entertainment platform, has great stories on their platform, you're competing with them. So, Rohan, you've had this incredible growth. How have you managed to keep up from a technical perspective? I'm sure that the user growth has been a strain on your systems and all of the creators must mean even more complex things for your LLMs. How do you keep up with all of it?

24:00It's been crazy. I mean, the last six months itself with such a big jump in the number of hours being produced, you know, in the compute costs, just the inference costs have just gone up in multifold. and it's sort of like I feel at the space of AI research I mean AI is at a completely different ballgame right now it's just the base of development is just so insane and what's happening is that we have to make sure with the gutting edge of it and not just AI but even AI entertainment so of course they've built our own we've post trained our own custom models for fiction writing which is prose writing or planning, step over fiction, story.

24:47So we have built our own custom models, but it's super hard. I mean, our infrastructure, the influence costs has been on our crazy ramp up. And we're also planning to figure out how to optimize these costs. And that's been a big endeavor, but it's fun. I think these are good problems to have.

25:06Josh Machiz: Yeah. Yeah. Scaling problems. Problems every startup wants. Yeah, for sure. I think also one of my favorite parts about technology and especially like consumer technologies there's a lot of stuff behind the scenes of a delightful experience like pocket fm that people often don't give visibility into and the ones that i think of even just as i think about the the idea that you can now create entire worlds there's issues around how do you technically embed narrative memory how do you have this sort of like coherence and characters across so many episodes there's all these things that like i think as someone who's been in the seat of a creator i'm like wait that's really hard to operationalize?

25:42Josh Machiz: What has been difficult and have you thought about productionizing that? Shredba, which is an AI fiction writing tool, we have, think of it as a multi-agent orchestration platform, which is built on top of custom post-trained models. Before that, maybe I'll take a step back and talk about why general purpose LLMs are, I mean, at least when we tried them, they're not really good at creative writing. So the three fundamental problems when it comes to general bubbles lms one is memory narrative memory just this if you're writing a show which has 500 episodes thousand episodes they're like 150 characters their relationship between the character for sure they absolutely forget the first thing that happened yeah there's progression yeah there's progression the character's personality changes uh i mean if you think about it a character is growing through different going through different phase of life that even their personality traits are changing so you need to keep track of that as well and it's not just you know just not the uh the plot progression it's all the the character progression and and so llms today when it comes to writing long-form stories they just forget a lot of details and and in fiction these nuances matter you you're falling in love with the character and how the character behaves changes you're like hey what happened like what happened on 501 episode so the narrative consistency long term has been a big problem for llms And then the second big problem has been prose or how these shows are written.

27:16My point of view is that alumni are really good at coding, logical reasoning, but this is emotional reasoning. If you're writing, if you're having a fight sequence, like if two people are verbally fighting, it has to be emotional. Yeah. It can't be just facts.

27:32Josh Machiz: I'm going to tell you an example from a micro drama I watched. It was like, I'm going to fight you. Yeah, stop fighting. I'm going to fight. And it's just like, it doesn't feel that. You don't have that emotional intelligence. It has to be over the top. It has to be those emotions in those situations. That was this prose problem, which LLMs are not good at, at least at the moment. And the third one, which is a big one, which is probably the hardest of them all, is planning a long-form story. You try to write a crime thriller story with any of these LLMs. It'll tell you who did it on the fifth episode.

28:07They struggle with payoff. Yeah. I mean, I'm like, what's the point? I mean, if like if you're writing a romance drama show, you don't want them to meet at the moment. You want that push and pull. If you make them meet, their users will churn. They have no need for them to now continue listening to the story. So these three big problems we had to solve for the pros part. We have so much data on the platform. We have 5 billion hours of engagement data on the platform. These are minute by minute retention data. So we know what a good process, what a bad process. So we're able to post train our own models for pros.

28:46Then even on the planning side, we know what a good plan is, what a bad plan is, because you have so many of them on the platform. so again we were able to post train a model for just planner and then the third component which is the narrative memory we have uh you know think of it like if we have a memory structure which stores everything about the story literally everything so there's zero percent hallucination so these are the fundamental building blocks of sherpa our fiction writing tool um and yeah i mean there's still a lot of lot of work to do because i mean you asked about what's still hard I would say it's planning.

29:22So when you think about planning a 500 episode story or a thousand episode story, you have to plan not just plot progression, but character progression. And not just individual character progression. If there are like 100 characters, their stories together, I mean, how does their relationship progress? So there's just so many different components or aspects of a plan. All of these have to work together to deliver a great long-term, long-form story. So planning is still really, really hard.

29:53Josh Machiz: It's interesting because, you know, I think there are often folks who will say, I can just do this with, you know, a bunch of models and chat to you, but based off of what you said, it sounds like there's a lot in there that makes it all work. You have visibility into billions of hours of data. I'm actually curious, just from an entertainment standpoint, what do you think goes into a good story? It's very unpredictable. So, So, of course, I can wear my analytics hat and tell you some patterns that we have seen. The most important thing about creating a story which is retaining and which retains a lot of users, which engages a lot of users is character affinity.

30:30So if you can build characters where users can fall in love with them, they root for them, they like the principles of the character. that matters so much more than just the plot pixels so a lot of writers what they do is they focus a little bit too much on the plot on the plot progression but not too much about how do you design these characters these characters need to be you know we have need to be so strong that it retains the users for 500 episodes so how you design characters and if you can build that very strong character affinity matters a lot so that's one really important uh really important aspect of creating a great story the second one i'm sure you will relate to it is uh the first few minutes of the show the first hour of the show a lot of writers would would plan this great story but then the first 30 second minute first one minute first 30 minutes is not strong it's not strong and there'll be a massive drop off in the first 30 minutes so whatever you do first 30 minutes first one hour the beginning is the most important for any blockbuster show the hook the hook but beyond that it's it's very interesting you know beyond these tactical sort of elements storytelling is very personal different people have will have different takes on how to design a character and how to design the world it's very unpredictable and which is what makes it fun i I guess.

32:01Yeah. Do you have any good human stories about some of the creators on the platform and like, you know, how maybe it's changed their lives and, you know, certainly from a, you know, visibility perspective? Oh, yeah. A lot of them. So my favorite one is this former delivery partner. And, you know, life pushes in a different direction. You're doing whatever you can to make ends meet. and something happened in that book and he's out of book and his friend tells him, hey, you have been a great storyteller and you tell us so many great stories. There's this app called Pocket FM. Why don't you try it out?

32:41Why don't you try to write a story on Pocket? And he goes in, writes a show, like a mythology cross science fiction. And there's just so many stories like that. One of the other interesting ones that I, at least, you know, you build businesses, there's revenue there's all of those metrics but those are just numbers but these are the stories that really have big impacts for instance there's this uh really like i mean a creator i i mean i spoken with my many times so he's uh he's legally blind and um he's been again trying to make ends meet and he had this talent that he was a great story he used to listen to pocket and um he was he's a great storyteller so he tells his partner and wife that hey i have this great crazy story can you help me with it and that story now is doing so well that show is doing so well that he's able to support his entire family with that and uh and and i'm really proud that it's not just about sharing these stories with with with the listeners with users but if there's an opportunity that you can create a great show and inspire millions of users and make a living out of it.

33:50Nothing is better than that, I guess.

33:52Josh Machiz: Yeah. It reminds me of like the early days when, you know, you saw the unlock of YouTube that like you could see anybody's life, even they didn't have to be Hollywood. But now you've taken that a step further and it's like anybody can extract that creative genius out of them. And I do agree. I mean, you know, when you see so many people, there are so many creators out there, but there is a difference between a really great storyteller And when you equip them with the right tools, you know, you can unlock amazing stories like these. Maybe switching gears a little bit to sort of like forward facing, obviously a lot of exciting things.

34:23Josh Machiz: I'm just so impressed by, from a product standpoint, from a team standpoint, what you all have built. What's kind of on the roadmap for Pocket and what's exciting you? There's so much going on. We are launching new markets in Pocket FM. AI localization has enabled us to now launch literally 100 markets. We can do, I mean, it's all like, think of this button, you click that button and you're live in like so many different languages. It's just so interesting. So we're launching new markets in PocketFM. We are launching Sherpa in a very, very big way, which is a fiction writing tool. The latest upgrade is just really, really powerful.

35:03Our tokens have gone through the roof now. I mean we need to figure that out and so yeah so we're doing a lot of work on expanding genres expanding to new markets but the most interesting one is also we have now launched a new our new AI microdrama app a video drama app called Pocket Saga where what we did was we took all of these user-generated stories that we have on the platform in audio so we built a harness which takes these audio scripts, turns that into a screenplay, and then turns that into a microdrama, a long form microdrama, which is coherent and one shots it. And the writers are just so happy because they came into the Pocket ecosystem.

35:49They produce an audio drama that that audio drama went live in many languages and then now in microdrama. So the microdrama app is really exciting. It's It's growing. It's growing almost like in three months. It's it's it's been it has grown to 15 million dollars of ARR just in three months. And I feel we are the faster growing, fastest growing products we have.

36:10Josh Machiz: And are you seeing on the consumer end appetite for this kind of, you know, diversification beyond audio? Oh, yeah. Big time. The demographics of both Pocket FM and Pocket Sal are different. So we're able to expand the time of that same IP now into multiple into multiple different audiences and demographics. Yeah, it makes sense. It's kind of a different use space, right? Because if you're listening while you're at work or all these other things, you're not necessarily able to watch your phone. So it definitely feels like it's a little bit of a different audience. Yeah, it is. It is. I mean, you know, in audio, users are listening three hours a day.

36:47That's not possible in video. You can't just, you know, scroll three hours a day. It's really, really hard. Do you have to change the format too? Yeah, it's a separate app. So it's a vertical two-minute video. So think of it like if an audio drama episode was six to eight minutes, five or 500 episodes long. This is vertical two minute, two minute episode. But the same 500 episodes, though, but two minute vertical episodes. But you're able to bring the serialized format that exists on Pocket in the way that it doesn't exist with some of the slop videos that we all watch where you kind of lose this narrative.

37:19Good, good labels. They're slop videos. And of course, try it out. I mean, you would see that these are high quality micro dramas in terms of the storylines. The storylines are unique. We also have animated micro dramas, not just cinematic or realistic ones. But if it's a fantasy show, we have these really cool animes. Of course, I love animes. We didn't know just because of that. But, you know, it's just fantasy. I mean, fantasy shows really come alive and in animated form as well. So we have both animated and cinematic or realistic microdramas on the platform, and we are seeing really high engagement and retention today.

37:56Josh Machiz: Yeah, I'm a big fantasy reader. And also, you know, I think I can totally see how that that world builds. And, you know, I myself feel very drawn to it. From everyone I've spoken with, I think a very clear, you know, personality trait I've learned about you is, you know, one, you're creative, you're curious. But the other thing I heard is that you cannot play without winning. And whether that's like Topgolf or Pickleball or Cricket. tell us a little bit more about how that translates into building PocketFM as a founder yeah I've always been like this I'm a I like winning any sport even if I'm that really bad at it I would just you know practice for hours and hours just so I can win somehow and or somehow hack my way to winning in a way maybe like especially in top golf I I just pay to win I don't care about these long shots I just care about those streaks and you know just winning and and just winning.

38:54So I feel the way to think about, the way I think about building a business is it's a game. It's exactly like a game.

39:01Josh Machiz: And it should be fun. It should be fun. If you're learning this and building this. If something doesn't work out in a game, you fix it. You know, you don't get too serious about it. If something doesn't work, you can try again. It's a game and you have to be competitive. You have to win. You have to keep reinventing. You have to keep upgrading yourself. You have to keep, you know, sort of improving and and and reskilling in a way so like like how a game is if we keep leveling up so the way i think about business is you keep leveling up and there are infinite levels that's the beauty about this other game in any game like you play candy crush that has like yeah that actually has a lot of levels but you know there's there's just so many different levels and that's what a business is there's no end you just keep getting better never settle just even if you're at whatever level you are, level thousand, there's always something, you know, on top of that.

39:52And that's how I build Pocket FM or a business. I'm always paranoid. It's not a good thing sometimes, but my team tells me that, that we draw$500 million a way out. I'm like, yeah. There's more work. How can we get to a billion? And, you know, and I'm not, I mean, I'm happy, but there's just this level of paranoia that I have that how can we do it faster, faster than ever before? So it just, I'm just really competitive, I guess.

40:22Josh Machiz: I love that. I mean, it sounds like there's no end stake to the game, but if there were, just to help us understand the big vision for Pocket FM, what does this look like in five to 10 years? Yeah, for Pocket Entertainment, now that's the parent company of Pocket FM and Pocket Saga, I believe the end game is going to be billion creators producing billion stories for billion people. That's, I feel, would be a nice endgame. Well, Brohan, congratulations on this very big milestone this week. I know you're all about celebrating the next one, but we want to celebrate this one. And thank you for joining us on Lightwork.

41:00Thank you for having me.

41:16David Art Kaye Earlier