#50 - Jason Carman, Founder & CEO of Story

0:00What stories are we telling now that people are buying into about the future? When I look around, I see really negative ones. We want to pioneer and innovate on that front of, can we create large cultural stories that everybody loves that makes you want to go back to movie theaters again? Founded the company in July, and the sole one-year goal of the company was CreatePlanet. I would say the first six months, 95 % of my time was spent on just making sure we didn't go bankrupt. And so as a result, I had very little time to write the script. Then I remember going to my chief of staff, Maxie, one day, and being like, okay, what if we just said we were going to film the movie in three weeks?

0:28She was like, fuck no, absolutely not. End of the week goes by, and I'm like, we can't do it. Now she's flipped and she's like, we're doing it. This is Jason Carman and he is the founder of Story Company. And he is moments away from releasing his first short film, Planet, which is about a guy that builds a planet. I know that this is like years in the making. How are you feeling right now? Well, it's about 56 hours of straight editing with maybe four hours of sleep. So I feel alive. Yeah. For now. um this is it's such a surreal feeling for so many reasons i've been wanting to do this since i was nine and since i graduated high school and started working full-time been wanting to make a short film to prove that we could make like a big feature film one day since i was 18 i'm 25 now so it's a little behind schedule but my god i'm so happy with what we've made um we'll release it online in a few days it's a big scope film and we have some other really exciting announcements tonight we sold out this theater which is nuts to me because it's 900 people and i thought we you would maybe be lucky to get 500.

1:31That's crazy. So we're incredibly excited. We're here at the Palace of Fine Arts, the most beautiful building in San Francisco where the last scene of the movie was shot. And which is so cool because the Palace of Fine Arts was built in 1917 for the World Fair. And it's just the most unique building in San Francisco, I think. And we wanted it to have this, for a sci-fi movie, there's not a lot of locations you can use that you don't have to build. Like for the next film we're doing, we're like getting ready to build physical sets. Like we're literally renting out a bunch of warehouse space to start building a Millennium Falcon-sized spaceship for a set.

2:01Oh, amazing. And normally we have to build it. But for this one, we wanted to, the whole film is about this man, Dr. Evren Kahn, and his vision to build an artificial planet. When the government requests they build an orbital supercomputer, he says, we can, but it's pretty big. And if you put a little extra effort, maybe more than a little extra effort, you could give it an atmosphere and then have a secondary planet near Earth. And so that's what the film is about. and it's about this big grand beautiful attempt to do great things which i think you and i both can relate to because for me dr khan in this film is the epitome of like what s3 was for me for the past two years it's like everything that s3 was the combined sort of median ethos i got from every founder engineer and scientist is in this movie and i mean there's actually people in s3 in the movie there's like five cameos and um so to be premiering a film about building things for the sake of beauty and for building the future in a building like this.

2:56It's so special. Why was this particular story the right one to start with? So I was in, I was filming S3. It was the most burnt out weekend of my life filming S3 in Montreal. We were filming with Fuse, Xtropic, a few other companies. I mean, Fuse out there is just amazing. The facility that they built is nuts and how much they've done is nuts. And I had some extra time. So I was walking around old Montreal, looking at the sky. Literally, I was like, I'm here to film these startups and I'm here to figure, come back home with the sci-fi story. Cause I knew it's like, we have to make this sort of minimum viable product almost to show that we can make a feature film and we could just go make a feature film.

3:33And we thought about it, but what you can't as easily do is make a feature film on the scale that we want to, in terms of the amount of visual effects shots, the CGI, the cast, the wardrobe, but just the scale of the movie, uh, without a larger budget. And we still think we can do it at like a 50th, a hundredth the cost. That's kind of our whole economic argument for making movies better and more efficient, which I can go into. There's a whole diatribe about why it's actually better for the art to do that. And I was there in Montreal and I was looking at the sky and the moon was particularly bigger in the sky the night.

4:05It was brighter. I was just so captivated by it. I was like emotional, kind of standing around buildings in old Montreal that looked a lot like the Palace of Fine Arts, this sort of old stone look and i remember thinking i was like man it looks so cool if there's a second one right next to it like a second larger planet that would just be beautiful i'm like oh what a beautiful sci-fi vision forgot about it came up with two other really bad short film ideas that weekend one of them was like intel commercial vibes i had read something like i think i had like reread the mark and recent's techno authors manifesto and was like yeah yeah yeah like and this could be a short film and it was a cool idea but it was just it just felt like a hype which hey we ended up making for Andreessen Horowitz anyway they hired us later that year to make basically something similar um although funny known lore we had a much cooler video in the works really for a16z that at the last moment they canned because they wanted something that was more NASCAR which I actually agree with because the final thing is a banger so Catherine I'm not throwing shade here it's amazing but there was like an art deco one that we were doing because they sent us the logo before it came out and I think the logo drop would have gone better had they let us make that original mood it's really cool maybe one day they'll let us do it anyways um and then i was flying home and i was like that that image of the second planet in the sky was still in my mind and the scene between the protagonist when he's young um who's the sort of oppenheimer-esque uh engineer likes metal likes mega structures he's like a boy you know just boy boy core founder core loving awesome stuff gundo core wants to build giant space imperium based and but then he's talking to a girl on the ship and they're on like a mission the idea was like maybe his funding got cut and so it's on this astrobiology mission to find other good homes for humanity and the fundamental issue with this is without light speed travel we're not going to get to another home uh within a you know millennia so okay we got mars and the moon um okay fine and so the that core scene the romance that the two of them had i just fell in love with this sort of like the the the woman feminine version of like what the boy core build build build would look like is maybe more of like a similar build the future idea but like maybe instead of just industrializing mars we're also terraforming it and making it feel um in trying to grow things and use biology and um not to say that like biology is for for women and buildings for men i don't mean that at all but like that's just kind of where my brain went with this scene and that they're polar opposites they're yin and yang yet they still have this this like love for each other that's really deep and that really i was just i like i think i cried while i was riding on the plane like quietly i don't think i annoyed anyone near me because that'd be so weird crying on planes is tough because everyone around he's like oh god they're crying it wasn't obvious um you hid the tears i hid the tears i was like this is so good and then that core story between the two of these people and then i was like as we were landing i was like what if she died and what if that catalyzes him to kind of have the merger of their dream which is building an artificial planet.

7:00It's using the megastructure, big metal stuff, but you're creating an atmosphere, which is a biological endeavor, um, and, uh, an, an atmospheric endeavor. Um, and so that's where the core story came from, I think almost a, over a year and a half, a year and a half ago, roughly. Yeah. I know you have this line that I really love where you say that, you know, story inspires science and science kind of, uh, leads to story or whatever. Um, even when we first met, you were like I really want to kind of like inspire the world uh to build things yeah um how are you thinking about things now yeah I mean well first of all it's been awesome to see you pick up the mantle on the interviews and do it so much better than me in terms of the energy you bring the lighting quality I like it's awesome and I love that so thank you and well all I could say is that stories non-fiction projects are only expanding and we have some really exciting announcements coming in the next few months.

7:56And YouTube and Twitter won't be the only place that you get to watch our stuff in the very near future. And I think at the end of the day, the motto is story inspires science, science makes story real. And that's this idea that the sci-fi visions that people write that are potentially tractable on a scale, one day eventually get built if they sort of win. And by win, what does it mean to have that thing win? And I think it means that society and the culture of a given time falls in love with the idea and wants to make it real and the stories that we tell the myths storytelling was such a big part of culture back in the day and i think up up until maybe before mass mass media and the internet it was even bigger but then like maybe 50 or so years like go technology which is great kind of came in and really took that away in many ways and has made it hard for us to have good unifying stories stars is an example maybe the avengers is an example, Harry Potter, but there are far and few between.

8:52But before then, story wasn't just like, it was everything. It meant so much to people. And so what I wonder is what stories are we telling now that people are buying into about the future? And when I look around, I see really negative ones. I see very pessimistic ones, ones that put other people down and lift others up. and I see ones that are paint a horrible dark vision of the future like victimized you know I don't know about that I mean I don't I don't actually mean so specifically but but I just mean that like the movies we make about the future in sci-fi oftentimes you think dark you think black mirror yeah um and I don't dislike the show actually like I think it's a great show but the reason there's so much more negative movies that are popular in our hits is because our our negativity bias enables us to enjoy a horror movie or a negative film more easily.

9:46And as a filmmaker, let me tell you, making something negative and dark and bad is so much easier than making a bright, optimistic, inspiring film because then it's just optimism slot. Yeah. So for us, we want to pioneer and innovate on that front of, can we create large cultural stories that everybody loves that makes you want to go back to movie theaters again and see things on the big screen? Because you want to see what happens when Thanos snaps his finger when Luke confronts his father, you want to be in that room with your people and like your society and like the people that are in your area.

10:19And we have such little community today. And I think movies are such a pillar part of that. And like at Story, I think we just want to see like the theater, like V-rate, which has just gone down and people attending theaters just tick back up again. Because it's such an important thing. You can't use your phone in a movie theater. You can't be loud and obnoxious. You have to focus. Like your sensory overload, it's dark. And then movie screen. And the value of that I think is just so huge. And at the end of the day, we want to be the company that when you go to see one of our movies in theaters, you know that we're the same people that are filming the real scientists and engineers.

10:55And you can go online and watch their films and see the parallels. And it directly inspires us. I mean, Planet literally, the story would not be what it is had we not made S3 and done some of the other documentaries we've done the past year. from our new space film, from some computing stuff we did, films that we made, some that aren't released, directly inspired the way that we approached the science and engineering document. There's a 20-page engineering document that we actually had made a long time ago, but we actually got it formalized this week. Shout out to Steven from SpaceX who helped put that together this past week.

11:27But we want the boundary between the sci-fi and the reality to be minimal and to see the overlap. And we want people to be excited about the future again. Young people, I think, on average, are very negative and pessimistic about the future for a good reason. The stories we're telling and the reality we're living in, it's the best time ever to be alive. It's also the most risky time ever to be alive. And I think to see us through that, we need better stories. For this, you can't just go to a movie theater once every year or every other year and kind of change the cultural zeitgeist. How are you going to kind of scale up your teams and story in order to put out multiple movies a year?

12:04That kind of thing. I actually think that, it's a good question. I actually think that, I would love to personally make one movie a year for a while, which is an immense task. Most directors, I think, end up doing one movie every two to three years. I would like to do more than that. But I don't, I actually think it's better to do less and nail them, like nail them every time than to just have a ton. I want to get our core trilogy. will still come out after the announcement tonight but the big announcement tonight is that we are already moving into our next project which is a full feature-length film but it's not one it's three and it is the first film in a set a trilogy set that is story's first cinematic universe um which will be a universe that lasts for as long as the company longer um like the we're writing like outlines and kind of narrative plans like a scaffolding if you will for future people that will pick up the writing and storytelling um so that the stories can kind of continue on and um we just got to nail that we got to nail those first three films and um and then from there we'll do more so i'm pretty focused on that and then we'll have a lot of shows and documentaries on on streaming and online that people can see too and then the other big part of it which sounds hilarious is merchandising which there's two parts of this one part is that george lucas made most of his money through selling merchandising and that's part of what made star wars such a big thing um and i would like to have more money to make more movies as walt disney says but also i think if you make something that people want to buy and wear on their body there's something there that that is either you just bought it because it looks cool which is actually the right way to do it um but then you go deeper and you realize that you're wearing sort of an armor or you have sort of you're representing yourself and i always like to say like a huge part that like you're going to see more from story in this next year is that there's no nike for technology and science and engineering like if you like basketball you can wear Michael Jordan jersey or some ones.

13:57But if you like rockets, engineering, science, space, these sorts of things, there's nothing that cool you can wear other than maybe a SpaceX shirt. And so we want to find ways to make stuff that people can wear that represents their interests in a cool way and gets more people a part of the story. A huge part of it too is actually just getting more people working in these STEM spaces, whether on their own companies, at early stage companies or bigger companies. And we have some really exciting partnerships coming up with like actual jobs and hiring and employment programs, like big ones across the United States where we're creating stuff with them in partnership with them to like literally propagandize our country with, hey, you can change the future personally and you should.

14:41And you don't just have to be really good at math in like eighth grade to have a great career in STEM or to have a real strong voice and impact on the future. And so, I don't know, I kind of see it as a holistic, a holistic thing. after that plane ride and you're writing the script and everything or you're writing things down and you're crying a little bit um what was the you know what happened like what were the what were the next steps on actually making this thing real how like long of an answer do you want like do you want the full production story we could do the full production story okay that'd be fun let me let me water up so i mean i we we have a really great behind the scenes coming out um a few days after the film comes out and it doesn't tell the full like hell of production in the mistakes that I made that caused it but I think you your show should get that story um yeah so originally it was like oh I well so something people don't know about me who maybe have seen come to know me the past few years for my like science engineering like filmmaking is I made like 20 short films in middle school high school one won best visual effects the all-american high school film festival got me a full ride to the university advancing technology in Arizona I was watching vacuum wars before this vacuum wars yes real ones no it's so bad um but it's pretty great for like what was it yeah making making the cgi's a 13 year old i'm not mad at that at all um and um and so and i'd made a feature film and a half uh by the time i graduated high school so i was like man narrative z like ah it's easy but i didn't realize that my muscles had atrophied for doing narrative.

16:11Like I totally forgot a lot of the basic rules. So that was maybe April or March, April founded the company in July. And the sole one-year goal of the company was create planet. And the goal was originally to create it and have it out by the end of 2024 didn't happen. And then we, and the issue is that like, I decided it would be a good idea to not raise money for story and bootstrap it off of doing client work, ad revenue partnerships and stuff. And so So I would say the first six months, 95 % of my time was spent on just making sure we didn't go bankrupt and getting our core team, which is mostly people I've been making movies with since I was in middle school, set up, onboarded, relocated, like, okay, we need an office.

16:51Okay. We need a printer. Wait, but we need wifi for the printer. Like, and like stupid things like this, or like, okay, the camera and this camera accessory, no, we lost this camera accessory. Are we filming? And we still haven't found the replace all this kind of stuff. Like we have supply chain issues as a film company, which is hilarious. Um, I remember Steve jobs talking about like, you have to get the coffee maker and you have to get the you know pencil sharpener and everything it's just you think before you do it it's nothing and like but it actually all of that in aggregate and also you're going bankrupt is is like really really pushes the limit of it um your default dead default dead and just focused on on i remember the first day we signed our first big retainer contract with like some folks that we're making videos for and we thought it was like just the biggest thing ever and now we sign contracts like that all the time.

17:34But it's just to say, like if you really lean in and focus on serving your customer really well and making them great stuff, how quickly the business can scale and that people are wanting to pay that amount because they are excited about the services and the value you're bringing, which is awesome. So it's that trying to keep S3 going and convert S3 away from being something that I made to that a team of people made, which was just really hard. And so as a result, I had very little time to write the script. And it was August, then October, September. I remember I said the order wrong. But at this time, like how many employees do you even have to pull this all off?

18:06Four, five, six. We ended up we ended up hiring about we were hiring about once a month. Now I think we're at two a month, which is terrifying. And we're really starting to scale in a big way, which is scary, but it's really good. And I think actually like the core team is doing such a good job managing and leading the new folks and the new folks are coming in with like all this excitement. They're not they're not burnt out yet. They don't know how hard it's going to be. well they some of them do but then like they hear the war stories of like the first kind of year and it's just so it's cool it's cool to watch as someone like you who studied company culture and building to actually get to do it is like wow i mean like literally you got your team sitting here it's like your first year it's like it's just it's just life-changing and it's awesome and it's awesome to be either the founder or just a member of the early team it's so special and i feel like everybody in life should try it once maybe bigger companies are for you but like you should try being a small company early days once because it is life-changing and the amount of ownership agency and belief in yourself you get is huge um unless you're the founder then you think you're the dumbest person on on the planet planet um and so can i write the script and then finally i was like okay i'm doing it and i kind of got a first draft down in november i was like this is good but i knew i was like my rule is like you want to write forget about it for two months and come back to it with fresh eyes and i knew that there wasn't the time to do that and so i remember did a v2 i thought it was great i didn't show it to anybody i've now learned that for me in my process, showing my writing to other people that I trust as a creative collaborator and getting their feedback on it is so important for me now.

19:28Like I show like eight people, a script now, um, all sorts of different folks, um, professional writers, script consultants, people on my team. Um, and, and I really craft anyways, you craft. You have to like really focus or figure out who do you trust? Yes, it is about who you trust. It's not about like, oh, this is the most credentialed writer in Hollywood. And they liked it. No, it's like, yeah. Stuff that you like admire personally. And like, I respect your work or something. I respect your work or your taste. Like, does this resonate with you? Or if it's about a subject matter, you need to talk to the people who, you know, are in the subject matter field.

19:57And so on that level, I felt covered because we'd done S3 for a year. And I was like talking to engineers and scientists all the time. But then I remember kind of looking at my chiefest, going to my chief of staff, Maxie one day, and being like, okay, who's also our producer. And I was like, okay, it's end of November. What if we just said we were going to film the movie the last week of the year before Christmas in three weeks? could we pull together the production stuff we need to do it in time and she was like fuck no absolutely not get out of here i was like no no we can do it just try just try it give your all for a week and if it's not good we'll can it end of the week goes by and i'm like we can't do it now she's flipped and she's like we're doing it and i was like okay um and then i did a big rewrite which threw off our production plans a little bit and we um filmed last week of december the moment the film really was like oh we got it and this is always how it's been for me with fiction is like the moment you cast the lead and we went through i think 2 000 audition tapes where it's really cool casting websites are awesome you literally like post the size of the script pages and then you have people read for them and submit them and when steven miller our lead who's going to be here tonight we're going to do a panel after this right here um sent his side and i was like oh this is like obviously the right guy this is the guy this is dr evan khan and um what was interesting is that the uh the other main character um alex platt also auditioned to be dr evan khan but he wasn't old enough well at the time we thought we didn't know how old he would be but we realized he wasn't quite old enough and then we ended up casting him as the second character greece who the movie is really hinges on um in a way and that was a big moment we um andrew really talented filmmaker my team who's made three four now awesome short films and is probably going to do a feature film soon, like convinced me that we should hire director of photography because I'd never done that.

21:43I normally like DP and direct and first AD on my sets, which if you're running on filmmaker is normal, but if you're like professional filmmaker is very strange. And I was like trying to save money. We were still very broke at that time. And I was like, no, no, like every like a hundred bucks like we need right now, we're not, we have to do it by the end of the year. And then we got to like, forget about the movie for a month or two, get back to client work to like get our money back up. and um indra convinced me that we should hire a really great dp so we hired this guy named amil who's got done amazing work he's i think the best narrative dp in the bay area um and he came in like four days before the the movie started filming and we we toured um the jewish contemporary museum where we filmed a lot of the spaceship scenes the palace fire arts all this stuff and planned it and it was awesome because it let me focus on the acting and directing of the actors while he handled the lighting and uh the film just looks beautiful as a result of him and and his work and our gaffer matt stoops and everyone so we filmed intensively the night before production i got sick um and i got sick a lot during s3 but i hadn't been sick since starting the company so i was sick the entire time we were filming i was literally i had a bottle of nyquil or dayquil and i went through a bottle a day i was just sipping it i feel like a wrapper it was like dirty sprite but it was the orange dayquil and uh it was it was powerful um feeling on top of it but also horrible at the same time it's horrible and then um and it's also the biggest set i've ever been on we had like 20 30 people every day huge crew big like lighting rigs and setups and that's why the movie looks so good um and of course that ended up making the lead sick um the second last day of filming which was tough so he had to give the speech like half of the scenes of this movie stevens and he's sick wow it was just so hard as an actor i felt so horrible and like sucked um we wrapped the movie and then i basically got the worst editor's block of all time which is weird because I'm a really good editor.

23:32And it was because the story wasn't baked all the way. And it just wasn't, there was like, in retrospect, very obvious things that were wrong about the script. And I mean, it was like, oh, I haven't made a fiction film in like years. Years. And I forgot a lot of the basic rules. Shit. So I couldn't make meaningful progress. I did the initial assembly cut of the film in a week. So we went from all the footage to a 47 minute cut of the film. in a week, but it wasn't great. And I thought it was just going to edit front to back and it was going to be good. And then that was going to be it. But that's not what happened.

24:09And then we were just trying to make the business survive. We basically were actually broke in January. Definitely one of those like, oh. I know that vibe. Yeah. You do. This is a good lighting setup. It's not too easy. This is a good lighting setup, Ty.

24:27And so we focused on getting the business back on track. and then we had some major contracts land that like really secured our future for a few years and sort of like okay we're back but plan it what are we doing there we got to finish it and so um we started making really good progress on the cgi we hired clay welch who worked at pixar for 25 years to come on as the concept director which was a dream for me because ever since i was a little kid i was like man one day like last night i was with clay in the office at 4 a.m as we were finishing the movie um looking at him and like apologizing that we were there and thanking him he's like no man this is like the coolest thing ever and then you know i told him it was like when i was a little kid making vacuum wars in my room and doing the rotoscoping for a week i dreamed of one day getting to be able to work with artists like as talented as him who who like were industry veterans um it was just such a full circle like 10 or 15 years later for me doing that but now with a guy that worked at pixar for 25 years responding to all my shitty notes and comments about how we could make the movie better um so it's really meaningful and special but he around march of 2025 he had kind of built the planet at this point like which you think it's like 3d it's easy but like there's a lot of concept direction and art direction about how you want to build the thing and how you want to make it look for the way that you're going to film it in cg there's over 200 visual effect shots in the movie um which for 35 minute movies a lot and i'd say about a third of them are easy the other two-thirds are not um by not easy like how much time per gifx shot that's a hard question i would say the average is probably a few hours a shot maybe literally thousands of hours yeah yeah like hundreds for sure and like a large team kind of came on to do it at the end so anyways i convinced andrew who i mentioned earlier to like take over the edit for me so i could just think about it from a story perspective and originally we were like he was like we can fix the film without doing reshoots and i was like i think we need to like do pickup shoots which to me i used to bully directors for doing pickup shoots like you guys are so stupid what you didn't have your story planned you didn't have everything mapped out yeah you didn't and neither did i okay um planet was a humbling experience for me and um but we did it we figured out the story we did reshoots two months ago a month and a half ago and two of the scenes we shot one scene we shot that we thought was the ending got cut because a month ago we showed the film for the first time and it's like rough state completion with no visual effects maybe some like temp animations from clay to the team about five weeks six weeks ago and everybody was like this is really good except the ending is just strange um wrong yeah it just it's just it's it was a and the reason is because the ending was never meant to be the ending that we had designed it was like it was kind of a patch fix um so we thought really hard about it and then we went back to like what the original script ending was supposed to really be and reworked from there and um we did another pickup shoot slightly after that a quick one um and in total if you laid out like the scene and rough edit of every scene we did we probably shot 70 minutes of scene over a 12-day production period which if you multiply that by two it's a feature film um and it felt like that and which was awesome and like as a team everyone on the team doing their different job to make that happen was huge and really like warmed us up for what's next for us, you know, and so about five weeks ago, we picture locked it, but not really.

27:47We, you know, had a lot of things to change. And then basically the past four weeks was the visual effects sprint. Pretty much all 200 shots got done in the past four weeks. And I just want to like highlight that this is being exported right now, an hour before the the the movie is like on screen. I don't actually let me let me validate that this is true. Okay. it's still exporting still exporting like okay so an hour before the movie goes out um yes my editor andrew said eta and the final we have so the entire movie's done but we were waiting on one visual effect shot from one contractor who's actually great and they said 16 minutes ago 10 minutes still exporting um wait so that one shot do you still have to like re-export the entire movie after that yeah but ironically re-exporting the entire movie is really fast okay because we've we've it's all baked out so it's really quick it'll take like three minutes and then they'll drive here put it on the on the projector and we'll be good to go um but yeah so it's it as we were doing this interview actually got exported that's amazing and then we're going to premiere it tonight and then we're going to do we originally we're going to release it tomorrow but actually like the story in the movie in the narrative is like 100 % locked but there's like maybe 20 visual effects shots that i'd like to just like spruce up a little bit um so i think we'll take a few days to do that and then we'll release it online because it's like on the one hand i want to release it tomorrow morning and like feel the excitement of it and um but and you know play off the 900 people here tonight but also like this is going to last forever on the internet and you want to make sure you put it out the right way the 20 visual effects shots that are like almost they're like eight and a half out of 10 and we have the opportunity to make them 10 out of 10 so we want to take it we've invested so much into getting here time money that it's like it's worth it to do it um so yeah the cut that everybody's going to watch tonight will never be seen again which is really cool i think um although it's basically going to be the same like i don't think anybody in this theater will like go and watch the movie again and be like it's different but they might see a visual effect shot be like whoa that's better um but it's in a good spot um it was a grind the past two days but um it is overall i wanted to have the whole film completed in six months and it ended up taking nine which isn't that bad all things considered but we proved our production efficiency we went from no pre-production plan to shot initial film in four weeks, casting in two, initial post-production assembly in one week, full read in three months, and then visual effects in about a month and a half.

30:11And I think the quality will speak for itself in that we're a big part of Planet is proving to Hollywood financiers that we can be trusted with a big boy budget to make a film like this at a bigger scale. Because it's not like a normal short film. The rigor that you have to have with working with the CG team and the live action team in every department is totally different for a film of this scale um visual scale and production scale than like a you know a not visual effects heavy film which there are very few today that are but where it's not like you know we're building a planet in space for most of the movie um so we think it proves that and uh yeah you're excited i'm excited yeah do you think that you're going to be able to you know you get to work with this guy that worked at pixar for 25 years do you think that there's going to be a day where you get to work with george lucas or steven spielberg or any of those other guys on a movie together?

31:00Well, we have some exciting news coming up pretty soon. I mean, yeah, I don't want to jinx anything, but like I hope very soon. I think that I've been studying a lot recently, like how directors end up collaborating through their careers because it's different. Like George Lucas had this really interesting relationship with Francis Ford Coppola and they tried to kind of build the new Hollywood mecca in San Francisco in the Bay Area to lesser greater or lesser success um that whole time him and spielberg were best friends spielberg ended up directing uh indiana jones that was george lucas's original concept um and these guys are just like going back and forth like george lucas proved with ilm you know george lucas built this company ilm to make star wars and then steven spielberg came around and made one of the best movies of all time jurassic park with ilm so the collaboration that happens with like directors is really exciting and um yeah there's so many things that i would love to do with with with these these guys one of my dreams is actually to do because i did a lot of interviews like this with engineers um and documentaries and i really thought hard and i was like i don't like interviewing i'm not as good at it as you and i want to only do things i really enjoy and can excel at but there's one more interview series i want to do in my life and it will be with uh we're actually filming the first episode of it with a pretty big director next july because he's filming a big movie right now um we think we're going to call it masters of the movies or masters of cinema and film like four hour interviews where it'll be kind of like this but i'll have like an imac screen up and i'll have their movies open and i'll just go through the film and ask them questions about like shots and is it like john yushe or john yushe or whatever he like goes through a video with the creator of the video i don't like that but but more it'll look really cinematic it's not about it's going to be long and uncut and it's and it's really about the way I see it is that these people, these storytellers have changed the fabric of our society.

32:50And there's basically no good interviews with these people. Like find me a relentless quality interview with any of these great directors. It doesn't exist. And, and for a while I was like, oh, it must be because they're cagey and they don't want to like reveal their secret sauce. But I'm like, that's not, that can't be, that can't be true. Um, and I think, yeah, so that's a dream I have that we're going to film an episode of that next July with, um, with a pretty big name. and I want to do that more. And so we'll see. You know, the way I broke into the technology and science industry was by making like films for these companies.

33:21And maybe that's how we'll do it for Hollywood too is us doing interviews with these directors and then that'll help us out. But that's not where we're doing it. It's just like, yeah, so I hope so. What have been the biggest like weaknesses for yourself personally that you've learned about? Like even the watching$100, like I kind of thought about it too. And I'm like, okay, I could, you know, go, I could not hire someone and just do it myself. Yeah. But the amount, if I just like get more momentum through this new hire, suddenly I can just pay for the hire because the new momentum. Yeah. Um, so what have those types of things been for you where you are like, you know, feel very strongly that you don't want to do something and then you changed and we're like, oh my God, I'm so happy that I did that.

34:03One of them is getting comfortable spending money, which you can only do once you have a little bit of it, but spending, and it's not that you spend a lot of it like flippantly but that you do it as efficiently as you can and you hire great people to do great work and i think for film i think a movie is kind of the master art form because it it includes almost every other one um even painting for example tonight uh there's a seven foot painting a plane in the lobby i haven't even seen it yet my dad painted it i'm very excited um to see that freaking painting there's a bronze statue out there that's in the movie made by a bunch of french guys they made that thing in two weeks and shipped it to france we got it three days ago we shot the last shot of the movie two days ago but my point with like filming a master artwork or like the one to rule them all maybe is that well they have it has such huge societal impact but also it requires an army in a village to do one um and you want the best people or the best people at a given thing like for example we we like filmed one of the best swordsmiths in the world recently for a project and he made all the swords for pirates of the caribbean um he like made us a sword that we got inscribed with our motto in latin on it and like we you know spent four hours with them talking about like what the swords in our sci-fi trilogy will look like and how they will be different like how do you make how do you do like lucas did the lightsaber is there do you go farther than that uh we have an idea um but like um i don't think it'll be as cool as lightsaber to be clear but it will be like you watch me like that's an awesome sword concept not as cool as a lightsaber um but uh not as original as an energy weapon not as well no the concepts are pretty good actually but just like it's not as iconic and cool it's a fucking it's a glowing like glow stick that severs you the moment you come in contact with it it's amazing it's amazing that there aren't more bad accidents that happen in star wars oh should i drop it and fall on there's your feet are gone um i remember i'm gonna throw some loving shade i remember when i was working at astronis and every week or so they would do these all hands meetings and some some of the executives would get up on stage and they would talk to the whole company 300 people and on average they would be so uninspiring like and i remember like like christian or john getting up there and being so tired because they like pulled an all-nighter like they did like some crazy thing and they're exhausted or going through it and they're just kind of like just a little tired but when you're on stage in front of 300 people like like like someday my point is that i remember seeing that and thinking like, man, when I'm the CEO of my company, I'm going to be so inspiring every single day.

36:32I'm going to bring all the energy. I will honestly tell you, if Astronus's audience were eight out of 10, mine are probably have been two out of 10. Like horrible. I thought being inspiring and like, hell yeah, let's go do this movie and make this thing. I thought it'd be so good at that. I was like, I'm natural born for this. No, like when you're tired, the bank account's running low. You think you're an idiot for like convincing a bunch of people to make this movie and like the story's not working. It's crap. you're like you're just depressed and you're like I don't like and you're supposed to be the guy that like the guy or gal that is like yeah this is like my vision and let's go make this thing and then you're like I don't believe in it right now we got to fix it so so learning like were there moments during that production process where you literally woke up and we're like what the fuck am I doing no cuz I don't know when I go into production mode I kind of become like i go into a different mode and it's because i've done so many production days i think in my life i've been on seven to eight hundred production days and so when i'm on a production day and most of the seven eight hundred production days are gorilla scrappy days where i'm doing a lot and my friends or close people are doing a lot and the amount of weight you carry has hardened me so that it's like if it's a production day it's like um it's wartime and you're just like locked in and you're making it happen you're up at 4am and you're asleep at 11pm and then you're doing it the next day and that's why you get sick um so no during production there is no doubt it's like we are doing this and it's gonna be the best thing ever that comes in post-production you need to execute so much that there's no like time to think no yeah exactly uh in post-production that's where you start i think steven spore has a quote about like your first rough cut you always think you're the worst director of all time um totally true it's never not been true for me um to feel that way and uh um so that definitely comes in and one thing too that i learned that was really unique i think an interesting thing for your audience too is that like i you know i did s3 for like a year and a half and i thought i like knew how to run a company as a result i was like oh man like i have more inside knowledge on how to build a deep tech engineering company than anyone in the world does um which is probably true i think i know more about how deep tech companies work than most investors do, which is like kind of a cocky, precocious thing to say.

38:51And I don't mean it that way. I just mean like I've actually spent time, serious time with these people helping them solve problems, working for them, getting paid by them. And I think understand it really well. And I was like, oh, I got this. First of all, the moment you step in actually doing the thing. Turns out it's actually hard to make decisions. Yeah, turns out it's hard to make decisions. Everything goes out the window. The second thing that was the biggest trip and took me like seven, eight months to figure out was that I'm not building a deep tech company. i'm building an art company the rules of the game are different um the way you push people and motivate people is different the way that you compensate people is different the way that you build a team and a culture is different the way that you decide what you're working on there is no spreadsheet of optimizations uh for the rocket or for the nozzle or for or for or for the bearing that you're that you're designing for there is no physics objective truth it is a matter fuzzy it is a matter of the soul like are you creating art that resonates and it's a different recipe for every single different artist and you have to go through that journey and the only way you go through the journey is by starting and making things and um so i think that was a big one and like i remember for the first six months i had so much resistance of like oh what would like my friend cameron do or like what would augustus do in this situation um and sometimes it was the same but oftentimes times it was like, actually, it's different.

40:13Like I like the way that I should approach this should be a little different. When I talked with you all the way back in our first meeting, and I was basically saying, like, I'm interviewing these founders, and I want to interview you and all this stuff. And you kind of, even in a few other interactions, you said that you didn't love doing S3, and you didn't love doing the interviews. And, and I'm, I'm wondering how, how you felt during that time and how you're kind of feeling now and and what that what that transition is like i loved s3 for a lot of the time by the end of it i was like oh i'm sick of this because it felt like a i had created some like monster that was like part of the venture ecosystem and like companies were trying to line up their releases to like get fundraising or things like this and it just kind of became this like it can it became like part of the startup industry in a bad way and i didn't like that um and i was burnt out by the end because i was the only one doing it for a week every year with a full-time job at Astronus, which was like a startup job.

41:10So it was insane. Um, and then the interviews, I never liked doing the sit-end interviews as much because I never got to prep them the way that you do. I never got to like them very well. And we were filming the interview after filming a documentary episode for four to six hours. So you're exhausted. You're exhausted. And you also feel like you're just really asking for a lot of time from people. Um, like even today, we're like only doing 45 minutes, but like, it was like four to six hours. So it's just the whole thing. And like the logistics of that we're tough um so i guess like at the end of the day like one of my like trident like rules that i deeply believe in for creative folks is like you have to really love or believe in what you're making and you have to figure out how to do that by whatever means necessary whether you're changing what you're making or changing your perspective on things or just refining it kind of like a sculpture or something um so for me with s3 i knew I loved the science and the engineering part of it and then I it turns out what I really liked was the getting into the concepts and the theoretical stuff with folks and unpacking that and learning about that and I loved the process of learning that myself and sharing that learning with other folks by making these videos um but I didn't like the like startup industry grind grind grind grind thing um as much um and so so yeah so today I don't know like if the question is like how am I feeling overall it's like I'm I think the biggest thing I've learned in the past year is like the value of focus um and you know up until now 15 months in for story we've been like an everything company like we've done so many different things in multiple projects at once but we can now afford in the next like month basically like when I get back in the studio on on monday um it's trilogy time like i'm that's all i'm focused on until that thing is out in theaters and um and if it's not that it's hiring people in building a great team to work on our other projects that i care care about like the other stuff because we have other shows and other things we want to make because i want to see them in the world but there has to be a line between like what would you die for in terms of what you're making and uh it's hard because if you're a passionate person like me, you can get passionate about a lot of stuff.

43:24But then you have to pick, like, what's the one thing, though, that will never be touched by that stuff? It feels, this almost feels like a, even your transition from S3 to this and now moving on to more of this, like, kind of timeless content, feels like a march towards timelessness. Yeah. Where you basically, you don't want to make something. I even hate it. Yeah. Well, I don't want to make a podcast. Yeah, it sucks when you do an interview or a documentary and then the company goes out of, like, business, like, a year later or something like that. That happened a lot for us. And it was like, oh, like, that sucks.

43:50And so like you want to make time with stuff 100%. Yeah. And there was there's another thing where it's like I'm trying to you know, I'm trying to interview like this founder because I think they're super special. I don't want to make something that helps them like pitch and raise the next round or right, you know, announces around. Well, because it's like what I love about what you're doing is like you're you're building this archive of people when it's like what you want to do or like what I want to be able to do is go find an early founder. Like I want this, but for like an early Lucas or an early Elon or early jobs or whatever.

44:15And it's just this like unfiltered thing. And it's like it's not about getting a ton of views all the time. It's not about always about like a cultural mission to change something. It's sometimes just about capturing authenticity and following your passion, which you do so well. And I think that's yeah, it's been a lot. It's kind of interesting because it's been like it's not necessarily optimized for for growth. Like if you go after much bigger names, it's significantly more growthy. Lots and lots of people want to listen to Sam Altman talk. Yeah, totally. But in the event that any one of these people goes and takes over the world, I would really like to have this documented growth where, you know, in year one what do they look like what do they think like yeah that's what i want to do three or four exactly five and i think that's really special yeah um i agree yeah uh let's let's end it on like what are you most excited about the trilogy just the trilogy i'm excited about um yeah creating creating a a cinematic universe has been my dream since i was a kid we've been working on it now for eight eight months active like actively working on it there's art development there's 3d models like physical ones in our office um there's a lot of writing uh one thing that was cool is like while we were in editing hell for planet i was waking up the next morning and for four hours every morning writing and immediately remembering ah don't make that mistake again because otherwise you'll be in this hell times 100 because that's much bigger the budget and the scope and the risk will be um and so that was an awesome awesome way to write was do it while you're like going through editing hell really because you get to escape like oh this will be so much better who knows maybe we'll do this interview again in two years and i'll be like ty i did it again it was the same mistake and now this time we're sitting at like a different theater uh for the world premiere of a theater release film and it's being exported matter of fact let's let's get an update is it exported movie exporting render time 11 minutes so in one minute in one minute the movie will be exported amazing amazing okay so actually it's kind of crazy the ending of this interview Yeah, literally the second that this interview.