AI-generated South Park, “Holy Grails” of AI & more with Sunny Madra | E1785

0:00It's like going running alone or going running with a group of people. yeah you run with the group of people you run further you run faster you run better you run alone two out of three people who run alone and i'm in that group i'm just not going to perform at the highest level when i'm in an office i used to do 20 meetings in a day with founders yeah 20 i would go for 12 hours 20 to 30 minute meetings crazy no breaks eating at the table with a founder i know when we did our accelerator i probably do 30 meetings in a day i would do three groups of 10 and i would give each one 15 minutes so yeah for an hour and we were on a clock yeah and we and the clock was in the corner i mean yc does this too everybody does this but the point is performance goes up in a group in a room this week in startups is brought to you by and broker startup insurance program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle save up to 20 off of traditional insurance today at imbroker.com slash twist.

1:03While you're there, get an extra 10 % off using offer code twist. Open Phone brings your team's business calls, texts, and contacts into one delightful app that works anywhere. Get 20 % off your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. And Roots, invest in the only real estate investment trust that creates wealth for you and its residents at investwithroots.com slash twist. All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm back. I'm back in the United States. And so is Sonny, Sandeep Madra, also back. We happened to be in Italy at the same time. That was nice running into you.

1:45Just randomly? Yeah, it was great. Spent a couple of days together, played a little bit of cards, saw some friends. But here we are, we're back. And our voices are a little shot. I don't know, I don't want to attribute it to anything. But nice to get a little time in Italy. And, you know, on this week in startups, we'd like to do this weekly AI recap, we tend to do it on Monday or Tuesday. So consider this this week in AI with my good friend, Sandeep Madra. If you don't know his company, it's called Definitive Intelligence. They do AI data analytics, basically pointing all this incredible AI at your data sets to make you smarter and make better decisions but then also combining it and do the work for you but also you're combining with public data sets too yes which is super fascinating so you could have your internal data set of let's say all your sales uh internally all your marketing internally but then you could put it against say amazon's reviews or google trends or the stock market or our weather and this is the holy grail that we never really got to why did we never get there sunny when we look at how data we've been talking about big data for 20 years we've been talking about the cloud for 20 years we've been talking about data science for 30 or 40 years you know in corporate america obviously these disciplines have existed for even longer than that but it's It's been front and center in corporate America, but it never really came together the way it is now.

3:20Why? Well, I think it was like a few factors and we've had a perfect storm. I think it was for a long time, companies were resistant to the cloud and companies that were doing this type of work natively were cloud native, meaning, you know, for the longest time, Facebook's of the world, Google's, Amazon's, you know, despite having their own clouds, they were using sort of cloud technologies for a long time. Yeah. And so it took a long time for enterprise to get comfortable with the move towards cloud. So that was the first shift that was needed. Then the second shift that was needed was an ability to basically make it easier for a broader range of folks to access this data.

4:04And I think that's what's really kind of come together with AI. You know, if you had a lot of data, which many companies did and had it in a data lake that you spent millions or hundreds of millions of dollars putting together. But usually all the requests from the CEO down get funneled into a team of maybe five or, you know, 50 analysts. And those are trying to answer all the questions for every person in the business. And that wasn't scalable. And I think that was the choke point, if you will. That was the choke point. Exactly. So you have this incredible data lake, you invest in it, but only like there's a little tiny dock and like five people can sit on the dock and fish from this incredible data lake.

4:45Correct. Now, everybody's out in the lake, wave runners, boats, people are swimming in the lake. Everybody can go drink from this incredible lake and then the insights happen. And that's really why this is a revolution. and uh the the thing i saw this week that i thought was or while we were on a little bit of a break there having all-star summer i don't know if you knew this but we dubbed this summer all-star summer here on this week in startups and man we just had the ceo of mongo db on ryan from qualtrics on we've been just having crazy ceo level talent on the pod to keep everybody's summer really really hard even dharmesh from hubspot came on uh thanks to all my friends coming on and supporting me during the all-star summer here and if you're one of my all-stars reach out let's go let's do it let's do a quick uh uh conversation actually know who i'm having on tomorrow is the whoop ceo i don't know if you know whoop everybody's into this whoop uh wristband yeah the band yeah yeah so i'm thinking about getting on that whoop because i'm you know i'm getting on the health kick so um will will be on tomorrow amazing but while we were gone a couple of things were going down obviously we still have the strike going on by the writers guild and the thing i found very interesting about that was i uh have been getting tapped for some entertainment projects and i find myself using chat gpt to do my research even to do some proposals and it's wonderful yeah absolutely works great there's no doubt in my mind that anybody who's a writer on a tv show can get benefit from using these tools and i don't think it replaces people but on the actor side i do think it does replace people and that was shown to me perfectly crystallized for me so perfectly not with the star wars you know princess leia luke skywalker cameos trying to cross the uncanny valley not even the new harrison ford i don't know if you saw did you see the new raiders yep i mean that harrison ford i i did not realize that was dh yeah i thought that that was from when i first started oh that's like a previous movie or is it outtakes or something no we and then i was like i think we even talked about it we talked about it right we saw like great when they took like a we did a uh like a demo of a like someone taking it older harrison ford and making them younger right so we saw that yeah yeah so i mean the thing that has crystallized it for me it's a little tv show called south park yeah and the reason this crystallized it for me yes is because when south park came out uh Trey and Matt, when they created it, if you've ever seen the first episode that they did, I think, in college or after college, they were doing stop animation, basically, with cardboard cutouts.

7:36So they used this lo-fi. So lo-fi, stop motion, would be the first thing that computers can just perfectly replicate, obviously. so sure enough somebody created an ai generated showrunner basically but not only did they now the animations which is easy to do they nailed characters location and plot now i'm using the term now um perhaps that is a bit of a moving target but i would say enough to be fascinating. So explain to us exactly how this has manifested because this is the first multi-dimensional AI effort that I've seen for entertainment specific. Yeah, and J. Cal, for this one, let's pull Nick in because - Oh, producer Nick, yes.

8:28Yeah, because producer Nick has really done a lot of good background work on this one. Okay, here we go. So Nick, why don't you lead out on this one and then I'll chime in with you. yes hey everybody um were you in italy no i wasn't so yeah this the south park demo was done by a team called fable simulation um they've worked on vfx projects for pixar and oculus in the past um and right now yeah they're they're legit this new model they built as a generative tv and showrunner agent it's called um it's called show one right animate direct create voices and even in edits and what they did was they basically put a prompt in which i can pull up the prompt right now basically the prompt was researchers trained an ai robot pig to write infinite tv shows but it goes horribly wrong cartman is a big fan of ai generated tv show westland chronicles which is basically a stand-in for westworld the writers guild is on strike because of ai and from that it created this basically 20 minute south park full episode and i would say honestly in terms of the plot it's like 60 to 70 percent there and just as a general like plot overview what happens of the episode is cartman kyle stan and kenny are all debating this new show westland chronicles that's ai generated cartman loves it kenny and uh i'm sorry kyle and stan think that it's wrong that writers are now being generated by ai instead of just so meta yeah well exactly it's crazy and then so the show and this is where it's like so it's so nails like the genesis and the joke writing of South Park.

10:00And South Park always does as well, which is great. So the show is being produced by a company called Bisney, obviously standing for Disney. And in the episode, these Bisney researchers are creating a generative AI pig, which is basically, you could think of the pig as Mickey Mouse. It's called Met Porker, which is funny enough, like a combination of Matt Stone and Trey Parker's names. Met Porker is the pig. And they create this like generative AI pig to, and they start training it on like different racial stereotypes. Oh no. And it goes horribly wrong and the pig turns racist and then it becomes a big news story.

10:33But that is almost exactly what would happen on a South Park episode about generative AI, I think, right? Yeah, I mean, I'm not like falling out of my seat, like hilarious laughing. So I think your 60 % sounds about right to me. It gave some good bones to an episode. It obviously has, as part of their model, my understanding is they put in every script every location every character that's ever been on and in other words they took the wikipedia or the wukipedia or wikia whatever you know those vertical wikis are south parkipedia south parkipedia if you if you ingest south parkipedia and it knows these are characters and it knows these are locations and then it knows the themes it knows they like to do laboratory experiments it knows they like to send up corporations in disney so the ai is going to get you 60 70 of the way there but what's very interesting about this is the script would normally be over here in language model land right sunny the images would be over here in stable diffusion land yeah so what's happened here is stable diffusion land and open ai land have been merged which we knew would happen but here we are in month 10 of this revolution or month nine of this revolution and somebody stitched those two things together didn't they It was bound to happen.

11:53And, you know, even OpenAI, right, has Dolly. And so, you know, it's not doing full animation yet. And we'll talk about runway and some other things in a bit. But that intersection, it's already here now, right? And so you can assume that this type of functionality, especially with the ability to set like context windows, in this case, like, you know, the entire South Park training set is coming really, really quickly to anyone. And that's going to be a big threat to the writers and this whole strike that's going on. listen i work with super early stage companies at launch like literally year zero they haven't even incorporated yet and then we hit the series a people have thousands of dollars in mrr and they maybe they've only raised a couple of hundred thousand before that series a and they don't have their insurance set up and in fact we recently had a great startup that didn't have dno and we had to really stop everything because they were having board meetings they were making massive decisions, there were legal issues, and they didn't have the basic D &O insurance that protects directors and officers.

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13:35That's E M B R O K E R.com slash twist. And use the code twist for 10 % off. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. and the truth is here in turn on the animation side nick you don't need for south park to send this to i think they were doing it in south korea wasn't that the big animation capital i remember reading somewhere that the way they turned over the animation so quickly in south park because you'd be like wait a second this wednesday's episode is about you know trump getting because of the video cameras right yeah and you'd be like wait a second didn't that indictment just drop on friday and you're got it by wednesday so there was some compressed thing that they that was part of the magic of south park was how did they do it so fast and here we have they could be working on it on a wednesday afternoon and drop it wednesday night yeah so south park could be commenting on the day's events with a with high fidelity in the animation and then you need zero animators so i mean if you're an animator for south park right now this is code red they don't need you now if you're an animator for you know uh ashoka or clone wars or pixar they still need you so this is the beginning of the episode uh where cartman and kyle stan and kenny are talking together get this bisney is using ai to make the entire fifth season haha that's right artificial intelligence baby what that sounds like a terrible idea how would ai I even make a good story for Westland Chronicles.

15:06Oh, I'm sorry, Kyle. I didn't realize you were an expert in AI technology. How about you let the super smart machines do their job and we just enjoy the freaking show? Whatever. You guys can keep watching your lame non-AI TV shows while I enjoy a thrilling new season of Westland Chronicles. Fine, you enjoy your AI-generated season. We'll stick to shows written by actual humans. I would say the voices, because I forgot to bring that into play here. You know, doing AI-generated voices are perfect like i don't i don't think i could tell the difference in a show um i think you can a little the inflection the inflection is okay yeah all right so but they could probably smooth that out oh yeah that's just a matter of i don't even think that's a matter of technology there's probably just a little more work more tuning yeah more tuning so let's just say they got the voices the dialogue is kind of lame it's not funny it's boring so it's halfway there and the animation is obviously 90 there or yeah i mean most people aren't even looking at the screen anymore so pretty amazing yeah the you're right the animation is the closest and i would say the general like the sting of the joke is probably the the furthest thing from what they have right but as we showed i think two weeks ago we were sitting here and we were putting memes up and it was explaining memes so i think if you did some reinforcement learning here and said that's a funny south park joke and the south park writers punched up the jokes in real time this thing after having 500 jokes punched up would have enough of a uh of a data set to punch up its own jokes and joke yeah yeah if that makes sense so with reinforcement learning and i have to say this is inspiring i think as well because um you can you can look at this through the lens sunny of what's lost okay the animators are losing their jobs 100 they're done the people who uh do the voices they're losing their jobs they're completely unnecessary to have matt and trey and whoever else is doing voices do the voiceovers now you may still want to have the animators you still may want to have people do their voices, I get it.

17:21But I'm saying necessary. In the next year or two, completely not necessary. And then the writers are the most necessary. But do you need 10? Or do you need five? I think you probably can get rid of two or three and let the AI brainstorm. And then next year is fine. Okay, so people are going to lose their jobs, or you don't need as many people. What are the what are the things you gain? Well, here's the things you're going to gain, you're gonna be able to do this in real time. You're going to be able to do it tonight based on today's news you're going to be able to do 10 times as many episodes because the cost is going to be so much lower so there's no reason for them to go on hiatus you could have a south park every week you could have south park every night if you wanted to do that now that might dilute the brand you gotta be thoughtful about it um well the other thing you could think about um is uh let's just say there's a historic show and that had you know writers actors the whole kind of infrastructure required for a show do you remember the the like the well i guess it's called the x account now the x account modern seinfeld do you ever follow this one oh yes there is an account on twitter yeah where they take the characters from seinfeld and they put them in modern day scenarios so a modern day scenario might be using open ai yeah or flying in a vtol or cryptocurrency so and it's like when they do they do this for sopranos there's a guy on tiktok who will do christopher moltesanti talking to tony soprano about nfts trying to order an uber or yeah yeah got it so modern day situations for classic shows and now you could actually do that and now you could do that right and so what i think it does is it basically says for creators that have you know strong basis in content, there'll be an ability because I would like, I love Seinfeld.

19:10I still watch Seinfeld. And I would love to watch some modern Seinfeld shows. Jerry is never going to do it, right? They're never going to come together. But I would pay for that. And I think everybody that was involved in that infrastructure should get paid. And so I do think, you know, there's going to be a real big opportunity. And what we might end up with is not like 10 seasons of a show, we may end up with one or two let's call them human powered seasons and then beyond that that's enough of a seed for people to continue with it because they enjoy it in other words you know like general hospital and some of these um soap operas i mean they've been going on for decades yeah and if you take the general hospital model where they produce i don't know a couple of episodes a year yeah um you could have the sopranos come back you could fill in the all the episodes in between you could just say hey here's the here's the foundation here's the um canon now we can do non-canon stuff and fill in in between here's what was happening in new york here's what was happening in miami just fill in so that's a really incredible opportunity you take some show that people still love i mean you could go far back you go back to mash you can go back to cheers you go back to you know um you know whatever show and so the op i like to look at the opportunity and then i think what you said there is very interesting in terms of a new model for those actors so those actors made all their money in the final seasons right yeah they negotiated together as a group they got a couple million dollars everybody makes their money on the last two or three seasons well what if you know some show like the sopranos with the less than nine seasons or something something like that yeah it was like seven but the last season was split into two so eight really eight seasons so you have seven eight seasons what if that entire group could vote or they had in their contracts hey for every additional season you're going to get paid even if you're not on it a minimum of in today's dollars 80 of what you got paid for being there and now if i'm an actor and you give me 80 cents on the dollar for something that i have to do zero work for that seems pretty reasonable to me in perpetuity yeah and then what does that mean for the network well the network can say well we can keep putting out sopranos at 80 cents on the dollar pretty great and if and even after you know uh gandafini has passed away you you know and a number of the other cast members yeah magically people can still enjoy this in the family i mean i think that's the the very interesting opportunity now this there's another rub here so we we've identified some really great opportunities here for everybody and it could be win-win and people could opt out of it too right you could be jerry seinfeld say you know what i created this it do not train you're not allowed to train which that should be like the artists at the artists and the producers and everything should have to come to that agreement but here's another opportunity you could personalize this stuff and so knowing what it knows just like cameo does personal stuff i could watch a seinfeld or you could watch a seinfeld that could tackle some topics that you really like i could watch a south park that was funny and included things in my world or you could regionalize it so you could have south park but it could be based on the politics of brazil or it could be you know have a an italian aesthetic to it right and and they did regionalize shows right you'll have shows like the office that came from the uk to the united states but now you can have the office in this model for every single location around the world yeah you know for every dialect so you know there's just so many wonderful opportunities here and as long as the studios are not greedy pig pigs they could share the wealth yeah or if if i just wanted to learn about uh like an event like a recent event you could have a show created about it and learn about it that way right many of the things that we would see on those shows where give us an example well let's just say imagine like a seinfeld episode where somehow kramer's involved in the trump indictment perfect yes incredible which indictment i mean i haven't i haven't refreshed drudge report in four hours so i could probably another 50 kramer was in that room with the box of course yeah of course no he was you know what he was the guy who they said go you go erase the videotapes of the uh they did the big boss wants you to erase videotapes it's crazy Are you still using your personal phone number for your startup in 2023?

23:44Is your sales team? Really? Your ops people, customer support? This is a huge mistake. You have your precious customers, your clients, your partners in one of your team members' personal phones. And team members last, what? One year to five years on average? And then all that knowledge is gone forever. And maybe they go to a competitor. Well, open phone will solve this problem. Open phone has rethought every detail of what a modern business phone will look like. It's just magic. You download an app or you log in on your desktop, and you're done. It's amazing. My sales team, my ops team, they use it every single day.

24:19And we've recently found that it's valuable for when we do conferences, we have a phone number for when we do something like Angel Summit, all of the communications goes through there. If anybody needs to call us our VIPs, they call that. And then it can do like a round robin kind of thing where it rings multiple phones at once. So different employees can field those calls and nobody gets to the fourth fifth ring. It's the number one rated business phone on G2 for customer satisfaction. And that's really hard to do. If you're in the SaaS business, you know how hard it is to beat competitors in the ratings game.

24:47Open phone is already affordable to you at a starting price of$13 per user per month. But twist listeners, you always get a better deal. You get 20 % off any plan for the first six months at openphone.com slash twist. And if you have an existing number with another service, open phone will port them over at no extra cost head to openphone.com slash twist to start your free trial and get 20 off all right so all right now building on this you have another company you wanted to show well it's just pace of innovation we've got runway back up and you were just starting to you know we've seen some of these things before so i'm just going to point out some very specific example.

25:27So this is runwayml.com. Runwayml.com raised a good nice check of money recently. They've been crushing it. What I'm showing here is a prompt that says aerial drone footage of a mountain range. And it creates a little clip that has that. What I'm going to go forward here on is something a little bit more interesting. And I think this is pretty cool. This is the example. So here, someone is trying to create like a storyboard. And J.K.L., you've probably done this way more than I have ever even come across. And the storyboard on the left-hand side is someone taking their iPhone and stacking up some books.

26:09But really, what they want to have is those books represent a shot that is of skyscrapers. Yeah, it's a flyby. Yeah, it's a flyby. Like a drone shot. Yeah. And so I really think this is incredible coming back to, you know, we're talking about the animation and where it's coming to and how you can create flyovers and screens. And last week we demoed the you were drawing your bulldogs. What do you think of this, Jacob? i mean the so the it's taking a shot on the left and then it's enhancing it and making it into what you want which is kind of like somebody walking into the you know design studio like george lucas comes in and says like hey um i made some drawings and here's what darth raider's gonna look like and you know they pull out a mood board or here's a picture of a samurai here's a picture from sci-fi and here's my drawing and and that uh is all part of the creative iteration process and if you can make the process go faster or increase fidelity um you're going to have better outputs you know it's like somebody coming into a room this is great video of um a producer pitching jay-z on a bunch of different tracks and one of them is dirt off your shoulder yeah uh you know that famous anyway and he did you see jay-z kind of like reacting to the first three or four you know uh loops and he's like he's kind of digging it but then he hears that one the iconic one and he's just starts spitting and he's just this is it you know like you see the look on his face like whoa this is going to be iconic yeah and that's the moment everybody's looking for which is how do we take and you're showing it right now with that turtle oh yeah You know, a human turning into a turtle.

27:56It's like, these are incredible. You know, if the actor can emote it or the director can emote it and then you can make it into an animation. I mean, I think some of the great animated films in history could be created today. You know, like The Little Mermaid or something or Beauty and the Beast. Yeah. It feels like that 60s, 70s into the 80s genre of animation from Disney. Yeah. Just like South Park. uh all of those the super friends when we would watch or he-man that fidelity is going to be available to consumers to make their own shows and so i think this means creative people you could have some kid you know some young girl in afghanistan is going to come up with the next south park or the next iconic superhero and that should be inspiring to everybody now i know for some people it's scary because you know they get to play superheroes on tv or they've got a lock on it or they've spent their careers.

28:52I look at, well, what is the opportunity for the next generation? The opportunity for the next generation is I think more people are going to be able to make the next iconic superhero, rap song, logo, poetry, novel, and more power to them. I love it. Yeah. I think we're just on the verge of an explosion of content creation. Yes. And each iteration has made it easier and easier. Think back to the very first filmmakers. They were limited to maybe the few hundred people on the planet that had access to the camera and the film. Right, J. Cal? This was amazing. I mean, look at what we're doing right now.

29:33Zoom and webcams all of a sudden enable everybody to have a talk show. Yeah. In order to have a talk show previously, we had to beg some local news station like Oprah did to get a time slot to get cameras. $150 ,000 in cameras,$10 ,000 in tapes. Every time you recorded in an hour, you had to have 20 people on the set and now the lighting and the makeup is all done by software right now. So that, you know, I, I love the fact that more people, when you lower costs, you increase accessibility. That's it. It's that simple. And so I feel bad for the, you know, actors and writers who feel like maybe um they're going to be losers in all of this but i feel grateful a long tail of content creators who are going to be enabled by this yeah and i think they're the seed like just to give them some hope like i think you don't have to do 10 seasons or you know what we were talking about earlier you can do two and you can put that out to the community and then they can create from it and i think what will be amazing is we'll see a show that maybe was like a B plus or a B in popularity in its original run.

30:44But then its derivative, its AI derivative becomes like a top five smash hit. And we've had that happen before. You've had things that had a cult following on air. They didn't make it to season three. I think there was like Firefly or some of these shows. And then all of a sudden people are like, wow, that was such a great show. Let's bring it back. Let's give it another shot. Make a movie out of it, whatever. um what else is going on in here all right okay now that we've got we beat the entertainment uh we're gonna keep cruising here um we don't know by the way for the studios you really just have to share the wealth and come up with the system that's fair so the the actors and the writers have a point here instead of the actors having to say no ai and you having to say like we're going to do ai just come up with an economic model it's very sad and they had an economic but they have residuals yeah so like i think this is on the streamers i think this is literally the technology industry is causing this problem i think netflix is the key bad actor netflix does not want to play residuals netflix just wants to buy it they don't want to share the data i put the entire industry's problems on netflix's shoulders and maybe double click into that jacal and what's the reason for that netflix is a technology company they basically want to pay everybody a flat rate on their content forever.

32:03What the studios did for a long time was they were like, Oh, well, we'll have you make this. And if we sell it again, we'll take Seinfeld, and we'll sell it to Fox for reruns, and we'll sell it in this region for reruns. And whatever money we make, we're going to chop it up, takes a little bit of accounting. Yeah, there's a little Fugazi accounting on the margins, but everybody's gonna get residual checks. Everybody's gonna get some piece of the pie what netflix said was your you did oranges the new black those actors got paid a pittance and they've been pretty vocal about it they got nothing and they oranges the new black was one of the seminal shows right that built the netflix original ip and jaco why did they get paid so little because the streamer said listen we're we're not reselling it we own it we're going to put it on our service for a subscription fee so give us a pass on this we'll pay you more Netflix lied they said to everybody or they eventually lied um they told everybody we'll pay you more on the way in uh and then but we're not going to do residuals because we're just gonna have a content library we're gonna subscribe and it's a new model what they should have said was hey we're gonna put you into this new model and you're gonna get equity some number of shares in Netflix and if you choose to sell them you sell them but as part of your deal you're gonna get you know 10 ,000 an episode in cash and 5 ,000 an episode in stock if you want to keep making you money don't sell your stock because you're going to have after you know as one of the actors on the show you're going to have a hundred thousand in netflix shares keep we suggest you keep it or they could say we're going to give you rsus so for the next 50 years you're going to get 10 shares a year of netflix and the notion of syndication went away the notion of syndication was you netflix orange is the new black is not available on hbo or whatever so the whole industry now is going to a library that you subscribe so how do you chop it up what they should say is we're going to pay you for the show the other possibilities pay for the show and then every time a show is watched on air when it hits a million views per year we're going to give we're going to put a thousand dollars into this kitty to share ten thousand dollars to share when it hits ten million another ten thousand whatever and you'll just build it up by the number of views so if something like orange is the new black or ozarks is a perennial thing that people keep watching great If not, great.

34:18And that's why you see HBO Max. You notice how they took shows down? Yeah. And everybody's upset. Like, why are you taking shows? That's because they have to pay residuals on those, is my understanding. So because they have to pay money, they're like, well, what's the point of having this on air? Not enough people are watching it. It's costing us money. We need to save money. So they take all that stuff down. And they're like, why would you take that down? Yeah. It's like, well, because we have to pay back ends on it and we don't have the money. Wow. So there's a balance between these two things.

34:43I believe the right system, if you want to read a great book. something like an autobiography by akira kurosawa one of my top three directors um and kurosawa is uh worked for toho studios and in japan you worked full-time for toho studios so imagine if spielberg and a great writer and the actors all worked for the studio full-time they had a full-time position they made a million dollars a year a half million dollars a year whatever it is and then they would send them to an onsen and like a you know for a retreat retreat when they had the retreats they would write two or three screenplays they would act them out then they would say let's go with this movie let's do this one we're going to do a samurai film no let's do this noir one and the group would kind of like almost like a little startup factory would make two or three films a year and you i would work with you on the samurai film then i would work with you on high and low the noir film and then we do an experimental film and everybody was just full-time employed everybody was part of the system and it wasn't this like begging for scraps nonsense, which is what's killing people now.

35:45So I think if I'm Netflix, I just hire 100 best writers in Hollywood for a million dollars a year each or on average 250k each, give them some 250k. Look at them like developers. That would work amazing. Hey, everybody. Today, I'm joined by Roots CEO Dan Dorfman. Dan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Jason. Tell everybody here in the audience, what is Roots? And what makes it different than the other real estate investing platforms. I'm a complete neophyte. Roots is a REIT with a little twist. Sorry, I had to do it. We are the first real estate portfolio that we know of that builds wealth for both our investors and our residents.

36:22And we've created a unique win-win model that creates partners and not tenants. We built this model because I've spent my entire career in real estate investment, 13 years. And what you always hear from people is, hey, location, location, location. But location at the end of the day, doesn't actually pay your bills. And location doesn't let you know when there's a small leak that will create mold in the future. The people do. And the people who rent your properties are really the people who generate your profits. And when those people are your partners, it really creates this amazing scenario.

37:01And it's this model that's helped us grow our fund over 36 % in the last two years. Fantastic. How can people learn more about this opportunity, both on the tenant side or on the investor side? Check us out at investwithroots.com backslash twist. All right, everybody go to invest with roots, no spaces, no dashes.com slash twist to sign up and start investing today. Jacob, I didn't set this one up as a demo because it's a CRM. Oh, I love this. And I want to talk about it because they've done some really incredible things. And as I was actually doing some prep work with Nick, he mentioned that you guys had done some heavy CRM work recently.

37:41And so, you know, I didn't want to create a whole fake CRM. No problem. Customer relationship management, if you're new to the game, is a way of putting all your contacts into a database to manage them. Those can be startups you're investing in. It could be customers at your restaurant. It could be people who buy your SaaS prop continually. Yes. So this is folk.app. Okay. Kind of a new CRM software. but you know they have some ai twists which i i thought were really really cool and so i just have their video up and i'm just going to forward through a couple of sections that i find it really interesting and so um you know you can do all the stuff about sucking in your contacts and what it's doing here is it's authenticating with your linkedin authenticating with your gmail and then it's putting everybody on the left hand navigation as investors journalists media, potential sales, so prospect suppliers, your team, etc.

38:34So it's automatically putting people into what looks like an error table or a Google sheet or, you know, HubSpot or pick your CRM. Exactly. And then they have a Chrome extension, sure, that as you're cruising around the internet as well, if you come across someone's page, you hit this ad as potential SaaS investor, and it adds them to that CRM, which I think is pretty neat as well. We have a company lead IQ that has that exact functionality. Great. And I think those are a little bit table stakes. Like I'm not sure. Like, you know, we've seen those have existed for a long time. Yeah. Where it starts to get interesting is as they go further down the process here and they're going to start.

39:14And in this particular case, they want to do some follow ups. And you can see here they want to write a personalized icebreaker to each person in their particular list. And what it's doing here is it's created this magic field, which is the personalized fault. And it's done it with AI, which is the personalized icebreaker to each person in that list. Love it. Yeah. And so, and then, you know, obviously you go down this typical CRM workflow here to create your template. And it obviously integrates the email mail merge type functionality that you're looking for. and i know as i was showing this to nick nick told me that he spent about a week customizing a bunch of outbound emails um yeah when we invite people like we're to the all-star summer we make a target list yeah and then we'll use mail merge technology to send a first email a follow-up email a follow-up email and a follow-up email and so that but you don't want to send it like hey joe join us or hey dharmash join us for this it's like okay let's be really thoughtful we got a thousand people we could invite who are the top 100 okay now let's write a very specific email to that person of why we want to have them a show hey dharmash yeah the last time you were on the show was 11 years ago episode this so that initial sentence that you should do and so it's basically doing that for you yeah who knows how good it is or the fidelity of it but you know that is uh definitely the holy grail uh is to write that ai sentence yeah and so and you obviously here you have all the different folks in the different stages of your pipeline and where they're at and so yeah standard crm standard crm stuff and so um yeah and i think you know this is a great example of taking an existing tool and just how you add in AI and almost make it really seamless to the workflow that is challenging to us every single day.

41:20And so I thought these guys did a really good job. I mean, this is the thing I talked about earlier with you, which was, hey, I want to be able to find startups that I'm unaware of and then send them a note, let them know JCal AI is operating. And I think this is like one of the holy grails of what is something we do every day? Well, we try to network with people. how can we more intelligently network without it being spammy and so if you're an investor in companies if if i know i have 10 meeting slots next week i and uh then 12 and then 15 and then 30 if i could set an ai loose on the world the baby gpt um to go and say find me anything that's like these companies in our portfolio that have become wins like uber like robin hood whatever door dash hall these are companies that we know are winners go for just go email people who have companies we think might win and pull it up on pitch book crunch base you know tech crunch new york times whatever could could be compelling uh in the future so i do think that everybody wants that um and then it just has to not be spammy and the thing i'm finding is fidelity yeah I'm working on a bunch of AI projects.

42:38And, you know, even things like tagging a blog post I was talking about in our previous thing and having the right tags, even getting that fidelity to human, I keep hitting 60, 70, 80%. And one of the things I'm getting a little concerned about is, is this technology going to hit 60, 70, 80 %? Because for me to trust it, I really needed to get to 100. Yeah. And so I think that's where the industry might have been oversold a little bit. And I'm really focused on closing the gap between 60%, like we're talking about with the South Park stuff, and 100%, or 99%, or the equivalent of humans, which might be 98, 97, 98, 99, so that a human can come out of the process.

43:16It reminds me of the Cafe X coffee machine that we're investors in. Yeah. The reason I invest, I knew robots would have a profound impact on food. I looked at Zoom pizza. I looked at the dishwasher robot. I looked at a fro-yo. I looked at a tea. I looked at a salad one. I looked at the Momentum burgers one that I think Koso had invested in. All of those, Sonny, would automate 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 % of the process. And if you look at that, you're like, oh, wow, it can make 70 % of french fries. You're like, great. But that doesn't make the difference that Cafe X hit, which was this thing's making you, you know, a dirty chai latte matcha with foam, iced, warm, with some cookies on the side with zero human intervention.

44:03That last 20-30 % of self-driving or making a pizza is the hardest part. And I suspect for knowledge work, it also is the hardest part. but when you close it right now those two machines in sfo the two cafex machines are the highest square footage of revenue of anything in the united states in an airport now it's not as high as a jewelry store like i think actually the highest per square foot is either tesla or um apple tiffany or well apple store is high but i think it's tiffany tesla and apple are the highest per square footage. Those cafe X machines are such a small footprint. Yeah. And the two of them are, I think are going to hit like they're getting close to a million between the two of them.

44:48And it take one hour of human cleanup a day to put more beans, put more milk, you know, take out the garbage kind of situation. So man, I, I, I think that has to happen for the knowledge work too, whether it's CRM or tagging something or making a script. My comment there is anything that has to do with language. I feel like we're in the high nineties. You feel high 90s, huh? I feel 60s, 70s. Yeah, and we need to understand. So one of the things that we should do offline is look at your use case and understand where it's coming short. Because we use it in a lot of different places. Anything that has to do with language, it can be definitely in the high 90s.

45:26Now, that requires a lot of tuning, but we'll get there. So let's continue with the demos. J. Cal, I know you love these. Oh, I love your demos. I need demos. So what we did here was we added the circle to our conversation about Netflix there that we had, JCal. Yep. And basically it gave us an overview. What's this product called? Circleback.ai. Okay. Yeah. Oh, look at this. It's giving, this is like Vinny's demo. Vinny's, yeah, exactly. Which is, hey, we just had this conversation on Zoom. We're talking about this episode and it says Netflix compensation model. Jason Calacanis criticized Netflix low payment to actors and creators, citing Orange is the New Black.