Show Vs. Business
Show Vs. Business
SvB: #137 Marvel halts Daredevil Production, WGA strike goes on, Jada Pinkett and Will Smith separated
The guys, @mrbenja and @the_real_theo_harvey, discuss Disney and Marvel: halts production of Daredevil, AI Chatbox putting in work, WGA strike update: Actors wants a bigger slice on the pie, Meta Threads update: Is it cool now? and lastly, Vent of the week: Jada Pinketts’ media presence like a boss.
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Show vs. Business is your weekly take on Pop Culture from two very different perspectives. Your hosts Theo and Mr. Benja provide all the relevant info to get your week started right.
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Theo Harvey: This is show versus business. Your weekly take on pop culture from two very different perspectives with your host, the real Theo Harvey and Mr. Benja come up all irrelevant info about the week in pop culture. So Mr. Benja, what are we covering today?
Mr.Benja: As always, we're going to be covering the five that you need to know about.
I don't know. I get, we got to integrate the five in there somehow, because they're always the five good ones. Anyway, this week, our five are. We're going to talk about Disney's approach to TV and does it suck or not? Actually, let me spoil that. It does suck. We're going to tell you why. We're going to tell you what's going on.
And they got some things they're going to change around. So we'll see how this all plays out. Also, the AI chatbots are putting in some work over at Meta. With some of your favorite celebrities involved too. You're talking about people selling their soul to AI and whatnot. It's happening already, whether you think it's selling their soul or whether you think it's good use of new technology, we'll see, but med is involved.
Celebrities are involved. That's going to be our AI watch for the week. Also, we're going to have the update on this, right actors. Sorry, I'm getting choked up because of the actors. They got me in my fields right now. The strike talk. The actors want more. They're still not pleased. Strike has a little update.
Theo's going to really go in heavy on that one. And for our fourth story, we're going to have Threads taking another swing at X. I almost called it Twitter again. Sorry. The artist formerly known as Twitter X. It's coming in with some updates and there is decided to jump on that and make a new push.
And I think they have a button they're turning that just gets people excited. We'll talk about what measures up to over there. Finally, we're going to have a little vent. We got to talk about Jada Pinkett Smith, just a little bit. Or are we just saying Jada Pinkett now and not Jada Pinkett Smith, so we'll see.
But yeah, she's out here using media like a baddie. Whether that's a good baddie or a bad baddie. Or a bad, meaning bad, baddie. We'll get into that later. Anyway, those are the five that we're going to talk about. The how does all that sound?
Theo Harvey: Man, it sounds wonderful, man. I'm ready to get into it. Mr.
Benjamin, let me tell you another story, man. It's story time. I like your stories. Yeah, it's just, you get excited about a show and you're like, man, I want to see something. I'm excited about, these new shows coming out, it's. After a long, hard day of work, I usually get one hour to myself to watch something new.
And I get so excited, man. I want to go in and just relax and just enjoy myself, Mr. Benja. So I thought this show was going to be the one for me. And, it came from, the predigree was strong. It was like... Strong. It came from another show. It was almost a spinoff, if you will.
And I was like, man I'm, I think I'm feeling this. I'm ready for it. I like the cast, man, the Gen V, the boy spinoff. It is not looking good for me.
Mr.Benja: I thought you were going to go with something else
Theo Harvey: here. Yeah, I know. That's why I tell the stories, man. Yeah, man, the Gen V is the new TV show that's on Amazon Prime.
It's been off of the boys, basically about superheroes in college. And like I said, I thought it was going to be decent, but it's almost like Riverdale or, those teen shows in the, on the CW back in the day, but I
Mr.Benja: don't know if I'd like Gen V to be that way.
Theo Harvey: Exactly. And I'm like, this ain't for me.
It's cool. It's that, that teenage angst. I get it, but it's and then they're trying to infuse it with, some conspiracy, some superhero conspiracy theory. So I think it's trying to do too much. Now, Beyonce, I like the cast. I like the premise. There's a lot of things I like here, but I guess the impression I was like, Hey, we're in college, let's explore, superhero stuff, but I think they're trying to do too much.
They're trying to be conspiracy theory, trying to show the superhero stuff in college. I don't think they mix well. And so I'm going to give it some more, I watched the first season of anything, but like I said, they need to correct this pretty quickly, Mr. Benjamin, but yeah, I'm not.
Yeah, I'm not feeling it. I don't know if you checked it out yet. Have you seen the show?
Mr.Benja: No, I haven't. But it's funny. You said anime in the past couple of years, and they've always had this edge to it, to them. But in the past couple of years, they've really made it a point to say, all right, our first three or so episodes are going to be bangers right out the box.
And. Even if you finish up and you if you finish like the first one, two episodes, you're like, okay, even if I ride through this and the ending's bad, I'm okay with it. And then, they don't do the try to build up slow or see if it ever gets this footing. It's like the way they write is now, listen, if we don't get you right off the bat.
This show is not for you, so you just know, and it's not like a bad thing, so I don't know how I don't know how Gen V is doing it, but we'll talk about some of the other Disney shows later. I wasn't impressed with how they were rolling out, so we'll
Theo Harvey: see it's hard. It's it's hard to get.
a banger out the box, right? I can count on one hand like the lost pilot, right? That was amazing. If you remember that back in the day, with the crash, airplane crash and the drama from that just hard to get a banger right at the beginning, right? Most shows us shows, let's be honest. There was a show I used to watch back in the country, Spartacus.
I think I talked about to you about it years ago on stars. Terrible first episode, terrible, but man, they corrected that thing so fast, man. You thought that it was a U train, man. It was like, wow, this thing got really good, really fast. And because I guess that the director and actors, everybody just knew what the show was about.
It was so Spartacus, just not to get into a show that came out 10 years ago, but basically it was about the slave uprising and. Ancient Rome, and I told the story of Spartacus, how he became a, a general and all that kind of stuff to take over Rome. And they started it off where it's just like really like too stylized and too all this over the place.
And then what they ended up doing is they flipped it around where they realized, what was really powerful was the story of being a slave in that time and how you had no control over your body and what you could do. And that made it compelling. It was like, You really cared about if this guy was going to become, something greater than where he started as a slave.
And so I think when people know what the story they're telling is about, it becomes more compelling. Gen V, I think they have a compelling story. They're trying to conflict a lot of different things here, right? So the superpowers, two of the superpowers, they're dealing with issues that young people suffer.
So basically one of the young girls, she suffers, she has the power of blood, but to get the power, she has to cut herself. It's okay you get power from, cutting yourself, which is, it could be triggering for some people. And another girl, she can get big or tall based on what she eats.
And so when she wants to get smaller, she has to throw up. So it's like guys, what are you guys doing? It's let's
Mr.Benja: play. There's a guy getting strength. There's a guy with the chart in the back. This is the nose and your show is how, here's how close your story beat is to that nose.
Are you on the nose? We
Theo Harvey: want it on the nose. Exactly, man. It's just what are you guys doing? So anyway just tell a compelling story. About what it means to be in this world and trying to, make a place for themselves, which they started. The young lady that they're featuring on, she we're seeing where she came from nothing and she's trying to do something for herself.
And I think there's a compelling there, but like I said, man, it's just like when you make a TV show, man, you gotta make stuff that's compelling. So yeah, I was hoping it'd be a little bit better because. Like I said, it's not a lot to watch anymore. We'll talk why with these strikes. But when I do have time to watch something, I'm man, Mr.
Benjamin, I'm going back to reality TV and I hate myself for it. There's nothing
Mr.Benja: to watch. I gotta put you on a concept show. Like we were talking about anime and how they do it. And I actually, I want to research this. I think it's because of the way they released the books first.
And the manga. Anime, I can't think of, I actually can't think of an anime only show. I can only think of ones that are translated from manga. And the way the manga works... Let me ask
Theo Harvey: you a question. Even, I know Dragon Ball Z, but Pokemon? That started from manga? See, that's a curious one. I don't know.
Mr.Benja: Yeah. I wasn't, that's a curious one. That's a, that's one of the few curiosities that may not be a manga thing, but it has a manga. I don't know if the manga came first. I don't know
Theo Harvey: if it came after. Yeah, exactly. I know Dragon Ball Z was one. I remember that. I remember Fall of Titan and all that stuff.
Yeah.
Mr.Benja: Yeah, but the way the Japanese manga system works is you just basically have this whole. Industry that sits around with the manga the manga writers and every month or every two months or whatever, a new one to come out, they'll just keep coming out. And what it is you have these newsstands and people will walk by the newsstands and just grab the new hot one or a new compilation, right?
They'll have five or six stories that are starting in episode one. And they're like, all right, we're about to give this show the story. Six runs in this magazine or six runs on the manga. And if it doesn't hit, we're onto the next one. So they have to come out the box hard. It's just, if they don't get picked up there, then they usually don't get picked up for a whole anime series and the big budgets and everything else.
So it's like sink or swim kind of stuff. And I'm gonna put you on one punch, man. You don't have to watch the whole thing because I don't say it's that great to watch, but. As far as I get a concept in the first episode and okay, I'll check it out. It's just one of those I'll send you, I'll send you a list.
Theo Harvey: Yeah. Maybe we'll put it out there too, guys, on Instagram too. But one piece I try to reach the manga cause I want to get. I had a story. I couldn't do it. It was just, yeah, it's just too much. And then I tried to watch a cartoon too much. The anime, it was too much. Yeah, it was too.
So it's I'm just, I'm stuck on watching.
Mr.Benja: That's how it should be. Yeah.
Theo Harvey: Cause it's I want, that's when it was game of thones came out, the TV show first I'm there. So I read the book and the books kept me going. But like sometimes you can't. Go to another medium with some of the shows you like.
And that's disheartening because I want to get ahead. I said, Oh, this is some cool stuff coming. Let me see. I can't do this.
Mr.Benja: Literally. I have
Theo Harvey: it on my, I have it. I bought a downloaded Kindle of the next series, the version would, as if they they move on in the series after you watch a live action one piece, and then they move on. I tried to read it, man. I couldn't read it.
Mr.Benja: Yeah, it's,
Theo Harvey: it's a different beast.
There you go.
Mr.Benja: Yeah. But yeah, that's cool, man. But yeah, I'll send the, I might put in the show notes, check out the show notes, I'm going to have a couple anime first episode or first two episode bangers. I love it. I write that note down, but yeah. What else has been going on this week?
Theo Harvey: Not much for me, man.
Beyond that just, high level. We don't get into the social politics too much, politics and things going on, but just, definitely praying for the Israel people and what's going on there. Pretty disheartening. That is, a social media story.
We don't really talk about too much on this channel or on this podcast, but it is one of those things that, I think it's changing how we view news and we may talk about that a little bit in our threads discussion. People are thirsty for content, right? And so Twitter is falling apart because they don't have moderation correct set up correctly.
So people are seeing all kinds of crazy stuff. So TikTok is stepping up and now, images are getting out there that, I can't have an 11 year old and a seven year old. Thank God they're not on TikTok, imagine stuff that kids are seeing now, right? Because people can put that on social media and there's really no moderation.
And so when you think about stuff like that, you realize the importance of social media, but more importantly to health, obviously, but also getting images out that may not be ready for everyone. And so we're seeing that with Israel, with some of the devastation that's coming out of there. And so definitely it's heartbreaking when you see the images and when you pray that everything, goes back to peace.
But I do feel like this is the beginning of something definitely different in the world.
Mr.Benja: Yeah. There's a guy that always post really edgy content. Like how is this guy still online and yeah, he, he got severely limited and many of his posts removed after a couple of images from from this Middle East conflict with Israel, Gaza and all that.
So it's yeah it's changing media because. I think right after Ukraine, people saw how we always knew media has, is a weapon that is used in these types of conflicts or any conflict, actually, but the way we're seeing it now, it's I don't want to say who can out,
Yeah, news, I'll shock you. Yeah.
Theo Harvey: That's wow.
Even the UK crisis, right? The president Ukraine, he used to be the John Stuart. He was a TV comedian host, so he's been using media to persuade the West to give him more help, more, substance so they could survive this war against Russia. So he's been using as a tool, not just to show the conflict on the ground, but, uses his communication style and medium to influence, the celebrities and influencers to come help his country. You're right, man, Mr Benj is, we're seeing we're in a new world of, but I do fear that it could be a good or bad thing, but I do feel people see these images, could be desensitizing, to everybody see these things.
These are real folks, that this is not TV is not fake, but at the same time, you do see the devastation. So maybe there will be some. Hesitation before people go full blown, into these type of areas, but yeah, it's just pretty devastating. That area, it's always exploding into some kind of conflict.
And, but this is definitely something that was, pretty devastating what they're trying to do there. And Israel don't play man. If you read anything about Israel, they can't, they're surrounded by enemies everywhere. So it was like, you do anything to them. It's you cut off their finger, take a coffee hand.
If you cut off, if they just, cause they have to, it's they have to be punitive in their rich, in their in their reply to any attack against them because. The folks have to realize if you do that, then you're gonna have to face the full blunt of Israel. And so basically they're now, Terrorist attack.
Yes. But now they're full for the full resources to get everybody that guy's a strip and they're trying to clean that whole area out. Now they're not even playing no more anyway. So it's going to be pretty tough for the next couple of months, maybe
Mr.Benja: years. Yeah, this isn't going away quietly anytime soon.
And once again. We want, definitely want to handle this properly and that's, we're not really going to get into it deeply on what's going on or our feelings on it, but we, this is something we do keep track of and, we hope for the best. And we hope some type of resolution can come to play because war is just a problem any way you look at it.
And when you're dealing with such a constrained place you gotta remember this strip is like the size of Detroit. Yeah, it's a hotbed. It's not a conflict that spread out over a large area, and then there could be some downtime. It's, it's like the size of Detroit, as I said yeah, we hope for the best and watch out for misinformation and be sure you're getting informed on both sides.
When I say both sides, I'm not talking about Hamas. That's definitely a terrorist organization, but there are multiple angles to this whole. And it is, it's funny. All of the search outlets are very quick to tell you if you do a search on chat, GPT or bar, and I went checking to get extra information, it's listen.
I'm an AI bot. I normally give you bad information, but with this, I'm going to let you know, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. It's a complicated issue. Yeah, it stops
Theo Harvey: and
Mr.Benja: tells you like listen, I'm just saying, I normally tell you shit that I don't know about and I don't care. But this time I just want you to know, go do your research, go talk to a friend, go find some experts see opposing views and it's it really takes care to make sure you don't go in there with bad information.
So it's very interesting in that respect.
Theo Harvey: I love it, Mr. Benja. So anything going on with you, Mr. Benja? And I'm going to walk away for a second. I got to turn some lights on. So you just keep talking, brother. I'm here.
Mr.Benja: Hey, I thought you were just chilling in the dark.
Theo Harvey: Yeah, I know. We're going to keep it on the pod though.
That's what we do. So go ahead.
Mr.Benja: Yeah. So I got two new concepts going on here. Not one concept, but I was listening to a few people talk about staying positive and keeping going from Jocko Willink to Tony Robbins to, Joe Rogan on the other side, even to Abraham Hicks, Woo Master and Brene Brown.
So I was bouncing all over the place, just seeing what different people were saying about positivity, because yeah. You go to one camp and they're like, just be positive. And the other camp is that's for boneheads. I'm like what do you say to be positive? You got to do this. It's they don't like it.
So there's different views on being positive. So one of these things, the idea that looking at everything, like it's all good. And, I put out the blog posts, all work is play all of it. And this is my, me updating the way I look at things. So if something bad happens, do you just say, okay, this is good.
It's not good per se in every situation, but I get the sentiment that you want to say, okay, this is good. This is a new experience. I can move forward, be positive. And when something actually is good, I don't necessarily want to say it's good because then I'm all of a sudden, I'm getting lax and I'm thinking that my outcome can be determined by some, or my feeling can be determined by some outcome.
So I'm going with nice and very well then. So when something good happens, Nice. It's not like I'm worried about the outcome. If good things happen, they happen and I'm happy for it. It's good thing happens. Nice. But if it's a bad, something that happens to me very well, then, and we change up our, we change up our options and we deal, but both of those are an acceptance of things.
And so I'm practicing this nice and So those are my positive and negative. Now, nothing is positive. Nothing is negative to get the nice or very well then. And I keep going about my business. It's going to be great.
Theo Harvey: I like that. I think you're trying to decouple yourself from the outcomes as human beings.
We struggle with that. All the guys I listened to, as well, they talk about that. You really got to focus more on your inputs. You can't worry about the outputs. You learn from the outputs, you get better at the inputs, but really it's almost like you, you have no control over that.
It's like you just have to and the more you can, because the secret of it is the more you focus on your inputs, then guess what? You will get the outcome, but you just got to constantly do the inputs. The challenge is you get discouraged because outputs are not what you expected. So he's I don't feel like doing it anymore, but I do that approach.
I might try to, just borrow that piece from you, Mr. Benja, because I agree that's a better approach to be positive. It's not so much. And I think people realize, and I think as you get older too, and you just be in this game a little bit longer entrepreneurship, you realize, what, none of this stuff is going to kill you at the end of the day.
It's you learn from it and you try to improve, but if you can just be above it all, almost, it's yes, I want, I got this big deal. I'm trying to do right. Mr. Benjamin they're taking forever to get the contract down. My business partner's Oh, you ready to spin up all this stuff.
We're going to do it. Wait a minute, he said, you said it was 90 percent done. I said yes, but they said they're ready to move to contracting, but I haven't heard anything about a timeline. So I sent a nice little email saying, hey, things are changing. We need to know what your timelines look like.
In order so we can prepare, with our inventory levels, she sent a nice email back. No time. She just said, yes, around the next, 90 days, we'll do something, but she gave me a timeline. I said, cool. And I told my business partner, that's all I can do, man. It's if they want to move forward, they'll let us know, but I'm not gonna, there's nothing else I can do to force them to, if they do great, in the meantime, I'm going to focus on some other inputs.
Yes.
Mr.Benja: So yes. Yes. Exactly. So that is exactly what you said, decoupling from the outcome where you're unconditionally badass, not conditional badass. If you're, if this happens or this happens. So in fact, that may be the title of it. Unconditional badassery or something. Is that an adjective? I don't know.
But anyway, how about story number one? Ready for it? Let's do it. All right. Disney's TV approach sucks. It's been a while. We've been working with it. We talked about the commercialization, the Easter egg TV, how many episodes should it be? Is it too short? Is it too long? They've been experimenting and trying out things.
But just recently, they restarted Daredevil. They went and looked at what the writers were doing, what they had prepared and how it was going so far. And they said, you know what? We're going back to the drawing board. We might have to admit that some of this is a little busted. Trash. Yeah. So Theo, what happened?
What happened with Daredevil? How did this, how did it get kicked off?
Theo Harvey: Oh, Mr. Benjamin. It's from what we read, right? I think it says that they actually filmed a couple of episodes already. Prior to the strikes. And and remember, this is going to be a big one. It's not going to be one of those little smaller, one off limited series, right?
Like Hawkeye or even Loki with eight episodes, six episodes. This is going to be 18 episodes of TV, right? So they created it. I guess Kevin Feige looked at what he had and he realized the old way of doing things is no longer going to work, man. We can't do that. Film this like a 18 hour movie because I think that was their impression that they could just wing it, create a storyline and it does seem like a lot of this approach is no longer working in the traditional way of doing TV where you have a B C D storylines, to core less at the end.
It all makes sense. Yeah, that's something that I think Marvel's going back to the drawing board with Daredevil and I think what I'd be honest with you now that I think about it, the 18 episode order, I think that's what probably made them reconsider a lot of things, at least with Daredevil.
Hopefully, that would start them doing other stuff, but I think because that link of because they look, let's be honest, they got the original cast pretty much right there that we can claim back. So they don't want to squander this, because there was already some good will. With the original TV show that Marvel put out there on Netflix.
So it's
Mr.Benja: which, and which even survived the Hawkeye treatment to some extent and the She Hulk treatment where we saw some of these characters reappear
Theo Harvey: to She Hulk. Yep. Yeah. It wasn't, was Kingpin in She Hulk or was he in something else? Kingpin
Mr.Benja: was in Hawkeye. He was in Hawkeye too. Okay,
Theo Harvey: perfect.
Yeah. Yeah. But. It was sketchy. You've
Mr.Benja: had two chances to reintroduce these characters and the reception wasn't that good. So going into this, I think they may have had a little more care about it. We're like, guys, we're about to squander all of this goodwill that's already. I don't want to say they built it up because it was existing back from Netflix and people still rocked with it.
And now it's okay. Let's not take this all the way because this sucks.
Theo Harvey: So many words. Yeah, man, it's interesting. Yeah. Loki's out now. I saw the first episode. I think you saw ahead of it. Me, Mr. Bidges said. Two episodes. Like I mentioned last time, it did feel like a little like homework.
I don't know. How are you feeling about Loki? So take a step back what last year two years ago, man We were so hyped for these Marvel TV shows remember WandaVision came out. We were like, oh, I was waking up at 3 in the morning Oh, I gotta watch this man. And yeah, what are you gonna do next and then Loki came out blew our mind And we're just like man, but it's just like I think the high came with Loki and it's just been steadily Loki, you know has moments, I had some moments that were slow, but ultimately it felt like fulfilling.
But this just feels like homework to me. I don't know. Mr. Benja, how are you?
Mr.Benja: It almost sounded like you said it felt fulfilling. It was just like, you meant, it was filling filler, it's just fluff, right? That's what you .
Theo Harvey: No, the original Loki was fulfilling, right?
It was like, Hey, this, yes, because of. The John's and majors of it all, which is a whole nother thing now. But, he, who, he, who remains right. That was pretty interesting and how they got to that point. But that was the best ending almost of all, all the Marvel endings, tV show endings. But like I said, I just think that, where are you at now? You're watching the second season. How are you liking it?
Mr.Benja: So I think they're doing the exact opposite of what I mentioned in the show Intro and our banter talk. I think they're doing the opposite of that anime jump in hit them hard kind of thing but they're trying to build up the characters and Take their time with things.
It's hey look man I got limited time. I got eight episodes, six episodes. I got to jump in. I got to hit the ground running. Don't come with any weak sauce. I was about to curse there. Don't come with, don't come with any weak sauce. And that's what they think they can do. They think they, Oh, we'll just treat it softly.
We'll come in with a little bit of intrigue. See what the people say on the forums. It's no, you got to give them the manga treatment. And once again, And this may be the thing with manga and anime, there is no connection with any other manga and anime from series to series, Dragon Ball Z might be the only long running, connection where it's yeah, if we're going to take these characters and have Dragon Ball Super, Dragon Ball GT, and these characters are just in a slightly different state.
Yeah. Form where we recreate a series with this Marvel stuff. Nah, man, I think you've got to come in and be like. Listen, this character could die, this thing could happen, this badness is going on, and you gotta hit him hard. None of this let's sit around and twiddle our thumbs for 18 episodes?
You talkin with Daredevil? Comin soft with 18 episodes and you don't see him in his suit for the first four? Get outta here with that. Oh, no. Oh,
Theo Harvey: no. Oh, no. Get outta here with that. Get outta here. I didn't know that. Oh, no. Kevin Feige sat there, he said, oh but let's be honest. I think it came down high that these TV shows were not going to do anything Revealing because they want to save it for the what the movies, right?
So they will put some little Easter eggs in there to prep you for Hawkeye for instance, Yeah, introduce some characters and we knew they were gonna show up in Black Widow. So it's Is that compelling or is that just a trailer? Yeah. You just watched the 18 hour trailer.
I think that model is dead now. Marvel and then to Kevin Feige's favorite. I think he's realizing that. And hopefully the strike had gave him time to really think through and map out how they're going to write this ship. Because I think a lot of folks are just feeling exhausted.
Mr.Benja: That's a good point.
When you're in the thick of something and everything's moving, it's hard to. Change a tire while you're on the highway driving. So you got to pull over to a gas station, stop, open the map, get some twizzlers and Funyuns from the store, talk about where you're going.
So yeah, I hope for the best and I just got back on Disney plus. So I'm starting into the Mandalorian season three. It's interesting, but once again, man, it just didn't hit me. Do I have to write it? Do I have to do a video essay on this? I don't want to become a video essay guy. Anyway you're up to date on the SOCA.
How are you feeling about that?
Theo Harvey: Yeah, this is outside MCU, but this is all the Disney, TV show brands I feel the same way. I think Ashoka had moments like I didn't know any of this stuff cuz I don't watch Clone Wars. I didn't watch rebels I literally had to fast forward to watch rebels to get caught up on Ashoka So that's homework number one, but it was good homework.
I think you yeah you and and my buddy Dr. Chris, maybe we'll get Dr. Chris on here one day. Dr. Chris, told me about rebels. It was good. And for what I saw, it was good. Fast forward, eight episodes I saw. That was some good. That was some good shit.
Man, I'm getting emotional. I only saw eight episodes, but anyway. So yeah, it was pretty good, man. I went to Ashoka with high hopes, like I'm sure all the Rebels and the Clone War fans were, but man, it just seems like this is a lot, man. It's very niche. They got whales in space for Star Wars, and this is okay?
So if I came in here, all I saw was Star Wars, right? I'm watching Ashoka. I would have lost my mind. I'm like, what? And then the whole scene, not to spoil too much into this, they just have a lot of stuff in there. She fell into this dimension this black dimension with, that had these different portals and she met Anakin, if you don't know what that's about, I luckily, thanks to you, Dr.
Chris, I knew about, you were just like, Huh? And then she survived. And then what? So it's it was a lot of stuff you had to know. And even then it still wasn't compelling because they did a lot of dorking around man, Mr. Benja. And then it didn't even end properly. You got the characters together and then just just sat there like a wet fart.
It was just like, okay we're together. We'll continue the story another time. Wait a minute. So I spent. six, eight hours of my time talking about a story that I may or may not care about. And it ain't concluded in some kind of satisfying way. At least the bad guys defeated or the good guy, the good guys were here.
They started here and guess what? The end of the show, guess where they were at. Right here. The bad guys were here. Guess where they ended the story? Right here. So there was no movement into the characters or the plot that was compelling enough. There was some movement, but it was very small. They couldn't do it in one episode.
One
Mr.Benja: of my tenets with any creative work is no matter how well constructed it is, what you've gone through, and what you've shown, you have to be able to have that headline statement of when you pick it up and say, hey. Should I look into this or what's this about? Oh yeah. That's the story of blah.
This is what happens in this. And it can come down to a one sentence thing where, you talk about empire strikes back. It's what happened there? Oh yeah, that was the one where this happened. What happened in this? Oh yeah. That's the one where this happened. And you have to very quickly be able to say, Oh, yeah, that's the show where this happened.
That's the show where this happened. This is the one where Matrix, where Neo got his powers, we're talking about the Matrix. This is the one where this happened. Everything's got to have a, that is this is that. And if it's just like everything is the same at the end of it all, that's a very dangerous place to be in.
Not saying it's impossible, 007 does that kind of where everything is the same, but that's a whole different vibe.
Theo Harvey: And is it the same? He's always facing a new villain. It's got a new girl, new settings. We know he's got a template that he follows, right? You got to do these eight things in the bomb movie.
He's going to have a hot car, hot babe, bad villain, save the world. But.
Mr.Benja: And that's the, where we get with the oh, that's the one where he goes to the moon. Okay. That's the one where he gets, that's the one with the golden. You
Theo Harvey: haven't seen moon raker. Go see that just to get your chuckle on, man.
That is the best one ever moon raker. But anyway, I digress. Yeah,
Mr.Benja: where every one you look back and say, oh, that's the one where they do this or Nightmare on Elm Street. It's October. Let's talk about oh, that's the one where Freddie turns into a snake and it's got to be the one where you're right.
They don't have, it can't be the one where. I remember those goofy space whales. Yeah. Yeah. That was weird. That was dumb.
Theo Harvey: You know what I mean? That's what, it's almost like it was a continuation of rebels, which I get. They should just call it rebels season four. Just be real with it. That's what it was.
Our season was a season for five. This is just called rebel season five and that would have been fine. Just live action rebels season five. Cause that's what it was, and so say anyway, Mr. Benjamin, we'll digress, a little bit more, but I think. The tv and then the fact that these things cost so much money and they're not compelling enough that shows you that creativity and money maybe don't get along too well because it doesn't seem like it's been all this money and these shows are not that compelling.
They're spending money, big budget. They create a whole technology, the volume, to make these images look compelling and get on time for a TV show. And the Mandalorian season two was amazing. And when we saw that, you know what they could do with the technology and then how they elevated it through Ashoka and, some other stuff.
But it's the story is just not compelling enough. So anyway, I digress, but it does seem we'll revisit, but hopefully Marvel, hopefully Star Wars TV shows, at least get back on track.
Mr.Benja: Somebody at at Disney needs to have a desk clearing moment. And what I mean by that is anytime you watch a TV show and I've seen it actually happen in real life, which is funny where someone's so angry, they walk up to a desk and just wipe everything off the desk and it goes flying on the floor.
If you've never seen it, it's horrifying, funny and intense at the same time. But that's clearly
Theo Harvey: damn it. Oh, you saw that? That's that's that's a live action cliche, boy. I love it. I gotta see more. I love live action cliches. I love it. When someone doesn't spit take, that's a live action cliche.
I love it. Let's do it.
Mr.Benja: All right. All right. Story number two, this is our neighborhood AI watch and meta is putting. Characters to work AI chat bots in live action form with your favorite celebrities Snoop Dogg and a bunch of others. This is good. This is getting weird. So basically Metta has been doing AI for a while now.
Everybody's hearing about open AI chat GPT, but Metta has been actually on the scene doing AI for quite a bit and now they're like, hold up. Let's jump back in the news. How are we going to do this? We're going to hire some creators. Let's say Snoop Dogg, let's say, Oh, what happened to the list?
I don't have the list anymore ahead of me, but Tom Brady was on there. Tom Brady. Yeah. There are quite a few Naomi Osaka. They've got quite a few people they're making these characters out of and having them basically filmed for about six hours. And, you get the camera view from a couple different sides, you get them speaking different lines their mouth moving, their head moving in different ways, and you create an AI avatar that you can interact with, and it speaks in their, not it speaks definitely in their tone, and with their mannerisms, and it's yeah, now we have this chatbot with Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady, Naomi Osaka, all these characters, and you can just talk to their live action AI.
So yeah, this is literally selling your persona, selling your soul to, to meta so it can just go chat. I haven't tried this out yet, but I don't know what this means, but this is definitely something to watch, right? Absolutely.
Theo Harvey: We talked about this with James Earl Jones, right? Wow, that was like maybe several months ago where he signed away.
Hey, you can use my voice of Darth Vader till eternity, right? Sure. As the state's getting some guap for that. And then we talked about the the the actor that reads the Harry Potter mood books, right? And the audio, how they've been still in his book. Yeah. Stephen Fry. They are still in his voice.
Yeah, man, this is going to be a big thing. And that's, We'll talk about later with the actor strike, but I think this is something that's going to be more and more important, like your digital image and likeness, who has rights to that into all perpetuity, all to the end of time.
And so it's you pay me 5 million now, but, you might make a trillion dollars off my image, the year 2050. And so this is something I think a lot of lawyers need to really think through when they got to put these things together because yeah, we're going to see a lot of celebrities going to want to try to take advantage of this opportunity and make some money here.
Yeah, man, it's scary time, but it's definitely something that more folks are going to start doing more of.
Mr.Benja: Yeah. And that was that was on the consensual AI side where they went into a studio, got paid 5 million for 6 hours of work. Which says a lot on its own how important this stuff is.
But we also have a AI, Steve Harvey sweeping the internet. I don't know what this means, but yeah, AI, Steve Harvey is doing his thing.
Theo Harvey: Yeah, man. It's a mean, so sure. Why not do some interesting things, to get people excited. Yeah.
Mr.Benja: So I don't know if you, if this is happening on your side, but I'm getting a little choppiness here.
Theo Harvey: Yeah, same here, Mr. Benja. So we got some choppiness going on here for our technology here. So give it a second here, but but I can hear you.
So that's important. We can still do the podcast if I can hear you, right? Can you still hear me?
So I think it's recording, locally. So that's a good thing. So we just got to wait for it to catch up, from that standpoint. But yeah, man, I saw this meme of Steve Harvey popping around. And I thought that was just hilarious. They, they, AI generated images of Steve Harvey being chased by.
Robots, monsters, things like that. And so it's one of those things that I think we're going to see some of these means pop up. I'm probably more and more. So the scary part is that a lot of this stuff could, we saw that with the Pope and then with Trump, right? People thought it was real.
And so I think we might start seeing more of that. So that might be one of those things that's going to get a little scary, right? When people start to make fake images that are means that people think are real. And so this,
Mr.Benja: Just last time we talked about ai Tom Hanks selling dental insurance. There
Theo Harvey: it is.
There it is. Yeah, so anyway, so like I said, I, I don't have too much to comment on that. It's just that's the world we live in and that's why we do AI watch. .
Mr.Benja: It's worth bringing up. And you know what I, I don't know why we didn't connect it before, but AI images of Axios just released a report saying, listen, people cannot tell what's real and what's not.
It used to be like pictures or it didn't happen, but now it's yo, we've been putting pictures in front of people and unless you're trained for this. You don't can't tell. And a lot of people just see news articles that are written, they see pictures and they're like, yeah, that's the real thing.
And we were just talking about what's going on, in the on the war front. Imagine how much bad information is getting put out there on outlets that like, we can go to the New York Times and say, okay, that image, we can trust New York Times or Washington Post, or even, some other Institutions like, okay, they're major institution.
At least we know that image is solid because if it's not people are going to throw rocks at them and they're going to have to do a retraction that happens, but at least be sure that someone didn't sit behind a computer and say let me make a I image of. Obama and Donald Trump in a hot tub together, it's I
Theo Harvey: would pay to watch. I wouldn't pay to see, I would not. What's going to be scary when these images start becoming moving pictures. The deep fakes, that's one thing, but they can create just whole cloth of images. They're starting to do that. I know you saw some of the ones that look like a Wes Anderson kind of movie where, the head is moving a little bit, a little blinks, but eventually they're gonna have people, interacting, doing stuff.
Yeah, man, AI watch, man, and someone, I saw this on the Bill Maher, this, I forgot the guy's name, Tristan, something he, he talked about. The, he was a guy in Silicon Valley, worked for Facebook and all these guys and said that the problems of social media and how it just, it basically hijacks our attention.
And so now we're a different society because of social media. He said, the reason why is because the original tent for social media was to hijack our attention, right? They had to do what the lowest common denominator to make sure you pay attention. So you stay in the platforms longer. So that was original social media.
So the original intent of AI now is to see how fast you can create the next version of AI, and even using AI. To improve upon the code of the original AI, right? And you can actually now real time taking code from the AI and, improve that code to make the next version of AI even better.
And this is a mad rush. And so we're just doing stuff now. So the intention of AI is to improve as fast as possible. But then are we even thinking about the consequences? Are we just giving a lip service right to what's going to happen and he made a good point So i'll leave this with this, but he said we have we have paleolithic brains Dealing with medieval institutions with 21st century technology.
Mr.Benja: Yeah,
Theo Harvey: our brains can't comprehend exponential growth. We don't understand statistics. And that's why it's hard for us to gauge. How things are really working. And so when you see AI, we don't know it's exponential. Yes, it's been a year, but you know what, that growth in AI has been phenomenal in that year.
And then who met, who knows what's going to happen next
Mr.Benja: year? Yeah. We're thinking about how long it takes us to draw hands. We're not thinking about how long it's going to take AI to draw hands. Yeah. And for another evil stat since the release of GitHub's co pilot, we found that 30%, 30 to 40 percent of.
All code on GitHub now has been written with AI assistance. That's, and that's the code repository where people go and they learn where to, okay, this code can do this and this. Yeah, if you've taken that out to five years the GitHub CEO says that five years, 80 percent of the code there will be written by.
Theo Harvey: There you go. There you go. And man, I'm gonna get this guy's name, but he has some great points. He said, think about a gallon of oil, right? The energy in a gallon of oil can replace, let's say 200 people, right? Because the energy can produce and stuff like that. A.
I. Is very similar. A. I. It could take the intelligence of, a semi smart person and emulate, hundreds of, smart interns or smart, intelligent beings to do your work. Literally, I found some prompts where you could actually create a prompt where acts and talks like a human being.
Yes. So it's almost like you create one prompt. And then now it's gonna ask you questions and you, it prompts you to help answer your question better. You're like, wait a minute, it's prompting to me. Yeah,
Mr.Benja: that's wild. All right, and we'll keep, we'll definitely keep a watch on the AI, but let's jump.
Theo Harvey: We're watching, man. Hey guys, we're watching for you. We, yes, we are. On that fence. You want me on that wall. You need me on that. We got, but maybe that should be our meme. We're going to put that out there.
Mr.Benja: All right. We don't have too much time, but these other three stories aren't going to take terribly long.
So let's get to them. Story number three. This is a rolling update with the actor strike and the writer's strike, but Theo jump into this one. The actors want more in short.
Theo Harvey: Yeah. That's not that's pretty much it. They get an opportunity from a negotiation standpoint, directors, DGA directors guild, they signed their contract writers took forever.
157 days or so to sign their contract and get these concessions on AI and increases in salaries. Now the actors. You thought it was just gonna be foregone conclusion. No, they're like, no doubt. We want to get even more. So WGA got more than directors. Now the actors want more than the WGA.
This is just labor playing games and trying to get to the next level, which is fine. I'm not against labor at all, but I'm just saying they're just trying to, and one of the sticking points is trying to get more revenue from streaming. And then also AI, right? That's just. Always a ongoing standpoint. I think here, they were talking about, how they, the latest proposal according to a source would allow abstracting consent for scanning from the actor at the time of employment.
That is when the actor is most vulnerable because they haven't yet secured the job. So basically when they got employed for any type of gig, like Marvel, they will scan your image. And now they have Theo in the next 20 Marvel movies, right? Because you signed it away because you haven't officially got paid yet for that gig.
You do one time, then you got paid, but Oh, by the way, we won't need you anymore. So I think the actors are getting smart with how this AI is going to be used.
Mr.Benja: Yeah. And so the issue of streaming pay while we're there I'm going to jump back slightly said they wanted 2 percent of. All streaming revenue.
Sounds like a chunk.
Theo Harvey: Yeah. Is it, we don't really know, but yeah, it probably is. Yeah. But they were trying to get a cut of that. And obviously stream pushed back on that. Cause we just don't have a reliable rating system in streaming. So I think they're going to renegotiate that and figure that out.
But it's just moving to goalposts. Just trying to figure out how do we get more money? At first actors loved it. Cause you got everything up front. Don't worry about it here. I don't, who cares how it does. You just want money, right? Here's a hundred thousand dollars. Go away.
Now people are like, wait a minute.
Mr.Benja: Go away.
Theo Harvey: How well did Stranger Things do? You got all these toys and stuff. You got a McDonald's deal. I want some of that. And so that's, that's just the nature of the game, man. I
Mr.Benja: think they should, I think they should get the chunk of all that.
It just seemed like a substantial amount, and not the way you'd think about it, but as I said, I don't see this ending well. I'm sorry to feel pessimistic, but I don't have a spin on it where it's like, Hey maybe it's just the landscape is changing. Absolutely. All right. So let's jump on to story number four.
Is threads cool now? Or are they pulling some moves? Are they pulling some type of, I think they're turning knobs, but before I get into what I think about it, basically it seems over the past weekend, past two weeks, maybe, people have been complaining about Twitter, X, and They've said, hey, how come we don't have an edit button or, oh no, my gosh, Now X is charging me for an edit button, or why are my posts so short?
Oh, if I'm not a paid subscriber, I can't get the longer post, my reach isn't there. This stinks. Hey, I heard threads is popping, people are getting engagement, people are going viral on threads. People are posting these, hey, hope the algorithm finds me, meme post and getting all types of engagement now.
I don't know I've been on threads, but I've definitely known, noticed the uptick in activity and people being interested in. Theo, I know you're not on as much as I am because. I'm in there like a dumb ass, but what's going on from your side of, from your point of view, how have things been going on threads?
What's happening over there?
Theo Harvey: Yeah. Mr Benjamin, just be honest with you. I didn't know until you told me about it. I saw other folks talking about it and I think, I don't know when you saw the uptick, but I think people are searching for the next Twitter, but the challenge is I don't think threads will be the next Twitter.
I don't think they matter has any inclination of being a news service like Twitter was. Cause you remember whenever, be honest with you, when I first heard about Michael Jackson's death, back in oh nine thousand nine, I went on Twitter and that was the thing. It was like, and that's what kind of submitted Twitter as the new source of record, right?
Yes. You can go to news and talk to the news all day, but Twitter would just give you that real time dopamine hit of updates, right? That you need. And obviously during the pandemic, it was very helpful then, but since Elon has taken it over. Like you said, the charging, the inconsistent policy around what they would show, what they won't show you don't know what's misinformation or not.
And so it's just very not useful anymore. People still use it because I think they're addicted to it and they've been, they built their platforms on it. But. This is the opportunity for threads. And so I think people are kind of Mike. I don't know, did you see that change around like last week or was it recent or last couple of weeks?
Cause last week obviously was when the Israel conflict is recording this. There's a big conflict in Israel between, unfortunate between Israel and Hamas tort and terrorist organization. And so there, Twitter was the go to place to know information about that.
That is no longer the case. And did you see uptick last September? Really? It was, last Saturday, I think it was as we record this or was it more in the last couple of weeks?
Mr.Benja: Yeah, I'd say, okay that's more on point. Last Saturday getting around there.
Theo Harvey: Yeah. We'll see, Mr. Benja.
I'm, I'm back on it. Thanks to you. You're on it. I see you blowing up getting comments, content. Yeah,
Mr.Benja: I'm I'm up. You like the features? I'm up over a hundred users. So I think people that are actually connected in there are, I don't want to say starved for content, but it's like they're, oh, hey, somebody's talking and somebody's doing something.
And I think. Actually having these conversations is starting to, it, the P the people are starting to connect. So that's always a good thing when the people start to connect. So I'm good with it.
Theo Harvey: Yeah, as we record this, I saw they have some new features like the voice recording feature. Is that real?
This AI algorithm thing? I just threw it out there. I didn't know if that's real or not, but you told me to do it. So I did it. You say, Hey, Algorithm looking for these people. I think that's some bs, Mr. Is that legit?
Mr.Benja: Honestly I think it, it went so much more viral. I think so many people were doing it in that format that the algorithm had no choice but to start pushing that content.
I think that's a trending topic before they released the. The front end of what a trending topic is. I think that actually said, Hey. I think the system actually said, Hey, this is a trending topic. Let's boost it. Because if you go to, if you go to, that's another one of those features that's going to be rolled out very soon, which is the trending topic where if everyone's talking about, the sports thing, or everyone's talking about this new movie, or everyone's talking about this new election.
It takes all of those related concepts and people who are talking about it and starts to boost that content a trending. I think we're seeing that actually happen with without the... Without the bells and whistles and the feedback that this is actually happening. So I think it's, I think it's real.
You
Theo Harvey: see some content that you see over and over again before the official trending topics show up. Yes. And you probably should follow that because that's what they're
Mr.Benja: pushing. Get in, get involved in the conversation. Start making multiple posts on it. You'll get a quick little bump. I can almost guarantee it.
All right, Mr.
Theo Harvey: Bidger sold.
Mr.Benja: Now we're going to have story number five, just a little bit of time for this little vent, because we don't want to give too much of a vent to this topic, but Jada Pinkett out here, Jada Pinkett. Out here doing her Red Talk thing all over the interwebs and the media, hasn't put out a product in, I don't know, aside from Red Table Talk, hasn't put out a project in ages.
But now she's out here spilling more tea, dropping more bombs being a little, some might say media reckless, but this is reckless like a fox. Yeah, she's using media. I don't know if it's in a good way or a bad way, but she's doing it. Theo, real quick, what you got on this?
Theo Harvey: She's got a book out.
That's number one. Oh, that's helping her sell the book. Yeah. Mr. Benja. She's just dropping stuff like, bombs after bomb and just making Will Smith look even more of a simp than he did after he slapped Chris Mott and just bring it back up again. So it's just dude, it's just.
This is very toxic relationship for one of the big things reveals from this is that she mentioned they never they haven't been married for over six years So it's like what? so Anyway, mr. Benja to your point, I don't like it is messy They put themselves up as this, ultimate, black, celebrity power couple something power couple and it's not true and it just goes back to the falsification of all our idols or all our people we put on the pedestal and you realize none of that's true.
And so it's just more of the same. So to your point, she's leveraging it to sell books. I'm sure she'll probably get a lot of money hit off of this. And maybe she can be happy. Maybe she felt she wasn't in a prison with Will Smith because of what they put themselves up, in society as, and it was not true.
Yeah, hopeful Will Smith comes out and just tells the truth too, man. So that would be. Really awesome. I want to see Will Smith come out with the book. He already did, but this would be the part two of his book where he just goes ham, juicy. I love it, Mr. Benja. Man, Mr. Benja, we did it. We always get it in on the time.
Guys, I hope you enjoyed enjoy talking to you guys as always. So please subscribe and comment at ShowBizBusiness on X. YouTube and Instagram, listen to us at Spotify, iTunes, or wherever you listen to the podcast. And you want to check us out on our website, go visit us at show versus business. All right, Mr.
Benja, take care. Peace.