You pay Netflix 35 bucks pretty much no matter what.
The people who run Netflix, the handful of people at the top,
get to decide how to allocate that capital.
So you don't really know where that money is going.
They don't really, they don't tell you,
they don't tell the filmmakers.
The filmmakers no longer have equity.
They don't have any incentive to do anything
even remotely interesting.
The whole structure from top to bottom is now broken.
The incentive system has been totally destroyed.
In December 2025, Netflix shocked Hollywood by announcing it will acquire Warner Bros,
legendary studio behind DC, Harry Potter franchise and HBO for $82.7 billion.
Paramount Skydance quickly launched a counter offer aiming to control not just the movie
and TV studios but also cable networks like Discovery Channel and TNT.
David Ellison's bid, founder of Skydance, backed by family members and international
investor could make him one of the most powerful figures in media.
Even if Netflix wins, Consolidation will drop competition, shrink theatrical windows and
leave actors, writers and directors with fewer studios to work with.
Theatre owners will be hit hard and fewer films might actually get made.
At the same time, Christopher Nolan, now president of Directors Guild, is leading emergency talks
to protect theatres and the cinematic experience.
Steven Spielberg is backing him, fighting to ensure classic libraries like TCM are buried
in algorithms and that directors maintain creative control.
This fight isn't about box office numbers, it's about who decides what gets made, where
it seems and who gets shot out.
Today we're joined by Zach Mahoney, founder of IndieHuff, to break down why Hollywood
is broken and how Bitcoin is giving indie creators a real shot at freedom.
Welcome.
Happy New Year, happy to be here.
Thank you for having me on.
Yeah.
Celali, how are you?
It's been a long time.
I don't know if this is going to be the first, probably not, but one of the first episodes of the new season.
Yeah, well, of our partner season? Yes.
Yeah, so yeah, big topic.
I think if I'm not mistaken, this is one of the biggest in history, like the media takeover.
And just recently with the court case as well, like Paramount suits Warner Bros, right?
They wore details, so the fight is like getting bigger and bigger.
So I like the point that you mentioned that it's not the fight about like, again, that the fight is actually bigger.
You indicated it.
So I'm very curious about what Zach thinks about it.
And Zach, maybe just to you, because I want the audience to understand your experience and your talents, let's say, a little bit better.
So if I may say you are not only entrepreneur, you are not only, let's say, a founder of IndieHub.
You were also a working actor and you are also a filmmaker yourself, right?
So you've been working, directing and editing independent productions, but also commercial ones.
Am I correct?
Yeah.
Yeah, correct.
Absolutely.
So a perfect, a perfect case for the topic.
And you are also based in LA, right?
Yes.
Yeah, if you can share a little bit about your background so people can know a little bit about you if they're hearing for the first time.
Yeah, yeah.
No problem at all.
Pardon me.
Jeez.
Totally unprofessional.
Lots of coughing.
Human being.
Absolutely.
I started my career, basically my whole professional career has been in film and television.
I started acting when I was quite young.
I'm from a small town up in Northern California, and I started doing like little plays and stuff like that up there.
But I had a unique opportunity, about 13, 14 years old.
Long story short, an independent movie production had come to the town I was from, and they wanted to shoot there, and they wanted to cast there.
And a lot of details, drowning out a lot of details later.
Through that project, I ended up getting an offer for some legitimate representation down in LA.
And this was over 20 years ago.
So the industry was very different.
The world was very different.
So I had an opportunity for a great manager.
She basically said, hey, I think you have a lot of talent.
If you're interested in acting professionally, I'd like to manage your career.
I was quite young at the time, maybe 15, 14, 15, something like that.
So I said, hell yes, get me out of here and tested out of high school very early.
and the second that I could move to LA, I did.
I started auditioning, flying back and forth
before I was able to actually test out of high school
and move back down.
But I came down to LA and my plan was basically,
if I don't, back then there was something called pilot season
that was a very big deal.
I think they still do it to some extent,
but it's just, it's not like what it was.
And this is where everybody from all over the world
would sort of converge onto LA
who thought they had any talent at all.
And basically all the networks would be testing out pilots.
So you'd go shoot the pilot episode
of a given idea or a show.
So you had just a massive amount of auditions.
It was total chaos.
It was an insane amount of work.
And then, you know, that was usually early in the year,
January, February, March.
And, you know, basically if you're,
if you got cast on a pilot, your pilot got picked up,
you know, that was off to the races for you.
So I went down and I said, look,
if I don't book any work in this,
in three months in this pilot season,
then I'll go back home and I'll go to community college
and do whatever I was going to do anyway.
And so I started, started working right away.
Booked my first job with like,
right within that three month window.
And that job led to a play and that play led to a huge commercial.
And that was pretty much it.
Got my union card and continued to act professionally in a lot of commercials, TV, theater, a bunch of indies, about a million short films, things like that.
Then 2008 hit.
Now, excuse me.
Do you want to drink water?
I know.
It's like I'm dying here.
2008 was a very similar setup to what's happening right now.
And I, of course, I didn't know this at the time because I was, I took the financial crisis.
Correct.
Yeah.
Correct.
Yeah.
You had, you had three things.
I can kind of get into this in a minute or I can dive in right now, but you have three
things that will happen.
If these three things get like demolished in any industry simultaneously, like you can
expect that industry to have massive disruption.
And in 2008, you basically had, it's a convergence of politics, technology, and economics.
So I, for brevity's sake, I shorten it to Canon release the 5D Mark II.
But there was a lot of other technological innovation happening at that time.
NLEs were coming out.
Final Cut was challenging Avid.
The internet, you know, bandwidth was getting better.
YouTube had just been launched.
But basically, you had technology, politics.
You had the writer's strike back then as well.
It was the same deal.
So production shut down and then the economy collapsed.
So all three of those things totally decimated the industry.
and it took a long time for everything basically to get rebuilt back into Netflix. So similar things
are happening now and the industry is going through a similar revolution. You've got technology,
politics, economics. It's all converging. Again, we kind of have these like 15 year
waves. But anyways, early in my career, I had zero respect for money. I had zero respect for
finance. I had zero respect for business at all, like none negative respect. I was like,
I'm an actor. I'm going to focus on my craft. That's what I'm going to do. I don't care about
anything else. And I did. And I did that for quite a while. And I was in my little bubble.
But when so, so I, I kind of came into the industry at the very tail end of what the old
business model looked like. And I had quite quickly, I had very big opportunities. I was in
some very big rooms and I was climbing the ladder. And back then there was a little bit
of a structured ladder and it wasn't just for actors. It was kind of for the whole
industry in general. If you wanted to be an editor, there was a, there was a union ladder to
climb. If you wanted to be an actor there, you know, it is basically a process. 2008 changed
all that. Everything went backwards. YouTube came out. Nobody knew what the hell was going to go on.
Nobody knew where the money was coming from. But my point is, is that for the first, first half of
my career, I was very focused on the art. And then the second half, I started to like, as the
industry was rebuilding itself, I started to go out on auditions that were just like, I'm not,
I didn't come down here to like do this kind of stuff. And I'm not going to like run around and
stress out and freak out about these kinds of jobs. So I said, to hell with it, I'll get into
the production side of things. I'm going to make movies that I came down here to make kind of thing.
And that led me on my own, a whole other journey. That's sort of when I started the entrepreneurial,
learning how money works, learning how business works, learning how to allocate resources and
capital and talent. And films and filmmaking is hyper entrepreneurial. The people who are in this
business, whether they know it or not, are basically all entrepreneurs. They're all experts
in their own craft. Whenever you start a project, you coalesce all of these experts who are in their
field around one idea around one thing. And when they're done, they all go, they all go to another
project individually. Everybody's a master of their craft and all of those crafts come together
to they coalesce to make something greater than the sum of its parts. So I kind of started to
understand the business side of things a little bit more. And that helped explain a lot of what
I had sensed was wrong and what was going wrong with the business. And then we can pause here,
but then Bitcoin came along and I started to understand the dynamics that were at play
globally and not just in my little filmmaking bubble. I started to understand why things were,
you know, my sense at the time was like, things aren't working the way they should. Something is
off. Something doesn't make sense. I don't know what it is. Things don't feel right. Bitcoin helped
describe what was broken about everything and is one of the reasons I became super obsessed
with the technology. So that led me to learning about the tech. And it was pretty clear to me
after a couple of years of studying this, like this technology is going to solve problems that
filmmakers have. We have a, we have a, we have a revenue issue. We have a distribution issue.
We have all kinds of issues, but nobody was really building it the way that I thought it
could be built. You had a lot of shit coins, pardon my French. You had a lot of people who
are maybe not filmmakers maybe people who didn understand the art and the business of it or they understood one thing of it or they were just technologists trying to solve a problem And so you end up with a lot of you know weird ICOs and weird tech tokens that I think
are not necessary, at least at the moment.
And so when COVID hit, nobody was quite building the thing that I thought the way that I.
And I think just to add to the very end, I think what you were actually building with
IndieHub, probably we will cover it shortly, a little bit later.
Of course.
Netflix, Warner Bros. and stuff.
the biggest topic but what i can say what you're building is like what i'm trying to say is very
unique because you are building a completely the same as bitcoin is a different world to the current
existing financial system the same indy hub is working on a completely different set of values
this is how i see so with netflix or similar streaming platforms you have algorithms and you
are trying to utilize and soak the energy of your audience and not necessary to connect them with
the creators because that's not the point you just want to make them like in the matrix referring to
a movie like they are plugged in and then you soak the energy and you also soak the energy from
from the filmmakers from the content creators but what you are trying to also bring with indie hub
is completely opposite you want to make them closer these two actually sides right so and this
is a very very very unique thing and beautiful what a future thank god thank you yes yes yes well
said yeah absolutely we're gonna cover a lot of that guys uh the structure or the idea that we're
going to do today is that first we're talking about this because we want to provide you like a
wide context about how the Hollywood system works right and then to understand properly the
problem that is currently right now and then I think the most illustrative definition or example
right now is the Netflix one and brother deal that is going on in Hollywood and of course the
solution is Bitcoin and Indy Hub and we're going to discuss that but in order to understand that
That's why we're providing this a little, this wide context, let's say, about what's going on.
And actually, I want to double pause, to pause and double click on that.
And because since you have explained everything that has been experienced, you have been experienced Hollywood up close.
So if you can explain how the studio system works and why it's so now every single day is more centralized and how that shapes the stories that audiences in the cinema.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I kind of like my own personal story progressed to I was in my little bubble and then it sort of widened out and widened out and widened out.
And Bitcoin helps me get, you know, quite wide.
You know, we're on a ultra wide lens here.
I don't think that any of this can be properly understood without having an understanding of how money works and how our financial system works.
Because Hollywood is not isolated in its in its fiat nature.
It's not isolated in the degradation of the quality of the product that it's producing.
This is true across almost every industry that I can see and all of society, as far as I can tell.
This is a rich get richer, a situation where you have massive disparity.
The middle class is gone.
You could analogize that to products as well.
The food is lower quality.
There's more of it.
It's cheaper.
The food that is of decent quality is astronomically more expensive.
The only people who can afford it have a ton of money. So this, this dynamic, this fractal is
playing out across society at large. And so I think to answer this question, you really have
to ask yourself where the money actually comes from and how, how public markets work. And just
to illustrate what's happened, I can kind of go back into the history of, of Hollywood over the
last, maybe even since the, even since the post-World War II, the forties, fifties, sixties,
If you go back and you do a little research and you can, this is readily, it's a very interesting deep dive.
Basically what you'll discover, and again, I think this is true of every industry, is you see a massive consolidation of every industry into the hands of a few players.
And Hollywood was exactly the same.
It started out with privately owned studios.
And over time, those got bought up and bought up and bought up and consolidated and consolidated into the hands of a few publicly traded companies.
There were there were even in the 80s when things were going crazy in Japan and the Japanese had like money hand over fist and they were buying up skyscrapers all over the United States and American companies.
It was a crazy time.
There was a point where like a parking lot company, like a like a Japanese parking lot company had bought up one of the major Hollywood studios.
What are we doing?
And so the story is one of consolidation.
When I moved to L.A., for example, if anybody has listened to this, has been to L.A., they've been to Universal Studios.
It's in it's in Studio City.
It's right over the hill from Hollywood.
It's right off the 101 freeway.
There's a tower.
There's a big tower, which is the Universal office building.
And it's right next to Universal Studios, the park and City Walk and that whole thing.
And then next to all of that is the actual sound stages in the backlog.
When I moved here, that tall skyscraper building, that building said Universal.
And then after 2008, it said Comcast Universal.
And now it says NBC Comcast Universal.
It's on the building.
Do they also expand the tower to have a space for adding more?
They should consider, right?
They just, they have to.
Pretty soon it's going to be, you know.
It's absurd.
And you can look at that example is you just go Google, just get on an AI, go on Grok, go on whatever, and research the consolidation of the industry.
And so the industry, especially since 2008, but this has been happening for decades, is consolidating into the hands of a few people.
Now, what I will say, my pitch to the world is that what I'm trying to do with IndieHub is I am simply trying to fix the incentive system in this particular industry that is totally broken.
Filmmaking is a very unique business, and it requires a particular kind of risk.
You have to take a particular kind of risk if you're interested in telling stories and you're interested in advancing consciousness further, because artists live on the on the edge of order and chaos.
They have to. Our job is to bring things in and reflect back to society and society can take that and process that idea.
And is this true? Is this not true? Is this what we're doing? Can we do better? Yada, yada, yada.
And it doesn't have to be so serious.
It can just be entertainment.
That's fine.
But it requires a particular kind of risk.
That's a very different business model than if I am making buggy whips or I am producing
a car.
If I'm producing a car, my goal is to reduce all of the variables to the fewest that I
can muster.
It's to reduce risk to the fullest extent that I can to produce the exact same product
over and over and over and over and over again.
That is not what filmmaking and art is at its core.
What it shouldn't be.
Not looking at a situation.
It's what it's becoming.
And we all sense this.
Everyone knows.
Everyone who's been alive longer than like 10 years is like, what is going on?
Sequels over sequels, remakes over remakes.
How do I come up with new ideas?
Well, I go through the old catalog of what we've already done.
And I think about how can we do that again?
in the same way. I don't know why I don't get that satisfaction I used to. Remakes, sequels,
prequels, sequels to prequels, prequels to sequels, remakes to remakes. Same story, same story.
It's all trash. And the reason it's trash is because the incentive system is completely broken.
Publicly traded, the CEO of a publicly traded company is an inappropriate risk-taking character
in order to make great films and tell great stories.
You need, you know, as much as people talk shit
on the golden age of cinema
and the egos of all the studio moguls and all that,
and certainly that's not without merit.
The critique is not without merit.
But you need people with huge egos
who are willing to put everything on the line
in order to push consciousness forward
with respect to storytelling.
It's hyper-competitive.
It's hyper-entrepreneurial.
You need direct, you need the artists' egos involved
because their whole life, their whole talent,
their whole job has come down to producing these works of art.
So you need them to be on board.
You need a really good business person,
i.e. the producer to be on board.
Like chief entrepreneur is the producer.
The director is chief artist.
Those two have to work very well together
and they have to have respect for one another.
And you have to go out and you have to compete
and you have to do it efficiently and quickly
and magically and profitably because it is a business.
it's okay to be profitable there's nothing wrong with that it just means you did something that
people liked and you did it well enough that you can do it again without dying but what's happened
is we now have the ceos of publicly traded companies who are making decisions about films
and they have no incentive to take risk their their whole idea of the world is reduce risk
as much as possible increase revenue as much as possible and furthermore you have because you now
have let's say let's say you know hulu's owned by disney fx is owned by blah blah blah so now
when you're making these products, you're making these films or TV shows, you have seven or eight
people who are the chiefs of various companies who all sit around and make decisions about what the
edit should be, about what the storyline should be. Oh, I don't like this line. I don't like this.
So maybe do that. And they all just kind of sit around like they have to give themselves purpose.
But that's not how you make a film. A film set correctly is a highly dictatorial military type
operation. It doesn't seem like that on the outset because we're talking about a bunch of artists,
but to get artists wrangled to do something productive, you have to be militaristic about
it. And there's one person whose opinion matters, and that is the director. And if the director
doesn't like it, tough shit for you. And if you don't do what the director asked you to do,
you're fired because we don't have time for this shit. And that's for good reason. That is for good
reason. I am as much of an artist as anybody, but when you're making a film, it's one person's
vision and you have to have everybody rowing in the right direction. Now that doesn't say that the
director is truly a dictator A great director is convincing genius level talent on every department to be rowing in the right direction And great directors are able to they directing
they're not dictating, but the buck has to stop with somebody. So pause there, going back a little
bit. The way that films used to get financed, talking to get back, I had to say all that to
get back to your original question. The way that the studio, now it gets complicated, right? Because
studios have had control and there's unions and there's a lot of politics vying for power and this
and that. But I'm just breaking this down for brevity's sake. Back in the day when you used
to go raise money for a movie and you used to try to pitch it to a studio, you would go get the best
what's called above the line people that you can get. I'm going to go pitch this script to Brad Pitt.
If I can get Brad Pitt to give me a letter of intent, I can use that letter of intent. Brad Pitt
says he likes the script. I can go shop for money. I tell Brad Pitt, hey, I'll give you 10 points on
the back end. You are now an equity stakeholder in this movie. Your name is on the line, which is the
most important thing ever. If you're an artist, if you're Steven Spielberg, or if you're Aaron
Shorkin, or if you're Brad Pitt, your name is your brand. That's who you are. So you would go find the
best above the line talent, directors, actors, writers, cinematographers, sometimes producers,
and you would say, I'm going to raise capital with these names. And I'm going to, because the
names have leverage, I'm going to have to give them some equity. And so back in the day, you'd
go raise money. X people would have equity. It was like a regular business. And you had writers
and directors and actors who were very vested in the success of that project because the success
of that project made them more money, not complicated, right? And so back in the day,
it was a unit sales-based business. You made a movie, you distributed that movie,
people went and bought tickets to that movie. And so the capital that started with the audience
member flowed through. You bought a ticket to that movie, that money for that ticket was allocated
to that movie and that group of people who made that movie. And that money was split up between
the studio. They bought X rights. They bought X equity. It goes to Brad Pitt, Aaron Sorkin,
whoever. And so the people who made the best movies that society resonated with made the most
money and they got to continue to make movies. Nowadays, the way that the streaming model works
is you pay Netflix 35 bucks, pretty much no matter what, the people who run Netflix,
the handful of people at the top get to decide how to allocate that capital.
So you don't really know where that money is going.
They don't really, they don't tell you, they don't tell the filmmakers.
The filmmakers no longer have equity.
They don't have any incentive to do anything even remotely interesting.
The whole structure from top to bottom is now broken.
The incentive system has been totally destroyed.
So literally you need to play safe and you need to play on a familiar ground
because you have no other choice.
Like there is the gatekeepers
and you need to fit into the gate
and then produce pretty quick, pretty cheap,
as low risk as possible to get in.
Yeah, and unfortunately cheap is now expensive
because like everything where there's no competition,
prices go up, quality goes down.
So that's what's happening in film business, right?
Prices go up.
It costs an asinine amount of money
to make these movies that are garbage
that don't really make that much money back.
And so all it is is just,
We've gone from a relatively free market where the allocation of capital is decided by the market itself.
That's the difference.
Now, the allocation of capital is decided by the handful of people who run these companies, which is always going to never work.
They're captured politically.
They're captured economically.
And nobody has the brain processing power to be like, yes, I get to decide what society likes today.
That's not how it works.
Fuck that, right?
So anyway, I know that's a bit, but that's the rough overview.
The incentive system is broken.
If you are a big director nowadays and Netflix is doing a Netflix original,
they just come at you with a stupid high number.
They say, I'll give you $50 million, take it or leave it.
You don't get any creative control.
I mean, you're the director, but ultimately you're overridden at every possible corner
when somebody doesn't like what you're doing.
You're just a gun for hire.
You're a mercenary.
You don't get any equity.
There are no points on the back end.
There are no residuals.
it's a one-time lump sum thing take it or leave it oh by the way we're not going to tell you how
your movie did we're not going to give you any insight into it we're not going to tell you how
many people watched it we're not gonna tell you how many people finished it we're not gonna tell
how many people liked it it's a disaster so there you go that's the rough overview you can prod me
from there okay slowly do you want to ask something otherwise we can do we have rough questions both
from i don't know i'm like a little bit shocked not joking of course i'm actually triggered with
many different questions because you know i i thought for a while that all these sequels all
this rubbish junk actually when you mentioned that the broken money also broken food i kind of
see the legacy media cinema industry as not fast food but junk food and very often when we talk
about junk food and fast food is actually referring to the same one thing and originally they were
two different right to get the food fast enough versus to get the crap now we have the fast movie
industry that is also junk just feeding us as you nicely said like to um how you how you mentioned
like something to do something with consciousness that was the original goal of movies with the
human consciousness right uh but now it doesn't work like this it just makes you yeah addicted
depressed or whatever so i thought for a while that it's actually playing safe that they are
producing this junk kind of thing because at least the audience is familiar with the content and if
you are also tired if you fight with money struggles and depression and this and that you
know like in the hustle culture overlaid then it's easier to consume this kind of shallow junkie
kind of movie than to watch a very ambitious movie so i thought it's also like playing safe
from how you describe the industry operating it looks like they don't give a damn like they they
don't care and that's the biggest probably problem trying to be a little bit on the positive side
for the question so do you think is there any chance that maybe hollywood instead of being a
brand and this gatekeeper where there's few actually few gatekeepers has a chance to embrace
independent filmmakers somehow and become not a brand but how to say like maybe to become somehow
decentralized that they will be forced by the audience to bring a little bit of niche and
quality things is there any chance for that because currently hollywood yeah it's like
the main thing is unknown i don't think that i don't in the current the way the current system
structure works, I don't think that it's possible. But that is why I started working on IndieHub.
There is no other, you cannot continue. The path that they're on is one of total destruction. It's
cancer. There's no, you're not coming back from that. It's just math. It's just the way the system
is designed. It's been corrupted. And for, you know, people, people ask me this question and I
could be, look, everything I say, I'm willing to be wrong. I'm not correct on every little point.
I'm happy to be adjusted and corrected in a minute.
I don't want people to think that what I'm saying is the absolute gospel of everything.
It's a perspective.
I don't think that people say, well, why can't Netflix just do what you're doing?
You're just going to get destroyed by Netflix.
And my answer to that, my perspective on that is that they can't.
Because that would be like Netflix saying, you go to a board meeting in Netflix and somebody,
you know, whoever's in charge goes, so, hey, guys, I got this idea.
I'm going to actually pay everybody.
I'm going to allocate our revenue based on audiences' attention.
I'm going to automate the payment system.
Basically, what I'm going to do while this plane is flying is I'm going to reduce our revenue by like 70% and I'm going to fire 70% of the people in this room.
Like they're not going to do that.
They're just not.
It's a completely different system.
I think that Hollywood as an idea and as a locale that had the monopoly on storytelling is done.
And I think that it is done because of technology.
There was no other way that this could have happened.
So you are referring to Hollywood also as location, that you needed all these studios and stuff.
Now, in theory, you can have AI production studio in Korea, script writer, human or AI, I don't know, in the U.S. and somebody in the U.K. and somebody in the U.S.
So this is what you're referring to, that Hollywood as a brand, as a location is done because of the destruction.
We're sitting here having a three-part, fairly high-quality, more or less live recorded conversation, basically for free.
15 years ago or 20 years ago this would have cost you like 30 million dollars
you know it wasn't that long ago so okay for anybody for any of the the film technicians out
there da vinci is a company that releases the suite of software you have da vinci you have
resolve you have you know fair light a number they have a whole suite of basically what's called a
non-linear editor system nle it wasn't and that's free you can download that for free and you can
edit 4k you can edit uhd 3840 by 2160 for free if you want to go up to dci it's a little you know
you gotta pay a little bit or whatever but you can do all this for free and it wasn't that long ago
that to do color correction the way that da vinci got famous is they were they produced they had the
world's best color correcting hardware to do color correction in a film and it wasn't that long ago
that a da vinci was a physical device that was massive that rolled film through it that cost
millions of dollars, just the console, cost millions of dollars to produce a film on film,
on 35 millimeter film 20 years ago or 15 years ago, which is basically the end of film, by the way.
But 20 years ago, it was incredibly expensive and it required an incredible amount of technical
talent that all coalesced around studios in one area. There was a physical monopoly because of
the hardware and the talent that was required to do this.
This massive industry built up around filmmaking
because it's so technical.
Over the last 20 years,
that moat has been eroded away by technology And it is astonishing the level of quality that we can get at the price that we can get it at And the internet moves the information around
Back in the day, if you didn't know how to use Avid,
you had to come to LA and take a class.
There was no, you weren't like downloading videos.
There wasn't YouTube.
So anyone can tell a story.
And we're seeing that happen.
And the quality isn't the best.
And this has been a 20-year transition
and it's gonna continue.
But my opinion is it's going to get better and better and better and better.
Teams are going to form.
They're going to be new studios that are going to be just small groups of human beings who are hell of good at what they do.
And they're going to be able to do it for cheaper.
The question is the mechanism of delivering.
This is what I'm focused on.
This is why I'm doing what I'm doing.
Because if you go down there, if you think down this path long enough, you go, okay, well, what's the thing that matters?
The thing that matters is how do you deliver the data and how do you ensure that there's still enough friction that filmmakers can get paid?
The hardcore cypherpunks out there who are borderline leftists, when you get down to it, are like, well, information wants to be free and data is free and it's too easy to copy.
And so blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
OK, well, then I don't, you know, then software shouldn't have value and everyone's paying hundreds of billions of dollars for it like daily.
But for there to be an industry, filmmakers have to get paid or there's no industry.
It's as simple as that.
And maybe we go into a world where there's no film anymore.
I mean, it's possible, I guess.
I don't know.
I can't predict the future.
But if there's going to be an industry that has to be enough friction that filmmakers can get paid,
is it going to look like what it looks like right now where Disney has a bajillion dollars and they,
hey, I'm going to sue you for copyright infringement and basically just destroy you?
I'm not so sure that they're going to have the ability to do it that way anymore
as data and Bitcoin changes the way that value and information moves around the world.
It's going to be a never-ending fight.
They're not going to go down.
They're not going to lay down.
But the leverage in the system has changed dramatically with the power of Bitcoin and
the internet.
So the question is, how do filmmakers get paid?
How do they connect with their audience?
These really aren't any different problems than, there's nothing new under the sun, right?
We have the same problems we had before.
How do you market?
How do you connect with people who want to buy it?
Can you make it well enough?
Removing the way the studio system has, I say, what I really mean by that is that the
publicly traded markets, which is how these studios get access to capital at nothing percent.
That's the real mechanism that matters because that's how they outcompete everybody. And that's
how they buy everybody. And that's how this consolidation has taken place. They can borrow
money at 0%. I can't do that. Yeah. There is no real competition. No fair. Of course, fairness,
when it comes to competing, never fully exists. But what I'm trying to say is like, if you have
zero chances like with everything else currently happening in the world the small entrepreneur
entrepreneurial kind of ideas are killed by amazon and others and the monopolies and
technopolies are coming in so same story maybe before who and can i just ask one one question
before of course yeah thanks um you know like we have amazon so the biggest let's say players the
biggest gatekeepers not to call them one of so we have amazon they have netflix and we have so
what Disney just to
sure right so you have
NBC Comcast Universal
the greatest name ever
if you are a streaming so
like IndieHab is a
streaming platform you
are not production studio
you are just a streaming
platform I don't know how
the future is going to
look like for for your
product for your project
but currently you have
one clear vision and then
within the vision you have
different goals as helping
and reconnecting the
creators and creators and the audience and so on, right?
But when we are talking about Netflix, when we are talking about Amazon, when we are
talking about Disney, the biggest players here, they are doing both.
They are producing and then they are streaming.
Is it possible that, for example, in the long term, what Netflix just did recently with
Warner Bros and buying also HBO and also buying rights to some of the films that the Paramount
had.
So is it possible that they are trying to build like an octopus, you know, the network
and then take all the production studios so that in the nearest future, they will skip producing on their own
because they will own everyone else who is producing so that they can maybe expand on different features,
streaming features, so that you are more tied into watching, more addicted, so that they will analyze more data.
Maybe there will be more sophisticated algorithms, maybe whatever.
Do you think that's possibly the reason or is it clearly the reason of destroy everyone else
And then whatever happens, happens and we will continue with it.
Okay.
So first of all, wonderful observation.
You absolutely correct.
And you've absolutely nailed the key observation here.
And I applaud you for recognizing it is that there's a difference between being a creative
production studio that makes movies and being an infrastructure company that delivers the data.
Those are totally different business models, right?
Like completely different incentives.
Like making a movie is hard enough, let alone like we're going to run the servers that
distribute it as well.
You know, like it's very difficult.
And what they're doing technically is no small feat.
I am of the opinion that given enough time,
and I don't know what the timeframe is on this,
but given enough time,
businesses are going to be forced to choose
what it is that they want to do.
Are you delivering the data?
Are you running the infrastructure?
Or are you a creative?
You're gonna have to pick a lane at some point.
I, with IndieHub, I'm going to,
I'm focusing on the infrastructure.
Not because I want to.
Honestly, I'd rather be making movies.
It's just, that's what needs to be done.
and if I can help build this and create this
and that leads to the liberation of the industry
or liberation of the art form
and leads to even 100 decent movies getting made,
then fine, I sacrifice myself for that.
That's worth it in my opinion.
So firstly, I think, yes,
industries are gonna have to pick a lane.
Now, my opinion on what has really massively changed
over the last 25 or 30 years
is that the media industry,
that includes news, filmmaking, streaming,
broadcasting in general. I am of the opinion that these are basically now propaganda wings of
a more insidious institution that is with the explicit goal of basically mining us for our
energy, for our money. They're parasites. So what do those entities like to do? They continue to
further consolidate power until they self-destruct. They collapse. They can't help themselves. That's
what they do. It's like cancer. It just continues reproducing until it kills the host.
Will they collapse? I don't know. I don't know. This could be a long time.
It's like we think that we're pretty far through the internet right now, but we're in the first inning of the internet.
It's been like 30 years. That is nothing. This is absolutely nothing with respect to where we're going.
So we're in the very early stages of this. Yes, I do think that they're going to continue to consolidate.
I do think that they're going to continue to, they're basically dopamine dealers.
They're drug dealers with a different delivery mechanism.
Some people smoke crack.
Other people scroll Instagram all day.
As far as the brain is concerned, I'm not sure there's a huge difference.
You know, when you're just boiling it down simply, it's more or less the same thing.
So I think that we're going to have a bifurcation societally.
This is up to humanity and always has been and always will be.
What choices are you making as an individual about how you want to live your life and where you're directing and giving your energy?
Do you want to go smoke crack?
You can totally do that.
You're absolutely like no one is stopping you.
Certainly not in California.
Or do you want to allocate your energy towards something that is more aligned with your highest, greatest good?
I'm setting IndieHub up for people who recognize that distinction and who say, when I'm allocating my attention to this film or this filmmaker, I am literally streaming them value per second while I'm watching.
There's nobody in between.
You know, this is where we're going.
That's not exactly how it's structured right now for technical reasons.
But I'm trying to connect filmmaker and audience member as directly as I can.
Back in the day when you were in a theater, you had an instant response from your audience on whether what you were doing was working.
I mean, it's palpable.
There's nothing like that, that back and forth.
Okay, well, are we in the theater anymore?
No.
So how can we have a direct, how can we have the closest direct, most meaningful, energetic
exchange?
Well, it's money, basically.
I mean, a like is free.
A thumbs up doesn't mean anything.
I can just press that.
There has to be something that has weight and value to it.
And that is money.
And so if somebody streams the first 10 minutes of your movie and stops, like you're punished
for it.
Like make a better movie, man.
I don't know what to tell you.
Motivated in a way, not necessarily.
Yeah, exactly. So, so I know I'm rambling, but it is going to continue down that line where these companies are going to continue to feed off of there's nothing that's free people like there's nothing that's free. Instagram is not free. Twitter is not free. None of this is free. In fact, you're, you're expending the most valuable thing that you have in your entire life, which is time. And you're giving that you're, you're giving them your time, like huge mistake, huge mistake. What are you doing? And I'm guilty of this. I'm totally guilty of this.
So they're going to continue to harvest that as long as they can.
They're not going to stop.
Why would they stop?
It makes them rich.
They're definitely going to keep doing that.
But we have the ability to fork off of that nonsense and to go build something that's more meaningful.
You know, it's like America, the idea versus America, what it is right now.
You can't kill the idea of America.
They've captured it physically, but they can't kill the mind virus idea of what America is.
And so we have to go continue to build that elsewhere.
I guess what I'm trying to say is it's going to be both, right?
We're in a fight.
We're in a fight right now between the unconscious and the conscious.
I say that.
I'm not trying to be arrogant.
I'm just saying like Matrix.
You know what I mean?
Like he wakes up and he looks around and all these people are in the pods and they're just like, derp.
You know, that's what's happening right now.
You know, there are people who are watching the Housewives of Beverly Hills.
Like, what?
What are you doing?
What are we doing?
So it really comes down to the individual, I guess, is what I'm saying.
We get to choose.
Very good.
you