In this episode, host, Alexandra Takei, Director at Ruckus Games, is joined by Jacob Rapoport (CEO and Co-Founder) and Nico Vereecke from Evil Plan to discuss their groundbreaking project in AI-powered, unscripted fantasy entertainment. The conversation explores the future of interactive storytelling, where community influence and fully AI-driven narratives combine to create an entirely new genre of entertainment.

Jacob and Nico express their belief in AI’s potential to address the “cost problem” of new IP (i.e., significant upstart capital for uncertain returns) and the “manpower problem” (limited hours available each day) that contributes to content shortages. They explain how their company is developing a platform for dynamic, emergent storytelling. With AI at its core, Evil Plan seeks to transform how stories are created, allowing audience participation to play a crucial role in shaping the outcomes of plots and sub-plots, resulting in both unpredictable drama and interactive experiences. If you’re a fan of community-driven entertainment phenomena like Twitch Plays Pokémon, Bandersnatch, Genvid’s MILEs, or Blaseball, this is a conversation worth exploring. You can also check out our content coverage on Genvid and Blaseball on our website.

We’d also like to thank Lightspeed Venture Partners for making this episode possible! With its dedicated gaming practice, "Lightspeed Gaming," the firm is investing from over $7B in early- and growth-stage capital — the by far largest fund focused on gaming and interactive technology. If you’re interested in learning more, go to https://gaming.lsvp.com/.

This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.

Alex: Hello everyone. What's up, and welcome to the Naavik Gaming Podcast. I'm your host, Alex, and this is the interview and insights segment on our show. We've welcomed multiple entrepreneurs in the field of AI, those building AI power agents for play testing, building AI powered bots for QA, building AI models to catch bots, building AI for NPCs, and we hope to bring you guys more content that showcases how gaming founders are incorporating AI into their development processes today. However, we'll be going a bit more frontier and discussing the second use case of AI and games. Totally new, never before had entertainment experiences and as mentioned in our most previous episode on the future of gaming venture, a sector in games that is experiencing tailwinds in investment are those companies with AI overlap.

So today, I'm joined on air by two folks from a company called Evil Plan. They, as you might surmise from their title, have a plan to build a first of its kind unscripted fantasy platform.

What this is and what they're dreaming about and what will come, is what we're gonna talk about in today's episode. And so, I have two guests. The first is Jacob Rapoport, founder and CEO of Evil Plan. Jacob was, to no surprise to the many founders we bring on air, precocious as a child and joined Microsoft in his teenage years. After spending five years at Microsoft, he founded several companies in software and successfully exited two of them. It's a pleasure to have him join our studio today. Welcome to the pod, Jacob.

Jacob: Thanks, Alex. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. Um, yeah, I think that pretty much covers it for me. I, you know, it's been an interesting journey, you know, I pretty much went from building operating systems at Microsoft as a teenager, you know, straight into the wild world of startups. I've had a couple of successful exits along the way and really I've just been lucky enough to get the opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream of working alongside some amazing people like Nico as a janitor here for Evil Plan.

Alex: Awesome. Yeah. And I'll definitely give you guys an opportunity to share a bit more about yourselves, but my second guest, who you've already called attention to. I think his appearance can be more described as a cameo. He was the voice of Naavik Crypto Show for many years. Um, Nico Vereecke, I'm sure many of you will recognize his iconic accent.

Nico, formerly an investor at Bitcraft, joined Jacob, and Evil Plan and is supporting strategy work for the startup. Nico, welcome back.

Nico: Thank you, Alex. It's fantastic to be here. Homecoming.

Alex: All right. I love it. Jacob, it's good to have you here for the first time. Nico homecoming. Jacob, since you're a newbie to our air, to our air show, I know that you just told us a little bit about yourself and your experience, but maybe take this opportunity to walk me through your journey of, you know, how you landed at Microsoft, some of the companies that you started and what brought you to Evil Plan.

Jacob: Sure. So I am, I ended up going to university pretty young.

I dropped out. I focused on molecular biology and philosophy. I ended up dropping out when I was pretty young as well. I joined Microsoft. I think somewhere around 17 and a half, maybe maybe just shy of 18. Was there for a number of years, had the privilege to work alongside a lot of amazing people, invented a bunch of stuff that people are still using today, left, did a couple other startups, did a bunch of other interesting technology, some, I'd say, kind of early AIML stuff, mostly related to ad tech and things like that. I did a couple of companies of my own. As you said, one was more of a, like, a deep tech kind of enterprise thing. I exited both of those. I was in EIR for an ultra high net worth family office for a few years, uh, which was great. And then from somewhere around, like, 2013, 2014, started to work on my last company.

We were focused on building a very early, like, blockchain based tools for esports platform. And I think for me, you know, what I'd say was it was really the first time that I got to, you know, really kind of fuse a lot of my own passions. I've been a lifelong gamer, and spent a lot of time building a lot of technology to solve kind of other people's problems.

And, for the first time, I really got a chance to, you know, kind of solve things that I cared about or work on things that I cared about. It's super interesting, you know, we raised some money, we wound down in early 2019 and I'd say by, uh, spring of 2019, I'd already been ideating on what we're doing now.

Alex: Awesome. Terrific. Yeah, it's an amazing journey and such a story of also, you know, multiple angles and dimensions of entrepreneurship. And so I'm super excited to dive into what you guys are building at Evil Plan. But before we do that, Nico, what about you? Uh, I would love to hear a little bit about your background in investing.

I know the audience is familiar with you, but what have you been up to over the past two years or so? And what are you bringing to Evil Plan on the operating side?

Nico: Thanks, Alex. So I spent three years at BitCraft, and what I ended up focusing on was more of the frontier applications to interactive entertainment, frontier technology applications to interact, interactive entertainment.

Basically the way I would summarize it is I was interested in the weird stuff basically. And so I, I, I led deals, mostly in the crypto space, around things like fully on chain games and, and how we can use these new technologies to build new types of experiences. In those years, I get to look at, you know, some of the best founders in the space, the best startups in the space, learn a lot of things and got some insights into what troubles and what complexities there are in the interactive entertainment space, what challenges many gaming companies have, where industry where consumers were heading, where consumers trends were, and when I met Jacob last year, he was talking to me about what he was doing at Evil Plan, and it was a bit of an epiphany and an answer to many of the challenges and in line with many of the opportunities that I had been observing in my years as an investor. And so, after what Evil Plan was doing clicked for me, other startups and investments that I looked at became not that exciting.

I just, I couldn't get this Evil Plan idea out of my head. Like what we're doing here to me, we're, we're creating a new category, a new genre of entertainment and the opportunity is bigger than anything that I've seen before. And once I clicked, I just couldn't unsee it. And I decided to, to make the leap, leave my cushy VC job and joining the operator role where I'm trying to help Jacob and the rest of the stellar team that we have in making this successful.

Alex: Awesome. Yeah. I mean, I think our journeys. I mean, I very much identify with that mission as someone who did something kind of similar. And it's one, I definitely know what it's like to fall in love with a team and fall in love with a mission and just only want to focus on that. And so I'm super excited to talk with you guys about what that mission is.

And so that's going to bring us to our first topic, which is around community influence entertainment. And so for the audience, before we give an overview of Evil Plan, Jacob, which I'm going to have you do, I want to summarize a couple of key pieces of community influence, influence, entertainment that have already happened in the world today.

And to be clear, when I say community entertainment, we mean experiences where the community meaningfully shapes the trajectory of the narrative at a large scale. And there's some phenomenon that happened that I think would be useful to educate the audience on in case that people do not know what these things are.

And there's, and there's four of them. And so the first is Twitch Plays Pokemon, which I'm sure a lot of the audience is familiar with, but Twitch Plays Pokemon was an online and social phenomenon that took place in 2014. Basically, a bunch of people on Twitch together through input commands and a voice chat played a version of Pokemon Red and controlled the main character.

So, basically, hundreds and hundreds of people online were attempting to catch Pokemon, battle the bosses. This led to some of the most hilarious situations in gaming history, such as selling the main Charizard that you had acquired at the very beginning. and it was kind of groundbreaking as a collaborative gameplay experience and highlighted the power of Twitch for interactive and community driven experiences.

The second is Bandersnatch. Bandersnatch is an interactive film piece, as part of the Black Mirror franchise, and basically this was released on Netflix in 2018. It allowed viewers to make decisions for the protagonist. And as the Mental state of the protagonist deteriorates, viewers control his actions.

This led to multiple story paths with different endings and that, you know, was also hailed as, regardless of how much of a financial success it was, trying to push the boundaries of storytelling by incorporating branching narratives and audience interaction to create something unique and immersive.

The third is Blaseball, the founder of which Sam have hosted on air before. Blaseball was a surreal browser based fantasy sports game that combined elements of Baseball with absurd and satirical and chaotic twists. If you guys want to, you can call back to the, to listening to the show. Players basically participate in a fictional baseball league influenced by fan voting and bizarre events.

Again, very similar community driven, ever evolving experience that pushed the boundaries of what I guess we would consider sports league simulation. Blaseball, unfortunately, however, is no longer available as the studio stops supporting the game. And then finally, there's something called MILES, Massively Interactive Live Experiences.

I'll actually make a call back to my other homie, Aaron, who did a podcast on Miles with Jacob Novak, founder of Genvid. Genvid has a couple of interactive series with well known IP. One that was particularly successful was called The Last Mile. Which utilized The Walking Dead IP and it's kind of an interactive show that was hosted over a period of weeks and was sold episodically over a period of time.

So we have Bandersnatch, Twitch plays Pokemon, Blazeball, and MILES. And to give us some grounding about the kind of community influence experiences we're talking about today. And so Jacob, I will now pass it to you. Tell me about what Evil Plan is.

Nico: Can I hijack this for a second and then throw it to Jacob because I really like those. A great intro, Alex, and it kind of shows a bit my thinking and how I got to get so excited about what we're doing here. I am you know as far as my investing role, investor role, I dug very deeply into what you just described into Blazeball, specifically Blazeball, because like the engagement and excitement around that was, was fascinating. Twitch Plays Pokemon, super cool. And it just showed me a couple of things. One was that one of the reasons that people got so excited about that, about these things, was because they didn't know what was going to happen because what was happening and what was being decided was like a collective decision and you don't know what other people are going to do. And so whatever happens ends up being new and fresh, and that is really exciting.

We love unscripted things. Another reason why I got so successful is because because of people's involvement. They felt like a really strong tribalism and a buy in into what was happening. One of the great ideas Blazeball had was they assigned you to a team. And so suddenly you had your team. And when you have your team, you care what happens to that team.

And that's why people got so involved and that when they could. Craft the narrative of that team they built an even stronger connection with what was happening and so I was seeing this and I thought about another entertainment experience I had and many of the people of my people I knew had a couple years earlier that was as unscripted.

As things could get in terms of movie and television and that was the show game of thrones when I was watching game of thrones I remember very well I would sit down for an episode and I would not know whether my favorite character was going to survive that episode and I remember very well after that show next day at school or at work we everyone would be talking about it.

And I think that, I realized that that unscriptedness and that having a favorite character and not knowing whether they were going to survive, um, really inspired me and showed me that, you know, these could be some of the best entertainment experience that people had. And to me, still the best. Most entertaining scene ever on television, um, is the right way because afterwards there were self help groups of people that were trying to like help each other through, through that scene.

And I think that it just, it doesn't get more entertaining than that. And so I was thinking about, sorry for the ramble, Alex, I was thinking about what, what, what, how can we apply some of the really cool things from miles and, you know, from Blazeball and Twitch Plays Pokemon and, and combine that with what I saw in game of thrones and I was thinking about what if we had a game of thrones like world with all of these characters that the audience could help you know could help control where you have this world that's autonomously moves forward and and tell stories. And this is something that Jacob has been, you know, thinking a lot about, so I'll throw it over to him and, and walk, let, let him walk us through some of his thinking about, you know, and scripted and fancy and that kind of stuff.

Jacob: No, I think I'm like, thank you to both of you. I think that was a great, great sort of set up, you know, I want to go back to something that you talked about Alex in your intro where you talked about storytelling. And I think that, you know, one of the one of the most important things that I've realized over the past, I don't know, however many years and probably one of the kind of kind of key insights around the company was just understanding that everything really is a story.

That it's all storytelling, you know? And so when you sort of step back and you look at all the entertainment that we, we engage in in whatever way, right? Whatever form, whether it's, you know, live sports or it's movies or television or, you know, reality TV shows or whatever it is, you can kind of frame all of that as being some mix of, you know, scripted and unscripted and then what we would call it reality and fantasy, right?

And so in that kind of unscripted, you know, reality bucket, you're going to have things like sports and e sports and many other things. And I think what's fascinating to me is that, and what a lot of people don't realize is that it really just is a different kind of story, right? What, what is live sports?

It's, it's a story where you're going to pick a side. Right. And you're going to, you know, be all in on that side, whether they win or they lose, you know, you're going to be with them and it's a story that doesn't really have a beginning or an ending, you know, uh, you're always sort of talking about what's going to happen next or what just happened.

And so you're continually kind of both looking forward, looking backward for a second and looking forward. And, you know, in a way, I think what you kind of realize is that the, the games themselves are not, not really the kind of the, the. The story so much as they are like almost like a plot device, like advancing the narrative right around what's happening and you know, when you when you think about people or just humans, it's interesting because a lot of the reasons why.

We are, you know, kind of the sort of, at least so far, the dominant species on the planet is because we're very, very good pattern recognition machines. We're very good at that. And interestingly, and maybe it's just a quirk, quirk of how we work, we're very bad at randomness. You know, if you give a person a sheet of paper and you say, you know, put 10 random dots on the sheet of paper, most people will start to freeze up around the third, fourth dot.

Because they'll just see patterns, you know, they won't know where to make that next dot. And at the same time, while we are so focused on patterns ourselves and pattern recognition and so forth, we really like things that are unpredictable. We don't like things that are like super random. You know, if it's just complete, complete chaos, it's not, it's not interesting, but if things are sort of surprising and unpredictable, that does become interesting.

And so when you kind of look at, you know, sports from that perspective, it's really obvious why, why it's so engaging to, you know, so many people. I think the problem with sports ends up being that it's just very difficult. It's very expensive to produce, you know, the CapEx and OpEx around the productions are super high.

The margins are not, you know, amazing. So we see like a very high top line, but you know, bottom lines are hard to deal with and ultimately, you know, in some sense, it's kind of a, as, as really all entertainment has been a people business, you know, and in that case, uh, it's difficult, right? You have someone at the top of their game, like Ronaldo, and he's going to play, you know, once a week, a few months out of the year, and then that's it, right?

So you really can't produce more of that kind of content, even though it's very expensive. When we think about movies, it's a kind of a different kind of storytelling, right? And we, we had more, more commonly associate that with storytelling, but it has the benefits of being sort of open ended, right?

Anything can happen, you know, you can be anyone. People can die. People can be born, you know, people can grow old. And in that way, you know, it has much more flexibility about scenarios and outer space and forward in time, background time, et cetera. We love that about it. The challenge, though, is sort of eco I think touched on is that ultimately speaking, it's all scripted and as pattern recognition machines.

We don't like that. Right. When you watch movies, when you watch television shows, you're thinking like, Oh, I know it's going to happen or, Oh, this is going to happen. Oh, it's so predictable. And we talk about that as being a bad show. You know, I guess one thing that I would think about or one way to look at this is that if you think about what makes a show good or what makes a show bad or what makes a story good or bad, I would say that it's a little bit like your ability to perceive moments of drama where a moment of drama is something unexpected that's going to happen.

For us, what's, what's ultimately fascinating about this and what we sort of realized was that there's going to be this new category of entertainment that we call unscripted fantasy entertainment. And to understand that, it is going to, combine, you know, these elements of these other categories, sort of the best of all possible worlds.

And in particular, that category hasn't existed before. It's never really been able to exist. It's, in a way, kind of uniquely unlocked by AI. And so that form of AI native entertainment that allows us to combine, you know, kind of the, the best of Hollywood with, with the unpredictability of sports and the emergent narratives of, you know, a reality shows and the inner interactivity of gaming.

That's something just completely new. And I think for for us, that is what is what is most exciting. The ability to really focus on something that, you know, is both native to AI, but really impossible. It has been impossible before we were at this point.

Alex: Okay, and so Evil Plan is a AI Entertainment company that is aiming to build what you were explaining on kind of like the sports side of live experiences in a more cost effective universe.

Jacob: I think I think it can be sports experiences. I think it can be. Oh, sorry. Sorry.

Alex: Something like sports experiences.

Jacob: Yeah, I would say that, you know, if you asked me to sort of summarize the company, I would just say that, you know, we built the operating system for the next generation of entertainment.

Alex: Okay. And so I think that there's something interesting here. Before we go deeper into the evil plan one on one, like what you guys are building and the first project you guys are starting with. I kind of want to spend maybe like five minutes or so kind of on it. Okay. Some, just some questions about whether or not this kind of thing would have traction and the hypothesis is that it would be based on the predilection for people to enjoy live entertainment and live sports and reality TV, etc.

But I think the interesting thing, Nico, about what you said with the Game of Thrones example is that, George R. R. Martin actually wrote Game of Thrones in reverse. He wrote it backwards. He knew what the end was going to be and therefore, he wrote everything, leading up to that end, right? And so my question to you, I guess, Nico, and I think we talked about a little bit of this before, is Why do you guys think that people at the community scale will be better at storytelling or will through that or through community influence activity, you will create a better, more interesting story than a designer who's perhaps this is their vocation has architected that from scratch, like, you know, George R.R. Martin architected Game of Thrones to be random and extremely exciting. Some would say that he is an incredibly brilliant writer. Do you think that you can create that kind of outcome, or do you think that all the outcomes potentially could fall flat, or how do you design a system to ensure that they don't?

Nico: It's a, it's a really good question. And so the way I would think about weird, what we're doing is I don't see us like the content that we produce is not competing with the stories that, uh, like that could like incredible writers, right? The content that we produce is more akin to the story that you see in the real world. Where, you know, when you have a bunch of like athletic organizations competing with each other, there's winners, there's losers, you know, these are the, and, and out of, out of this, there are stories that emerge.

Like the way I think about a lot of sports is sports are essentially human created, created rule sets to enforce drama. And when you just like let that happen and let people like try their best within these environments, you get, you get great stories. I think that's. What we're doing is, I'm going to, I was going to repeat what I just said before, so I'm going to end it, end it with that.

Alex: Do you guys, I guess, think, and I, you know, I think that's the premise, which is super interesting and I think it's totally right. People are, you know, I watched the Super Bowl last night and people are talking about Travis Kelsey and his relationship with Taylor Swift and the drama that he's having and everybody's on Instagram and social media.

Do you think that there's something different today about consumer behavior that makes this particularly exciting for right now versus something that was true in a traditional media landscape in the past? Is there something today that you guys are looking for in terms of what people are doing that has led to your hypothesis about this kind of unscripted fantasy?

Jacob: So what I would say is that I think, you know, there is this sort of misconception maybe about storytelling in general, you know, we, we tend to think about, like, and you see this with, with UCG, sorry, with UGC platforms a lot, right? It's like, how do you solve a little of the variation of kind of the problem that you were talking about?

And you say, okay, well, you know, if, if, Okay. If we can't clone George, right, then maybe we can make a million Georges, right? And then somehow we're going to produce something interesting out of that. And I think that the issue ends up being that, first of all, you kind of have discovery problems around it, right?

When, when there's a bazillion HBO's or whatever, like, how do you even know where to find, you know, the good game of thrones versus the bad game of thrones or whatever, most of those games of thrones are not gonna be that great. And I think that the challenge ends up being that we're really, you know, very few of us are actually good storytellers, right?

Very few of us are even storytellers, let alone good, good storytellers. And, you know, but at the same time, we're all story consumers. We love good stories, right? There is a, I don't know if you know this, but back in like 82, when EA was announcing themselves, they put out this ad. And the title of the ad was can a computer make you cry?

It was a really interesting question, and Spielberg had seen that ad and it had this very profound effect on him, you know, and later he would go on to try to, I think, he did it some, tried to do some games with Sierra and some other things. And he gave a talk not too long ago and he mentioned it, which is kind of interesting.

It was like, you know, 20 years later, right? That this thing had stuck with him. And I think. You know for me that that question of you know can a computer make you cry is the question right right now we have an up until this time we've really used technology you know to deliver the stories that we make right you know to your point but we also can't clone george and we don't really have a million Georges, right? And so if you kind of think about that question in a different way, what I would say is that if we all love a good story and we know that a good story can make you cry, right? Then sort of the answer to that question is, yeah, a computer can make you cry. But, uh, if we build a computer, that's a story machine, right?

And what we've built this entire time are basically calculators. You know, and whether that is a, you know, a deep seek or open AI or, or any of the frontier technologies, you know, their tools, they're not, they're not story machines. And, you know, I think for, for us, to kind of go back, you know, what, what is, what is something like AI, AI native entertainment?

How would I define that right broadly? And what I would say is that it's, it's storytelling, as Nico said, in a slightly different way, right? It has these qualities that are per, you know, perpetual. It's gonna be real time, it's gonna be interactive. The, the actual underlying story, whether it's a sport or Game of Thrones, or, you know, a, a Pokemon adventure or a reality show is less, I wouldn't say it's, it's not, it's not that it's unimportant, but the more important thing is that, you know, it has these qualities to it. Like whatever story you're telling is told in this way. And so, you know, for us, I would say that we've, we've realized that and been focused on building that kind of story machine, that perpetual real time interactive story machine. You know, we call it a prism, And for us, that is the way in which we're going to tell, you know, stories in this, in this new way.

The only other thing I would add is that, you know, you asked, how do you know, to some degree, you know, what, what the right, I guess, what the right plot twist or what the right answer is, or, you know, how can you tell something in a way that, that, you know, a professional storyteller would tell? And, and to Nico's point, I would say that it's not really a competition in that way.

You know, people play a lot of different kinds of games. People, watch a lot of different kinds of shows. And I don't think this is a question about trying to, you know, erase something or display something in any way. I think it's that, that, that kind of content, meaning all forms of existing entertainment, there, there just isn't enough good versions of it.

If you think about what I'm saying, I guess a different way would be, if I were to describe to you a, a scene, right, out of something like, you know, I don't know, a western, and I would just say there's a train, it's moving through the desert, there's a sheriff, there's a bunch of passengers, and there's a bunch of, you know, outlaw bandits riding towards it.

And you would be like, okay, interesting. You want to know what happens next? If I told you that what happened was the sheriff killed all the bandits, he saved the day, you'd be like, that's a good story. If I told you that the bandits killed all the passengers, it would be sad, but that would also be a good story.

If I told you that, you know, the train was disabled and they ended up overcoming adversity to survive in the middle of the desert, that would also be a good story. No matter what I'm going to tell you, it's going to be a good story. And partly, that's because it's all unexpected. All possibilities are there.

When Nico mentioned the red wedding scene, I think what's interesting is that even though that was sort of the best scene in the show, it also kind of ruined the show. Because every moment after that you were sort of sitting there as a viewer wondering if this is what this is the thing that was going to happen next and that in a way is the problem with scripted content is that it takes possibilities off the table.

You know, even if you surprise the audience, it's very difficult from that point, almost impossible to surprise them again. Another example I'd say very quickly would be like the movie, the sixth sense, right? I don't know if you remember it, but you had this amazing plot twist at the end. And I don't want to spoil it for me, for anyone who possibly hasn't seen it, but there's this big plot twist at the end.

That director, he had a problem, right? His problem was that every time he made another movie, people would go and expect and wait, sit there and wait through the whole film for the last, you know, two minutes where he's gonna have his big plot twist reveal thing. And in a sense, you know, even his form of unpredictability, in the same way that the Red Wedding itself was unpredictable, became predictable.

Alex: Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. And I think actually, like, I think to answer my own question, you know, about is there something today about consumer behavior that makes us exciting? I think you have a point there where people have a fascination of figuring, well, what else could have been? You see that with a lot of the Marvel universe of the shorts that they've made of, you know, what if instead of Iron Man dying, this happened?

Or what if instead of Wonder Woman being a man, she was a woman? Or what if this person was this ethnicity versus that ethnicity? I think something else that's interesting is that you just see. that, you know, people don't are great, great consumers of stories, but they might not be. amazing storytellers themselves.

I think that actually people probably can be really good storytellers, but even in like little microcosms. And I don't know if you guys are following like the Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, like smear campaign stuff. But I think that that is itself. It's so interesting because there's basically an online warfare of like social media, tweets, quotes, videos, fake accounts to ruin the other.

People's reputations, but people are participating in that and creating their own like little mini tidbits out of like some they saw they saw Justin Baldoni at a coffee shop for people in New York, and then they were like he was totally meeting with somebody and this is what happened they propagate that story, and obviously this is awful because it's happening to real people. However, I could definitely see an entertainment case where that kind of fandom of like tiny little snippets of moments of influencing the mainline narrative could be interesting at the public level.

Jacob: One way I would think about that, and I think it's a fantastic example, right, is to think about the fact that in that case the audience is not responsible for the outcome.

Right? They're not in charge. They don't have to be responsible, you know, if it doesn't have to end a certain way or a different way. And I think in that way, it's very similar to what we're describing is that, you know, it's less about traditional storytelling, you know, we it's funny because we think about it as a creative exercise, right?

But if you think about it, we use a lot of like construction terms. We talk about foundations, we talk about framing, you know, it sounds like we're building a house more than we're making a painting or something. And in that way, I think that there's this problem where You know, again, we're, we're, we're pattern recognition machines.

We think in terms of patterns. And so if I tell you, if I ask you to tell me a story, you're going to think, well, it has to be a beginning, a middle and end, you know, , I need to, I need to maybe do some foreshadowing in the beginning so that the end makes sense, or, you know, I need this thing to make sense of that thing.

And I, you know, I need to show a, a shot of a revolver on the, on the nightstand, even though there's no reason to show that shot. I have to show it to you now because later, otherwise, this other thing won't make sense. Right? That's our problem. We kind of can't get out of our own heads. And so to your point, you know, if people are not responsible for that, if they just are contributing, you know, more like influencing in a way, right?

Nudging, you know, or contributing small bits, then there is no, there is no need for them to understand how all of these, you know, sub fit together, sub plots fit together and so forth. Exactly, yeah. And they just naturally fit together.

Alex: Yeah. And I think that's to the main point of it's like, you know, you're talking to your Game of Thrones thing, but it's like someone needs to potentially architect the subplots and the, and how they fit together.

But people can still influence like the micro dramas and the tinier things. Nico, sorry, go ahead.

Nico: No, no, so just to add to that point, you asked about indications that this is where consumers were heading. And I think what Jacob just said is also really important about what we're doing. I think that one of the challenges that we have as a gaming industry is that people seem to want to try new games less and less.

And there's this trend that, like, I just call it people are getting lazier. And they either play games that they've been playing for 20 years or they want to sit back and, you know, actually not play and just watch a streamer that plays a game. I don't know that recently some stat came out that like 50 percent of gamers watches games.

They actually don't play. And to me, that is a trend that is like, it has been growing over the past five years, and I don't see any reason why it would stop. And so. I think what we're doing is we're allowing we're giving consumers the option to, you know, sit back, right? If you're participating in Twitch based Pokemon, like you could just watch it because it's entertaining, right?

But you can also like type and you can orchestrate. And so these. Like having these types of experiences just allows for many ways to interact with the content. And I think that is, it's something that we'll probably see more of. And that's something that I, as an investor, get really excited about.

Alex: Okay. Awesome. All right. So we've talked about the dream, but let's maybe. Now we're going to back up and, you know, get grounded and talk about kind of how you'll begin the dream and we're going to definitely talk about some of the business model implications of having, people that are observing versus engaging.

But tell me a little bit about the first project that you guys are going to start with Evil Plan is building an unscripted AI driven fantasy platform. What's the first thing that I'm going to experience and how do I experience it?

Jacob: Well, I guess what I would say is that, you know, where we are kind of right now, there's not a ton.

I'm able to get into detail around specifics of that. But what I would say is that to a large degree, we think that this is in general pretty transformative, right? And so When we think about the kind of things we're talking about here, different ways to tell stories, different ways to, you know, interact and engage and so forth.

A lot of a lot of what we're working on and focusing on is really just thinking around trying to solve these problems, right? There are issues with, you know, how we tell stories. There are issues with the ability to scale these kinds of, you know, content, and I guess the truth is, you know, if I'm going to be really candid, what I would say is that we don't really fully understand.

You know, we have a Or at least yet, right? You know, we're sort of just starting to try to answer some really hard questions in the in just the entertainment industry in general, but also specifically in gaming, you know? So for us, it's sort of a process, I guess. But I suppose the way that I think about this is that, you know, we came together as a company because we saw that there were these big problems, right?

And then a lot of those problems touched kind of all of us directly. And so we have thoughts and we have ideas. And, you know, we have things that we've built over the past several years that we're kind of excited introduced to people. But I guess I don't know that Part of it is being able to say it is this or it isn't that very specifically, I think a big part of this is the idea that we want audiences to help shape these things like that, in a sense, is maybe a different way to think about it, that it's less so about us being prescriptive, which is more of the traditional model of how what we're doing.

This happens and it's more about allowing for or inviting audiences to be more kind of co-creators.

Alex: Okay, so in that regard, though, I guess there must be something that you guys are building and coke that I would be a co-creator as an audience member, a first product, a minimum viable product that as a startup, you guys will be building.

Do you have an approach or something that you guys are starting with that lends itself to the hypothesis? and a vision for how I would co create alongside of it, whether that be on my phone, on a TV, how do I interact with it, how long do I interact with it, is it a sit down thing, like a baseball where I come in every season and put in some inputs, is it very regular?

I guess I'm trying to envision what the consumer experience might be like for if I was going to play an evil plans game. Project.

Jacob: Yeah, I mean, I would think about, and I guess we can talk a little bit about kind of what the first concept is, I suppose. But, I guess, to step back a little bit, we talked about kind of, you know, sort of sports in the, in the beginning, right?

And I would sort of start there, you know, look, anytime somebody is going to say to you, Hey, we're inventing a completely new, you know, genre of this or that or a new category, it's going to feel a little bit like an ocean. And, you know, it is, right? It is a notion. And so for us, it was a question of, you know, where do we sort of, how do, how do we boil this, you know?

And, you know, the answer is always one cup at a time. For us, that was starting with, with sports, when you think about all the different kinds of content and stories, you know, and how, like to your points, like how, how things work or not work or how a story unfolds or not folds the, the, the question for us really became, how do we give people, you know, to your point earlier, like kind of enough context quickly where they can have some kind of, you know, impact in whatever way, right.

For us, that was starting with something very, very simple. Right. And so if you think about like all the within the world of sports, right, what's interesting about it for us is that it sort of simplifies a lot of things, right? The amount of, you know, for example, a dialogue is, is less, right? The amount of, you know, physical interaction and kind of like sort of overt competition is easier to understand, right?

The, you know, the strat, like the ability to have a strategy and understand how you can influence that strategy becomes. Easier to understand, right? From a consumer perspective. And so, you know, what's for us? I think the starting point was thinking more about like, like more of a simplified combat sport.

What's interesting about you know, fighting in general is that it's just very simple. Like, like I, I don't have to understand anything about what's going on. I don't have to understand anything about the background of, you know, the characters. I don't have to understand their lore. I don't have to know anything about the rules, you know, to, to Niko's point.

I could just look at two characters, you know, engaging in, in kind of combat and immediately understand. What's going on and orientate myself, you know, in terms of like how you're going to experience it. You know, I don't think it's necessarily substantially different from what you'd imagine, right? I think that it's more about, it's more about what, you know, it's less about us trying to dictate to you if this makes sense, right?

Like Nico's point. It's less about us trying to say, Hey, You know, you have to do it this way or have to do it that way. I think it's more about you being, you being able to, you know, participate in, in a, in a story, right? And so, again, I, I would say that many of the, many of the things you might imagine, are true are, are true, you know, and many things you'd expect are, are gonna be the way you'd expect. And I don't think it's it, I think it's less about that. It's less about trying to. Get you to do something different, if you will, right from a behavioral perspective in a sense, but more about trying to trying more to, like, lean into the behaviors you have now lean into the way that you would think about it.

Alex: Okay. So you're going to start with this, this, I guess, of to the sports sense of some sort of fighting or combat could be boxing, could be anything else kind of entertainment experience. And it seems to me like actually from a lot of the examples that we've discussed, that IP is really important to this, right?

It's the Raiders, it's the Kansas city chiefs, it's game of thrones, it's Twitch plays Pokemon. Are you guys planning on starting with an IP that you think is going to have people be automatically invested in those characters. And if not, how are you thinking about the IP overlay of, you know, perhaps it's the dynamic of fighting, but who is fighting?

Jacob: Yeah, sorry. I think that's, I think that's a really interesting question and, I think the answer to that actually kind of goes back to what you were talking about at the top, which was Blazeball, right? One of the things that was super, I think, compelling about Blazeball to myself and also Nico was that they did not create waterfall characters.

Right. You know, for, for people who are not familiar with baseball, it was basically text based, you know, it was pretty much played on Twitter for the most part, in a sense, and they just, you know, put the name of a baseball player and, you know, like it would be like Stammy hotdog figures, or I think I'm getting this name wrong today, a couple of years, but, you know, something like that.

And the community was really the one that stepped in and created the narrative and created the characters. And I think in a lot of ways, what that demonstrated is that we've sort of made a mistake. A little bit in entertainment, and maybe this is a different way to kind of explain your or to get at your earlier question, right?

Which is in entertainment and in games in particular, we've had this idea of how to create, you know, worlds, right? And that that world building sort of starts with a very small group of people years in advance. Right. And they try to think about, you know, what the world should look like and how it should work.

And, and, you know, these are the characters and these are their backstories and so on and so forth. And this is the way they're going to interact and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think what Blazeball demonstrated is that you can just really turn that on its head. You know, you don't, you don't actually need to figure out and you don't really even need necessarily a third party IP like the Raiders or like Twitch plays Pokemon or whatever.

It's certainly, I think nobody would argue that it's not, or it can't be an accelerant. But I think what Blaseball showed is that it turns out that when you put, when you give people blank space, right, when you give them the ability to, you know, tell a story, you know, or at least contribute to it, they will.

And so I think our, our view is that this is more about how, more about, that Blaseball has demonstrated in a lot of ways, what is, what is, what is a, I guess you'd say almost like a latent ability in people, right? That if you create a, enough of a frame and a construct, they will fill in all the things that we would normally spend, you know, years and, you know, in some cases, millions of dollars trying to create on their behalf.

Nico: Alex, an additional point there. One of the things I love about games and the gaming industry as a whole is how many dynamics we can see in games and we can draw parallels from two other industries and other situations. And so one of the things that it's always been true within gaming is that, whenever there's a major platform shift, any IP that is successful and dominates there tends to be an IP that's native to that new platform.

In a shift from, you know, PC console to mobile, the first successful mobile games were not ports from PC console IP. Angry Birds right games that were designed for that new platform and so very similarly we are creating a new type of entertainment um where the dynamics like the progress of storytelling is unscripted and fantasy based.

If we were to use existing IP, we would be limited in the kind of things we can do. We'd be restricted in the kinds of stories we can tell. When you watch a Batman movie, you know that there's going to be a next Batman movie. And so you know that Batman is not going to die. That is something that we don't want to be restricted by.

Again, which brings me back to the example of Game of Thrones, right? I think the best stories are the stories that are unrestricted in what happens in what can happen, and that is exactly what we can do. And so The strongest stories, the best stories, the best IP universes that will be created within this new category of entertainment will be IP universes that are created natively for this new category of entertainment.

Jacob: And just for that point, very quickly, like, you know, you had, you had asked earlier, for example, like how, how long would you, would you spend, right? And I think, I think a different way to think about what I'm trying to say is that we don't know how long you would spend. It's how long you would spend, right?

If there was something that was, if there was a world and that world was perpetual and that world was occurring in real time and that world gave the ability to interact. You know, and you had the, and that was on your, you know, I don't know, your, your, you know, kind of current current devices using, you know, all the methods that you would normally expect, would exist, then I don't know, you know, we think that some people will spend a lot of time in these things.

We think that some people will spend very little time in these things and that both answers are okay, you know, a different way to think about it is that, I just think about this for myself, maybe, you know, I, I have been a lifelong gamer, as I mentioned, but it's been a while since I've had time to play games.

When the Switch came out, I went out and bought it. Like a lot of my friends, I was very excited to play Breath of the Wild. I was super excited about that game. I played it for about 45 minutes. I have not picked it up since it's not a reflection of the game. The game is amazing, right? My problem was that when I looked at it two weeks later, I had no idea.

Like I loaded the save point. I had no idea where, like where I was, what I was doing there, what was going on. Right. And I was like, I was like, okay, well, I guess I could go all the way back to wherever the hell I was in the beginning. And then, you know, I just never end up picking it up in a multiplayer game.

I have sort of a variation of that problem, right? I don't have 10, 000 hours to go learn Valorant, right? Or to get good at it. I, you know, maybe I played CSGO or I played Overwatch, whatever it was that I played. And now, you know, that that's the one I've spent time in. And so it becomes troubling because, you know, if you show me a new IP, even if it's amazing, even if it's an incredible game.

There's so much, there's so much required of me, right? Like time, focus, energy, et cetera, in order to, you know, be good at it, in order to, you know, to drive the story, like to be the battery, if you will. In a multiplayer sense, you know, what's going to happen? I'm going to find two hours, maybe, that I could play this new game.

I'm going to get yelled at by 12 year olds. I'm not going to yell back because, you know, I'm the adult, right? And I'm, you know, I'm going to be like, well, I'm trying to be on the objective, or I'm trying to, you know, like, I don't know what's going to go, what's going to happen. And that's, that's not going to be a very filling, fulfilling entertainment experience.

And so I guess like the, the, it's not to, it's not to try to be vague. It's just to say that like the point in a way is not to, is not to do those things, right. Is to give you the ability to have something that you can plug in and plug out of, right. In the same way that, um, if I don't, if I don't catch the big game on, on the weekend, right.

You know, I don't know if you're a sports fan. I mean, I am, but. You know, it's like if I don't, if I don't catch like the big game, that's okay. Like, it's okay. You know, it doesn't matter. It's fine, right? I can, you know, I can catch it next week, right? Or I can spend, I can decide to take my weekend and spend time with it. Both are okay.

Alex: Hmm. Okay. Yeah, I think that that makes a lot of sense. And I think, you know, this is a, it's a very interesting thing from the Consumer side about what someone would want to enjoy and how people want to engage with entertainment. , and you know, as we talked about in the, as you know, having IP, you know, something like Blazeball, which kind of created its own native IP from scratch.

And so I kind of want to in the last like 15 minutes of our episode shift to. You know, there's clearly this could be like an interesting consumer entertainment experience, but is this an interesting business? And to quote something here, Blazeball ran for three years. It launched in 2020 and shut down in 2023. As someone who's obviously had the, the founder of the company on air at, at the time that Blazeball was really hot, it was an amazing game. However, they found it really, really hard to support due to the high cost of requirements of developing this game. And so they did have their own IP, but it was again a very small fan base dedicated fan base.

But they didn't, they had struggled very much with monetization. And so from guessing for your, for your guys's question, beginning with a non IP license IP and building your guys's own IP from scratch. What do you guys think is realistically to start the addressable market for a game like that, the first one that evil plan will be making and kind of what business model do you approach or you, do you think that you're going to tack onto it?

Just given the success of something like, you know, looking at the different models of GenVid and looking at what happened to Blazeball.

Nico: So we start, like, when we describe what we're doing, we're talking about AI native entertainment. And I think that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

But when I hear AI native entertainment, I think about entertainment where the, every additional unit of content is produced by AI. And in traditional forms of entertainment, every unit of additional content requires human work. So if you think about a video game, every, like every level, every quest requires work from a human.

If you think about a, a, like the sports sports league, you know, every game requires work from a human. Similarly, every, every new episodes requires work from a human. If you're going to use AI in, in many of the ways that we see it today, you'll see that AI is just helping things being done faster, but at the core, there's still humans making decisions.

And when I think about AI native development, I think about. You know, making it so that the AI decides what the content is, and that is a fundamental shift in how entertainment like is produced. I think that's like you all, you both, both of you will notice and most of the audience will notice, but most of the decision making in IP or like entertainment products is a costs like a risk or a cost benefit analysis and how risky it is to make something and how much we expect to make from it.

You know, if you look at most of the big AAA games, they are, you know, their sequels of existing games or their reboots. Right. And the same is said within the, like the movie and TV and show landscape. Right. All of the major IPs are like, there's almost so many, almost no major new IPs that are being developed just because it is super expensive to make because there's so many, you know, humans involved.

There's so much work involved. And the risk is just it's not very high. The risk or the potential benefit, it's just, you know, it's so risky because you don't know if it's going to hit or not. The moment you can replace humans with AI, you don't, you can truly have a native entertainment that is like, it just fundamentally changes everything, right?

What if you can create like a new IP for, you know, but a fraction of the cost of what it would traditionally cost. It just changes the way you try to do experiments. It changes the kind of products that you make. It changes, you know, how you look at small markets. and so from that point of view, I think that this is really revolutionary.

It's one of the reasons why I'm so excited about what we're doing.

Jacob: Yeah, I think I would just add that, you know, when you I said earlier that we were, you know, you could describe the company as having built an operating system for this new form of entertainment. And that's very true, you know, I would say that in a lot of ways, this is sort of, you know, stealing from the best, right?

If, if you want to understand kind of what we're doing or how we're thinking about it from a business perspective, and, you know, to your question about kind of original IP, I would just think about Epic, you know, Epic did Unreal, right? And Unreal at the time was, you know, relatively, it was pretty successful.

Right. But they did something very, very smart. You know, they use that as an opportunity to get Unreal Engine essentially as a free output. And Unreal Engine allowed them both to have the time to, you know, kind of find what was going to be the best version, in a sense, of that online 3D multiplayer game, which turned out not to be Unreal, it turned out to be Fortnite.

And along the way, they were able to, you know, and I think in some sense, naturally create, organically create an ecosystem around the engine, right, that helped them. Find, find, ultimately help buy them the time, in a sense, to find that IP, right? And so I would say that in many ways, this is very similar.

You know, we, we created Prism. We used that to get Prism OS as a free output from that process. And that, you know, an OS like, like any OS has apps, our apps are called Prisms. We expect that an ecosystem will You know, build around that over time, and for us, the point of it is that a prism or prism OS can solve a almost a very fundamental problem you've touched on in a lot of different ways, which is really just that we don't currently have the way to make the content that audiences demand.

We don't have it. Right. We can try, but we don't have a good way. And so we've tried to solve this in one way. We tried to solve another way, you know, UGC or whether it's, you know, different, different approaches. It's not, they've not really worked, right? And I think the idea here is to solve that problem.

You know, there, I said at one point that there are not enough good storytellers in the world, right? And that is really a problem. It's a problem of scale in a lot of ways, right? And of the good storytellers, they just don't have enough time. To tell all the stories that you want to hear, right? And so this is one way, and I would say maybe possibly even the only way that we're going to solve that problem.

Alex: Okay, so for you guys, this Prism OS part is part of the business model because you'd plan on potentially licensing the Prism, the Prism, I guess, OS itself in a similar to an engine business. And so I guess my question was, are you guys thinking about monetizing content? Are you guys, it sounds like you're potentially monetizing.

And so that's kind of, I guess the question is, you know, is it when you make this first fighting game experience or what, whatever it may be, are you, is that where the value is coming from? Because it's obviously there's cost reduction, right? But then there's inflows. And so I'm kind of wondering and curious about how you guys are thinking about inflows.

And it sounds like it's mostly infrastructure rather than content side.

Jacob: No, I don't think you have to make a choice. I think it's just sort of a false choice. You know, it's like you're going to make a product that has its own commercials, right? And in in doing so, you have a platform, right? You can make content on that platform.

You can open that up to other people that could look like co production that could look like an AWS model. I mean, there's all sorts of ways in which you could do it. I don't think that I can give you a specific example as to like, what is the best way? Because we don't know. You know, what I would say is that, we are going to, you know, explore and, and there are lots of options and we'll focus on, on the best one.

For me, I think the, you know, the most important thing that I think about really with this company is really not so much, any, anything we're talking about here, but really just the team. You know, the, the team for the company is pretty incredible. One thing that I find really kind of amazing. It's not just that, you know, we have these like experts, you know, in 20 years and like all these, all these things we're talking about, right?

Whether it's like e sports or sports entertainment or actual entertainment or, you know, gaming and so on and so forth. It's that they, you know, I didn't recruit a single person. Every single person on our team asked to be here, right? And I think the reason why they asked to be here is because they all fundamentally want to change the world.

But more importantly, and I think maybe to your earlier questions, they want to change it right now. You know, they don't want to do it in 10 years or 15 years or 20 years, right? They want to, they want to be able to solve these things that have been problems for them or pain points for them in their own careers.

And in a lot of ways, you know, I don't know that any idea is, you know, perfect exactly. And I'm not suggesting that this is, but I think it's, it's for all of us. Maybe the the best shot we've seen from our different perspectives at being able to solve the kinds of things that we've been talking about, which, you know, frankly, are huge issues.

Alex: Hmm. Okay. And that was actually going to lead to one of my next questions about building the, this, the organization that you guys have. And, you know, I had a question in here about who are the right people to bring on board to the endeavor. It sounds like you didn't have to bring anybody on board. They all just voluntarily joined the joined the ship.

But, I do have a question around the actual, you know, as we said before, one of the problems that you guys are trying to solve is you fundamentally believe that the storytellers do not have enough manpower or hours to tell all the stories that everybody wants to hear and consume. And therefore, Nico, to your point, you actually believe that it's not AI in the process and with human in the loop, you mean human out of the loop, AI drives the process entirely.

They make the shot calls, et cetera. And so. But as you're beginning this journey, right? Because I presume that you're at the beginning. And there's lots of talks about where AI is going and what it will be in the next 510 years. But for right now, I assume that you want to hire some sort of storytellers at the beginning of the process to architect some sort of.

You know, the first fighting game that you guys are talking about is it challenging to hire any like narrative directors or people who want to tell stories who know that their stories are going to be influenced by a crowd? , can you tell me a little bit about recruiting those types of people?

Jacob: Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to.

So, uh, the, the answer to your question, I mean, the succinct answer is no, it's not hard. you know, I think that the, the yeah. The truth is that everybody in the games industry has always wanted to make, you know, a beautiful game. They've always wanted to make, to tell a beautiful story. They've always wanted to do these things.

And to Nico's point, why don't we? Right. Why don't we make the beautiful games we want or tell the wonderful stories we want? And the answer is because we can't afford to, right? We just can't. And, and so, you know, I think the, the way that I would think about this is much less about, you know, a restrictive version, but more about just a fundamental unlock, right?

It's, it's like, if you want to tell the world's most amazing story, right? And you know that there's no way you're ever going to get the resources to tell that story you want, because it's just too cost prohibitive in one way or another. This is a way that you can tell that story. And I think in a lot of sense, it's more like, I guess you'd say that it's sort of turning it more into science than art, right?

Which is the science of storytelling. You know, how do we tell stories? So to kind of go back to what I was saying before, when you think about, you know, can a computer make you cry? And what does it mean to build a story machine? That is, in a certain way, thinking about it more as science and engineering in a sense.

And less about, um, you know, the reliance on a, on a specific person to be able to, you know, kind of shoulder that entire world.

Alex: Okay. Well, we are wrapping up on the end of our episode and I want to ask you guys two, um, quick conclusionary questions. Jacob, perhaps you would lead us off here.

Is there, if you had to name one risk, the biggest existential risk to Evil Plan’s plan, what is that to you? And why?

Jacob: I mean, I suppose I suppose that the, you know, that the right answer would be to say that, you know, there's, there's some risk that we are, you know, directionally wrong, right? That somehow we've, we've just gotten it wrong.

You know, my view there is that all the available evidence, everyone I've ever spoken to, everything tells me that that is not I think, you know, and so there's, there's far more indicating that, that, that we are directionally correct and not, I'd say. the other, you know, the other thing that I suppose would be a, a risk to the company would just be that.

You know, we like all companies that we don't execute correctly, right? And I think for me, you know, the answer there is really just the team. You know, I can't give you all the answers to exactly how this is going to work or that's going to work or what's good or what's bad or what? You know, I don't know.

I mean, I think when you when you do something transformative versus something else. You know, by definition, you don't really fully understand all of these things yet. But if I had to, you know, go to go to battle with a team of people that I trust to be able to figure out what the right thing to do is to understand, you know what, how to make the right trade offs and to execute it correctly.

I wouldn't feel I mean, I wouldn't feel that way. I'm like privileged, frankly, to be around the people that I'm with and to, you know, frankly, it's very, I mean, I don't know, maybe moving is the right word, but it's pretty, it's pretty impressive to me personally, to have people who I respect, you know, want to drop whatever they're doing and come work on this.

And so, you know, I think for me that that is the, yeah. That is both in a sense, you know, probably the most true, the most true risk, but also the reason why I feel the most confident about what we're doing.

Alex: Awesome. Yeah, I think that, and I think that is really moving and it is really exciting. But thank you for sharing, I guess some of the things that you could, so I think always, you know, when you're at a company, you're thinking about, you know, what is the risk here?

What could go wrong? And then obviously how do you play defense against that? So that was the thing, sort of the, the impetus for the question. And now, Nico, I'm going to ask you this question, because you're good at this, and you like these kinds of questions. But, you know, paint me a picture of a strange and dystopian future, where this is the primary form of content, the, you know, the, literally the way that people interact with entertainment. And what does that look like to you?

Nico: Asking me to paint a dystopian picture. You're just asking me to, you know, talk about the future that I envision,

Alex: Right. Which is why I gave you the question.

Nico: So you're putting me on the spot here. I generally think that everything today in entertainment is fighting for attention. And I think that humans, the best a human could do is next to being healthy, working out and, you know, strengthening their body. It is strengthening their mind. I think that meditation is a superpower. And humans that, you know, don't meditate will just start to see their attention span shrink and shrink and shrink.

And so, I think that, as content becomes better and more ubiquitous, I think that Humans are at risk to fall in this trap of just permanently being stimulated from each side and always having something that's super entertaining and super engaging at their fingertips. And I think that we will have to find a right balance between, you know, healthy, staring at a wall, doing nothing and just controlling our mind and engaging in some of that fantastic content that is coming towards us.

Alex: Okay, well that is very dystopian, and I like it. Alright folks, this has been fantastic. And I, you know, it's been so awesome to hear about something that's so frontier, and, and you know, I guess to some, to some wildly out there, but to you guys, you know, right around the corner, and something you guys are so inspired by.

It was great to learn about the company that you guys are building today, the software that you're building, as well as the, the first content experience. But as always, this is the end of our episode. And if you have feedback or ideas, please hit me up at [email protected]. I'm always open.

Jacob or Jacob or Nico, if anybody would want to get in touch with you after today's episode, how can they do that?

Jacob: I mean, they're welcome to, I guess, email myself or, or Nico. It's just [email protected] or [email protected]. You know, welcome to reach out perfectly happy to chat.

Alex: Awesome. Okay. Well, thank you guys so much. It's always a pleasure. Nico, thank you for your cameo, and that's it. With that, we're out.

Jacob: Bye, everybody. Thanks, Alex.

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