Episode 1: Can we spin a Netflix?

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to iGB podcast iGaming Checkup with Dr. Eyal. Brought to you by iGB in partnership with RubyPlay. I am Dr. Eyal. I've been passionate about games and the people that makes them for many years. Humans have been playing games of chance even before we could write. So what is going on here? Why gambling games are so central to our experience as a species, and why something as simple as a slot machine is also the hardest game to make sure, there are plenty of igaming podcasts out there covering industry trends and headlines, but this isn't just more of the same. We are here to challenge assumptions, invite sideways thinkers and industry outsiders, and explore the complexity of an ever evolving, fascinating and innovative space. If you are ready to think differently about igaming, you are in the right place. Let's go. So I'm joined here with Travis Geiger from WagerWire, Right. And also from California Pulp to discuss this episode. Can we spin a Netflix looking at igaming in the context of Netflix, see what's the commonalities and what the differences. And I think it's going to be a really interesting conversation. But before we start that, I wanted to talk with you a little bit about something kind of unrelated. So I, I noticed you have a, an IMDb profile. And having an IMDb profile is kind of like, well, not common in this kind of podcast, I would say. So, you know, have you ever heard of the, of this, you know, the, the Erdős-Bacon numbers? Have you ever heard of something like that? Yeah. Yeah. So, okay, so the idea is it comes from six degrees of separation. From the 1960s, Stanley Milgram started this project of trying to see how connected we are as, as a species, how far we are from one another. And it became popularized in the 90s where people realized that, you know, for mathematicians, if you wrote a paper with someone who wrote a paper with Erdős, which was a really famous Hungarian mathematician from the previous century, then you'll, you'll get the number with how far you are. So my Erdős number is. Is 2, which is kind of, kind of cool. It's a really nice, you know, it's a really nice way of bragging. But then I was curious, like, you have an IMDb profile. Oh, my God, an IMDb profile. What's your Bacon number? So I post to you, Travis, what's your Bacon number? Do you know what your Bacon number is? Which is the girl's grades? Like, have you done a movie with someone who done a movie? Who. Someone who done a Movie with Kevin Bacon. So what do you think your Bacon number is? [00:02:47] Speaker B: My. I've never met Kevin Bacon. I think my Bacon number is two, though. [00:02:53] Speaker A: That's cool. Yeah. Why. Why is that? Why is that? [00:02:56] Speaker B: Well, I guess the closest would be, I guess the one that. There's several. But I guess Matt Damon and I worked on a movie in China, and Matt Damon and Kevin Bacon were on a Showtime drama together called Sitting on the Hill. [00:03:11] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:03:12] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:03:12] Speaker A: So I noticed that you've been on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which is one of my favorite movies, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood with Brad Pitt as well. Brad Pitt. And just like you said, Mad Dam, they've been together with Kevin Bacon in sleepers in 1996. So congratulations, Travis. Now you can walk around just like me and tell everybody, like, my E. Bacon number is at least two. How is that a Saturday morning where you are? [00:03:43] Speaker B: So I. I love that. I think maybe we'll circle back to that. At the end, we'll find the igaming equivalent of the Kevin Bacon number. I wonder who it is. [00:03:51] Speaker A: Yeah, Someone famous. So I was wondering, you know, looking at Netflix and looking at. Looking at igaming and thinking, look at the history of Netflix. And for that I refer to, you know, it's a really good book written by Erin Myers and. And Reed Hastings called no Rules Rules. And a part of it. They're talking about the history. And what really hit me, if you look at Netflix, like, there's stages, but the first stage, what Netflix was about was accessibility. It was the way they broke the Blockbuster model was where Reed realized, hey, I don't want to make my money from penalizing people for returning stuff late. I'm just going to completely change this model and turn it into accessible content. You know, like, you just get whatever you want to watch, return it whenever you want. And it seemed like a completely dumb idea in a way, because, hey, you know, like, how are you going to make your money if you're not going to charge anyone for late fees? But that was an amazing idea, an amazing idea that really started the Netflix revolution. And then when you think of accessibility and you think about igaming, you can see there's a lot of commonality as well. So, you know, like, igaming made, you know, games of chance, casino games, very accessible. You can just play them on your mobile. So I see, like, a point of commonality. But then the next level for, for. For Netflix was the, you know, with the release of House of Cards, where it was the first time in the, you know, that was 2013, if I remember correctly, but which was really, really high quality content. And. And all of a sudden it's not really about accessibility, it's also about quality of content. So I think that for me, when I look at this really big thing of good content and accessibility, this is two really common things I see with igaming and Netflix. I was wondering, what do you have to say about that? [00:05:49] Speaker B: Well, I think that you hit the nail on the head with the modern evolution of Netflix, and I wanted to dial the clock back all the way maybe to 1913, so, like 100 years before Netflix, to show the cyclical nature of actually entertainment and the studio system. Because I think that Netflix, as much as it is from a product point of view, something to look for, look towards as a North Star, as a way to serve up, you know, entertainment and the attention and the affinity economy, which I think we're in, there are some first principles of being entertainment industry that I think whenever the incumbents betray their first principles, there's a revolution. And so those first principles, for me, I kind of summed it to the three E's of entertainment. Embracing technology, empowering artists and entertaining audiences. And if ever an incumbent doesn't do one of those three things, there's a revolution. So if you take it really far back to the first, when the big five studios were first getting established, one of the big five studios was actually Edison Biograph. So Thomas Edison, even though the Lumieres and Europeans were first to the cameras, Edison as the American was the first to patent the ip. So he had Edison Biograph, he had his cameras, and he was actually running after people, making them pay licensing fees for his cameras. What's that make people do? It makes them go build their own cameras because they don't want to have to deal with Edison. Now, Carl Laemmle, he had Laemmley Theaters. He was the founder of Universal. Universal started as a way for theater owners to rent each other's movies, movie reels from each other. After they would do their run, they'd pass it off and they have to stop buying them each time. Well, then the movie theaters came. The movie studios came and said, hey, theaters, you have to buy your own copy. So they said, that's too expensive. That's why Lenley started Universal to make his own movies cheaper than the studios were charging him to license them. Warner Brothers did something similar. So these barriers to entry and in igaming, you can, in America especially, you could think of it as like gaming licenses. These artificial barriers to entry actually create the competition that swallows up the incumbents. And so by creating these things, like, I mean there's a lot of barriers, but let's just focus on the gaming licenses. Now you have sweepstakes, now you have dfs, now you have prediction markets. If the incumbent sportsbooks and casinos actually had adapted naturally, they could have absorbed this competition or actually innovated. I think the other thing that's interesting too, once we get to the technology of it all, like from brick and mortar, from theaters to then your home, from land based casinos now to apps, there's another changeover that happens. And I think a lot of these hospitalities woke up and realized they were technology companies too late in the casino space. [00:08:42] Speaker A: No, that's, that's really interesting. It's really interesting point of view. I think that what you find as well, like with, you know, with, with, with igaming is whenever we, we end up in a very strict regulatory environment, what you end up having is like, like black markets starting to pop up, like other ways to, you know, to actually engage with this kind of content. At the end of the day, you always, you always kind of end up there. So one point of view we've got at RubyPlay as well, like we're trying to work with regulators, is really getting to embrace, you know, to embrace the industry and put aside that kind of like almost like a war on vice that you've got, which I think is another kind of difference you've got to some extent between Netflix and igaming. Like when you've been thinking of Netflix, you think family entertainment mostly you think mostly that kind of. When you think of igaming, you kind of think of it's more adult, more vice, more like there's more elements of shame. I actually have a whole episode in the podcast on that. [00:09:53] Speaker B: That's interesting. Yeah. So to that point, I think, yeah, the nature of the content itself is interesting. But when you think about Vice, what was vice in the entertainment industry? It was pirating, right? So they were really scared of people illegally downloading movies. They were really scared of people illegally downloading music. And then guess what, the music streamers are the biggest music companies now. The, the digital platforms because, because they figured it out and they found a way to make money doing it. Now you talk about vice. I mean, when you look at where innovation is coming first in entertainment, strangely, it's pornography. And comedians are always the first people to experiment with platforms and form because they're out specifically because they're outside of the system so that outsider nature forces you to be innovative. And yeah, I think there's something interesting there. We'll kind of color in this metaphor as we keep going. Iow. Yeah. [00:10:43] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean look, I think that there's lots of similarities I see in the way things been evolving. Right. Like to your point, like the pirating of content and then. [00:11:01] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:11:01] Speaker A: And then all of a sudden when Netflix comes about, then all of a sudden the idea of pirating seems preposterous because of the accessibility of it and the low price point. It's all of a sudden you're thinking, well, if I'm going to go out and pirate this content, I have to spend all of this time and I might get sued and all those things, but I'll just buy a subscription for, I don't know, a few dollars a month and I get access to this huge amount of, amount of, you know, huge variety of content that I can watch whenever I want. So I think it's a really, it's a really interesting, it's a really interesting point. [00:11:38] Speaker B: So when we talk about the establishment too, I just, because there are people that are doing things on the fringe I want to talk about like Vegas and Hollywood and so the, and the, and the one to one about like kind of the road that you were just starting to go down in Las Vegas, you actually cannot sign up for an app without walking into a casino, showing your ID and putting the money on the counter because they were obsessed with getting you on property because that's how they thought they were still going to make their money. And because of that, actually they have some of the lowest virtual handle digital, you know, banning handle of all 50 states. And they're Nevada because they didn't embrace it in the right way because they wanted people to come on to their property. I think it's really interesting. [00:12:23] Speaker A: That's like, it's a little bit of a Kodak moment, right? Like if, if you think of a Kodak, a Kodak moment. So the thing is. Yeah, but yeah, like yeah, it's, it's, it's when, when you got a, a model that you're so in love with that works so well for you. It's so hard to change. And I can understand this if you run a multi billion dollar company that's buying into an idea that even you invade. You came up with Kodak, came up with, with, with you know, with a digital photography. It's so hard. It's so hard. And I look at Vegas and I think that there's A point there. But I'm also kind of wondering, but when you look at regulatory element, do you think that has any limitation that Netflix ever faced? Because I was kind of curious about this, because thinking about this episode, yes, we can really. We're very limited in what we can do. Um, and that's. That's limitation creates innovation. But with Netflix, is it kind of content that you just. You just can't make? Like that. That, that kind of. [00:13:29] Speaker B: Yeah. So it's interesting. We can get into the democratization of production and the decentralization of distribution, but that. To continue that, that Kodak's great point. So a lot of people don't know Kodak motion picture film. They actually had the patent for digital photography, but they thought it was going to cannibalize their, you know, photochemical process. And of course, they had a huge supply chain up at Rochester. They had to get the film, they shipped the thing. They had distribution houses. And it's just like a casino. We're about to go to G2E, we're going to walk the floor, and people choose which chairs to sit in at slot machines, which security cameras. There's a whole industrial complex and if someone's on their phone, like, how are they going to sit in a casino chair and these vendors and their minds dry up. It's the same reason Blockbuster could have beat Netflix to the punch. They were all ready to go digital and they decided, no, we need our brick and mortar stores, partly because of lobbying from the movie industry, because they liked physical media, because physical media could command a higher price point. It was another, like, way to be in people's lives. They didn't understand this invisible thing that you could just access whenever. And it messed up their supply chain, right all the way down to the plastic clamshells of the DVD cases and all this other stuff. There's a lot of mouths to feed and things get a little bit bloated and they go that direction. Now what. As far as what headwinds they had. As far as regulatory. Actually, they had this brilliant move where they got the sidestep the fcc. So when you needed a broadcast license in America, you were subject to all sorts of scrutiny, including foreign ownership scrutiny, including censorship laws. And we just saw it. We just saw it with Jimmy Kimmel. So Jimmy Kimmel said something that the administration didn't like. The FCC license threatened the producers of the show. Well, people didn't realize it's not about just Jimmy Kimmel's production. It's not about just Disney, the parent company they actually Disney is not the one that owns the broadcast rights to get ABC13 in Las Vegas and ABC7 in Philadelphia. Those are owned by different companies. Right now Nexstar and Sinclair, the two biggest, are trying to merge. They would be 80% of the broadcast licenses. Right now they're sitting at 30. So anything above 50% you need government approval for. Right. And so because of that, they have to kind of put play nice with what they think the administration wants so that they can get the executive approval on their merger. Now, Netflix doesn't have the same problem because they can reach every home through the Internet. And that's different than terrestrial broadcasting. So they don't have to worry in the same way about losing a broadcast license that could ruin their, you know, commercial sales, which is really what this is, was kind of all about. And, and what everyone's ultimate leverage is or they think is these ad sales, which we can talk about. Because I think the future of ads and the companies and even the gaming companies that are going to be doing it better in the future, it's not the traditional model. So you had these broadcast licenses that they're not scrutiny to. You also got to do the hbo, you know, grandfathered in, where you can cuss, you can have sex. Because now it's the Internet, just like how it was pay cable. Right. And pay cable was subject to a different set of FCC licenses. So the FCC licenses, which go back to the radio days, and ironically enough, just last year, I think Voice of America this year, Voice of America was shut down. But this idea of terrestrial radio and signals, before even satellites, is still governing basically the, the legislation around mass communication. The Internet is a different set of mass communications. So when it comes in that way, you don't have to deal with it. A huge benefit for Netflix. If Jimmy Kimmel ever went off air on abc, Netflix can make a offer to him the next day and they wouldn't be subject to the same amount of scrutiny. [00:16:56] Speaker A: Yeah, but it's interesting to see that there's a whole ecosystem within broadcasting content that unless you are, you know, you're very close to, just like we are in igaming, we understand the regulatory landscape and the limitation that it creates. When you think content, you don't quite see it. It's kind of like it sits there under the hood and then you get to see content. And there's all of the. But there's all of these limitations and regulations. But what, what, who can broadcast what to what age, at what time of day, what they can say what they cannot say, you know, and, and that's, it's actually quite fascinating, I guess, as, as an equivalence between the iaming and its limitation and regulatory environment and, and, you know, and what you can actually consume from, from the broadcast perspective. But, you know, I was thinking, looking at the, the how would, how would Netflix would view its competition? Like, there's a famous quote from, from Reed Hastings when he talked about what, when, when he was asked, are you worried about all of this streaming, other streaming services? And he said, no, no, no, no. Like our competitors are not really the other streaming services. It's sleep. He literally said that. It's sleep. It's games, it's social media. I mentioned TikTok and those are the things that we actually worry about. Where you look at the way he proposed, like people consume the content is the time, the free time that they've got. And the thing is, when you look at igaming, we look at the sessions, people don't sit like in Netflix and they don't really binge shows like you do on Netflix for hours on end, which I think we all are guilty of at times. It's more of that kind of a grinding on. On some content. Right. And then it's usually short terms, the decisions are much shorter and discovered throughout the day. [00:18:56] Speaker B: It's. [00:18:56] Speaker A: It's the time on the dentist, you know, it's the time in the subway where, where you look at, where you look at Netflix, it fills up slightly different areas of time. And when I think of the closest equivalent of a direct competitor of igaming in between time. Right. I don't know if you remember it. In 2020 was a company called Quibi, which lasted for a solid maybe 10 months. I was one of its subscribers. I liked the content only lasts for 5, 6, 7 minutes. Abysmal failure. So I was wondering, how do you see that competition between consumption on the Netflix side and then consumption on igaming side from the players. Players on of your perspective. [00:19:43] Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting and I think Reed Hastings quote right there, probably good at the time when he was the only game in town, but I don't think it's the same anymore. I'll tell you why and answers the other question of yours. He was dealing in the era of the attention economy when you were just trying to reach people's time. Now we're in the area in the era of the affair, affinity economy. So it's not just where you spend your time, it's how much you enjoy spending it there. I mean, If I, if I stare at a slot for 20 minutes and it does the same thing and I lose all my money. Like, yeah, you know, 20 minutes time on app. Like. But it like because, because there's no narrative to participate in. There's no journey. Especially like sports betting, which is what we mostly deal with. You do all this research, you place your vet, okay. And then it hits her. It doesn't. And then in between. What are you doing? Are you just staring at your bet? You're like sweating it, watching the game. What people I think are misunderstanding about prediction markets. It's not just that you can bet on the Pope that has very little of their actually it's a marketing stunt. So everyone talks about, oh, they have a market on what's the South Park's gonna say. They have a market on when the pope's gonna die. That's a marketing stunt. Their volume comes from their major markets. The reason people like it other than it's simple to understand out of a dollar is they have agency autonomy over their choice. They can sell out of their position, buy into a new one at any time while the event's going on. Right. And so a sports bet is just this asset that's block frozen. Boom. Can't do anything with it except get mad at the cash out offer. Right. Try to hedge it. But even that's confusing. WagerWire my company, Quick Plug, you can sell your bet at any time. You can buy your friends bets, you can do fractional sales, right? That turns the bet itself into a piece of media. And I think like people think that you're going to turn on a slot machine, like you're going to turn on a show. It's like every single bet, every single moment is actually part of a narrative journey. And I think the really good game developers are going to do that. Right. And if the, the aggregators don't want to let them in, then they'll probably just launch it on their own aggregators. I want to get to too, because Hulu is a great example of an equivalent of an igaming aggregator. But back to that Reed Hastings quote real quick. Like the reason that YouTube is coming up like this on Netflix, eating into their share and actually more people watch YouTube than watch all of terrestrial television combined now is because they're a creator forward platform. Netflix actually ended up building the exact same thing it disrupted. It hired all of the executives from the companies that it got all the people at Paramount and Warner Brothers and Universal in trouble and then it hired them back to basically build the same exact sandcastle. And what you end up is with movies by committee that takes two, three years to get done and by the time they're done the culture's in a totally different place. Whereas YouTube is iterate iterate iterate creator first, creator first, creator first. And you that ends up being where the conversations happen TikTok too and when the conversations aren't happening and that because. And the conversations people want to participate in that affinity which shows that people are feeling like are fresh or new that you know that affinity and it's just like new Netflix show blep. The best Netflix shows right now are something to do with something that affinity is already attached to like the Charlie Sheen documentary and but that's the problem with the tail chasing that Hollywood is doing is they think you like this so they're going to make more of it but every time they make more of it, you like it a little bit less and it's a death spiral. [00:22:58] Speaker A: The thing is, you see, I think that what's, what's at the core of a lot of it, it's, it's the problem that you try to solve is I call it consumable content. Like for me in my background from making casual games you have viewers or players that they are used to the content and now you need to continuously be in that kind of like chase right to create more and more content for people to engage with. And that's really, it's a really big problem to solve because your best players, the most engaged players I would say even for viewers, even if it's a subscription model, the ones that are less likely to leave and just probably up their subscriptions, they can watch it on more screens and all that are the ones that have been with you for a while, but they are also the ones that have watched all this stuff and now you're just feeding them with these low equality derivatives. Right. So the consumable content is really the biggest problem to solve. And in RubyPlay we believe we have the vision of trying to cater for this because we realize that for you know, for, for the operators, you know, the, the, the, the players in the, in, in, in say in the US the way to actually be bring value is about how they can entertain their players in a way that distinguish themselves from, you know, from, from, from others. Because if, if I'm going to go and play a specific slot game with you or have a certain like jackpot mechanic, whatever, I can just go and do it with anyone else. So it's not really interesting how do you distinguish yourself? But at the same time, for you to distinguish yourself, you need to work on IP deals, you need to work on features, you need to do all of this. You need to start creating content that is not just grinding, it's bingy. And as you try to create this bingy content and moving from grindy content to bingy content and give yourself that edge, right then now you just brought on yourself the problem of consumable content which then for Netflix, you know, like trying to solve it by doing recreating derivative. But then in YouTube, user created content and TikTok user created content that is, you know, that is created fast and is relevant and also is driven by lots of influencers and all that. The consumable content is just, it's so rich and it's always there and it's. Some of it might be trashy, but still there's always something to watch. And then when you think of igaming, how do we kind of create this? And then for us, it's trying to really work with those brands and then create those speeds in the stuff that we create to allow them to enter the world of consumable content and sustain themselves there in a reality. We have regulation and you can't really do stuff very fast and you have to comply with all of those things. So I think that's a really interesting shift that we see that kind of like we're probably a few steps behind Netflix. But I wonder if you're going to end up at the world 10 years now when you're going to have like player created consumable content that is like igaming content that would be really interesting or something like this would look like. [00:26:12] Speaker B: That would be really interesting. So looking at the most successful entertainment products, they all build their own world, right? They only have their own cinematic universe. And like within that actually the fans have creative license to write fan fiction, right? To dress up and do live action role play, to, you know, create all sorts of their own world within this world. It's like the Netflix menu isn't the same as a blockbuster shelf when it's at its best. You step into the world of Stranger Things when you click it right and then you come out of there and you go to the Stranger Thing message board. You dress up like Stranger Things for Halloween. And now Netflix is Halloween having live Stranger Things experiences. It's all about creating this experience that you can step into. So what I kind of think when I look through some of these homepages of igaming casino sites, it's like the menu screen of Netflix and then clicking into it just plays the trailer on repeat. Is kind of how a lot of these games feel. The story doesn't take you anywhere, it doesn't pull you in and it certainly doesn't give you license to participate. [00:27:11] Speaker A: But it's also like I think that the technology, the hardware that is used, what makes many of those platforms so successful, the igaming and accessibility by the way and also YouTube, TikTok. But it's just, you just need the mobile phone, it's in your pockets, you are there, you can record something crazy just happened and you can insert yourself with, you know, when, when if you need to carry like your 70 inch TV, you know, or, or you, or you need to have your, your you know, complex virtual reality Googles and all that, that's where, that's where things don't quite flow as naturally. I'm not even sure that even you know, if you've got, if you have like those, those, those glasses that might not follow as naturally would just yet to be seen. But I think that it's like the, when you, when you look at, when you look at the hardware itself, like I believe it's always going to be simple. Like it's going to be the simple stuff, the cheap stuff that you have on your, on your, you know, on you, on your pocket that you can engage with that you can feel that in between those a few moments here and there and then continuously have something interesting to engage with. I think probably that would also be, you know, similar to what you do at WagerWire. Like it's, you have a few minutes there, you take your phone out, you do, you know, you, you engage. Maybe you are the pub watching a game or maybe you are the pub watching a TV show and then you can engage like that and maybe some of the experience just happens in your head right before you even actually it's a good. [00:28:51] Speaker B: Okay, so yes, that's a great point. Actually we don't even measure success by time on app. We measure it by the amount of times people are returning after going to our partners app. We want them to like click out but we're like that center of gravity and we kind of flavor or tint. The way that they even think about sports betting. They're going to look at their sports bets for the day first they go on wage wide of their portfolio. They might do eight clicks and come back an hour later. But like when they, when they think about sports betting again, that's like where they start their journey. And so about the democratization of kind of like creation because I think like this is part of the decentralized distribution as well as like the platforms in the entertainment space. Looking at just the infrastructure that was built. The idea of a sound stage was a warehouse that was soundproof because sound movies just came along and the microphones were, you know, a certain way. And now you have these giant warehouses and they would build sets. Right. And now I was just at the Sony Pictures lot. It's an empty cathedral, right. No one can even film in California any. Well, we'll see. Trump just put 100% tariffs on foreign which is gonna do. Which is like town's freaking out because they're already crunched. [00:30:00] Speaker A: Definitely an interesting world we live in. [00:30:02] Speaker B: It's crazy. So you know, the Tyler Perry just built a, I don't know, a couple hundred million dollar movie studio in Atlanta because Georgia had the tax credits. But at the end of the day they're still creating all of this overhead. Like you said, iPhone right in your pocket. Some of the most talented filmmakers are actually shooting on an iPhone. Sean Baker, who just won the Academy award for Anora best picture best director this year, his kind of breakout movie Tangerine, which I think won Directors Fortnite at Cannes in 2017, was all shot on 2015. The quality of the hardware was shot on an iPhone. It's crazy, right? [00:30:36] Speaker A: It's crazy. The, the power of the, you know, like you, you. This is a supercomputer. When I was back doing my Ph.D. and that's the. The supercomputers were not as, as powerful as. [00:30:48] Speaker B: Wow. [00:30:48] Speaker A: I just told everyone how old I am. But the thing is, it's like it's a supercomputer in your pocket with this amazing, amazing quality camera and an amazing quality screen. And you can do really powerful stuff with this for sure. [00:31:02] Speaker B: It's crazy. And then pair with that AI, which I think is overused. But when you talk about game dynamics, one thing an AI could really understand very quickly is the game dynamics that could allow you to get regulated and then you're just applying creativity to it now. Okay, that's all well and good. We have all these new games. What. Who's the company that's really going to win out is actually the one that has a trusted audience that they can test and get feedback from. And I'm not talking like data like oh, time on screen or like where did they click? But like to actually know you're building affinity. Like why is a slot working? It's A question I don't have an answer to. But when people used to think about how, how movies are working, they would do test audiences, they would do box office returns. But now the process is a little bit different. On YouTube and with these creators, creators, you're actually teasing out a premise or you actually have a little sketch over here that might grow into something but it's growing with the affinity to it. It's not just. [00:31:53] Speaker A: But I can tell you about slots. When a slot works, it's viral, it works, it works. And you can see it like a successful slot can easily get to a point where to dominate 80% of the market. Like I've seen this happening and that domination would last until something else comes about. But, and that's, that's. Yeah. So when it works, it works. And sometimes it's hard to say why like exactly. But there's always something there like something about how engaging it is, how fun it is to grind on it. The kind of, you know, the, it's and it's like a perfect storm of you know, the, the, the, the art fits your culture really well or the, you know, or pop culture reference really well. The timing, the flow, the, you know, the, the production value, all of it just create this perfect moment. And, and, and the slots are very good. Slots are very engaging and it's, and, and they're very dominating which is, which is really fascinating. I kind of wonder like you know, when do you actually have something like this when you think of like a broadcasting like do you have like the movie to rule them all or the show to rule them all? I think you know so well. [00:33:02] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I think that's actually what got the studios underwater is they were by same logic they're looking for that billion dollar B.O. cover their you know, 25, 35 million dollar kind of like. And sometimes those 35 million dollar movies will break out and be extremely profitable. But this idea of always going for the grand slam. It takes so much money to make like a movie like Avengers costs. I mean the first production, first ones were production budget around 250 million which with you know, with the marketing puts it at half a billion. And now keep in mind the studios take 50 or 60% of the return, split the rest with the movie theater. So you have to make a billion dollars to break even on the, on what was supposed to be your grand slam. And then they're going to keep going back to the well like even Harry Potter broke up the last one into two because you, you're stuck on this Drip. And it shifted at this arms race, shifted the entire model. And this is why Netflix is about to buy Warner Brothers. They got upside down trying to compete with Marvel. So just because the Aviator works doesn't mean another Tappy bird or another tappy or whatever crash game is going to work. But it might. I mean, they tried Batman four different ways, and each time it almost made as much as Avengers, but it sunk the whole studio. [00:34:20] Speaker A: Yes, yes. So I'm kind of conscious of time, so I want to kind of finish with like, with another topic that is slightly, maybe slightly less comfortable. One thing you can say though, in entertainment and the Netflix and subscription model, which is very different than igaming, that the risk of harm in entertainment is slightly lower. Unless you're binge and you never sleep, and then you never sleep and you binge and then, I don't know, maybe you go and see, seek some help. But with iaming products, you do have, like, you do have a certain risk and it's at the core of the experience, you know, like the, the, the, the winning are not meaningful unless you can lose. Right? And then, and we can see in, in social games which are free to play social games, when, when you have a. Players that end up having a really large win, they, they can, you know, they can draw. It's social, it's free to play. Like the coins are worthless, but they lose interest. And in any of those games, when you, when you have this really, really large win or really large, like you get, like you get to a point that you have all the resources, you lose interest. Like the need to lose is important for the experience. And how do you, you know, how do you see that kind of a balance? Is there something of this, like a risk of harm in this, in the context of this content that can be somehow equivalent to igaming. [00:35:51] Speaker B: Fascinating point, because when you're in the zone on a slot, you're losing money each time it spins. When you're binging on Netflix, you've already paid, you know, so you might as well just keep watching. There's a difference there. I do think the reason that these FCC broadcast licenses even exist truly is because of the moral hazard of media perceived and the censorship too, because it was perceived that this, this magical invention of mass communication, video or audio or whatever it is, could have such a hypnotic cool on people that the wrong person saying the wrong thing at the news desk night after night could create insurrection. And I don't know if they were wrong or not, but that's it actually. A lot of things. [00:36:35] Speaker A: How many people, how many people jump of rooftops after the first Superman aid? You know like. [00:36:41] Speaker B: Well that's. Yeah, I mean that's true. So, so like because. Okay, so what I will say not to get dark for a little bit, but one of the actually interesting use cases, very direct is the guy that the sequel to the Dark Knight comes out. Guy dresses up as the Joker very much in the character of the Joker, commits mass murder at a movie theater. Warner Brothers refuses to pull the movie at the request of the families because they thought that that would create, you know, a winning ideology for somebody who. And so, but who knows what his ideology was. But the person dressed up like a movie character went into the movie theater and shot people watching the movie. I just saw a casino. I mean I don't even know nowadays I just saw a casino was shot up in America yesterday. So I don't know what people's motivations are. But I do think that media the, I mean even just look at the events recently, the implication with media is that it can cause mass harm or it could you harm other people because of its influence on you. With betting, the implication is that it's self harm. It's you that you have to worry about. In both cases, I think filtering what goes into your mind like and also taking care of making sure you're not in an addictive relationship. With gambling, it really does come down to personal responsibility because I think in America if we're not going to regulate guns, we're not going to regulate gambling addiction unless it gets a weird burst of win at the right point in time. And you know, you can't advertise cigarettes, you can't advertise pornography. That's if gambling ads don't get funnier, truly they're going to get banned. Like they can't just be so fricking boring. That's honestly the sense of humor. No one would be complaining. But they're so freaking boring. And like it's like they seem like scams. So hey, shape up guys and you don't have to get banned. But I think personal responsibility is the mantra for this whole just era of humanity. For me, because there's only so much you can control as an industry. I think it's great to have the conversation. But I mean look, look this, these things are designed to be addictive. You're actually the more money someone loses, the better the game is. [00:38:37] Speaker A: The more I would, I would argue there and maybe, maybe that's just to finish this point that our Incentives are set such that we don't want that like you what you want, you want players to engage with your product for as long as possible. It's within their habit. Like if they spend, say, $20, $15 a day for the next 20 years, this is good business. If they spend a thousand bucks in one week and they are gone, that's bad business. Our incentive are not to get people hooked on our content, but to get them enjoying our content on long term from a totally selfish point of view. So I think that the incentives actually set up the right way. And it's true that like any kind of. Any kind of product can cause harm if. If it's not used in moderation. So this is really something I personally really believe in. And that's why I think it's like. [00:39:28] Speaker B: Yeah, that's really cool to hear, man. And I, my sister is actually a nurse practitioner that specializes in addiction and we do a. A show every Wednesday on Twitter where people can anonymously come talk about their addictions. And I think that your, you know, your philosophy is the right one. And what I hope to evangelize too is like, let's be building a sustainable industry, right, for. For our. For our audience. Entertain the. Back to the three principles. Embrace technology, empower artists, and entertain audiences. So we talked about the tree embracing the audience and then entertaining the audiences. If a person is not entertained, if they're getting bled, they're just not, you know, Absolutely. [00:40:08] Speaker A: The three E's. And that's a good place to finish three Es. Yes. So thanks, Travis. It's been a great, A great conversation and yeah, I hope you enjoyed as much as I did. [00:40:18] Speaker B: I did, man, I love this. Thanks so much for having me. [00:40:20] Speaker A: Thank you for coming. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of iGB podcast iGaming Checkup with Dr. Eyal. There's plenty more to come, so stay with us for more eye opening, thought provoking and stigma challenging conversations that dig deeper into the world of igaming.