The Limitless Podcast

Speaker1:
[0:03] We're here with pj ace pj ace i think is going to be the first person to ever have a full-length commercial ad entirely generated by ai run from well first but then also during the nba finals which uh was a tweet that rocketed around the ai community pj welcome to limitless thank

Speaker0:
[0:20] You guys so much long time listener and uh really excited to be here.

Speaker1:
[0:23] Uh so we kind of just want to pick your brain about what that experience was like and kind of get into the nuances of it But first, just tell us about what

Speaker1:
[0:31] it was like to make that Kalshi ad. Tell us about the experience. What was it like? Was it hard? Was it fun? Was it easy? What did it teach you?

Speaker0:
[0:38] Yeah, I mean, I've been a commercial director for 15 years, grew a YouTube channel to a million subscribers, have been around content and viral content for a while. I've been in the AI space for the last six months and have just kind of been in the troughs of this. So this was honestly just another day for me. I didn't kind of expect this to have such a crazy reaction. It's got about 100 million views across, you know, earned and paid media over the last week. So it's pretty insane, like what it's led to, which we can talk about in a bit, which is basically just most major companies coming to us and saying like, this is an order of magnitude cheaper and faster. In what world two years from now, isn't everything going to be AI generated, which sadly it will be.

Speaker1:
[1:20] I want to start off actually with a contrarian take, which is that as soon as this becomes normal and easy, Kalshi did it, they were the first ones, they were brave enough, bold enough to go first. But say, for example, four, five, six more commercials go live with VO3 as the actual main generator. And then society becomes aware that that's happening and it becomes normalized.

Speaker1:
[1:44] And they see this AI commercial and they actually realize, oh, this is AI. You know maybe maybe the product's not that good because they are actually just using ai in order to just like get get distribution so i want to give you the first the counter take like do you think that's reasonable or why will ai generated ads or you know content generally become the norm it's a

Speaker0:
[2:06] Great question and a good and a good take and i think there's a lot of merit to it i would just say that like ads historically have always been artificial like we've been talking to a lot of pharmaceutical ads recently because i made this like viral pharmaceutical ad like a month ago when vo3 first came out and they were like but but won't our customers like you know realize that these aren't real customer testimonies and i'm like do you really think they think they're real anyway like when we see all these you know like crazy medications and it's like you know insane side effects for 30 seconds like advertising's never been a particularly authentic thing that I think precludes AI from being an integral part of kind of making that. And at the end of the day, like capitalism is going to capitalism. It's not like budgets aren't going to be, you know, compressed by 10 X over the next year or two or three. So the question is just public sentiment. When's that going to shift? And I think if what I've found is that the ads of the future are going to be entertainment first, they're going to be social, like, like Superbowl commercials on a weekly basis from your top brands where it's like, this delights me, I'm laughing. It's all like the Bigfoot, Yeti, Squatch, Sasquatch kind of like Stormtrooper vlogs you've been seeing all over the week. Like that's going to be the future of how advertising is done is like, make them laugh first, integrate your product on the backend and drive them to you.

Speaker1:
[3:23] Was there anything that just you'd learned that surprised you or shocked you or you weren't expecting during the process of creating the ad?

Speaker1:
[3:29] You said you had already been steeped in it. And so this was already normal to you. Was there any insights that you had while creating it? What's stuck out to you?

Speaker0:
[3:37] I mean, I always tell people you have to work within the constraints of the medium. So, you know, the reason this was a big step change to what we could have done, I don't know, a month ago, two months ago, is that like a Google is in VO3 is an all in one tool. It does the entire stack from just a text prompt. And it sounds lifelike. It's probably 90% of the way there to what you would otherwise get. What's surprising to me is like.

Speaker0:
[4:00] Some of times just the performances and like the richness of these little new like character quirks that like you know indiana gonna win baby you know and just all these like from the chest voice and i just i have no idea how these models are trained on such like weird people and you can get weird takes and like now a lot of what you know we're kind of talking with clients about is just like taking this to the next level and i do agree with your earlier point there will be a fatigue on the like dopamine to the face for 30 seconds ads. It's, do you guys remember dollar shave club like 10 years ago?

Speaker0:
[4:35] Yeah. Yeah. So for like the next 10 years, people were like basically mansplaining the commercial was a whole genre and everyone wanted that. And like, it's great. And one of my, one of my buddies runs the agency that kind of did that. And he was just like for 10 years, we, we, this was our bread and butter for a hundred, a hundred brands. I don't want to be that for us. I just kind of always want to be on the cutting edge of like, okay, this week we did, you know, this, let's try and push it further. And we've gotten some of the best comedy writers to really like apply from Jimmy Fallon and comedy central, just saying like, you know, how do we work with you guys? Cause I think that's the, the team, like our teams is basically just a comedy writer and an AI director. And we have some supplemental positions to fill in, but that's the bread and butter. You really need the script to be super tight on that front end. And then you just need is someone who's done films like myself for 15 years and then can work with the tools and the tools are very simple and they just get faster and cheaper each day yeah could you walk us through i'm actually super curious about the tool set that you use because when i was looking at these ads it's hard to imagine that you just typed some problems in and it popped out this like amazing video i'm curious kind of like the the stack that you use to create these to create the scripts to create the videos to edit them together.

Speaker0:
[5:46] Yeah. I mean, I can screen share for like 10 seconds. If you guys want to see, I pulled up a couple of windows and for our audio, our audio listeners, I'll try and, you know, walk you guys through it as well. To be transparent, it's, it's a very similar process to what we, I did for the pharmaceutical commercial a little while ago, but basically it's like, okay, I work with ChatGPT or Gemini, like LLMs are relatively, you know, commodified and that they're pretty similar, but it's like, give me four different scripts for a standard pharmaceutical commercial. So if you didn't see that one, the basis of it is basically like it's a pill for depression. It starts off, everyone's like, I tried everything for my depression, meditation, journaling, nothing stuck. I just felt numb. But then I tried Puppermann. And basically the pitch that we found was that Puppermann doesn't target depression directly. What it does is it secretes a pheromone that attracts puppies. And then you see all these puppies showing up on your doorstep and they won't stop. but you're like really happy. You don't have depression anymore. So like chat GPT and I kind of walked through this and then I was like, okay, give me a bunch of lines. So then like the lines from it is, you know, it's like, let's see. Oh, he licks my toes almost just as much as my, my late husband used to.

Speaker0:
[6:57] I used, I used to feel so empty, but, and now I feel joy and a little concerned about how there's a pee stain on my ceiling. And then I named him Earl. He farts in his sleep and follows me everywhere just like my first husband and he listens twice as good as my ex-husband and only humps half as many of my friends you're.

Speaker1:
[7:18] Prompting chat tpt and just pulling out the gold nuggets that it gets you as anyone i think would be able to relate to as if they've used the

Speaker0:
[7:24] Product exactly if you can see it here it's just kind of like i'm getting like sometimes hundreds of okay give me another line give me another line it'll give me like 20 at a time and I just kind of like, find the best ones, pull it out. And then, and then how I get the prompts is I have like, I actually share this in my newsletter. It's like a very similar prompt structure. I'll literally show you the exact one here, but it's basically like, you know, a cinematic shot of Carlos 30 Latino man, visible tattoos on his arms, blah, blah, sitting outside this location. He's got a puppy speaks with Latino accent. He says, he looks like a rat. He barks like a demon, but he saved my life and and you know and then it just gives you like some some pretty incredible performances and.

Speaker1:
[8:10] Then you just you just stitch those together

Speaker0:
[8:12] Yeah exactly and then you're just stitching clip after clip after clip together and i'll probably run each kind of prompt like so they say there's 10 shots for this commercial i'll run each one about 10 times and on the quality mode it's maybe a dollar a generation on they have like a fast mode now it's 20 cents but you know this commercial was like i don't know a couple hundred bucks in credits to generate which is nothing if it's like a real paid commercial it definitely hurts the indie filmmakers that are all trying to like

Speaker0:
[8:38] just do this for the first time but it generates some like pretty incredible stuff i'm.

Speaker2:
[8:43] Kind of curious because what you just described would make like a traditional filmmaker probably days or months to make right that's right um so for you it's probably like a dream but i'm curious like were there any points along that process that you were like super frustrated or that like really annoyed you that you thought like maybe AI should do better? I'm kind of curious.

Speaker0:
[9:04] Yeah, I mean, I got a I got a laundry list of things I think it should do better for for one. There's really no character consistency right now with VO3 and you can get it by hacking together a bunch of different programs and doing like text to image and, Yes, we know the workarounds. The problem is it's like, it's like seven tools. You have like seven different platforms you have to stack together for character consistency. So I just kind of lean into the constraint where like when we're telling all this, our clients now, it's just like, there's no character consistency. This is going to be talking people right now. Kind of our bread and butter is like talking people in crazy situations, you know, whether it's like kind of vlog style of like Bigfoot saying this throughout time or somebody on like the Titanic or something like it's like crazy big budget scenarios everything's nuts and then we and then we figure out creative ways to kind of integrate the brand into that but we lean into the constraint for that but google's going to solve this in two months or more it's not a long yeah well.

Speaker2:
[9:58] I'm actually super curious when you introduced yourself you said that you had a lot of experience as a commercial film director and you just walked us through

Speaker2:
[10:06] how you use gemini and chat gpt to kind of help you ideate the script and the shot list. I'm curious, like, has collaborating with AI kind of like shifted your creative identity? Like, do you feel more like a curator or dare I say, like a kind of cheater using these AI tools or has it just kind of like enhanced? Like, yeah, a manager has it just- Yeah,

Speaker0:
[10:28] You know, they're like almost like employees in a sense, right? And you guys have all kind of co-created or you're like the conductor of the orchestra. It's like almost like having a team together And it's like, it is a sarcastic parrot or whatever, or it is like, it is pretty dumb in a lot of situations. I was actually just like, I was screaming at chat GPT because I was trying to get it to stop doing M dashes. And for like 60 lines in a row, I was just like, stop fucking using M dashes. And it's like, I'm so sorry. M dash. I will never say M dash again. I have logged this to memory. So it is absolutely stupid a lot of the times. And it's so brilliant and others. And that's the weird world of AI where it's this like logger algorithm, whatever, like J curve of exponential growth and still has so far to come. So I don't, I don't view AI as like replacing creativity, but I do view it as like a 10 X superpower for creative people. Right. Mm hmm.

Speaker1:
[11:20] So you obviously are able to make these commercials because of your background. You have actual experience, 15 years of experience. Not everyone, you know, tinkering with VO3 has that experience.

Speaker1:
[11:30] And so, like, what would you say that the typical creator, could the typical creator create this ad? Or is that something that you actually do need to have just like real world experience in order to do?

Speaker0:
[11:42] They could definitely create a pretty interesting version of this ad. I think we're going to get pretty good at deconstructing like viral formulas soon.

Speaker0:
[11:50] The problem is like, so like the Bigfoot blogs are really, have you guys seen that on like TikTok right now? I mean, it's all over the place. And like, I've talked to a bunch of the account owners and some of them are like, they're just kids in college or some of you are in like high school where they're just like, I don't know, I'm just typing in funny prompts. And they get like millions of views. So like, I do think that the creator class

Speaker0:
[12:10] is going to quickly adapt to this new medium of anyone being able to tell pretty funny stories. Now like are big big brands going to really want to work with like younger creators like you know creators just out of film school if they're creating good stuff absolutely and also can people learn filmmaking in a relatively short time frame i think youtube has shown us and being a content creator on instagram and tiktok show like you don't have to have a huge history to be a good content creator i think it's always just taste right it comes down to taste of do you know what hooks them on the front do you know what retains them you know throughout the content and then can they kind of re-engage share it with their friends like that's kind of the the viral concept like yes what you have to do to create the video has to be kind of inherently viral but almost just hooking their attention to watch the first second and a half is just as important and that's kind of what i really try and train people on from like my more youtube background it's like you know when mr beast thinks of a new video he starts with the title and then he says okay if If this title would get me to look at the thumbnail, then I will go all in on the thumbnail. And then if this thumbnail compels me to click on the video.

Speaker0:
[13:19] Then I will watch, then like I will make this whole video. But like his team just pitches like title, title, title, title, title, thumbnail, thumbnail, thumbnail. And that's kind of how I think people have to also approach ads now in the AI space is like, just pitch me on the first opening shot. So the, a good anecdote to this is I did this like Bible influencers one that went super viral like two or three weeks ago. I don't know if you saw any.

Speaker2:
[13:40] Wait, that was you?

Speaker0:
[13:42] I was one of the first ones to do it. So like I had Jesus on the cross and he goes, G-O-D is about to B-R-B.

Speaker2:
[13:51] I saw that. I had no idea that was you. That's hilarious.

Speaker0:
[13:56] That's great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And oh my God. And I grew up in the church. So like, I love making fun of Bible characters because it's like, it comes, it comes from a good place, you know, like whatever, man. I prayed about it. Jesus said it was a cool commercial, but it was very divided in the, in the, in the faith community everyone was like sacrilegious in the other half like this is the funniest thing you know i showed this with all my church members so i think i think but what was the best part about that it was like my first all my other tiktok videos had like a thousand views two thousand views that one had five million views like within 48 hours it was it was crazy and and i think all of it came down to the fact that the the opening shot was just provocative and good and so that's now how i kind of think of the the content even the calciate it's like I've got an old man in underwear with an American flag around his shoulders and cops are escorting him out of the arena. That's a good opening shot to me. That's how you got to think of content.

Speaker1:
[14:51] Yeah, I suppose just the laws of virality don't change. But I think the tools to make something 10x more viral are 10x more powerful. And so maybe that's what really, really changes. What you're doing is you're going after, you're leveraging AI tools to disrupt the ad agency business, at least with this call sheet ad and anything else that you do with that. But also, I don't think it really takes that much imagination to understand that the creator economy on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram reels is also going to be penetrated perhaps even more quickly. What do you think when it comes to just like disrupting industries that are big and pre-existing? How do you think this really changes things?

Speaker0:
[15:29] Yeah, there's a lot of thoughts I have. I do think that budgets are going to

Speaker0:
[15:33] come down by an order of magnitude where instead of spending a million bucks a spot.

Speaker0:
[15:39] Brands will be able to spend maybe a hundred grand and some like really high tier AI studios like us, where we can make essentially like pro sports level commercials for more in the five figure range is probably what I think the prices are going to get compressed down to. That's an amazing thing for brands. And then to all my fellow agency owners who are trying to like, well, like make sure you don't tell too much about the pricing of the generation credits and like i think if we're not sharing our process like you're missing out on the ability to kind of like help other people that help the creator class actually understand like how this works how's it so i'm i'm kind of like a little problematically to my peers and that run out of their ai studios i kind of try and share my prompts my process i share it all in my newsletter and stuff just because i feel like if we're all trying to like not share prompts as if that's some secret sauce like that's that shouldn't be what makes your studio the secret sauce and it actually shouldn't you're like your cost plus shouldn't be what you're basing your value as a studio on. Really, I think your moat as an AI studio or as an AI filmmaker, to those in the audience, is understand what actually creates the value here. And the value is always attention. And so it's like, crack the code on attention as best as possible, and then offer that as value-based pricing for why you charge still a good premium rate. Because I do think at the end of the day, a lot of this pricing will go to near zero and brands will cut out agencies entirely. And they're going to do a lot in-house with a few directors.

Speaker0:
[16:58] So essentially the winners will be brands from this AI boom and high-level creators that can wear a bunch of hats. And then the, I don't want to say losers, but the people who are going to be disrupted is these like huge, bloaty, middle-level agencies that otherwise made all their margins on kind of having like 60 different people on a production shoot.

Speaker0:
[17:19] I'm really curious to know what the perception of AI created videos is along that spectrum of people from the like slow moving companies to the really fast

Speaker0:
[17:27] moving ones that are excited about this. Are, are people excited to lean into AI or do some people feel like it's disingenuous? It's not real. It's kind of artificial in a way that rubs them the wrong way. Do you kind of see any sort of, yeah.

Speaker0:
[17:41] So like, and I, and I've been in this space for like six and nine months of like, I had one of the first super viral AI videos. It was, I took like the Princess Mononoke Studio Ghibli trailer and I made it in live action like back in October and I got like 22 million views and then I did a Studio Ghibli Lord of the Rings that was like also super viral so like I've definitely been the subject of a ton of like AI hate like death threats like go generate a bridge and jump off of it you freaking hack you know like all those insane DMs yeah some of them are like I want to put them on my wall because they're really great and and and so from a public sentiment I would say it's shifted a lot just in the last month where people hate crappy ai but people actually don't mind good ai and more importantly they don't mind funny ai because because it could it can tell stories we never could have before as you see with like yeti vlogs and the bible stuff and like it unlocks something new here so then as far as filmmakers and how do they feel about it it's changed so much from the writer strikes you know a year ago well you know where i was at comic con and like you know i had a show in production and the strikes screwed everything because everyone's afraid of AI. And then it was like more fear, more fear. And now I get calls daily of filmmakers saying, this thing's not going away. I was hoping it would. I was hoping it'd be banned. It's not. So how do I adapt? And the filmmakers who do, they will be fine. You're not going to be replaced by AI. That's the phrase. You're going to be replaced by somebody who uses AI, right?

Speaker1:
[19:07] Right. Right. Yeah. So obviously the tools that we have at our disposal are incredible. AI is That's why we're talking about these things, but also VO3 is just the first iteration of what is production grade. So in some sense, we also understand them to be pretty primitive for what they will be. Like we're constrained by eight second clips, character continuity is, you know, dog shit. What are some of the biggest things that you're excited for that you know are coming, like technological unlocks with this whole tech stack that you know are coming that you know we just don't have yet today? How do you want these tools to improve?

Speaker0:
[19:42] Yeah, there's a lot. So obviously the character continuity is going to be the first major thing that some of these brands tackle. I also just think that like production process, like figuring out an agentic approach is something I'm really interested in. Like, okay, the scripts kind of need to be co-written with AI, but the step from taking a script and turning it into like a shot list and then giving me first looks at each shot on the shot list, like there's no reason that needs to be human anymore. Like it understands my prompt structure it understands how to take it the problem is like nobody's really has like a great kind of agentic orchestration layer as we call it or the application layer from like you know that kind of sits on top of these foundational models there's great companies like free pick and foul and some of these others that are trying to address that but i definitely think that in the startup space that's where like some new startups that kind of help orchestrate the compress the timeline from idea to output is it's it should not be a one touch approach to advertising i don't think that it needs to be this kind of like iterative like shot one shot two shot three that's where a lot of progress is going to be made and then it's going to be really easy because i do think that like we'll be able to deconstruct viral formats and brands will be able to say okay do that format for my brand and ais can kind of reciprocate that Meta is going all in on really trying to do a one-stop touch for fully automated AI ads that understand like a hundred different components of your customers.

Speaker0:
[21:09] I don't think that'll be good for the next year and a half, but then I think three to four years from now, it's going to be all most people use.

Speaker0:
[21:16] So the clock's ticking, I guess, for AI filmmakers as well. You know, I don't know how much longer it'll be like three AI filmmakers. I think it'll be one and I think it'll be automated, except for at the highest levels.

Speaker0:
[21:27] And then, and then there's a hundred other thoughts I have that I don't think actually direct ads are going to be the only way we see ads. I think there's going to be narrative stories that are told on a weekly basis that's unlocked for the first time ever. So, you know, like stranger things was a great show, but I don't really have like a vested relationship in it because it comes out every four years. My vested relationships I have are with all my content creators that I like look daily and I see the top stories and I see the top YouTube videos and those are the ones that I trust. So I actually think we're going to move to that away from like Hollywood's like 90 minute models on movies every one and a half years. I think Star Wars is going to do what you see with like Stormtrooper vlogs where it's like daily content of crazy stuff from the battlefield. All this like ancillary. Sure, main Star Wars films are going to happen. But it's kind of these like little funny, mostly just comedy driven content

Speaker0:
[22:16] that's going to be given to you on a daily basis. And then brands are going to want to integrate with like product placement. That's where i'm like heavily looking into like how do we we be the first ones to are proving out these models yeah.

Speaker2:
[22:27] So if i were to summarize that trend if you had like super quick short form reels or tiktoks on this side and then you had like the longer form hollywood movies here we're kind of finding somewhere where we meet in the middle right that sweet spot and i think the point you make around the agentic process is really interesting because like you know you just want to automate a bunch of that creative work so you can kind of like focus on how you hit that sweet spot. I'm actually kind of curious about the YouTube stuff and you have like loads of experiences. So I'm really excited to get your take. Google obviously created VO3 and Alphabet also owns YouTube. And we were saying on another episode earlier that like integrating these two things would be the obvious move, right? But I then started thinking about like what makes YouTube so special, and Josh, David, and I have spoken about this so many times, it's like, it's the human element of it, right? Because there's human consumers behind it, right? So I want to see humans make that one in a million trick shot, or I want to see a million humans fail at, you know, some kind of ridiculous bicycle trick or whatever, right? And that's what makes it inherently cool. But I feel like with an AI generated video, it's always going to make the shot. It's always going to be able to do the trick. How do you see like AI kind of like fitting in with human culture here, like on a YouTube platform or on long form Hollywood films? Like, what does that look like? It can't all be animated, right? Eventually, it's going to look superhuman. so like how do you see that evolving i'm curious

Speaker0:
[23:53] Yeah that's a good question i mean like yeah dude perfect doesn't work if it's ai right they do always make the shot and so yeah that there's not going to be like that channel won't be disrupted by that but i definitely think that we're able to kind of push it to where they could probably change where they are they could be on the surface of mars and they could kind of like just retract themselves into these environments but but beyond that it's just like it's the fact that you can make now a christopher nolan film or a star wars kind of film with all the sci-fi and the budget for you know whatever like a couple hundred thousand dollars and i think that's what's going to unlock this like new wave of like very small studios like we actually just finished a 25 minute story about a story of jonah from the bible and this would have been a 30 40 million dollar picture because all biblical epics would have been a lot we made it for a fraction of the time in three months with six people working on it and that's even gonna probably get compressed like we had one actor do every single vocal performance on it and then with 11 labs we re-skinned him to do like old voices young voices male female like he did everything and and so like the Andy Serkis thing of like Gollum kind of you know multi-character multi-hyphenate performers are going to be in demand I don't think actors will be in demand in the same way that them being super attractive is going to be as much of a selling point in the future. I think it's going to be about their performance just because you can have them look like anyone.

Speaker0:
[25:20] So it's like range is going to be important. So everything's going to shift and content will 10x.

Speaker0:
[25:26] There's going to be just more important than ever, I guess, to develop relationships with your audience. All your favorite content creators, you trust that they're going to create good content. So they're going to integrate AI slowly And it's just going to be something that still feels on brand a lot. Yeah.

Speaker1:
[25:43] I want to double tap on something you said, the notion that actors or actresses can do the acting, but their physical appearance is actually not the thing that they are valued. It's actually the acting. And so, I don't know, when I see Tom Hanks act, I see Tom Hanks. I'm watching Save a Private Ryan. He's on the beach. You know, people are blowing up. And I see Tom Hanks. It's just, that's just the nature of who he is. and he's so identifiable. And maybe what you're alluding to is like there's this notion of like, Yeah, you're going to see the actor, they'll get re-skinned over and over and over again. It'll be like maybe males are most likely to be portrayed as males, but it could be any sort of male of any sort of age. And the actual physical appearance of the actor just does not matter because they're just the reference material. And all you need to be as an actor or an actress is just be good at acting and AI can take care of the rest. That's pretty mind-blowing because that's not that's not what i expected to go into this conversation talking about ai generated ad or content but that's a whole entire other vertical that i think is really interesting

Speaker0:
[26:47] Yeah i also just think it puts it puts hands in the power of the creators that can like do it all really scrappy so like indie filmmaking is like back on the menu i think actually netflix needs to be terrified and they kind of are because tick like Like their biggest competition, even over the last couple of years, hasn't been Paramount and Apple Plus and all these things. Their biggest competition has been TikTok and Instagram and YouTube because that's where they're losing all their subscribers to because people just they like daily content and they like it to feel real and familiar. And now for the first time ever, you've got like any world like we're pitching these crazy series where it's like it's like it's like aliens and it's it's parodies on a lot of our shows. One of my favorite accounts right now is this account called NeuralViz. You guys have to look it up. But basically, they parody like house hunters, but it's all aliens. And it's like unexplained mysteries and like all these funny like Channel 5, all gas, no break style street interviews with like all these other. So I think we're going to get this like brand new genres of content on a weekly basis, on a daily basis. It's going to be wild. Where does that distribution happen? Do you see it happening more on TikTok or YouTube or Instagram? Is there a specific platform that Netflix should be afraid of, like where all of this is happening? Or is it just spread out across everything we already have today?

Speaker0:
[28:07] Yeah, it's probably just going to get spread out across, you know, either it's either vertical. But what's funny is like all of the viral VO3 videos, they have to be horizontal because that's all it exports at. And they're just like horizontal clips and then with big, big, big black bars are going super viral on TikTok. So I don't even think that vertical has to be like the format. I think it's just you distribute it. I think it's more of timing. Things need to be three minutes or less to make it to Instagram and TikTok and stuff. So it's basically it's short form vertical ish content is and then you distribute it to every platform. And certain I found that certain you like most creators do really well on one or two platforms. It's actually kind of hard to like do well on all of them. Yeah.

Speaker1:
[28:55] So VO3, of course, capped at eight seconds. And I think that's just like one of the fundamental constraints that you can see across all AI models is that their working memory is just so short. They just can't really remember four prompts ago, five prompts ago. But that's the thing that I think really interrupts me in my workflows when I'm working with ChatGPT is that I constantly have to be reminding it of context over and over and over again. And that works well in the TikTok, Instagram, real short form content. But I think if we're really going to talk about TV shows, 20 minute YouTube episodes, we're going to need it. Which is pretty big unlocks out of the AI models there.

Speaker0:
[29:31] Yes, but no. In the sense that like if you actually watch shows, most like cuts are less than eight seconds. So you're constantly changing camera angles. Well, in ads, it's every half a second to every three seconds. On tv shows sure maybe they'll hang as long as eight seconds but we just did our first you know our 25 minute uh tv pilot it was no constraint to have things every eight seconds as the limit wow wow interesting i.

Speaker1:
[29:58] Mean you know more than me but even with those tv shows the scenes are acted out by the actors for multiple minutes like it's a multiple minute long scene there's right so

Speaker0:
[30:08] It's just the character consistencies and then you're just swapping angles so then but i like what's coming v google's already previewed it is basically you're just going to be able to upload like a character a scene and then elements you want in it and it's and you're going to say okay like here's your your elements of your canvas do do this with these prompts and then and then ideally too it's going to be like give me six different angles using these prompts to cover this scene it's just going to get faster and faster i think that's a net good to people who aren't even filmmakers as well these like chat gpt and gemini are just going to make it easier and easier for you to just prompt like, you know, I mean, you shouldn't prompt name, proprietary names, but you can just basically say, give me a script like Christopher Nolan style, but instead of Batman, you know, it's this. And then it's like, give me the cinematics of that. And it's going to make it visually look similar. So it's just going to get easier for anyone, which copyright and all that kind of stuff aside, I think it's great because it's like, it's the democratization of like storytelling. That's what's going to happen here. And on the topic of models, Have you had a chance to check out the new MidJourney? It just came out today. Yeah, yeah. On what that unlocks, because I know there's a lot more features that MidJourney has that VO3 doesn't necessarily have.

Speaker0:
[31:21] Yeah. So it's, it's interesting. I, if, if David is listening, your team did a great job, but practically speaking, it, it, it, it seems like something that would have been really groundbreaking like a year ago. It's not a 2025 summer model. And the, and the reason I say that is because, you know, it's only 480p. It doesn't have sound yet. Now I'm sure he would say like, we're going to add that in the next month or two or three. That's great. The thing is like, sadly, and again, apologies to all my other friends who run, you know, Higgs field and cling and all these like i don't see any world in which the category winner is not two companies it's obviously google it's going to be it and then it's bite dance tiktok because they have the biggest training datas in the world so like i don't in what world like aren't the best models going to be those now i do think it's kind of like llms where everything will get commodified over time just because like the differences between the models over time aren't so then it's like okay is it the application layer that sits on it is that the moat and and maybe that will i don't know you know i.

Speaker2:
[32:23] As a final question i was curious if you were to kind of draw out this technology for the next decade right i'm kind of of the opinion that it just ends up being personalized or hyper personalized videos and movies for each individual and is that like Do you agree with that? Or is that far-fetched? Because I don't see any other way. The way I use ChatGPT, it's private conversations. And I wouldn't want my mother or my sister to ever know about what I'm typing in there. So I'm kind of curious whether you see the same thing with media.

Speaker0:
[32:58] Yeah, I agree. And I think that's a pretty common sentiment of like, you know, every ad is going to be hyper personalized. You might see yourself in a movie, you know, your favorite movie starring whatever actress, you know, or whatever AI, you know, avatar is like your, your, whatever love interest you want. You can just kind of dial in your preferences of kind of what you want. But I do think there's this, there will always be a demand for like the shared, like we're watching a movie together as a friend group. And maybe what it does is it's like all right i'm just i'm gonna like i think like you'll have a huge star wars like film and it's gonna say this is like 80 of the story but the 20 of like what age bracket it's geared to what ages are the characters and all that kind of stuff or how violent it is or how much swearing it has it's gonna like auto adjust the the little details of that so yes as a family we can watch it and it's gonna be like most of what everyone else is going to watch and it's age appropriate for the kids and there's going to be younger characters or as yeah like my my parents are watching yeah and and the the ages would be older and you know all that so.

Speaker2:
[34:02] You have kind of like a pg-10 pg-13 and then pg-18 or whatever uh that's a rating

Speaker0:
[34:09] Yeah yeah wow and and then from a solo viewing experience i do think it'll there's it's probably going to shift more in the territory of the video games at some level i i'm not i'm not fully convinced that like it means that like i think people want to veg out and they don't want to think when they watch things so like they won't all be video games but i do think there's going to be this new interesting experience where it's like a video game with no hands like a black mirror bandersnatch they experimented with that

Speaker0:
[34:38] and that was really fascinating pj.

Speaker1:
[34:41] I've already learned so much in this short conversation so i really appreciate you coming on is there anyone Anyone else in the creator economy that's tinkering with AI or any AI people who are on the frontier shoulder to shoulder with you that you think we should bring onto the show and talk to?

Speaker0:
[34:56] Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a one of my biggest peers is a guy named Dave Clark, who runs Promise Studios. They're A16Z backed and just phenomenal, like what they're doing and more of the Hollywood space than the I'll intro you guys if you want later. There's there's another guy named Henry Dubray. That's like Google's poster boy. He's done some like award winning films for them. Lots of other creators. I'm happy to introduce you guys to amazing. And I don't consider myself that great. I'm like the most mid director ever back in the traditional space. I was just one of the first people to come into the AI space. It feels great to be a really big minnow and a ponder.

Speaker1:
[35:34] Well, at least the creative space, I feel like, is a very solid canary for everything else that AI is eventually going to touch. And so it's cool to being able to experience this frontier just develop in real time. And thank you for coming on and sharing with us your thoughts and learnings. No worries, guys.

Speaker0:
[35:51] Yeah, if anyone wants to follow what I'm doing, obviously, I'm on X at PJ Ace. And then I have a newsletter in which weekly I break down. Here's all the top AI films. Here's my prompts. Here's the process. So go check that out on my X page.

Speaker1:
[36:03] We'll get all those links into the show notes in the YouTube. And for all the listeners, viewers out there, subscribe to the YouTube. This is where we interview people like PJ who are changing up what the internet looks like. And we do it all here on Permissionless. PJ, thank you.

Speaker0:
[36:17] Thank you guys for having me. Take care. See you.

Speaker1:
[36:18] Cheers.