Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…It’s interesting though, I mean, like where– You know, as you said, there’s so much innovation and a renaissance going on in the television format right now. Is there or will there be something similar in the film format? I mean, obviously there’s independent film and there’s lots of innovation going on. But, not at the kind of mass audience scale that something like Netflix and Amazon has allowed risk to be taken in television and still have the ability, a channel to distribute that to a mass audience. Yeah. It’s interesting. I think sort of the same thing has happened with music where there’s a psychological thing where we love the things that other people love and we all love having the same darling and the same heroes and like the same sort of music feels good to us that feels good to the other people around us. And with global distribution happening so quickly and so cheaply, you have the ability to achieve much more sameness and have much more people agree on what the best thing is. We like to think that we have independent taste but a lot of the time, we’re sort of just looking to hear from people like, “Oh, what’s the best? Who’s the Taylor Swift right now?” And that’s why we’re getting so many fewer… except for like the Beatles, there was never like the Beyonce or the Taylor Swift. They were much more distributed and there were many more people that could make it big. And now there’s this echelon of people that you can count on one hand who are like these super phenomena. I think the same thing is sort of happening in movies. This totally leads super well into my tech theme, which is something I’ve been thinking about. I’ve been reading this great book that came out last year, I think, or a couple years ago, called Sapiens by this guy, Yuval Noah Harari. It’s a great book and it’s about– It’s sort of a biological time history of home sapiens and how our species came to take over the world basically even there were – there are no longer but there were – other species of the genus homo; Neanderthals and many others. But homo sapiens sort of “won” and you could argue now are destroying the planet but certainly have taken over the planet. What actually differentiates us from other homo species and from the rest of the animal kingdom, and he argues that the primary thing is our ability to create and believe in fictions, he calls them, which are like– A reality is like there is a lion over there, run! But a fiction is like, there is a company and there is a story but we are– And the internet is a fiction. It’s not that it’s not real. It’s very real but it’s not something that any other species could comprehend. So that kind of makes me think about IP and exactly what we’re just talking about, like as the internet has spread communication instantly and globally, are we seeing these major blockbuster franchises just continue to consolidate because of the power of these fictions.…

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