The Man Helping Hollywood Understand AI

Technically Creative by KoobrikLabs Podcast Transcript

Title:The Man Helping Hollywood Understand AI

Orlando (00:05)
Eve Burgquist, I’m so excited to have you on the podcast. Getting to speak to anybody at the Entertainment Technology Center is very exciting. And you’re the Director of AI and Neuroscience and Media at the Entertainment Technology Center at USC.

That’s

incredibly exciting all by itself and I can’t wait to get so into that. But also you’re the CEO and founder of Corto AI. And I would love to understand more about that as well. So you’re in this great situation where you’re

both a sort of SaaS founder and technology kind of user and company developer, as well as having this amazing role at the ETC. ⁓ So first of all, I’d like to say welcome and thank you. Good. Well, yeah, so you direct the kind of, you know, AI and blockchain and media project at the ETC. For listeners who might not know about the ETC, can you explain what it does and how it partners with the major studios?

Yves (00:40)
Mm-hmm.

Thank you for having me. I love talking about this stuff. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Yeah, so the ETC was created in 1993 on the impulse of George Lucas, the George Lucas at the School of Cinematic Arts at USC, best film school in the world, number one. And at the time it was created to have a place where the studios could discuss interoperable standards around digital cinema. And over the years, so it’s been over 30 years,

And Lucas thought the studios needed a place where they could discuss technology as a whole, but especially digital cinema, far away from regulators and in completely antitrust safe environment, an academic environment. so over the years, we’ve evolved to be a very central place.

in the entertainment industry and the media industry as a whole to discuss technology, to prototype new standards and also do a lot of R &D, is what I do. And it’s really cool because all the studios sit on my board, all the CTOs of the studio sit on my board, companies like Dolby, Amazon, Google. So we have tech companies, have entertainment companies, and we have this big giant conversation and sandbox because we’re developing a lot of new systems and protocols.

⁓ it’s, it’s tremendous. I mean, it’s amazing. I don’t know a single place, frankly, in any industry, possibly the MIT media lab where you can talk to a whole industry at once. Right. And you can affect, a whole industry. So it’s super exciting. I’m having the time of my life. There’s been 10 years and, ⁓ man, I’m, ready for 10 more years. I’m not going anywhere. I love that place.

Orlando (02:24)
Mm-hmm.

That’s awesome. is incredibly unique, know, when you say talking to the whole industry. Obviously, you know, the studios have kind of been like the five families, you know. You don’t need to kind of speak to absolutely every person. You just need these, you know, these big conglomerates and media companies to be at the table. What do you, how does the conversation flow? What do you learn from them and what do they learn from you? Do you get sort of marching orders of things they want to consider or do you much more kind of go,

Yves (02:45)
Okay.

Orlando (03:04)
No, we’re more tapped in. We’re going to tell you where things are going.

Yves (03:07)
Mm hmm. It’s both. think, you know,

we’ve been talking about AI for since I started, right? So nine plus years. And it really is a dialogue. There’s a lot of realities about the content production, post-production process that I’m not aware of. not a post-production executive. I’m a technologist. And so it’s really…

So you have these sort of two polarities, these two realities of like technology and AI over here and content production over here. And so it’s a dialogue, right? So a lot of the times we say, hey, you know, there’s this coming up. Do you want to play with it? Or, you know, I’m giving an example. We are engaging in a…

We’re starting a project called the Content Fingerprinting Initiative. And the Content Fingerprinting Initiative is an opportunity for us to test, is there a mathematical answer to copyright claims on generated output? So when does a car that you generate on Vio3, for example, become a Batmobile that is protected by copyright? When does a voice that you would generate

Orlando (04:01)
Right. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yves (04:13)
becomes the voice of a major talent. So there’s

a possible mathematical answer to this through vector embeddings. So this is perfect example of like, we come to the studio and say, we have this opportunity, we’d to investigate it. We get some funding. We test the idea. We get some of their assets. And we test the idea. If it works, it works. And it gets deployed in the entire studio system. If it doesn’t work, well, we failed very cheaply, very quickly, far away from

you know, anybody, right? So we can really be very aggressive in the kind of stuff that we try technologically. And if it works, it’s like all upside and then the entire industry suddenly has a system and a standard that they can use. ⁓ it really is. ⁓ Yeah, yeah.

Orlando (04:54)
It’s a sort of new version of hashing, right? So yeah,

so like for people who don’t know that hashing is kind of a digital fingerprint for a media file that you can kind of, you you can judge against things. The FBI famously uses it when it comes to, you know, child pornography, they hash the digital piece of media and that way they can make sure that no human actually needs to see those things in order to be sure that this is a piece of known, you know, flagged and horrible content. Sorry, that’s a.

a really dark example, but ⁓ it’s a real world use case ⁓ that people can relate to. Yeah.

Yves (05:23)
Right. Yeah, this took a turn. Yeah.

It’s essentially, is there an opportunity to represent the features, the features of a voice, the features of a car or a character into a vector space where you can have a fairly precise

mathematical answer to, well, your car

is within a certain cosine distance of my protected IP, in which case we decide that this is too close and you have to, you So it’s great. mean, it’s like a, it’s a sandbox where I, know, very often I have an idea, right, in my shower. And then, you know, a month later I’m working on it and prototyping it.

Orlando (06:17)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yves (06:19)
with my team

and if it works, it’s deployed throughout an entire industry. So it’s phenomenal.

Orlando (06:25)
Yeah, that really is phenomenal. I it’s such an exciting place to be. It feels like you guys kind of get to be in a constant sandbox, you know, of playing with things that you have a reasonable expectation are going to be used by these studios long term. You know, I’m.

Yves (06:33)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

and I spend a lot of time on lots, which is film lots are like one the most magical places. I mean, you know, right? So, yeah.

Orlando (06:49)
Yeah, mean, I mean, you know, what’s an experiment you’ve run at ETC that really surprised you about the relationship between, you know, stories and audiences and how, you know, how these studios can really use these, you know, technology for maximum impact? .

Yves (07:03)
So it’s hard to get in details, but

we’ve been doing a lot of R &D, mostly in my startup, but also a little bit at ETC on trying to understand narrative and algorithmic level at a DNA level. It’s really my big thing. It’s my life’s work. It’s the stuff that I’m really the most excited about.

been doing a lot of research around understanding the semantic relationships between certain character archetypes, certain narrative structures, conversations in the audience, certain attributes of the conversation in the audience about the character or about the film or the TV show, and how that

Orlando (07:41)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yves (07:48)
impacts performance. So we have a sort of a triangle between the features of the content, the features of how people talk about the content, which is really, really relevant, and the features of performance. Putting all

Orlando (07:50)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yves (07:58)
that together, years ago, we worked on Mr. Robot for NBC. And we were able to tell them, to give them very specific insights about when the main character of Mr. Robot

as these emotional tonalities, these sort of emotional arcs, the audience will be turned on or turned off by those. And this is how it impacts your performance. And we’ve done that, you know, dozens of times over the years. ⁓

Orlando (08:24)
And where

does that feedback data come from? Does it come from social media? you getting control groups or test groups that you’re running that against? How do you collect that data and understand it?

Yves (08:39)
⁓ The audience data is generally from our side. So the studios have their own research. From our side, it’s generally social media data. know, MDB, Rotten Tomatoes, social media. We have the largest set

of social media sources anywhere in the world. Literally, I was working on that. We have like 65 places we can go to to collect, including in like China and Korea and Japan.

Africa, Indonesia, Brazil, and so on and so forth. So it’s very extensive.

Orlando (09:11)
Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up because you know, I know you’ve studied Chinese film audiences as well and foreign film audiences through online conversations.

Yves (09:16)
Mm-hmm.

Orlando (09:19)
What are the main patterns that stand out compared to sort of US audiences? imagine, know, gone are the days where people only talk about box office being domestic box office. know, everything is, you know, everything is international, has an international lens on it now. What are you learning from, you know, that data that’s coming back about foreign audiences versus US audiences?

Yves (09:43)
So what we’re learning right now is audiences, there is sort of a kind of a global zeitgeist that is emerging where audiences, cultures exchange with one another extensively and in real time. And so what this does is local

values and norms, local cultures, right, kind of gets team-rolled by the sort of the emerging global culture. There are still a lot of local particularities, especially in Asia, for example, in the way that characters, for example, are motivated by their own intrinsic struggles or looking for personal power or personal gain.

versus the benefit of the community, right? So that’s a really, really big theme in China, for example, and in Asia. But increasingly, it’s really interesting that we’re seeing sort of like Gen Z, for example, like Gen Z culture is very, very homogenized, much more than you think across the world. It’s really interesting. Everybody’s watching the same things and riffing on the same things. It’s kind of cool, actually. In a way, it’s cool. In another way,

Orlando (10:46)
Really? Yeah.

Yves (10:49)
it’s a little scary.

Orlando (10:50)
Yeah, it’s funny, I remember there was a great example of the show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. One of the reasons it didn’t work in Russia was because when they polled the audience in every other territory, the audience would give the right answer. But in Russia, the cultural reality was people would give the wrong answer. They didn’t want to see that person succeed. And so they would purposely give them the wrong answer.

And, you know, there was, I forget what the book was called, but it was sort of the, notion that, you know, the way we look at things, like so much research data is based on basically white Anglo-Saxon Protestants or white educated, there was an acronym for it, but, you know, white university educated, you know, kind of people. And that we sort of, so much of our suppositions about the world and about data and about the way people interact with things is based on

Yves (11:27)
Mm-hmm.

Orlando (11:41)
this actually really, you know, non diverse test group. And so it’s very interesting that now where we’ve got globalized data in a much more real way. But yeah, I mean, you know, just when you’re doing things like that, I mean, do you localize the data by country or do you have different models for each territory or, or, you know, or EMEA versus Asia versus, know, versus us.

Yves (11:47)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Orlando (12:31)
Yeah.

Yves (12:09)
We have different models for, so we have, we process about 27 languages. We have unique models in about a dozen of them. Meaning that models that are trained in that language. And then we kind of look for the same things across, across cultures and languages, but the way we’re looking for them, the way these things are expressed, for example, like purchase intent, right? The way purchase intent is expressed, the way.

the

way influence to purchase is expressed is different in certain languages. I’m going to give you an example, really fascinating. We’ve been working with a really big CPG company about deodorants in India. And that’s putting them on my corduroy, not the ETC stuff. And what we were able to tell them was really, really interesting and layered around who…

Orlando (12:51)
Yeah.

Yves (12:59)
you know, Indians are, you know, have a lot of traditional ways to, they only have their own traditional deodorants, if you will, right? They have different methods. And so Western deodorants are really sort of like starting to penetrate India in a big way. And we were able to realize, looking at the conversations about deodorant, that

Big siblings, older siblings, big sisters, big brothers had a tremendous influence on younger kids in getting them to adopt certain beauty routines and wearing deodorant and stuff like that. That was really, really interesting. And again, we can only do that if we’re looking at specific aspects of how people express this in Hindi and Gujarati and Bengali and other languages in India that we’re processing.

Orlando (13:47)
Yeah, I mean, you you, you, that’s so fascinating. You also, you mentioned before how, you know, you were talking about how with Mr. Robot as an example, you know, the plot arcs and storytelling devices and character moments and things like that affect user engagement or, you know, interest and whatever else.

What, how do you optimize for that in the creative process? Cause you know, mean, certainly it’s must be easier in a television program where you’re, you know, you’re making it almost as much in real time as possible. but how did, how did the creatives optimize using that data?

Yves (14:21)
Yeah, it’s obviously a lot easier in TV, where it’s an ongoing process and you have this conversation, this almost real-time conversation with the audience. With film, it’s a little bit different, where we are able to process a script, get a bunch of comparables that are… So we analyze all the narrative DNA of the script, get comparables, we have a million scripts in our database. We have the largest script database in the world.

⁓ And so we can say, well, this story is like these 25 stories. And then we go out to social media and we pull data on these particular comps and we say, okay, your audience really cares about, your audience, like a lot of stuff that we find out, for example, is people care a lot more than a lot of industry executives think about the story itself. Right.

and a lot less about the cast, example, right? Especially in North America, it’s different in international markets. And then we say, all right, well, for this kind of projects, they are really going to put a lot of emphasis on the VFX. They’re gonna put a lot of emphasis on the story. They like these kinds of characters. Oh, and by the way, these are the brands that they like. These are their lifestyle. These are their cultures, right? And a lot of the time, so,

Orlando (15:32)
Yeah.

Yves (15:35)
In the traditional development process, people read a script and then they get together and say, right, here are the comps, right?

And generally the comps, and we’ve done some side-by-side comparison, generally the comps that people come up with are very mapped to the genre. So you’ll have a spy script and the comps will be James Bond and born identity, stuff like that. There’d be very sort of literal comps genre to genre or subgenre to genre to subgenre.

the AI model will pick up on little narrative DNA nuances and will say, your script, which you thought was a spy script, sure is a spy script, but there’s a huge horror genre flavor to it. So here’s a whole new category of people you can start marketing your project to, and this is what they care about. So what we’re doing is we’re bringing the marketing process into the development process.

so that from day one marketers can say, this is our target audience, this is what they’re gonna care about, this is what is gonna turn them on, this is what is gonna turn them off and so on and so forth. And then throughout the production post-production process, we can actually optimize narrative level like color, like to the level of the color, the white balance, the shot types into what these audiences really like and really want.

And I think that is essentially what this is creating is a gigantic opportunity to personalize this content downstream. So this is really where everything is going is that we’re going to be able to personalize content to you and me and, you know, different tastes and different cultures and communities.

Orlando (17:11)
Yeah, mean, you listen, for me, when I see a movie, a John Hughes movie, like that was, you know, undeniably shot in the 70s and 80s.

I feel comfortable. Those are the movies I grew up on. It’s like if somebody wants to target me, that sort of nostalgia, Stranger Things did it, the Duffer Brothers did it incredibly well. Everything, the way they shot it and all the props they used and everything else, I felt right at home in that and that was wonderful. We spoke to Sergio Perez, sorry. Sure, no, please.

Yves (17:37)
Mm-hmm.

Can I tell you something really interesting? Okay,

based on that. it really, really interestingly, yes, me too. So super impactful. Something that we’re telling the studios more and more is Gen Z males, there’s an opportunity for Hollywood to go back into the John Hughes movie type stuff because Gen Z males,

really, really love to watch movies about people misbehaving. Do you know what the number one favorite iconic movie for Gen Z kids, boys is? It’s a Wolf of Wall Street because of all of the antics in that movie, right? So, you know, if you’re watching this, yeah, no, that’s like the…

Orlando (18:16)
right, Yeah. I stupidly was going to say Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but I now understood. I now understand

where I made the mistake. Yeah, exactly.

Yves (18:26)
The PG version of that, yeah, no.

There is a huge market for raunchy, out of control comedy in America right now. And so we’ve been telling this to the students, hopefully it translates into some really interesting projects. But like movies like Project X, example, Wolf of Wall Street. it’s like John Hughes, like on mega steroids, 2025 style.

Orlando (18:53)
Yeah, mean, you I think that that’s, I think Vince Vaughn said it on an episode of Hot Ones, but he said, the beauty of those films is that they were about, there was no high concept. The high concept was a human experience. know, skipping school is, you know, you know, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Kids trying to get alcohol for a party is super bad. Like, that’s the whole idea wrapped in, and it allows you to explore these amazing,

Yves (18:53)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Orlando (19:21)
and now we’re so wrapped up in this sort of post-Don Simpson high concept world, I almost feel like everybody’s trying to do too much all the time and actually just going, can we just have something about like, you know, a guy trying to get a girl to impress, you know, just trying to impress a girl? Like, let that be it, you know? I mean, Greece essentially is a guy trying to impress his friends about this, you know, summer romance he says he had, you know, that he characterized one way. It’s

Yves (19:27)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

100%.

Orlando (19:47)
It’s all, you know, that stuff’s all fun and we’ve lost a lot of it.

Yves (19:52)
And you’re right, and I very, very much believe in the future of theater, like theater, because what you described is theater, right? Theater is not like this just gigantic high concept thing. It’s like you take one situation, one dilemma, and you just like drill really deep into it. And so I personally really believe in that theater is going to get a huge revival.

Orlando (19:57)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, listen, I’m encouraged just to hear that, you know, some simple storytelling might be back because of Gen Z. It makes me like that generation a whole lot more.

Yves (20:20)
Mm-hmm.

Orlando (20:23)
But yeah, I mean, you what are the key variables that move the need? I mean, we’re actually no, sorry, I’ll start here is we spoke to Sergio Lopez and he said a very interesting thing. He was Sergio Lopez is the head of production. He’s the CEO of Omnicom Production. So he was really talking about production from a an advertising lens. But how, you know, if you think 18 months back at the time of the recording, he was like there was a different president.

Yves (20:39)
Mm-hmm.

Orlando (20:50)
We had a different understanding of the voting population. We had a different understanding of the world than we do now. And that’s when a brand started figuring out what their campaign that’s going to launch today is about. And so, you he was like, you know, we talk a lot about production efficiencies and things like that as cost saving. He’s like, but I actually think production and time efficiencies are less about cost saving and more about putting out things that are far more culturally culturally relevant because they are far

Yves (20:55)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Orlando (21:19)
closer to the moment of ideation, the moment of release is much closer to the moment of ideation. I mean how much of what you do in terms of data analytics almost needs faster production schedules to still be relevant because there must be a delta surely where you go we believe that this is true as you get closer to the release date you’re like well it’s no longer true.

Yves (21:41)
So it’s both. what Kordo does is zeitgeist intelligence. And the zeitgeist is very fast in certain ways and very slow in other ways. you have cultural… Culture really is sort of Imagine like a Russian doll-like structure. You have like little micro moments that are cultural moments that sit within a bit more longer term

You know, trends, right? So you have the fads and then you have the trends and then you have the cultures. Things like the rethinking and shift around the masculine archetypes and the divine masculine, right? That’s a longer trend, right? So, and

Orlando (22:20)
Right. Yeah.

Yves (22:25)
we’ve done a lot of work on that for a big beverage conglomerate recently where we were able to say,

This drink that you’re trying to market needs a different male archetype than the one that you’ve put out because your male archetype is following culture and not ahead of culture. So what we do is brands generally follow culture, right? Something’s really hot, they sign a deal with them and then they put out some campaign or some product.

But then generally, that’s after that person reached their peak. What we’re trying to do is we say, all well, these are the rising trends and these are the waves that you can serve. There’s very short-term waves, but there’s also very longer-term trends that we’re advising these companies on. Things like relationship with men and women, relationship to your body, relationship to your work, relationship to…

Orlando (23:05)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yves (23:17)
your friends and so on, relationship to food, right? This is something

Orlando (23:19)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yves (23:21)
that there’s a, those are very, very long, long-term trends. And you have to be able to differentiate one from the other.

Orlando (23:25)
Yeah, well,

Yeah, I mean, I’m so glad you you you started with the conversation about Korto, because I’d really love to understand more of it. mean, it seems that you’ve taken so much of what you’ve learned from, you know, at ETC in terms of data analytics and really finding ways to.

to break down and understand and quantify cultural understanding and cultural wants and needs and has that relates to storytelling. Can you, yeah, exactly. Yeah, and so, I mean, can you just explain more about that? mean, you know, what’s the bite point? What was the thin end of the wedge where you go, okay,

Yves (23:54)
And narrative, right? So it’s like, where’s culture and what does my narrative fit in that culture? That’s what we do.

Orlando (24:09)
If we can solve this problem, then we’ll get the opportunity to solve, you know, many more with with Corto.

Yves (24:15)
⁓

So two things. traditionally, the way that storytelling has been done, and I’m talking about in film and TV, but also in branding and advertising, is very top down. You have one or several people who say, hey, this is what we stand for, and this is the story we’re going to tell.

and then distribute that story to as many people as possible. What we’re doing now is we’re giving storytellers and media makers, so film, TV, advertising, branding, the tools to understand digital culture, digital communities, and at a very granular DNA level, what is that cognitive neuroscience relationship between the DNA of the stories that they’re putting out there?

and how people react to them and what kind of outcomes that creates for sales. So it’s what’s the culture, what’s the story, how do I fit my story in that culture in a way that’s meaningful to me and my brand to be able

Orlando (25:10)
Yeah.

Yves (25:19)
to drive actual growth and revenue outcomes. Generally, we are very surprised with all due respect to our customers that

very, very large brands, most of them, not all of them, some of them are very good, still are having trouble getting a finger on the cultures around them and how to leverage these cultures to grow. mean, look, let’s just say it plainly, advertising just sucks across the board, right? It really does. So, there’s a reason for that, right?

Orlando (25:52)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yves (25:54)
⁓ And so what we’re trying to do is

we’re trying to, and people are very vocal about like how much advertising really sucks. People are very vocal about it. And so what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to connect these brands and these companies and these corporations to cultures in a way that’s very organic and authentic and meaningful. One thing that I really like one,

One nugget that I wanted to talk about that I really, really like to talk about is the most effective ad of all time was is the show Yellowstone. So Yellowstone increased sales of Stetson hats and Luqueze cowboy boots by hundreds of percent. So the revenue of these companies are exploding because of the show Yellowstone.

Orlando (26:26)
really?

Yeah.

Yves (26:39)
Paramount didn’t get a single dollar from that, right? So was free advertising for Lucchese and Stetson. But

Orlando (26:41)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yves (26:46)
you can see how, you know, it was a very, powerful ad for the cowboy lifestyle without specifically saying, hey, just, you know, buy my product. might, here’s my product. You want it. Do you want to buy it? Right? That stuff doesn’t work anymore. You have to create a story around it. You have to create a world around it. And so what we’re doing is we’re helping brands understand what that world should be.

Orlando (26:52)
Yeah, yeah.

Yves (27:08)
in order to meaningfully move the needle for them as

brands and also as corporations and sell more stuff,

Orlando (27:13)
Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I suspect, I mean, House of Guinness just launched, I think, two nights ago on Netflix. I mean, I suspect, I mean, to be honest, I don’t need a lot of nudging to want a Guinness at the end of a week, but I suspect that a lot of people will be splitting the G this weekend as a result. ⁓ But, you know, so what data sets do you plug into with Kordo? Because obviously,

Yves (27:20)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Right.

Orlando (27:37)
You know, one of the things I find fascinating is I think that actually, interestingly, what’s becoming clear now is that tech very often in new products and new offerings is sort of almost falling away because, you know, everybody’s plugging into a lot of the same gen AI APIs. And that actually what really differentiates a piece of tech or an offering is

the data sets that augment and that the, you know, the gen AI or machine learning models or whatever those things are can tap into and a user interface that has enough specificity and subject matter expertise embedded in it that it’s user friendly, not just to anyone, but user friendly specifically to the experts who are going to be using it. mean, you know, Photoshop is one of the greatest examples of that. But yeah, so what sort of data

are you tapping into with Corteau to be able to give those levels of analysis?

Yves (28:33)
So let’s head back a little bit because you said a couple of things that I want to riff off of. General AI solves the second biggest problem in media, which

is how do we create content faster and cheaper, Doesn’t solve the first one. The first problem is still, what kind of story do we tell to what kind of audiences? And that’s the problem that Cordo targets very, very specifically, right? This is the culture. This is where it’s going. This is how you capture it to create revenue and excitement, right? ⁓

Orlando (28:44)
Right. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yves (29:01)
attention, like the war of attention is a real thing. generate

Orlando (29:04)
Mm-hmm.

Yves (29:06)
AI, you know, the media, the traditional media industry is experiencing some difficulty because attention now is, it used to own attention now it’s completely fragmented in tens of thousands of channels, millions of channels. So what we do is, we have three datasets. We have the content, the stories, so we have the brand.

or the studio, and this is your story, we have what audiences are talking about, right? So that’s generally, that’s ton of social media data, but also a lot of other things, Amazon reviews, Walmart reviews, and so on and so forth. And then we have performance. And so what we do is we have a lot of AI and machine learning models that are our own models that essentially will break down the content in the DNA of the story, right?

that will break down. it’s like, okay, these are the color schemes. These are the shot types. These are the narrative archetypes. These are the emotional tonalities and emotional arts and so on and so forth. The character types. This is the actions, the comedy. It goes very, very deep into even like wide balance and contrast and stuff. These are the conversations about this content or these are the conversations about the culture that this content belongs in.

Orlando (30:11)
Wow,

Yves (30:24)
and this is the performance. So you have the brand content,

Orlando (30:26)
Mm-hmm.

Yves (30:30)
you have the social content, which is also a story, right? You have a lot of video. So we analyze the brand ads and social videos in the same manner with the same stack to try to understand, well, if you tell your story like this, down to the color scheme, your performance will increase by X percent. ⁓

Orlando (30:48)
Yeah.

Yves (30:52)
It’s super, super effective. It’s never been done before. I mean, this was really like the holy grail of marketing, of being able to tune your messaging exactly

to what is really, really hot and trending at the moment, almost in real time. And the beauty of gener of AI, which comes as a compliment to that is suddenly we can, so we’re actually prototyping with a large ad agency, right? Corridor detects a trend, matches the trend against pre-existing

Orlando (31:19)
Yeah.

Yves (31:20)
footage that they have for a specific brand, generates more footage, right, if need be,

and uses Gen.ai again to put together a rough cut of an ad or a social video that would be branded. And then a human editor will review it, right, make sure it makes sense and it’s all tight, and then distribute it. Cordo measures performance, and then rinse repeat so that the longer this runs,

the smarter it gets and it gets scary, scary smart. mean, we’re running all of advertising for a big CPG brand in India, for example.

Orlando (31:58)
Right. And so, you know, so let’s say for a piece, I mean, and so is it is that just the so it’s used in both advertising content. So you’re talking about when you’re ingesting a script for what’s for for an ad you’re going to shoot and then, you know, and then it’s giving you all of those watch outs all across the line. But also as well for television and film. And so.

Yves (32:18)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. ⁓

yeah.

Orlando (32:21)
What’s then the best way? Okay, let’s say just just taking one of the workflows for example, let’s say an ad You know you What is the best way for a brand? advertising agency and production company to be working with Corteau What does that workflow look like in an ideal scenario?

Yves (32:41)
So, so there’s the way it works best right now. And there’s the way it’s where it’s going. Right. The way it works best right now is a lot of brands and studios. For them, it’s very, very new. Right. And so they need, they don’t necessarily have a staff of trained analysts who are going to be able to, to, you know, take the output of

our models and say, this makes sense and this makes sense in this way. So in this case, what we do is we work more as an agency where we have our own analysts who are using the Cordo stack to pull the data, analyze the data, come up with some insights and come up with some conclusions and recommendations that make sense.

Orlando (33:20)
So acting

like an internal brand strategist. Okay.

Yves (33:23)
That’s right. ⁓

The second way is, you know, we have, we’re building software that is customized for each client that essentially allows them to have, to pull the data, analyze the data and analyze the input together, the insights themselves. And the third way where this is going is much more programmatic. So, you know, we’re working with

big media asset management companies, right, to be able to process the media assets with the Cordo stack and sort of tag all of these media assets with very, very granular, like narrative DNA, right? And then we use Cordo again to take what are the trends, right? What are the stories and the narratives in each different communities and industries that are really trending right now?

Orlando (33:58)
Yeah.

Yves (34:11)
match them to the same tags and essentially kind of match those tags so that in real time, a brand or a studio can say, hey, this is trending in this community in a really big way. I have assets, I have like trailer assets that really match this or I could, I only have 75 % of the assets, I can use Gen.ai to generate the 25 % that I don’t have. And then, you know, here it is.

Orlando (34:30)
Yeah.

Yves (34:39)
Boom, let’s go. So it’s like a rapid reaction capability for marketers, whether it’s studios or brands. That’s where everything’s going.

Orlando (34:40)
Right. But presumably as well, you know, if the goal is for it then to inform production decisions, surely then Courtauld then moves.

from the brand strategist position into the agency ideation role and then presumably as well that’s given either as a mandate or or corto plugs in as well at the production company level is that is that how it should work

Yves (35:09)
It may. This still needs professional storytellers to take the data that we’re giving them, and these are the trends, and turn them into really meaningful stories. We can give them a lot of detail about certain character types, certain character archetypes, certain situations and certain topics, but I think at the end of the day,

Remember, not all of this is accurate. Not all these insights are accurate, right? So you need very, very acute and smart creatives to say, hey, this resonates with me and this not so much. this is, I’m going to take this and make something. I’m going to listen to this part of the insight, not listen to this part of the insight. So it does need still.

Orlando (35:34)
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yves (35:55)
a professional class of people who really understand this stuff. That’s why we spend

a lot of time in our clients, training them on how to interpret this stuff and how statistically significant the insights are. example, sometimes you have a very, very small number of people talking about something, right? So that’s not very statistically significant. Some other times we have a lot. So there’s a lot of nuance in doing this work that we’re also trying to go into.

Orlando (36:17)
Yeah.

It’s interesting because, you know, what you’ve kind of described for entertainment or advertising is actually it moves film production, for example, much closer to the theory of or the way ad production works.

ad production comes from a very simple thing. A brand needs a piece of media that will have the result of changing people’s minds to get them to purchase X-Wire Zen. And that is usually a some sort of data conversation. It’s an understanding that, okay, people currently think this about my brand. They think Adidas is not as good as Nike from a physical standpoint, but it is way cooler, for example. Let’s say,

Yves (37:00)
Mm-hmm.

Orlando (37:01)
Now let’s say Added Us understands that about themselves and they say, okay, we want an ad that achieves this and either leads into the cool or actually we want to go against type and we want people to think that we’re a high performance product. The agency, which is the creative studio, gets that brief and gets that money and then they go away and they go, okay, we’re gonna make a piece of creativity that’s going to match this desired outcome.

That sounds, know, putting that into the entertainer’s hands, that actually is quite interesting because it kind of goes, we’ve got a marketing brief for this subsector of people. We want to make a movie that really hits 35 to 55 year old males. Here’s the brief on what that should look like. We’re going to send some creatives at that brief and they’re going to go execute it rather than studio executives, as it’s always sort of worked, going,

Yves (37:45)
Mm-hmm.

Orlando (37:53)
sitting around waiting for one of their general meetings or a script to come across their desk with a magnetic director, producer or writer who goes, you know what hasn’t come out in forever is a coming of age story of, you know, or men 35 to 55 getting back to their childhood and going back to high school or whatever it is. It’s flipping that script and making it more like, you know, a production pipeline we’ve seen before, but we’ve

Yves (38:05)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Mm-hmm.

Orlando (38:20)
just seen it in ad agencies more than we’ve seen it on the entertainment environment. Yeah, exactly.

Yves (38:25)
So both of these things that you’ve described appear to be different, but they’re actually the same. It’s what we call top-down creative, right? And it’s not down

versus bottom up. It’s both. It’s the meeting. First of all, men 35 to 45, we’re not in that world anymore. There’s about 5 million segments in that demo that you just described. So it gets very, very complex.

Orlando (38:43)
Yeah. Yeah, weirdly I picked my own demo.

What a shocker. The white male thinks of himself. What a shock.

Yves (38:51)
Right, exactly. Me too.

Yeah, exactly. So,

it’s, it’s a little bit more nuanced than that, where we, we tell our clients, hey, you know, in your market, these are the cultures. And these are the cultures that are very significant that we think are really sort of meaningful that are that are very rich in being able to create stories. So for example, that going back to that.

CPG example in India where it’s like, well, if we know that older sisters, for example, have a huge influence in shaping the beauty routine and the healthcare routines of their younger sisters. Wow. That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s a narrative we can latch onto. Like that’s something that’s, that’s a wave we can serve. Okay. And so we can go.

very deeply within that story to say, hey, this is how you put it together in ways that the data shows. It’s going to make sense. Or the creative can say, you know, I’m going to take it from here. Right. This was very interesting. I’m going to take it from here. I’m going to do it the way I want to do it. And then you sort of roll the dice on whether that’s meaningful or not. I would say, though, that what really drives excitement is

fresh and new things. And I think the marketing industry, the entertainment industry, for a lot of reasons that are very valid, really is having trouble taking risks on it’s less and less true. I think the stuff that we’ve seen coming out of Warner Brothers, for example, like in the past 12 months, have been really exciting, successful, that was really happy to see that. ⁓ But there is

Orlando (40:23)
Yeah.

Yeah, everybody kind of says

that new things are dead, but Warner’s has just been pushing out really new IP not based on existing things and crushing it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, true.

Yves (40:36)
Yeah, mean, not just Warner’s. A lot of Netflix has been doing it, Sony Pictures.

But increasingly, think the risk in media production is in not taking risks and doing too much of what’s been done before. And so I was really interested to see Sony Pictures, which is one of our clients at Kordo.

come out with, you K-pop demon hunters. You know, we’ve been working with them for, you know, six years in understanding the anime culture and the K-pop culture. You know, this was, mean, I’m shocked that it took that long for anybody in the media industry to say, gee, anime is really big. Like, K-pop’s really It’s been big for like six years. Like, wake up.

Orlando (41:22)
you

Yves (41:26)
Like, why did it take six years? Right? And I can give you many, many examples like this. And Sony, by the way, it’s super, super smart, very data driven, incredibly intelligent when it comes to this. Generally, I would say the studios get a bad rep on data and technology and using analytics, but they’re actually quite good at it. Right? There’s just inherent, as you know, right? There’s just inherent constraints in the media production.

Orlando (41:27)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

yeah.

Yves (41:51)
⁓ process that you know really limit their ability to react really quickly to certain insights but hopefully genitive ai really helps in that

Orlando (41:57)
Yeah.

Well, yeah, I mean, and the other thing is, if I’m I know we romanticize the writer working and toiling in their, you know, their office, coming up with a whole brand new idea and then sending it out to the industry and some studio picking up and going, it’s the greatest new script, you know, in forever.

But I think that one of things that we don’t, you know, romanticize enough is the idea that if you’re able to tell people what you’re looking for properly, they can still be writing that script in their office. They just have a much higher probability of it coming out and being something that eventually gets made. You know, I mean, Hollywood is, you know, so many people have given up their dreams of being a writer because they wrote something that was brilliant, but is just never going to get made because it’s not, you know, within the

needs of the studios at the time. Mm-hmm.

Yves (42:48)
And I think it’s going in a different direction now, which is what I call the let a million George Lucas bloom, right? I think where

this is going is we have now potentially millions of creators armed with the gen of AI who are themselves very, very sensitive or very attuned to a specific aspect of pop culture and who are going to create themselves content.

that fits within that culture. And then all the studios need to do is to monitor who is building an audience, right? And pick up the ones that are building their audience faster, which we’re helping them do, by the way, we have this gigantic database of Gen.E.I. creators, and the studios are very, very interested in monitoring who’s building a meaningful audience, telling a story that really resonates in a specific community that the core data shows.

will also resonate in other communities or has mainstream potential, right? So again, you’ll see like, you know, a million people will create and then a lot of that content, like I think the next Star Wars is gonna come out of UGC for sure, right? And so what we’re doing is we’re building the interface for the mainstream media community to understand who is doing something that has potential.

Orlando (43:57)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yves (44:10)
⁓ The thing that is really interesting is increasingly I think the studios are going to be doing focusing on their last strength, if you will, right? It used to be like they had the monopoly of distribution, they had a monopoly of content production,

and they had the monopoly of understanding the audience and be able to market to them in a meaningful manner and the resources to do it. They’ve lost the distribution, they’re increasingly losing the content production monopoly.

What remains is their ability to understand culture and understand how to sell within a specific culture. And so I think there’s sort of an emergent symbiotic relationship between UGC, which is going to be like high velocity, just lots of creativity everywhere, that does not have the ability, the knowledge or the resources to market on a large scale and the studios which do, right? So that’s the future I think we’re heading into.

Orlando (44:56)
Yeah.

Well, that’s, yeah, I do agree with that. Eva, we ask a question on this program of everybody. I had a great boss named Dan Wyden who said, you’re useless to me until you fucked up big at least twice. really? Okay. Because very often we get people who kind of say a lot of.

Yves (45:14)
Well, I’m going to be very useful to you, man.

Orlando (45:21)
things just like, know, yes, failure is important and you’ve, you know, you gotta fail fast and fail often. And, and, ⁓ I find that actually it all works best when we’re talking about something specific, but I would, you know, I’d love, you know, can you remember and would you be willing to admit a time where you failed and what you learned from it? I could go on forever. This is actually my, always my favorite question.

Yves (45:24)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

How long do you have? There’s dozens of stories.

No, I look, I’ve been very transparent. The most famous one is very public. Several lives ago, under a different name and a different career, made some stuff up on my resume and did some other things and was fired. And unfortunately, I was in position where I had enough notoriety that it became a very, I was working at ABC News as a…

sort of consultant producer, but really more of a producer reporter. And it became public and I was fired very, very publicly. And everybody thought I was the Jason Blair of ABC. And even though ABC did a huge investigation and it was cleared of any wrongdoing in my reporting for ABC, I had lied and made stuff up. And, know, I always tell people, like, I highly recommend dying. Like,

There’s nothing worse than failing just a little bit at a time every day, right? If you want to fail, just fail massively. And so that was essentially to the death. Like I had a huge career, you know, on Monday, on Tuesday, I had like a hundred thousand websites that were calling me a con man, right? This was perhaps obviously very painful, but the biggest opportunity for me to

examine myself at a very, very deep level, which not a lot of people do. When you go to therapy, but it’s kind of BSE, not a lot of people really do the work.

Orlando (47:11)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yves (47:13)
I had to do the work because it was like, ⁓ crap, like this is bad. Like I really messed up. Like let’s not do that again. What does this come from? And so, you know, looking at my own

⁓ you know, insecurities and selfishness and, and trauma and all, all this stuff that sort of drove that massive, ⁓ breach of integrity, was very useful. You know, I’m

Orlando (47:27)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Yves (47:38)
not happy I did it because I really hurt a lot of people that loved me and, and, and cared for me and had, especially at ABC had, ⁓ really gone to bat for me for my career and to help, to help me and stuff. And I really screwed them over.

involuntarily, but still, and I really regret that very much. But it gave me the opportunity to start a journey in self-discovery, self-awareness that is still continuing today, where I am able to see myself for who I am, understand where I am failing.

myself and my loved ones understand how I get back to, you know, baseline and show up, especially as a man and give me a lot of humility and a lot of tools to actually really control my body, my emotions, my thoughts, my future, my work, my relationships in ways that is a lot healthier.

a very long time for me to do that. And it’s still going on. I’m still doing a lot of work around that. But that is a very spectacular screw up that the Hollywood Reporter wrote about, I think, five, six years ago. So you’re welcome to go check it out. really haven’t had this is really the first time that I have the opportunity to talk about it. And I’ve been meaning to talk about it publicly in a way that wasn’t like self-serving or was

Orlando (48:47)
Right.

Yves (49:04)
promotional but in a way that hopefully would help people. ⁓

Orlando (49:06)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yves (49:09)
You know, it’s really important to be aware of your shit and handle your shit. I’m sorry, and I hope we can say that on your podcast.

Orlando (49:15)
No, you can

absolutely swear it here. mean, you know, it’s, that’s a fascinating, I mean, A, it’s a fascinating story. B, you know, I’ve not talked about it very often, but I got clean about seven and a half years ago. And I similarly experienced some sort of, you know, ego death through doing a lot of that work, you know, and, you know, so I very much understand kind of where you’re coming from.

What’s interesting to me, do you think, you know, because obviously you have a lot of that, you know, dies and you do a lot of the work to reframe who you are, what you care about, how much of that, who you were was just buoying up your insecurities. What did you find was the things, what were the things that did stay? When you kind of take away all those insecurity things and all of that.

the building up of one’s career in a dubious manner or whatever it is, when you strip all that away, what are you left with and what did you sort of keep about yourself? Or what was the fire around yourself that you huddled around to go, no, this is good and this I’m gonna take forward?

Yves (50:20)
You know, what stays is what saved me at the end of the day. And, you know, I’m really, honestly, really proud to have been able to reinvent myself and, you know, have a new life, a new career that is built on solid foundation. What stayed and what saved me is just hard work and hunger and hustle and curiosity and trying to think differently about, you know, identifying new opportunities.

⁓ you know, I’ve never written a resume. Everything that I’ve done, including, you know, starting Kordo, obviously, but also my, my position at ETC, I walked into someone’s office or give someone a call and say, Hey, I really want to work here. You’re have to pay me for six months. I’m going to show you my worth, but I don’t want to work anywhere else. And I think this is tremendously exciting. And I just want this to be, just want this to be my life. And now that I’m hiring people, I understand how.

⁓ successful that was and I wasn’t kind of telling a story. was like, this is generally how I felt. You can’t train people to care about your company or where you work, right? And so you see someone who maybe doesn’t have the exact qualifications right away and you can train people in almost anything, but you can’t train them to care very much. so what I did was to

express what I wanted clearly with passion, work very, very hard to show my worth. And that’s kind of how I did it. And that’s how I got my job at ABC, right? They hired me as a little consultant and I showed them, I took more work and I showed them that I was worthwhile and grew that way. It just so happened that it was based on very bad foundations, but it’s the same thing that I’ve done at Cordo at ETC is to really…

to work hard, be passionate, be curious, and really want to help others, whether it’s my colleagues, whether it’s the studios, whether it’s my customers at Cordo, like generally want to help people. I think that’s something that stands out for me.

Orlando (52:16)
Do you think that there’s an overlap in what you do now versus what you do then? mean, obviously being a sort of investigative journalist and, you know, and being in journalism, mean, it comes with a fair amount of curiosity, a certain amount of chutzpah to be, you know, putting yourself in situations, you know, both physically and, you know, socially that you’re, you know, you’re trying to dig quite deeply into things. Do you find that that

Yves (52:30)
Mm-hmm.

Orlando (52:42)
You know that there’s an overlap there between what you were doing then and what you’re doing now.

Yves (52:46)
Yeah, you’re a basically a reporter, you’re selling something, right? And

it’s actually a really, really hard sales job because I was running around Pakistan selling to military and intelligence officers the opportunity to give me confidential information and risk their careers or their lives in exchange for zero. I mean, that is the hardest product to sell.

Orlando (53:02)
Yeah,

Yves (53:08)
So in many ways, it is my ability to sell back then a horrible deal to them, which luckily they took enough time for me to be successful, but to now sell in an environment where there’s more of an equilibrium of value where I’m actually providing value and

Orlando (53:17)
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yves (53:29)
they’re providing value. So there’s a clearer and more balanced value exchange now. But selling is really the essence of the business.

Orlando (53:35)
Yeah.

Yves (53:37)
No one’s going to eat, you know, if anyone’s going to eat, someone has to sell. And so that’s what I do, you know, day in and day out.

Orlando (53:41)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what, you know, because it does seem, you know, looking at that part of your career, seems like…

there was a huge amount of incredibly legitimate success and achievement and yet there were these moments of I don’t know what you’d call it. ⁓ Right, and so how do you divide between those two? What…

Yves (53:56)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, insecurity, lack of integrity, shortcuts. I call them shortcuts.

Orlando (54:09)
what, so you’re doing like an amazing amount of real work and then these certain things that existed outside of that based on the insecurities you say, what did make you make that jump and what were those things and what? Right, yeah, yeah.

Yves (54:24)
Because I was an idiot. Because I was not, I didn’t understand that I’m enough. Like my work is enough. I needed to

tell people that I had a PhD. I needed to make up these interviews. I needed to feel, but it was not for them. It was for me to make myself feel. I didn’t recognize, no, no, no, no, no. I’m enough. I’m recognizing that now. It’s taken me so long, but like I’m enough. My work is enough.

Orlando (54:36)
Yeah.

Yves (54:53)
my mind is enough, my curiosity are all enough for me to be successful. I don’t need anything else. I’m enough. That

Orlando (54:53)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yves (55:00)
is something that is a very powerful realization. think a lot of people feel this way that they’re not enough. it, in a way, still fuels my hunger and my passion and my hard work to want to prove things and achieve things. It’s a little bit healthier now.

Orlando (55:12)
Yeah.

Yves (55:18)
in the sense that it’s not really proving as much as it is breaking new ground and doing new things and building. It’s more of a creative endeavor now versus fueled by insecurity. ⁓

Orlando (55:19)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yves (55:29)
But the tragedy of all of this is I didn’t need a PhD to work at ABC News or any of the other places I worked. I didn’t need to make up these fake interviews. I didn’t need to do any of that. Like I was enough and I didn’t think I was enough. So I had to create all these different.

Orlando (55:47)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yves (55:47)
you know, aspects to my persona to make myself feel better. you know, it’s, I’m glad that, I’m not glad it happened because I heard a lot of people and I still carry

that, but selfishly, this was something that essentially was the most important thing that happened to me.

Orlando (56:05)
It’s funny because that feeling of feeling enough, almost think you looking at it from the outside, you go, well, if I feel enough, I’m going to be arrogant. And weirdly, it’s the not feeling enough that makes you put on an arrogance that is more likely to hurt others and hurt yourself than actually just feeling enough and going, well, this is the way it is. And, you know, I’m sort of.

Yves (56:16)
Yeah, that makes you arrogant. Yeah.

Orlando (56:27)
Okay with that being the case and I think that it’s it’s certainly for me It’s something I only found out through the program is you know by letting go and and taking Ownership and saying that I’m enough That that could still come with humility without having to come with insecurity Yeah

Yves (56:30)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

I think yeah, I think insecurity and arrogance is out of insecurity.

mean, you and I have been in this industry long enough that we know the people who have like amazing careers and who are very accomplished in this business are really nice people. And the ones that are not are people who are insecure. You know, I think it’s important to…

Orlando (56:54)
Yeah.

Yves (57:06)
you know, loving yourself is really, really important. it was very, it took a very long time for me to love myself through my

Orlando (57:12)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yves (57:15)
failures, what I had done, you know, my little boy that’s sitting inside of us, right? And to parent myself and love myself and parent that little boy is something that I do now, very, very important.

Orlando (57:16)
Yeah.

I see you two have done the chair exercise. ⁓ Well, that’s I mean, listen, that’s a wonderful I really appreciate you sharing that with us. I think that that’s.

Yves (57:33)
That’s right.

Thank you.

Orlando (57:41)
I’m very sympathetic to it having gone, know, having, you know, hurt people myself and being, you know, constantly trying to get rid of that shame while still feeling responsible without feeling shameful on an ongoing basis. And I just, I really appreciate you sharing with that with us. Thank you. Well, thanks. I mean,

Yves (57:59)
Well, thank you for sharing your journey with me. That was cool.

Orlando (58:05)
Just to end on a slightly different note, mean, what is the thing, you know, if you’re looking at the work at ETC or the work at Cordo, what is, what’s the thing you’re most excited about?

Yves (58:16)
I am most excited about the Golden Age of creativity that we’re heading into. I think the ability for anyone to have near Hollywood production capabilities and tell their own stories in a way that is meaningful to them is scary for the industry and for the people working in the industry.

that are real people with families and mortgages. And I really, really respect that a lot. And also, if you like the craft and the art of storytelling, the next 20 years are going to be just absolutely insane in terms of pure creativity. Not just from a UGC perspective, but you have to remember what’s going on with regular Hollywood now is the studios are moving into the next level up.

of complexity of production, is immersive, multi-platform, personalized content. So traditional Hollywood is really going to get into more of like, how do we tell the story of Star Wars across linear TV and theatrical and AR and VR and personal and location-based experiences? So we’re moving in that world in Hollywood. And at the same time, the UGC world is really exploding with creativity. So I think these two trends together

are gonna be just awesome. And not to mention that, I think brands now and advertisers are getting, have more appetite in really getting more into culture and really telling more edgier stories about more personal and authentic stories about themselves and connecting with people more versus being like, just buy this. So all of it, think is heading, is really taking our society into a much more creative.

world and I’m super excited about it.

Orlando (59:59)
I feel the same way, you know, it’s funny when,

Somebody said, uh, who was talking about climate change was saying, Oh, we’re hurting mother earth. And somebody else said, mother earth is going to be fine. We’re hurting humanity. When we’re all dead and gone, mother earth will be just fine. You know, she will continue. And I feel the same way about creativity is everybody’s like, well, you know, the creative industries and this, that, and the other thing. And, a lot of people bemoaning of it, but I’m like, creativity is going to explode in a, you know, it already has, you know, there are more.

Yves (1:00:10)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

yeah.

Orlando (1:00:28)
Lighting kits and there are more people making short form content now than ever before That’s just gonna change and move up the the tree in terms of complexity and interest ⁓ Yeah Yeah, yeah

Yves (1:00:39)
You have to go back to like hundreds of thousands of years ago, cave paintings, right? It’s part of who we are. So it’s not going anywhere. And

in fact, it’s going to get empowered because now a lot of the gatekeeping is falling away. And now it’s just a wide open field. And I can understand why that’s really scary for professionals in the industry. Totally understand. At the same time, it’s kind of exciting from a pure artistic perspective.

Orlando (1:00:54)
Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I mean, on that note, I, you know, we can kind of end there. Eve, this has been so far. I know I took you over time, but I was just so.

Fascinated by talking to you and really appreciate you opening up as well. I’m so appreciative of your time and thank you so much for doing this with me. Absolutely amazing.

Yves (1:01:26)
I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity.