Film Distribution in the Age of AI with Tara Hein-Phillips

Welcome back to On Production. I'm Cameron Woodward, your host. Today's guest is Tara Hein Phillips, who is the CEO and co-founder of Jolt, which is a film distribution company reinventing how independent and documentary films reach audiences. What's interesting about Jolt is that they're using big data, AI, and performance marketing to really pioneer a scalable audience-first model that bridges analytics, monetization, and creative integrity for filmmakers.

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Previously, Tara was the chief product officer at Sundance where she launched the first virtual Sundance film festival and then co-founded Sundance Collab, the institute's global online creative platform. Her expertise spans product development, digital strategy and audience design, which is then always of course focused on connecting stories and communities in more meaningful ways. Jolt's latest release,

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is directed by Dan Allgrant, who did Sex and the City, People I Know, and the story really captures the power of reconciliation and memory through a decades-long friendship in Boston. This film exemplifies Jolt's mission, which is helping emotionally resonant, creator-driven stories find their audiences and sparking the kinds of cultural conversations that last. Tara, thank you for joining me. I have a bunch of questions. I know our filmmakers will be very interested in what you're doing, and of course,

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how Jolt can help them out. So first, just thanks for being here.

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Tara (01:30.685)

thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk about it. I love your podcast. So this is great.

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Cameron Woodward (01:36.608)

It's a pleasure. So you've said that Jolt is building a new kind of distribution model. I've had distributors on the show before, both like niche distributors, of like broad-based distributors, and that your model is a new kind of distribution model for independent and documentary films. I'm curious, what does that look like to you? What is that model and what problem is it solving?

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Tara (02:02.256)

think if we take a step back to where Jolt began, which was about, which was just about two years ago that we started talking about Jolt at least, the crisis in films getting distributed was just beginning then. I think it seemed like a crisis even then, but now of course it's like in catastrophic free fall. And the fact is that films are not finding homes and it's left filmmakers.

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having to be a bit more scrappy about how they do that and how they get their films to audiences. And I think that that changed radically, even since the time we started doing that, the willingness and the openness to new ways of getting films out there has certainly opened up. When I was the chief product officer at Sundance, obviously, as you just said, I was there during the pandemic and we had to stand up the first virtual festival. What that meant...

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was also that it was the first time we got to see what audiences do and what films they watch and how they behave. And we were able to form what I like to call audience archetypes from that. you know, somebody who doesn't watch a film unless their friends tell them is one type of person and somebody that watches every single film about sports is another type of person and another type of archetype. And so we broke down the audience segmentation and thought about how audiences

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What would they need to be motivated to watch a film? And so we took a lot of that early learning at Sundance, of course, like four years passed in between these two initiatives, but what changed in the middle was AI. And so the notion behind what we're building, which we call the Interest Delivery Network, is that you can actually at scale look at a film, look at other films and say, okay, these are the audiences that are likely to watch this film. And then in real time, figure out where those audiences are.

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That has changed even in the time since we've launched. That's become like it's a continually evolving situation how you do that. I think, you know, but it takes it takes a lot of coordination. It's not just and then you turn those audiences on on meta and there they come and then they all watch the film. That would be nice. But it's a combination of your channel, the filmmakers, the film subjects, the people that are close to the topics.

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Tara (04:27.8)

the people that are going to be impacted by the film in some way, or the super fan communities that will watch anything to do with the topic. And it's kind of a swirl of all of those things that then you lay out in a cadence to continue to build this momentum that hopefully then breaks through with the public consciousness and people will watch the film. We then...

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We sell tickets, we share the revenue with filmmakers, and then we give them all their data and we show them what worked and what didn't work, and we're doing that continually. And we're tweaking all of that as we go along as well. So that's what we mean by all of that.

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Cameron Woodward (05:07.85)

There was obviously COVID and then the lessons learned from standing up a digital festival, but maybe even before COVID or since going on this journey, is there a moment or a set of experiences that made you realize that, know, traditional routes, whether that's streamers, theatrical festivals, were not serving filmmakers or audiences as they should?

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Tara (05:33.094)

I think the thing that's become clear, more clear to me, I feel like this gets worse almost every day. There's a lot competing for our attention. And I started my life as a playwright. And so I know all about trying to get people interested in your work. I know how hard it is. It's not like it was ever easy. It was never easy for art houses. It was never easy for independent film versus big studio productions with giant budgets.

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has changed, there's a couple of things that have changed, but the biggest piece of that is, first of all, the budgets, I think, are much smaller and throwing a couple of, I think I read today that it was in somebody's blog this morning that the last Star Wars series, that there was something like a budget of $458 million for marketing. Yeah, when you think about a budget like that relative to what an independent film,

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Cameron Woodward (06:25.358)

I'm sure that I can get some.

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Tara (06:32.058)

was ever going to have, it was always going to be difficult. I think what changed is our attention is being pulled in a lot of directions. And short form content was not yet what it is today, even during the pandemic. I think that probably helped to fuel some of that. what's pulling at our time and what's pulling at our attention is very different. And the idea of committing

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to an hour and a half, two hours, two and a half hours of your day has become difficult for all films and independent films are no different. I think what hasn't changed is our appetite for great stories, community, experiences that transform us, those things have remained the same. And so the question is, can you bypass the intermediaries and try to connect directly to the people that are gonna be the most excited to watch and talk about your film?

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Cameron Woodward (07:28.29)

That's awesome. So at Sundance, I mentioned this before and so did you, but you helped launch both the virtual festival and then the Sundance CoLab, which were major digital transformations for the Institute. What did those experiences teach you about this phenomenon that you're just chatting about? Like the direct connection between art and audience through technology.

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Tara (07:53.438)

I think I'm going to take them separately because they're a little different. with Collab, think it was very easy to see for both the Institute and for artists the need for something that was going to open up the incredible resources and access that Sundance has to be able to help a bigger, wider, more global

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group of artists. And that to me is what Sundance Collab has done so well. It reaches people all over the world. can come in at a much earlier stage of their projects and also just of their development. And now that it's been around for a couple of years, you can track projects that started on Collab and have come all the way across the journey through the awards journeys. And it's just incredibly.

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gratifying to see artists from all over the world being able to participate and connect with Sundance like that. And really, I think Sundance is such a beacon and the energy and the spirit of the labs, which were obviously created by Michelle Satter, who was my partner with Sundance Collab and is still the founding partner there. I think the energy that she

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has used to build the labs into what they are, which I think is this incredible safe incubator for just remarkable, you know, self discovery and improvement of your work. I think that that was infused into Collab from the beginning. So I think that transformation was such a natural one and such a, you know, such a generous opening of Sundance that, you know, it didn't, I don't think it came with as much of the

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the kind of friction that you can sometimes feel with digital transformation. The festival, a little different. I mean, it was a pandemic. obviously, you know, the, was, I think in the things that I said about Sundance before, you know, I think it was important for Sundance to show up as a beacon of light.

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Tara (10:10.786)

in that time that was so confusing and so hard for so many people, including artists and audiences, and bring them together. And I think it was an incredible success. And I really deeply credit, you know, Kerry Putnam and the rest of the leadership team in, you know, in holding the energy that it was going to take to make that happen. Because it was, I think it was an important thing to do. We were lucky in that we, you know, we were having discussions, everybody at Sundance in...

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January 2020 was having discussions about what was happening in China. And so we started early thinking about like, hey, I wonder if this thing were to get bad, what we would have to do for the festival. And luckily, like we gave ourselves that couple of months head start that enabled us to put that together. But I think even now, and I interact with festivals quite a lot with Jolt, I think it has continued to raise existential questions around

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should you give digital access? Is it an in-person experience only? Does it detract from it? it, filmmakers, some filmmakers I think see the opportunity for reach. I think other filmmakers feel like they would rather have their films not yet sort of digitally seen. And so I think it's created some tensions around those things. I personally think that it's your,

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If your film isn't naturally going to be bought out of Sundance anymore, and this is now with my jolt hat on, know, festivals are no longer the guaranteed marketplace that they, you know, kind of briefly were. I don't think they always were, but you know, for some period of time they were. Then you need to think about festivals as the marketing launch of your film and its chance to break through the public's consciousness. And to me,

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That means get it out there as widely as you possibly can and try and make as big a mark as you can with the opportunity. And then you can always figure out what to do about that later. But as long as the opportunity is there, that's what I think.

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Cameron Woodward (12:17.602)

Yeah, Tara, I was going to ask, like, so did the time at Sundance across those two programs and then even just broadly your experience there as a screenwriter and then, you or as a, you know, you were, you were telling me, right. Right into, you know, I know you have a, you have a background as well and like these types of digital tools and transformations, USC and all of these other things that you've done, but.

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Cameron Woodward (12:46.136)

Did your time at Sundance influence the way you're really thinking about structuring Jolt's team, its tools, its partnerships, these things that you've learned, and what you were just mentioning related to how your view on the festival is like, you need to be thinking of it in part as a marketing platform. How does that context sort of inform moving forward with what Jolt does for filmmakers?

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Tara (13:09.744)

Yeah, it definitely, certainly I do think that the experience at Sundance was pivotal just in terms of understanding what it's like to build something new, build a new digital business and a new digital set of tools in this space. I have a unique love for it because it is at the intersection point of a lot of things I care about. were other areas.

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that are a little bit easier, I think to build and there's a lot of sensitivity in the artist space. I think the thing that has made me, that's been helpful to me both at Sundance and at Jolt is that I do have, at least at my core, a really deep understanding of what it's like to be an artist and try to put your work into the world. And I think that if anything is helpful for me in making this work, it's really that. I really understand the sensitivities that

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that go into sharing your work this way. As far as if you didn't need to have that and you were just building a business that was kind of cut and dried and very kind of revenue focused, you would do it differently for sure. And probably, arguably you should, but it wouldn't work.

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it wouldn't work for artists. I think, you know, if it's going to work, has to work for artists. As far as how, what we learned the hard way, I would say, in terms of how Jolt operates, we thought in the beginning, look, like these films aren't being acquired and they have nowhere to go. So we'll put them up on our platform and that will connect them to audiences and that will be great. But without a distributor, there were these...

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many, many other steps that weren't, that there was nobody else to take care of. And so we found ourselves very quickly getting pulled into the entire life cycle of the film. You know, it can come on jolt if it hasn't had an Academy qualifying run. A lot of times there are theatrical goals for films that have, you know, that proceed their digital goals. And to some extent, I see that almost the same way, you know, in terms of what I just said about festivals. It's another,

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Tara (15:34.342)

potential marketing launch, right? We have a film launching today that had a one day IMAX release for, you know, in a hundred cinemas or somewhere around a hundred cinemas, which was great for getting people to know that this film exists and is coming, you know, for us to now launch a couple of months later. And so there was that. There was also the impact side of the films. And a lot of times there were people already on board who were hoping to

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expand the impact of the film, but sometimes they weren't. And so, you we found ourselves kind of fulfilling all of these different roles. And so over time, we figured out how to do that, either through partnerships or by things we do directly. But it was a misunderstanding to think that the only thing a film needs is a place. has a life and it needs these other things too, which has probably been the biggest disruption, I think, with these films not being.

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acquired in the way that they were before.

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Cameron Woodward (16:35.064)

This is something I want to dig into more because obviously our audience on production may be hearing a jolt the first time or they've heard of it, they weren't sure. And so like, feel like we have an awesome canvas to dig into some of this stuff. So, I mean, we talked about this at the beginning of the podcast. I don't know if by name, but sort of like the underlying technology of like this concept of the interest delivery network, which is a super fascinating concept. Can you explain what that means in practical terms? And then how does.

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data actually find and activate an audience.

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Tara (17:09.08)

Yes. So I mean, what it means in practical terms is that we are in the business of audience discovery and that we are connecting audiences to the things they're interested in. that's at its core. That's what it's doing. The way that we're doing that is, know, we're kind of, we're kind of turning the algorithms on their head a little bit. We are tracking absolutely everything. So we can, we can track everything.

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that people do and what works. make, know, so using a film like, I know we're gonna talk about cathedrals in a second, but I'll talk about cathedrals for one moment. Using cathedrals as an example, that might have an audience that lives in Boston and is really interested in the history of the city. That might have an audience that is really interested in, you know, stories about faith and community.

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that may have an audience that's really interested in stories about race and race in society. We make content and look for audiences that are specific to the things that we think people are going to care about. And then we use those to kind of draw people in and draw people to us. We use a variety of tactics to do that.

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We do events, we look for partners that are aligned to those specific themes so that they are really doing the outreach in some ways on our behalf, but we are giving them the tools to do that so that we're creating almost like a satellite of interests around a film and their reach to audience is the expansion of our reach. And we're making some assumptions about what that audience is in advance to build that strategy.

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But then as we go along, we're continually testing that and then we might put more resources here or there depending on how it's actually going. For the film that's launching today, we have 11 or 12 sports bars lined up to do a screening of the film in community with other people. There are climbing gyms that are going to do screenings of the film. We have the athletes themselves who are...

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Tara (19:24.984)

really excited to talk about the film today. We have the brands that support them that are getting the word out about the film. We have people doing direct to camera videos and sharing that throughout their community. So we're doing all of these things.

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Cameron Woodward (19:39.438)

Okay, so Tara, the time this conversation is released, this film will have premiered today. Tell us about the film just for listeners that are curious about how all of that marketing activity is going into the.

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Tara (19:51.654)

Yeah, just so they could track it back. The film is Girl Climber and it's a story about Emily Harrington's free ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite. It's a great film. It's a great film on every measure. And we are working on that with the film team, but also Red Bull Studios. And that's a really good example of, you know, this is the kind of partnership that we really look for.

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They've been incredible partners. The film cast is an incredible team. The filmmaker is amazing. Director, who's also a fantastic climber. North Face, who supports Emily and Alex, who are in the film. They're excited to promote the film. And then there are these other satellites, like I was just talking about, that are also now, they already have communities, right? Like, the climbing gym.

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you know, kind of community is a community unto itself and they already have a community. We know we can reach those climbers through that gym. We're not gonna just try to reach them ourselves. We're gonna use them as proxies. So we do a lot of that kind of thing, but there's also private events that are happening. are, you know, there's kind of a whole swirl of things that come together to create the full strategy. And then the data from all of that is being collected. So we can tell where did people come from. We can tell.

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what marketing worked and what marketing didn't and what, not just what worked and what didn't because a lot of times marketing works, but what actually got people to watch the film, which is the absolute only thing we care about.

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Cameron Woodward (21:31.503)

That's awesome. So pivoting back to, well, and also like congrats on the launch and, you know, may it be very successful by the time we release it. But so the next release is actually Cathedrals, as I mentioned in the introduction. And I think you've touched on this a little bit, but it's very interesting. like Cathedrals takes place in Boston. Like maybe there's a distribution play for people interested in Boston history. There are these like sub communities.

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Tara (21:37.19)

Thank you. It's really just the class.

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Cameron Woodward (21:59.417)

Can you walk me through how analytics is shaping the rollout and marketing decisions for cathedrals?

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Tara (22:06.574)

Yes. So, I mean, and it's a good place to start with Boston because, you know, as soon as we started looking at it, the film team was really interested in how they could have as much presence and impact in Boston just because they live there and the film is so centered there. So one of the things that happened was it was accepted into the Boston Globe Film Festival, which is where it's going to have its premiere. And that is in...

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I should know offhand, but I think it's the 23rd. It's the 23rd or 24th. I think it's the 23rd. But it's having its film premiere there and really paying attention to the Boston media and making sure that the Boston audience knows about the film and is really excited to watch it. We also have a couple of screenings lined up at churches around the country where the film will be shown.

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We have other community partnerships where they're really interested in sharing more about the film. The film has a lot of themes like addiction and incarceration and kind of the recovery from those things. there are communities that share those interests and sharing hopeful stories around that.

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that we are also doing a lot of outreach to. We also just think this is an incredible story of friendship and it's a beautiful film. It's a little bit of a mystery, you know, kind of as the journey, you know, kind of unpacks and, you know, it's the story of, you know, someone who made a student film and now is going back to find those subjects again as an adult.

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And so you're not really sure how it's gonna go. then I think I don't wanna give too much away because it's such a beautiful, impact of the film is so beautiful when you, it really gets you at the end, that's all I'm gonna say. So, and I think people have been really responding to just the hope of it and also just the depth of emotion that you feel in this film. And especially at a time that I think, it's been a difficult year.

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Cameron Woodward (24:24.174)

So with the film, like you guys are going to be using a different approach. I mean, I guess the analytics, the data fundamentally are the same, whether it's the climbing film or cathedrals, but like the activations look different depending on how the data is sort of guiding you all. How do you think Terra, like filmmakers themselves should begin thinking differently about audience building, especially with new tools like Jolt? And then also, mean, sorry to keep asking a...

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Tara (24:38.904)

Yes, yes.

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Cameron Woodward (24:53.248)

an add-on question here, but Jolt doesn't accept open submissions. So I guess on one hand, filmmakers definitely need to check out Jolt and see if there is a good alignment with their project and the platform. But even if they are not necessarily a great fit, just yeah, how do you think filmmakers should be thinking differently about audience building? Maybe that's a question in two parts.

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Tara (25:17.738)

Yes. So, well, first of all, just to address the point you made, every film has a unique strategy, which is, in fact, the hardest part and why we really can't help every single film, because it is such an intensive process. That said, there are common things that are common to every film. think I'm not going to be alone in saying this, and I think filmmakers are going to be tired of hearing this, but

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I think you have to build your audience early and probably while you're making your film. I know that's not particularly realistic if you've already made your film and that hasn't happened, but even there are things that can be done about that. I think sharing the film with the people, the couple of people that you think are going to really resonate with it that might become your ambassadors would be one way to do that. They don't have to be, this is actually very critical.

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They don't actually have to have giant audiences. And in fact, it's somewhat better sometimes if they don't. If you see somebody who has, or an organization or an individual that has 20,000 followers, that can be immensely more valuable than an organization with millions, because you might have hit follow on those millions and be one of those millions. you're not really. The further away, the more there are, the further away from the core mission you probably are.

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where the 20,000 community is tight and they probably listen to the person who's actually sending them things and they probably follow them and they do what they recommend. So finding some people like that, I think is really helpful. know, thinking about festivals a little differently, like don't, it's not like you get in and you know, that's it, your journey's over. But if you're thinking about festivals as a marketing launch for your film.

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and as a way to get the word out there and as a way to build, you know, kind of some momentum for the film. I think that's another way. But I say this all the time and it's a little bit of a hot take. And I know not everybody agrees with me about this, but your film fan audience is probably not the right audience only for your film and is probably a small percentage of any specific film.

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Tara (27:37.424)

just because somebody will go watch 26 films at a festival does not mean that is their behavior when they go home. And so, know, over-reliance on the film community can be difficult. I mean, if you sit in a room with your friends who are filmmakers and you just get them to tell you what they watched in the last seven days, nine times out of 10, it's gonna be.

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Love Island, it's gonna be, it's gonna be things, it's gonna be whatever series you're watching, it's gonna be sports, it's gonna be nothing, it's gonna be TikTok, it's gonna be, you so you can't over rely on the independent film community per se. I do think that there's many people that are interested in independent film and love the idea of a filmmaker that connects directly to them and is speaking directly to them.

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but that needs to be a little bit more aligned at the film level, I think. And so those are just two things. also think paid marketing has changed pretty dramatically. I feel like it changed again like two weeks ago. I mean, it's been changing and changing and changing with AI. I do think there's some low-hanging fruit there now. I don't know how effective I think it is. I mean, we're still learning.

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and understanding all the changes ourselves because the ways in which we used to be able to micro target are not the same anymore. But what that has meant is that someone who doesn't really know what they're doing with digital marketing has almost as much chance to have an impact as someone that does. And so in some ways that's good for somebody who has less experience. So maybe try a few things and try some A B testing, try your messaging.

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you know, don't get married to your laurels and your very long trailer. Try a couple of shorter cuts. Try talking to the audience about your film. See what works and see what resonates, and that's a quick way to do it.

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Cameron Woodward (29:35.896)

Tara, from the Jolt perspective, how do you feel like this model supports sustainability for creators, both financially or creatively

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Tara (29:47.14)

I think the hope is that by giving filmmakers a chance to monetize their films a little bit differently than what would have happened if they'd gotten a sale, it allows filmmakers to continue to make their work. I will say, I think there probably needs to be, and there probably will be a fundamental shift in how films get made.

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and how much money is being spent to make those films. think budgets probably need to come down in order to make this a little more sustainable. And I also think that you need to think about it almost as like a living wage. Like, you create a career where you can make a living wage that would support you in making more films versus like you're necessarily gonna hit it out of the park and get, you know, a big eight whatever figure deal, right?

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I mean, amazing for people who still get great deals, but I think they're so rare now that people need to think about it a little bit more like, how much do I love this? And, you know, if I put all these pieces together, you know, and I'm being mindful about how much I'm spending, you know, can I make enough money doing this this way that I have a career and I'm making a living, but it's more like job level, you know, kind of salary levels of thinking about.

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So, and I think that's going to be a big shift, but I think that's, I think it kind of has to be the only thing that happened or, you know, has to happen or films just, you know, people just won't make films and yeah, and we don't want that to happen.

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Cameron Woodward (31:26.734)

There's also an element of this where it's like, one doesn't want to bias themselves or like for you and I, we've been in this business, this is where we make our living wage. And it's like promoting delusional thinking is not a kindness to anyone or to the industry. However, sustaining a career over decades, astounding wonderful things do happen. And it's like,

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Cameron Woodward (31:56.175)

Think about it from a sustainable, first principles way. Leave a lot of room for serendipity and like keep yourself in the game as long as possible, making work and telling stories. I think that resonates.

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Tara (32:10.31)

Absolutely. Yep. No, I couldn't agree more. And you can't, that serendipity can't happen if you're not in the game, right? 

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Cameron Woodward (32:18.414)

Absolutely. Looking ahead, mean, where do you see documentary distribution heading in the next five years? I know everything's changing so rapidly with technology.

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Tara (32:28.646)

Yeah. Gosh. I don't know. It's a hard question, right? I don't know. I don't know how much people have been paying attention to the new Sora app and what AI is able to do with video and for video. So I'm going to give you the negative case and the positive case. So let's start with the positive case. The positive case is.

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you know, these tools that are emerging that make it easier to make things and much, much, much cheaper to make things are going to democratize creativity in a way that we've never seen before. That it's opening access to people that, you know, like forgetting about, you know, I mean, when you think about just the expense of making a film even, you know, five, 10 years ago, that...

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The fact that these tools have become completely democratized could mean a real explosion of creativity and incredible impact. And that's the positive case for this. I guess I think the negative case is that our attention is so divided already that the sheer glut of content

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that will be produced will be so consuming and so overwhelming that it will be hard to figure out where those nuggets are. And so I worry a little bit about that. do think that there's some, think filmmakers need to be very adaptable about form. If this is where things are going, I think you need to think about form and I think you need to think about, you know,

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If really people don't have attention spans for an hour and a half, well, then maybe you should break it up into a couple of pieces. I know that's easy for me to say. And, you know, but maybe you need to think about like, what is the most important thing? it your story? Is it the form of your story? You know, and if it's, they're, you know, if they're linked in a way that you can't separate, then great. Then, you know, you have to be true to your art form. If reach and...

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Tara (34:52.91)

you know, access and audience size and all those other things are also a part of the calculus, then I think adapting form might be something that people will have to start to consider more.

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Cameron Woodward (35:08.79)

Absolutely. It's very interesting. It's because, you you were mentioning even in the marketing for the films, it's like audience engagement sometimes in real life, technology to like understand the touch points of the marketing campaigns or audience engagement mixed in with just classic storytelling in the form of cinema. And they're all converging seemingly, right? Like you could even imagine like telling a story.

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creating some sort of IP that deeply resonates with an audience. And then like with Sora, an audience member putting themselves into the story. Like whether we like this or not as purists of the form is almost irrelevant. It's now technologically possible. So then how do you...

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interact with that as an artist. It's fascinating. And along those lines, I'm curious, Tara, because I know that you are following these things as you are pretty much at the cutting edge here talking about Sora. What excites you most about this intersection of storytelling, technology, and audience engagement?

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Tara (36:11.866)

Yeah, I mean, if I was forgetting about, if I put all the concerns about, you know, film and I mean, I've been here a million times with theater too. these things keep getting reinvented. So I'm not really afraid of the death of them forever, but putting all of that aside, I mean, I think about like at the start of my career, what it would have meant to sit down at a computer, even as a brainstorming tool, right? Like even if you're not trying to make a finished product, the fact that you can sit at these computers now, or even as a product,

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person, right, as somebody who makes digital things. I went through an exercise with a couple of people on my team at Jolt to see if we could rebuild what we built at Sundance using some of this more vibe coding tools. I mean, we built it in under a day. It took a year and like over a million dollars maybe, like when you factor all the pieces in and all the things that used to happen to build something.

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I mean, not quite that much, but still, it was a lot of money. And now you could really actually build that quickly and in very little time and have it be super high quality. So when you take away the friction of that and all you're left with is like your imagination, you can imagine great things being made and great advances, whether that's in the arts or other fields.

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Tara (37:37.902)

I think the question is what I said before. It's like, just because you can doesn't mean you should. there's just going to be a glut of things kind of hitting the market because of that. And it's going to be just a little bit hard to weed out what is actually quality. But from a storytelling standpoint, mean, it feels revolutionary to me for a young person, especially, and knowing what it was like.

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to want to get stories out there in unusual forms, I think I would have been thrilled to see what's happening.

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Cameron Woodward (38:13.878)

That's awesome. I've been thinking a lot about this as well because it's like, there's of course this notion of AI slop, right? We have generative LLMs that can produce everything from like sophisticated seeming philosophy to sophisticated seeming video. And is it good or not? And that's a really hard question to answer sometimes, especially as the new models are coming out. recently there was a post from...

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Terence Tao, who's an absolutely brilliant living mathematician who was describing GPT-5 as being able to actually be useful in his process of doing academic mathematics. So we're actually seeing the models doing more than just sort of like generating seemingly thoughtful material and actually being like a co-contributor to real progress in the world, which is very exciting.

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But then it also does beg the question to your point of like, what will we do in terms of what we will be able to consume with our limited attention? And I think like while the systems that produce this massive amount of work is changing, I think that there will be answers related to how do we actually ingest this stuff and determine if it's valuable or not.

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An interesting space that I think is emergent right now is betting markets, things like Kulshy and Polymarket or Manifest. These are marketplaces where people are actually betting with money or with social capital if a proposition about the world is true or not. So like, that is to say like, hey, is this movie good or not? Bet yes if you think so, bet no if you think it isn't.

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and then you'll get money if your bet was correct. And like with a large like set of participants betting, like does that create a new sort of filter? Like Google had created PageRank to do this online a long time ago. Is there some new intersection between LLMs and betting markets and will that hopefully help us? Or the other thing that I think is so curious is like, will there be an LLM?

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Cameron Woodward (40:26.818)

that filters out my stated preferences while also observing my actual preferences, right? My stated preferences that I love art films, my actual preferences, I watch Love Island. So how do we balance that out?

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Tara (40:36.198)

100% it will be doing that if it's not doing that already. 

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Tara (40:48.9)

What makes me really curious is kind of where you're going with that is a little bit how we evolve as a pretty heavy user of these tools. what it feels like cognitively to create with these tools is a little bit like what I imagine it feels like to drive a race car for six hours.

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Tara (41:10.158)

Like your brain is like super firing. And I do feel like that to me also feels a little bit like what it feels like to be consuming content at pace as well, where our cognitive load is so high that our brains are like, So I worry about that a little bit. do think we have to adapt. Like think we need some physical adaptation to the pace that we're being asked to live at.

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But let's assume we overcome that hurdle. Then I think, yeah, I mean, these tools will rapidly get to a point where they will know you better than you know yourself, I think, to some degree. And they will be able to articulate that to you in ways that will be really interesting. But what I think is, if you can move at scale, and if you can actually

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create like that, whether it's art or progress or getting real answers in real time. I think that the real leapfrog over this is kind of, well, then what would we do with our time if we were able to take away some of the friction of the things that make life hard? Like we were saying about filmmaking, what would we then do? What would our goals for the world be? And what would our goals for our life be? I think you start to get into bigger philosophical questions around like,

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How do we spend time and do we want to actually like cooperate and maybe make the world a better place? Because we have time on our hands now. We have these things that are these tools. And then how long does this period of friction take to get through with jobs changing and with some people being super operators of these tools and really doing well and other people being displaced by them? Like what does society do about those things? And do we have the right people in place to make those decisions?

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So it feels to me like it's a, I mean, there is definitely an optimistic case, but I think we're coming into a period of friction, right, around that. And maybe, you know, as a person with an artistic soul, I like to think that that kind of creative friction can create really, really wonderful things. So I'm gonna stay on the side of optimism for now.

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Cameron Woodward (43:19.991)

Absolutely.

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Cameron Woodward (43:23.476)

Absolutely. Well, Tara, thank you for joining on production. This has been super enlightening and super awesome. For filmmakers that are interested in Jolt or finding you or getting involved more deeply, where should we send them?

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Tara (43:38.722)

If they come to Jolt Film, there's a tab for filmmakers. Please fill out the form, tell us as much as you can about yourself and your project and we'll be in touch. And I read every one of those. I look at them, I look at every single thing personally. My team is looking at them all the time. we're, you know, we're talking to filmmakers all day long.

f

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Cameron Woodward (43:56.696)

That's awesome. Thanks so much for joining me.

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Tara (43:59.132)

thank you so much for having me.