Dinesh Shamdasani - The brain behind Bad Idea Comics!

Dinesh Shamdasani – Interview

[00:00:00] Melissa: This is Barbara country and I’m Melissa circuit today on the show. I get to chat with film and TV producer and comic book publisher Dinesh I’m Disani Dennis. Welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks for being here today. How are

Dinesh: you doing good. Very excited to be

Melissa: chatting with you. Awesome.

We are still very excited. There’s so much I want to talk to you about you, you know, you’ve created and been a part of so many cool projects you studied film at USC then became the CEO and chief creative officer of Valeant. How did you, how did you get into this business? How did you step into that role?

Dinesh: At balance? It was it it’s funny. Entertainment is, is. Such a weird industry that I feel like everyone’s story is unique and it’s like a, you’ve got to find a way through this brick wall. And once you find a way in somehow the interview just shuts it behind you and no one else can go that way. [00:01:00] My way was I went to USC film school and I was very lucky.

I got some advice when I was at. At USC, which was, don’t worry about kind of school, just try and meet as many people in the industry using that, that credibility as possible. And so I did the thing, which a lot of students do, which is you, you pretend that you’ve graduated before you have, and you try and get internships and jobs, et cetera.

And I very quickly learned that there was a very difficult path. In the film and TV world. And and it was around the time that IP was starting to become a thing with Spiderman, the first film, the  film and the first excellent film, both coming out, nobody in the business, really understanding what was going on, why they were making so much money.

And every comic book fan of the world was five minutes ahead of Hollywood. And I thought I better take advantage of this. And so I was thinking to myself, what happened to Valiant Valley? It was my favorite. I was a kid of the nineties and. I didn’t know, Marvel beyond really the biggest, I didn’t really know comics beyond Spider-Man the [00:02:00] Hulk, Superman and Batman, maybe excellent with the cartoons.

So when I got into comic books, it was just as legitimate as everything else to me, like just gravitate towards that and had an energy to it. So I was trying to figure out what had happened to him. I learned that they had been bought by a video company called the claim that that claim had. Over the years, published more books, but then a claim went out of business.

They had some bad video game decisions that they made and they took every division down, including balance. And that luckily for me, at that point, there was gonna be an auction, a bankruptcy auction for all the different assets, including Valiant. And I had no, no inclination that I was going to win this, but I thought I’ll learn something.

I’ll go. It might be fun. I called a buddy of mine. Who I grew up with in Hong Kong who had very wealthy parents and convincing to come in with me. And be the money. And we went to this do due diligence, read all the documents. And I was very lucky [00:03:00] in the sense that I think it was 86 parties.

Did due diligence, all the biggest companies, Google. So everyone Marvel heavy hitters. Yeah. So of course we expected, they will come to the auction and they’ll they’ll win. But when we went to the auction, there was only three parties, including us. There was a former CEO of a claim and that was us.

And then there was a guy who used to a marketing manager at Marvel. And what had happened is the the legal documents were so messy that no one felt like they knew what they were bidding on. But being a, you know basically a, a college student, I had to have the time to go and meet all the former employees at a claim in the publishing division and get a sense of what we were bidding on.

Which is actually pretty clean. We were getting almost all the rights. Still came in second. And the day that the auction ended, there was a fourth party that couldn’t afford to bid that it filed intent to use trademark applications, essentially blackmailing the winner. So the, the lead bit of pulled out, [00:04:00] the trustees went to the acclaim seat in the pharmacy of a claim.

He had put his money elsewhere. So they came to us. We were the only party left. We said, great. Big reduced price. Now we’re about to get into a legal fight and being a kid. I thought I’ll figure this out and then spent the next eight years trying to figure it out. When this slide had had a publish. It was a mountain of, of add days I’m

Melissa: learning.

That’s incredible. And how long did you end up running value? Cause I did read that, you know, at some point there was another company that came in and bought it. So how, how long did you spend with value? It.

Dinesh: I was at 15 years. And so I spent the first 18 years being a fan of comic books, not knowing how to publish, not knowing anyone in the business, trying to learn it, trying to figure out how publishing worked.

And then the best thing that happened to to us at the same happened, Italian when I was at was the sale of Marvel to Disney. So what happened was more volatile to Disney for $4.4 billion. And a lot of the big executives that had run Marvel [00:05:00] cashed out. And there was a man named Peter CUNY, who is the CEO of Marvel.

And I had read. I got a hold of the Harvard business school case study on Marvel, the mobile story, which is about Peter and his philosophy on how to bring Marvel back from their bankruptcy. And I’d use that as my Bible for how to try and structure a Valiant. And so when he cashed out, we approached him through his son, Gavin.

They will looking in and do something together and spend about six months to a year, convincing them, and then negotiating with them to come in and be a partners. And the same time send a put together the, the management team, the editor in chief, head of marketing, head of sales, et cetera. That’s when Peter came in, he gave us the legitimacy and the financing to at least start that process.

And we got to launch the company in 2012. And so I was there for seven more years, publishing eight years, trying to figure out how to publish seven years public. As we were there for seven years, we would raise money and we brought other investors on board. Eventually one of our investors, Chinese company named DMG [00:06:00] liked the business so much.

They decided that they needed to own it completely. So they did that.

Melissa: Okay. And that was, was that something that you were okay with or it just, that was the way it was.

Dinesh: It is no, it wasn’t something I was okay with. It was it was a hostile, aggressive situation. The entire time I was at Valiant the entire 15 year period.

I cannot think of a day where someone wasn’t trying to buy the company out for me or, or get me fired, fire me, take over because it’s such a valuable asset. It’s, it’s such a rare thing. What the original Valiant creators, Jim shooter and Paul blatant, Randy Smith, David Latham, all these comic book, geniuses built is really, really special.

And it’s not, doesn’t have the awareness of strength of Marvel DC, but it’s probably the closest comp to those of everything else.

And it was just, it was like a really dusty, dirty diamond. Then when we got it with this diamond underneath all this crud, and as we started to clean it up, people started to see that. [00:07:00] And so DNG came in and initially that came, we were looking for a film financing partner. We went out to about 70 different companies, basically the same list that was looking at bidding on, on the valued assets.

And we got three offers, one from Amazon, one from the WWE wrestling company and one from DMG. And the mg was by far the richest offer with the least controls. So it’s a great. We’ll take them, we’ll take the steel. And over time they decided that they wanted to more and more in the film and TV world and Valley was doing very well publishing.

And we had a lot of things we had to announced like the Russo brothers and the bloodshot movie and digital, et cetera, they wanted to get more and more involved. And I had the controls myself to keep them at Bay and they started to buy up other investors. And then I have the controls of Peter team that Bay.

And then ultimately they made a very, very lucrative offer. And. Peterson investor in gambling Baxter. And they said, we’re going to take this, but they were very gracious about, they said, look, you should. You should think about taking this too. So it took a [00:08:00] day and I thought to myself, all right, I’m going to tell them I’m gonna take it.

I’m trying to kill the deal. That’s many, you’re trying to kill the deal and I just didn’t have the mental but no one, but it was a good situation. It’s one of the things I love balance. It was the dream come true. I would have worked there for free the rest of my life. Ultimately I did very well financially and now I have a much happier I have.

So much opportunity and I’m getting to do so many cool things. Yeah.

Melissa: Well, that’s good. And sometimes everything happens for a reason and leads you to better opportunities like you were saying. And you know, and, and I was going to ask you about bloodshot, where you, so you were still with Valeant when, when bloodshot was.

Made the film or

Dinesh: yes, yes and no. So, so bloodshot was, we started developing the bloodshot film in 2008, before we even set up publishing. And we went through all sorts of incarnations. I mean, at one point will Smith is going to play bloodshot. If you can imagine that he was directing it, there was a long period where Matthew Vaughn was directing it.

And these things [00:09:00] happen only with you. It’s an, it’s a very interesting process and you get to meet a lot of fascinating people. And the movie we brought we got to a place where everyone was excited and wanted to make the movie. So nanny and we were casting, we needed the right. They needed someone with weight to carry the film star, and we would talk to a bunch of different actors.

Michael B. Jordan, Jared Leto to Joan Hall. Ben diesel and Tom roughen, the head of Sony, his favorite for the role was been neutral. I go ahead to keep that secret. And and we locked in and that essentially got the movie green lit and that was. Now the same week that DMG managed to close the deal.

And, and and of course the first thing and part of the deal of course, was that I had to resign. And I had built film and TV agreements as the CEO and in as arms length agreements, a lot of publishers will tie themselves to. The agreements. I try not to do that, try to run the company in a very business forward way, which I [00:10:00] think was part of our success as well.

And so of course I was a designee that was designated for who would produce the movie board. As long as the board approved that I was a designee. They wanted me to be the designated course wants TMG takes over. They want their people to be the designee and So I got the call from Sony, from our executive at Sony, who was basically in tears because we’d worked together for so long and we have a really, really good relationship with friends saying, they’re telling me you have to be off the movie.

It’s contractually something I can do. I told her, I looked at him. Totally effected. I get it. It’s okay. It’s heartbreaking. Of course, but it’s okay. She was like, we’re going to fight this. We’re going to fight this. I don’t know how we’re going to fight for it to figure it out. And I ended up being back on the movie.

So I missed about four weeks. What happened was. Our director, Dave Wilson is first time director, but he’s had a huge a vast, a lot of experience doing these super high-end video game trailers, commercials video game, little short stories, doing things for the division star awards, the halo of the biggest brands.

Wow. [00:11:00] He’s a genius and our writer, Eric Heizer, so nominated for an Academy award for a rival and he worked bird box. And it’s now show running this big show on Netflix. And w and had written comic books for us as well got together and they went to Sony and they said essentially we want to put the weight of our, our, our leverage on the table.

In fact what happened? I shouldn’t say this publicly. I hope Eric doesn’t get upset with me. But what happened is Eric. The studio wanted Eric to come back and do some last minute rewrites and do some production work on the script now, because very busy didn’t have the time for it. But once he found out I hadn’t told him that I was embarrassed.

I hadn’t told him that I wasn’t on the movie anymore. David told him and Eric called the studio. And said, Hey, I’ve been thinking about it. I know you guys want me back on the movie. I will do the work you need me to do. In fact, I will also do the production work and I will be there for as much as you want because students very happy and I will do it all for free the studios pretty what’s going on here.

So I just have one condition and they said, what’s, this is the story I’ve been told. What’s the [00:12:00] condition. And he says, I need Dinesh back on the movie. Kind of what I was told, this was, there was a silence. And then I think it was Sanford Peniche or on any the. Heads of a, sometimes she’s impressive production and Alondra our executive.

One of them said I love me a gangsta move. You’ve got a deal. And then I got the cool set DMG and that they decided not to be involved.

Melissa: Wow. That’s an incredible story. And so fortunate like that you have so many, I mean, that just is a Testament to your character and you know, you’re working you know, ethics some yeah, absolutely.

I mean that many people would like stick up for you like that. That’s awesome. Yeah, because I was

Dinesh: in Hollywood. Yeah.

Melissa: Very true. You hear about people getting the, yeah. The opposite, you know, closed, closed doors and turning your back on turning their backs on people. So that’s a really nice story.

Thank you for sharing that with me, actually

Dinesh: very freeing as well, because it, it. It gave me the ability [00:13:00] to essentially just pour myself into the movie and do whatever it took. And also gave me the goal to say to people, this is why I’m working so hard. This is why I’m willing to sign this check over.

It’s why I’m willing to go over here is why I’m willing to do this. And it allowed me to much like when I was running balance, help get other people to, to race at that level. And that was a really, really invaluable experience to be able to, to learn how to do that on a film set.

Melissa: That’s awesome. And now will you be doing a

Dinesh: SQL.

I can talk. Yes, I can talk about it cause I’m gonna get in trouble. But but I can say that we got, we got a raw deal because of COVID there’s a lot of people,

Melissa: a hundred percent.

Dinesh: Yeah. The movie came out the, the COVID weekend where we’re literally from our Friday to our Saturday, they were reducing seating capacity by 50%.

So there was no way to win, which is frustrating because we had a premiere on Tuesday, which was a. Big highlight day for me and the whole movie and the our executive at Sony was saying, okay, so Tuesday, keep the, keep the afternoon free. [00:14:00] The tracking was looking really good. We’re looking like we’re gonna open 26 million.

We want to sit down and talk about SQL. If that happens. So here we are at the premiere on Tuesday thinking, Oh my God, the studio just at SQL, we’ve got a meeting potentially on the books. And then the Thursday is okay, the numbers are going down. And Thursday, Friday, Saturday was like that’s 2016, March 22.

It’s 20th, 18, 17, 16, 12, 11, eight. We all do the open at 11, but it’s become so nice. When I’m being told the seventies, number one, VOD film, full time. And I think number two, when I’m on video. And so now they’re being very aggressive about doing something more.

Melissa: Good. Well, that’s good that they they’re understanding about the situation because the press on it was pretty intense.

I remember seeing, you know, trailers for it every five minutes, you know, on television. So it was definitely like not lacking in marketing, you know?

Dinesh: Yeah. They felt very strong about it. They, they saw that the early tracking numbers they wanted, they saw when they would try

Melissa: to push for it. Well, and you can’t.

I mean, if VIN diesel, I believe [00:15:00] is the perfect person for the role and and he has so much box office draw that. I mean, you really couldn’t have expected more if you had anyone else.

Dinesh: We were lucky. We were very lucky to have them. Yeah,

Melissa: absolutely. So you also co-founded hive-mind. Which produced, you know, shows like the expanse and the Witcher how did that concept come about?

How did you, you know, put that together?

Dinesh: So I had some people that I was working with when I was at Valiant two producers by the name of Sean Daniel and Jason Brown. And we were working on civil films together and we became friends and we had a very shared philosophy and we would talk extensively about.

I would, I was really fascinated by their world, their choice in life to be a producer. It’s difficult, very difficult path. And there was a time when it was. A different kind of thing. It was real lucrative and it wasn’t as difficult. And as corporations have come in and, and the move business has changed to produce less movies and [00:16:00] things have moved to television, it’s become a very difficult job.

We would talk about that and they would have the same point of view. And it just felt like producing what was a 20th century job. And that there was an opportunity to do it in a 24th century way. And so when I left that and we talked about maybe one day we’ll, you know, we’ll try that. So when I left Valley and they said, Hey, why don’t we do this?

Yeah. And they knew very successful veteran, very respected tell the improved by name of Kathy Lynn. And she had started JJ, JJ Abrams, television division, and produced all these amazing television shows, fringe and lost, et cetera. So the four of us sat down, we thought let’s try something different.

Usually production companies are. One by one person at the top, whether they’re a producer or an actor or a director someone who spearheads it and it’s their taste. But also the companies limited by that tastes limited by their bandwidth limited by their relationships. Right? The old adage is only when it’s who, you know, so we thought, okay, what if we, the four of us pool, [00:17:00] those three things we pool our tastes have brought a taste to pull on relationships, have more relationships, pull up bandwidth, as long as we.

Don’t have an ego about this. We share everyone, you frequent everything. But the goal is as a publishing everyone’s cup runneth over overall, maybe there’s a way to do this. And we found that we were, I think, right. We were very successful at six months in. Which is, if you, the first year I should come in, if you have one thing going into production, it’s a miracle six months in, we had four things.

We had the Witcher winter production, Sean and Jason would be producing the expense. It was canceled at scifi. We all worked together to bring it over to Amazon. Got it renewed for fourth and fifth season. Now the demo six that one’s production flood show went into production and scary story was telling the dark with gamble, the Torah separating part of what its production.

Oh, wow. So the four partners had to each go to a different continent essentially to manage the production.

Melissa: Yeah. And they’ve all been [00:18:00] extremely successful, you know, particularly, you know, the expanse and and the Witcher and the expanse. Yeah. The Witcher just blew up. And I, I played the video game and I’m, I’m just as I’m sure a lot of people did.

And then there were people that had no idea that it was a video game and just thought this was like a really cool, you know, about magic and, and and medieval times. But, you know, the expanse is at an interesting journey, as you said, because it was canceled and brought to Amazon prime. And I actually just interviewed Corrina Beko who did the comic book a few days ago.

And, you know, so yeah, it’s just a really interesting how it has like this cult following, you know, all these people, all the fans sort of like rallied together to be like, no, we don’t want this to be canceled. And that’s amazing the power that, that has.

Dinesh: There were people with Sean and Jason spearheaded that they’d been producing that for years, but it was, it was just for all of us, fascinating to watch, we would get texts from Amazon saying, did you do this?

Do what they’re showing us photos of Pete fence, flying planes outside the [00:19:00] Amazon opposites with banners that say save the expense. It was really amazing. It’s a Testament. I think to, we tried to do it at Valley to just build something that there was no substitute for in any medium. And if you look at the expense, if you love hard, Saifai.

Mm, there’s nothing anywhere else doing, doing that. The books do it. And the show does it absolute hard physics, hard science fiction, but with the Storytime point of view, Yeah,

Melissa: absolutely. Yeah. There’s nothing like it out there at all. Not currently. And, and speaking of comic books, so I’m I nice segue here.

So I’m really excited to talk to you about your new comic book publishing company, which I love the name of it. Bad idea. So many great things you can go off on that. So it’s an interesting concept because you have. Select retailers. No digital issues, no variance. You’re just putting out like two issues a month.

What inspired this completely [00:20:00] different kind of, kind of off the wall, if you don’t mind me saying yeah,

Dinesh: it came from, it was a couple of things and I think everyone about idea has a slightly different version of the orange story. So I’ll tell you my impetus for it. Failing was a very high risk. We were playing Moneyball.

We were trying to punch above away. We were title of publisher with tiny little resources, trying to compete with Marvel as best as we could, or as close to mode as we could. And I think we did a great job. I think we, we sent a ton of sales records, Austin. We were the number one in pen publisher. We would be de facto best to be publisher in the business the entire time I was there.

And it just mentally really just throwing man out as a throwing town just were out working and. And that was tough, but it was also super fun. And you really build relationships in a different way that they’re in that method. And so I was very excited to, I was very sad to not be able to make comics anymore because it’s just such adrenaline hit you.

You’re working. What you coming up with an idea. And 60 days later from the stand versus [00:21:00] 2008, you have an idea for something in the movie. And 2019, the movie comes out and 2025, the movie comes out and you don’t even remember. What, what, who, how w why did that there? So I, to get back into comics and I also wanted to work with my friends.

I wanted to work with some of my team, my partners, and a bad idea at Warren Simons, who was our editor in chief at Valiant. Josh Johns, who ran the Valley digital division, Adam Freeman, who was an Eisenhower is an award winning retail enough head of sales at Valley onto Goranson was a head of marketing at Valley.

And then all the creatives that we, we just, I think the super talented and. They were friends, Matt Kindt, Jacqueline mayor, Eric Heizer, Louis Thomas J  hustler then, and we just wanted, it was a bunch of friends wanting to get together again. And that’s the one half of it. And the other half is no value. Was we didn’t.

We would never the number one book in the Institute, because we just were never going to be, we don’t have Wolverine or Batman. We will easily, [00:22:00] many times by far the number one independent book. It’s oftentimes we would be the walking dead, which is just a huge accomplishment. We’re really proud of the team.

And we checked a lot of boxes. One of the books is we didn’t get to check because we didn’t build the house. We just rebuilt it. The house was built by the original creators of balance. So there was this checkbox, if you look at like the list of things to accomplish in publishing, I kind of felt like, wow, we had this, this foundation so much harder.

If you don’t have that, could we do it? Is it possible? Do we have the skills let’s try and then having accomplished all this other stuff. Come boy to do it again. So we thought, well, maybe we try something different. And also without the burden, the benefit of vine is you have all those characters, the disadvantages, you have all those characters.

So you’ve got to fight the nineties. You’ve got to fight. People’s preconceived notions. Even if you got to find all this stuff, that’s already been built, like we’re going to do violence. We’re going to go to San Diego comic con, we’re going to do digital. So we took a look [00:23:00] at. The business had said, is there like, actually, like I have mine, I’m thinking about it.

Is there a 21st century model? And so digital, for instance, and balancing was such a small component ultimately of our sales. And I think it is for a lot of publishers, but we just don’t like to talk about it. And most of that we found with sampling, it was people buying the first issue digitally, liking it, and then going and buying the first issue again, physically.

And then we didn’t see it physically. It isn’t that much work to also mean digital, but it’s not worth the effort or trades for instance, trades a great there’s a whole audience of equates for trades, but the trades are sold differently than they are monthly comic books. They’re not sold returnable. So you they’re sold returnable, I should say.

So you’ve got this huge inventory. You’ve got to worry about returns. You’re going to overprint. You’re going to store those prints, those extra copies, and even a company like Valiant. In a few short years, you’re sitting on seven figures of [00:24:00] inventory in a warehouse and that’s money that can go towards other things that frankly, I think are more important.

Like the quality of the books. Yeah, we just tried to hack essentially publishing

Melissa: it’s interesting. Yeah. People don’t often think of it in those terms of like, as a business side, you know, as you were saying of all these, you know, books, just sitting in warehouses and you can’t sell them, you know, you have them and they were returned or whatever.

And I think that. You know, people just don’t know how that really works, you know, logistically. And if you want to keep a company afloat and still making money and be able to pay your employees, you have to have profit.

Dinesh: Yeah. And it’s also speed you’re you’re, you know, everyone wants to publish and gets together the conventions and eventually you’re drinking and you won’t, you, won’t just kind of opine about, Oh, you’ve got that much in inventory.

Let me tell you how much we got in inventory. And you talk about all the other things that are problematic and the number, it all [00:25:00] boils down to. One thing, everyone in publishing is trying to outrun. This, this Panther that’s chasing him. It’s about how quickly can you build the company? How much can you build awareness?

How much can you build the next hit before this? This could publishing is a very narrow margin business comes and takes you down. And so everything that we’re trying to do a bad idea is about giving ourselves as much runway as we can so that we don’t have to worry as much about that. And we can worry about the books.

We’ve tried to give us as a place where if the books don’t sell well, that’s okay. They’re good. They found their audience. It’s not when I’m building books that I think everyone’s going to like, but we’re building books that some people are going to absolutely love. And a lot of these components, they sound silly.

They sound like bad, bad ideas. And it’s the name of the company?

Melissa: Yeah, I really liked that. I think it’s clever, clever, you know, and you know, are you, are you concerned because you know, you have these select retailers, you know, I went online and I searched and I wanted to see, you know, okay. I’m in [00:26:00] California.

So I was like, okay, where are the locations in California? And, you know, it’s limited. Are you concerned at all that like, people that really want your content, aren’t going to be able to get it, like, especially in the pandemic right now where, you know, a lot of people are ordering online because you know, they can’t leave their house or, or for whatever reason.

Are you trying to expand that distribution still keeping itself distributed by expanding like the reach that you have?

Dinesh: Yes. I’m I’m not concerned that people put it this way. The bet that we’re making. Is that we shouldn’t be concerned that people that really want it are going to find it. They’re going to do the extra work.

They’re not gonna be happy about it. They can be a little annoyed with us and we have to make sure that the books are good enough and that they’re full enough that they’re worth the effort, but we’re always looking to add stores. We have six rules, bad idea rules that still would have to adhere by. And again, these are kind of like a 21st century hack.

And we thought people, we told to be much more upset with this. They’ve all been very generous about [00:27:00] it. And what we found is that the stores have come on board, we’ve got 154 stories and our first wave will be announcing our second way by shoot very soon. We’ve got another about 40 50 stores there.

The specific common board happened to be the source of the most aggressive, the most forward thinking. Do the best hand selling they’re the stores that frankly will do the best with our books because at Valiant, we found that they were stores that. Cause people, I don’t know if people know not all stores are the same.

Some stores are 20% comics, 20%. Yu-Gi-Oh 20% Pokemon and 20% video games. There’s diverse. Some stories of just Marvel didn’t even sell DC. There were stores that literally will only someone with books and that’s their audience. Wow. And a story. That’s just a Marvel story. So this is a Marvel DC store.

They really have no business selling balance or bad at it. And it’s a waste of their time and our time. To try and have that relationship, but they’re nice people when they feel bad, they see us at comics, bro. They’re like, they always talk to us. I’m having trouble. What [00:28:00] can I do? What are the best practices?

And you really just want to say, you know what, don’t worry, man, we’re gonna have a drink, but we don’t have to, you have to buy any more books. This is a way to do that. What that allows us to do that is again, just like the traits. You say to the 154 stores that we have 250 locations that they have, we can double down on you.

So one of the things we did for instance is we sent these ridiculous giant Gadi gold frames. I got a mad magazine that they have to put up in their walls and a prominent place. I’m going to send them a new poster every month. We couldn’t do that with every store in the world. It would be too much money.

But when you have stores that are. Doubling down on your company, they’ll be done in your books. You can go the extra mile. You can do things that you can’t do everywhere. And I think what will happen and we’re already, we actually, this week we got our first orders in for our first book. We’re seeing it already.

We’re getting a better response there. The percentage is so much higher, but the net is very much worth it.

Melissa: Okay. [00:29:00] So it’s kind of like. Dangling this carrot, you know, and in front of them and saying like, this is a better product and we’re going to make you jump through hoops. And then as a result, it’s kind of like what they do in luxury branding, in a sense, you know, where it makes it more viable.

You know what I mean?

Dinesh: Yeah. Yeah. There’s pieces from luxury branding. This piece is from things like sneaker culture. And design toy culture. And then there’s pieces from things like the disruptive nature of, I don’t know, dollar shave club where you can’t just go on your Walgreens and buy a dollar shave club blade, but you’ve got to go online.

You go to one through next, a couple of steps, but the product is better. You’re saving money. They can advertise in a different way. And ultimately they don’t need to be in Walgreens. They do better without it. So there’s a bunch of different things we’re trying to pull from.

Melissa: Okay. And as far as you know, the requirements go for, for the comic book shops, are they allowed to, to mail a comic book to someone or do they have to come [00:30:00] into the store to buy it?

Dinesh: What we’re trying to do? And I’ll give you some examples we’re trying to do is we’re trying to foster a. Physical comics in comic store experience, they are allowed to mail order the books. We understand that there are people in countries that we will not have a store for the first year or two, who knows?

Maybe never. We don’t want to exclude anybody. We do want to talk a little harder to get them mailed. It is not something that today. With the internet with easy access to everything is anything to do. It’s a little bit of work. So we do, we do allow us to us to mail it. They cannot though send the books out until the day of release.

So the people that are mail ordering, won’t get them in their hands prior to release four on the day, Louis, it may be a few days later. And so that’s one of the annoying things. It’s a little bit of a throwback, frankly, to pre-internet culture. Pre-digital culture.

Melissa: Oh boy. Yeah, I like that. It’s I mean, I grew up in a world without the internet, so I know exactly what you’re talking about

Dinesh: and there’s [00:31:00] something, there’s something that liquid not in, well, not a, not only analog.

There are components of what we do that are very forward-thinking and very new and, and hopefully innovative in a good way. But there is a con there are some components. And one of the things that I liked about what we’re doing is that extra work ends up being part of the narrative and to be part of the experience.

I remember having to chase down. A copy of a movie that I was excited to watch. And the six month chase, we, even if it was six days, Addison the experience, it heightened the anticipation and stuff that we can do a little bit around. I don’t think it’s about.

Melissa: Yeah, I agree. I actually stood in the rain at like two in the morning for a PS three.

Dinesh: Right, right. And now you go on Amazon and you just click refresh, refresh, refresh until, until one pops up. Then it comes in the mail. There’s something lost there. None, everything has to be that way, but maybe some of our books will be like that.

Melissa: Yeah, no, I like that. It’s interesting. I mean, obviously like new generations, they, they don’t understand that, like, because [00:32:00] of the times now, but I like that it’s kind of a throwback in a sense too, you know, it’s kind of nostalgic in a way.

Dinesh: Yeah. Yeah. We’re seeing actually we’re seeing a, quite a few, we have a bunch of different mechanisms to help the stores get pre-orders and to make sure, because it’s a new idea that people we’re trying to connect. The two pieces we’re seeing the age group for our books is a lot lower than we would expect it.

What we’re seeing is that the younger readers, the younger buyers are. They don’t quite understand that this is a throwback. They just think it’s like new and kitschy and different. It’s kind of funny. I think we’ve invented this it’s

Melissa: retro futuristic red trout.

Dinesh: Right? Exactly.

Melissa: So getting into the actual content itself, how, how are you going about selecting creators?

Are you doing a submission process or is it an invite only just people, you know, how does that work?

Dinesh: Well, we don’t publish a lawn. So we publish no more than two books a month, [00:33:00] which is tiny, tiny amount to give you a sense. Marvel publishes, I think over a hundred books a month. Yeah. DCS, I think eight.

70, 80, although that seems to be changing potentially there’s rumors going around. No, we, we have obviously having worked in the business a long time, every one of the company has relationships. We have writers and artists, et cetera, that we love and we’re excited about. But there’s a lot of new blood as well that w we’re always looking to expand.

Some of it is submission. Some of those people that we see their work either to conventional online, some of the recommendations from people that are already working with them. Some people are just people that were like, Hey, we haven’t worked with this guy one time we hear he’s coming up for air book.

It’s finishing up it’s this column and see what what he or she is doing. Nice.

Melissa: And are you doing you know, like some of the larger companies like Marvel, DC, they do layer exclusive contracts with people. Are you doing any of that or is ever been freelanced and can do other things?

Dinesh: Part of it’s there’s actually two answers to this and I may be.

I might, I might upset a lot of them publishes by revealing something here. [00:34:00] The the writers were built again, two issues a month. We cannot support and even one writer’s entire workflow. And so we encourage everyone to be working. And all the other things that they want to do and to come here and do this, and it’s a specific thing, but not to worry about being exclusive here.

Now the artists are different. They’re just really only can draw a book a month often at best. And so the fact of putting them on a book makes them exclusive. And so what you’ll probably see from us in the next couple of months is a couple of announcements saying so-and-so is an exclusive artist and yeah, they are.

But technically they’re not, it’s just that. They can’t physically draw more than one book a month. So humanly my way. Okay. But it’s not advancing. We would sell, we, we were worried about being a feeder system for Marvel and DC and DC very much then the deal, especially he, he had every, one of the valid books on order and read them straight away.

And that would immediately see anyone knew when they got the [00:35:00] place where we would announce somebody who could called them, trying to bring them over to DC was such a fan of the books were just so flattering. But we were in this war because we don’t want to be, you see the London sports, the smaller team that’s punching above their weight becomes a feeder for the bigger well money team.

So we would put a lot of the people that we were bringing on board and we excited about an exclusive, I think at one point 40 exclusive. Right. It’s an artist, but that’s a different process here where she doing the opposite here.

Melissa: Yeah. Yeah. You’re just completely like bending the norm. Well, what we know of the norm now, I guess but I think that’s really interesting and it could be something that other people might even copy, you know, in the future, to be honest,

Dinesh: Potentially.

Yeah. I mean, I think some of the, the great gifts so far for bad idea has been that everything that we’ve predicted, all the predictions we made we’ve exceeded them tremendously. We didn’t, we have 154 retails at launch 254 locations. We had budgeted for 25. We thought this 25 retailers that either our friends won’t feel pity for us or we’ll pick it.

[00:36:00] Yeah. It’d be 10 times that sales numbers that we just got. I mean, we have a huge problem that we’re gonna have to solve this weekend at bad idea, which is. We haven’t printed enough copies for the orders that just came in. I’m not really entirely sure we’re going to do with, to figure that out. That’s a champagne problem to have, but I think no matter what happens to the bad idea, it’ll, it’ll be interesting.

It may be an interesting tacular crash failure, or it may be something that. Maybe a little bit other people pick the pieces up and say, that’s innovative. And we’re going to try that too.

Melissa: Yeah. Have you had any pushback from people in the industry that are like, what are you doing? Like this isn’t going to work.

Dinesh: We haven’t had push out. We’ve had a lot of this. Isn’t gonna work. You know, w when we now with the pandemic, we’ve all been essentially under house arrest. Right. We had Before that when we would see them at conventions or at the, the comic industry events, we would see that the publishers and they would just, you know, kind of elbows and be like, are you guys good?

I’m not going to work. This is crazy. What are you really? What’s the real plan here. They, they think that we’re just saying this and that there’s a, [00:37:00] we’re not actually going to fall through. And I’m like, no, no, no, this is why it’s going to work. Can you sit down and talk to them? And they go, huh? That’s so crazy.

It kind of makes sense. We haven’t really seen any, I expected a lot more pushback, but we haven’t fitted retailers to get upset with us. One of, one of the rules that we have in the company is you can’t sell any of the books for more than covered price for the first 30 days. We don’t because we’re in select stores because it’s going to be hard to get the books.

We’re of course aware that there’s a speculative culture to comics. We don’t want to feed into that. We don’t want to build a limited edition manufactured collectibles. And so we’re insisting that any store. That sells our books can only someone, a couple of questions there first 30 days that hopefully we’ll stamp out that initial kind of speculative bubble.

And we’re going to be very, very aggressive about anyone breaks those rules when they’re right.

Melissa: Yeah. Well, and it, in an interesting sense. So with such, you know, a limited. Amount of retailers currently that may change in the future. [00:38:00] And if the books take off in a sense, they are kind of collectibles, right?

Because they’re hard to get.

Dinesh: Yeah. I, my personal hope is that we grow slowly and people look back in a year or two or three and say, wow, when they first started 154 stores, that’s not a lot. That’s a very small percentage of the stores in just America. Let alone the world. There won’t be that many of them.

These books are really hard together. I really want them because this company is a vibrant, exciting company and I want to have their whole lot.

Melissa: Yeah. Yeah. You’ll probably have people selling them on eBay for like $300.

Dinesh: We put, we bid, we did put one book out in, in, in talking about everything we’re doing seems to break our projections.

We put one book out called the hero trade. Hmm, which we kind of did as a little test, but also during the pandemic, we wanted to stores where there’s a lot of uncertainty for college bookstores. We wanted to help them as part of the community when you, we hadn’t put a book out yet. And it was a little, a little excitement.

So we had an eight [00:39:00] page story. All of our books are going to come with eight pastries in the back. That’s one of the things we’re doing to try and say, we know you have to work a little harder. Here’s a little extra. Yeah. Hopefully they’ll make a little up for it. We had an eight page story that. Matt Kent wrote and David Latham drew, we were absolutely in love with, and we said, you know, what, if we just print this as a little aid pager on cheap paper stock and send it in almost like an Ashcan actually Mark Nathan who’s a retailer comics cards.

And collectibles was saying to us, you guys should do an Ashcan. We would sell it for 20, 30, $40 and it’ll help the stores out. So we said, okay, we’ll do that. But we kind of have a bad idea, tone that we try and hit. So we did is we came up with this kind of mean idea. We sent one to every one of our 154 stores with a letter.

And the envelope was not, it did not say bad idea. The book does not say bad idea in the, it doesn’t say bad. Let us says, Hey, this suffers technically true. We love your store also. True. Can you please sell this, put on your shelf and sell for three 99? And if you want more [00:40:00] than three bucks, a piece email, the hero traded gmail.com and we would try to make it look like kind of a, self-published almost like a Xen, maybe someone who had shopped at the store for years, but didn’t love the comics made their own client book and sent it into saying, Hey, can you please sell it?

And stores get this along. So. We thought, well, maybe we’ll follow them. And we also know that the right market isn’t really set up to take a chance on an unknown, tiny little book and they would lap him. Who’s an absolute genius and has an incredible style. If you don’t look for too long, if you look just at a glance, you could think, Oh, this is a super talented kid from SCAD that just, just started.

And we put the book out there and only four stores emailed us and said, we want more copies. One of them, I think. Gambled that this was laughing. We’re trying to do something interesting. The other three, you started it. Interesting combined. I think 60, 70 copies were ordered from the four stores. And then once the deadline passed, we announced on Twitter.

That our first Spanish books in stores [00:41:00] and no one believed this it’s called the huge rate and no one believed this. Then we put a picture up of it and no one believed us except for the store owners who were like, Oh no. And everyone was like, what are you talking about? Why are you so upset? And they’re like, Oh, I think I threw that away.

Or am I going to go fish it out of my doughnut box? Oh my God, it was just an explosion. And that book now we couldn’t believe it. That book became. Well, I asked the one that I’ve talked about with the last year. It’s a $1,500 book. If you can even find a company. Oh my God.

Melissa: Gosh. What an interesting experiment to, to, to go that route.

And now everyone that listens to this is going to be like, I’m going to pretend I’m in sentence, started sending my stuff.

Dinesh: I think part of the success is man. David did it. It’s an amazing story with it really gives you the, a hint of this broader. Narrative it’s the premise is this is sky kind of like a Quintin Tarantino type character.

And the Lowline is driving around in his car and the trunk. He’s got a superhero, like a suit man [00:42:00] type he’s driving from criminal organization to criminalization saying I got the, I got the biggest superhero in the world. My trunk here. He’s dead. I’m going to cut them up. I’m going to sell pieces. You want the legs, 2 million bills.

You want the ice, 50,000 and thousand. I can give you a song and he’s going to do this one night. It’s going to get the money. He’s going to go off and live in paradise. And I think that really captured people’s imagination. And they were really excited about it. And we had, we had, we had complaints from stores saying, I don’t know what you’ve done my phone.

I have to turn my phone off. It wouldn’t stop ringing because I’m one, 154 stores. One store had so many requests. They decided to rip the book every page apart. Eliminate every page, just to people asking them they could come into a store and read it. They want it. Wow. Wonderful.

Melissa: That’s a huge compliment, you know, and it also kind of shows you too, how there’s a little bit of like snobbery, you know, cause the book was obviously written by super talented people and, you know, drawn by super talented people and for stores to be like, [00:43:00] Oh, I don’t, I don’t want this cause there’s no name attached to it.

You know what I mean? It kind of shows the, that side of things as well.

Dinesh: But I think also they just don’t have the time. It’s such a hard job. The, these people are deciding what they’re going to order. Four months ahead for the marketing side cuisine have started. That’s how far had they have to order. And they don’t know if it’s going to be a torrential rainstorm the week that the book hits in the book.

No one’s going to come in. They don’t know if it’s going to come in damaged and they’ve got to do this for thousands and thousands of products every week. Yeah. And then they’ve got to be expected to read all the books because even I, when I go to store how’s this one

got too much work, so there’s no way they can even look at it.

Melissa: I would be a terrible comic book shop owner because I would just buy everything I just loved to read and I would just buy it all.

Dinesh: And I think some of them, some of the unfortunate ones that don’t last very long, they do that. I would be, that’d be terrible store.

Yeah. Gives me the heebie-jeebies just thinking about [00:44:00] all that stress.

Melissa: Oh yeah. No, I would never, I would never survive that. And the first, so the first comic book that you have coming out with that idea is releasing soon, right? I mean, you had the pre-order for it. When’s that coming out and kind of tell me a little bit about like what it’s about.

I read some, some stuff on it, but I’d love to hear in your own words

Dinesh: coming out. It’s coming up the first Wednesday of March, March 3rd, 2021. It’s called ENIAC. Nick’s a real thing. It’s M stands for electronic numerical integrator and computer, and it’s a real computer that was built. The world’s first supercomputer built in the forties.

And Matt Kent Campbell’s idea, and wrote the script. Doug with withdrawing it dig it. Are you guys calling with great cover from Lusa Rosa, Laura Martin. And the premise is this it’s kind of set in the wheel well, but it veers off premises. The backstory is 1940s. During world war II, the allies are doing anything they can to win the war and they have a bunch of projects most famous of which [00:45:00] is.

The bomb, the atom bomb. Yeah. But real life, they were also trying to build the supercomputer and the pro the, the problem they were trying to solve with NEA was they were trying to figure out how to calculate these huge mathematical problems for trick deployments, missile, velocities, and trajectories weather patterns, because they’ve got to deal with all this stuff.

And this is now three easy back then they didn’t, they couldn’t do it by hand. They had to build something to do it. And so we proposed, okay, so they’re doing this. And the building, the bomb and all these other things. And what they inadvertently do is create the world’s first to pay in any of that. And so the bomb is finished.

They shut down the intake program. They dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. And real life. Three days later, they dropped the bomb in Nagasaki. Now this is where the con takes a little bit liberties. They dropped the bomb in Nagasaki three days later, and all of the high command at the the allies it’s one.

What just happened? Another bomb was dropped, who authorized that? How did this happen? And they get a message from maniac. Congratulations. [00:46:00] You’ve created the world’s first AI. I did the math one bomb. Wasn’t enough. I took the Liberty of jumping a second. And then just three more or tries to launch three more.

And the future enemies that is projecting out the cold war, et cetera. And and then the backstory continues how they tried to stop any yak, how the allies have stayed the allies at 60 years. Cause this is the longest period of time in modern history that a group of managers have stayed together. We don’t really know why truth in real life.

This convenient we propose, okay, it’s this, this greater threat. And we go through all of this, but the book really starts. This is the max of the book really starts in present day. That’s two FBI agents. They’d been hired by the secretary defense and they told this story and they’re told, we discovered we’ve been trying to hack in the neck for decades.

We’ve discovered a program running in the background of us satellites to count down. In three days, this countdown ends. We think ENIAC is going to launch a new all over the world to get humanity. [00:47:00] So your job is to critical find any act. Things are going to go back and find the original creator. They got that smuggled out into Russia, that people in Iran who they took down the nuclear program in the eighties, et cetera, you got to tracking it down.

You got to figure out how to kill it and you gotta kill it before it killed all of us. Wow. So it’s kind of a big Chris Nolan, espionage science fiction. Sure.

Melissa: That’s interesting how, like the minute the AI is created, it almost becomes instantly sentience.

Dinesh: Yeah. And it it’s, it’s a common trope in, in in storytelling and what we propose in like giving too much away in the book is that the creator is very much trying to figure out how to get it, to learn faster, how to teach, to ask questions.

And so we try and mimic anyone that has kids on the fast things like kids is. You forget, you know, if you don’t remember what you were like as a kid and to watch them, they really are little computers and struggling for the first time, you can almost see the signups, it’s connecting with their first words and it’s so fast passing how quickly they start to teach themselves [00:48:00] to learn.

And so we try and mimic that a little bit. And the story is, I mean, we’re certainly trying to give off very aggressive to foster and driven point of view with the book. And there are components of that, but one of the things we’re trying to maintain is the big finish because. Matt’s come up with something really organic and surprising.

And it really plays with kind of a human humanity or identity what human condition is. And I think people are going to be really excited about, about what he takes that fourth issue

Melissa: total.

Dinesh: Yes, that’s a forestry store.

Melissa: Okay. Okay. And I read online, I went and looked it up and I read the B side, you know, that you had posted for it, which I thought was really cool.

And I love that the line that’s, you know, like a video game with save points, I close my eyes and go back and start over. And I thought that was really interesting because you can take that, you know, literally or figuratively. And it’s an interesting way to like think memory. But he actually can.

Rewind and go back and start over. [00:49:00] Is, is he at, I know you can only tell me so much, but is, is there a lot of characters that have that ability or is he specifically the only one that can do that?

Dinesh: He’s getting on, but we’ve talked about, and this was a much larger story that we send to play around with.

And we just fell in love with the idea that you have this team of superheroes and they would go in and immediately get killed because it’s hard because how do they know what to do with this big threat? And you’ve got one character who watches them all die. We loads explains to them, this is, this is what we’re going to try next.

And he just keeps trying over and over and over again because they don’t really know whether he has his power or not. Because every time they do it, It seems to go, right? They don’t remember all the times. It didn’t go. I had to reload. And also the idea that what would happen if the w if he got to a place where the apocalypse happened, some kind of traumatic event like that.

And he tried over and over and over again, old permutations and everything was worse. And the best course of action for the future was this essentially Holocaust. And what would that look like? And we just thought those were two really interesting scenes. [00:50:00] And so we built that as an eight pager and people like it, I think.

Go and try and break the rest of the story. But our premise is that he’s the one, although it is interesting. I hadn’t thought about that, but that could be another might. I might pitch that to the team.

Melissa: Yeah. Go for it. Happy.

Dinesh: That’s part of what we, what we’re excited about with the eight pages. The backups with the besides for each book is they allow us to not have to worry about, is this a commercial enough idea that standalone is there enough meat on the bones for it to be a full issue of issue?

So ongoing? Can we do something just experimental? Can we use talent that doesn’t have the time to do something more encompassing or maybe it’s it’s not clear if they’re ready yet or not. And you can find something really interesting there, and you can just push the boundaries of the video and pretty much the way that ISI comics used to do in the fifties you got those great, you know, we had science with fantasy, the equip stories.

Yeah,

Melissa: absolutely. Like the possibilities are limitless. When you start getting into a world like that, you start creating a world. And like you said, you can have you [00:51:00] know, different, different characters that maybe don’t exist in this, you know, these four issues, but you’re like, Oh, there’s a spinoff here.

And you know, a way to go in this direction or it crossover, you know you just never know what’s going to happen. And especially when you get a response from fans, if they really are into the story,

Dinesh: Yeah. And it gives us the ability to, to kind of have fun and connecting them playing with expectation and really rewarding people that are there with us on this

Melissa: journey.

Yeah. Well, I have one comic book store where I live and so I would be definitely. You know, I’m going to give him a call and be like, Hey, you guys need to get this because I need to read it. Yeah, I know for sure. And you know, before I let you go, I want to bring up one more thing. You’re you have a new film company all-nighter yes.

Yes. And you’ve got some really cool projects coming up. Gideon falls, Luther Strode, final fantasy, which I’m very excited about. I’m a huge final fantasy nerd. So what can you tell us about that and what what’s [00:52:00] coming up with that.

Dinesh: All night, it was really a spinoff from hive-mind. What happened was we had the Witcher, which became such a huge really cottage industry.

And I can’t say too much about that because Netflix may or may literally assess them. Maybe they have people watching constantly, but there’s a lot I’m even deciding whether I should. There’s a lot of Witcher things coming. And we found that, that ourselves really building two companies, hive mine, which was the Witcher company and then everything else that we were doing.

And we found this moment in time, last year, where. We had this first look, deal on the table from Sony pictures, with big video game consultants. And we had a lot of different projects and we thought, you know what? We should just formalize this. And so we built all night and all night, it was essentially everything we were doing a hive mind other than the Witcher, and then everything else that we’re doing going forward.

So we’re doing things like Gideon falls, the awesome Jeff LeMay under 17 are comic books. We’ve got a. I actually don’t think it’s announced. I should be careful what I say here. We’ve got an amazing show runner and amazing network on board and that’s going very well. We are doing strange [00:53:00] tale with Strode, Justin Jordan and tread Moore’s book.

We’ve got a director on board that I don’t even announce that either. And sorry, I didn’t mean to tease. I’m just thinking. Okay.

Melissa: It is fine entry, you

Dinesh: know we’d fantasy. Which is, you know, we just don’t like ISI is an amazing, easy title, but just has some of the greatest science fiction stories of all time.

And we’ve got a massive, massive group of people. I mean, some really heavy hitting globally renowned creators that have. That have just knocked on our door saying this is my favorite thing. I can’t believe anyone else even knows. It says you gotta let me in. Of course, please come in. And so we’ll have an that’s one.

That’s gonna be very excited about that. I think that’ll, they’ll turn some heads think that’s just a crazy point of view in that is the showrunners are just have gone. Awesome. Yeah, so we just did a bunch of new stuff and all night it’s been a lot of fun. It’s a slow process, but but it’s a fun world.

Melissa: Yeah, much slower than that. As you said, the comic book industry goes a little bit quicker than the film industry, but you know, the content [00:54:00] all gets enjoyed in the end, essentially.

Dinesh: Yeah. And I think what we’ve done is we’ve really taken that, that high in my point of view and we’ve encompassed it all night.

And I think I am hoping that what will happen is we’ll have you have this hit rate as a production company. That’s like one 50 things goes, hide mine. We find a much higher hit rate. And I think that all night it will be even higher because we’re. I guess Jerry and requiring it right. Money, many less projects, much more attention to each one.

A lot of love. Don’t take on anything on this. You producers have a tendency to take something on because they think it’s commercial and it’s going to get made. Right. It’s okay. You guys do that. We’re going to do the things that we love, whether they’re commercial or not. I think we had fantasies with the testaments, that model where I didn’t know that anybody would care and it’s probably our, the thing that people have asked us the most about.

I’m thinking it’s moved the fastest. I think it’s a Testament to following the things that you love. Yeah.

Melissa: No, that makes sense. And I have to also ask you, when do you sleep? You are so busy.

Dinesh: No, you know [00:55:00] what it’s I actually sleep? I sleep well. I didn’t evaluate, it was a period of two or three hours a night.

So really, really, really bad. I didn’t know. You hear these stories. It’s like a currency or I don’t sleep that much. I’m such a hard worker or like the military and sleep three or four hours, all nonsense. I gave him some, some physical problems for a short period of time. Cause you really do need to sleep.

No, so I, I sleep. What, what I do is I have it. A team of people that I work with, like older people, a bad idea, man. The cruises is on my partner and all-nighter, and it’s really about making sure you’ve been super efficient. Brevity is very important. Being super disciplined about work and trusting being, not having an ego, you know, so, so right now, Amanda, I’m here talking to you.

I just left a meeting that I was on with Amanda on a zoom with two other people who looking to partner with, and she’ll take the second half of that meeting and the next time I’ll do it and she’ll be able to do something else and you have to worry from an ego standpoint of, am I going to be cut out of something?

I’m going to miss something it’s not going to go as well. It’s about finding the right people that you trust in the trust. You, and I think. [00:56:00] That allows you to have that at least a better balance work life balance.

Melissa: Yeah, I like that. That’s really refreshing. Not something you hear often in the entertainment industry.

Dinesh: Yeah, yeah. Trying to be a little different. Yeah.

Melissa: Well I think a bad idea is probably going to really push some boundaries and I’m excited to see, you know, what the content and you know, how you guys fare, you know, in the, in the coming years, because I think it’s really interesting and you’re definitely, you’re definitely stirring up, you know, some is some hype and there’s, there’s a lot of talk about it.

So congratulations on that.

Dinesh: Thanks. Thanks for lunch.

Melissa: Yeah. And thanks for being on here today. It’s been really fun. I’ve enjoyed getting to learn more about you and getting to chat and please come back, you know, anytime to promote any of those things you couldn’t talk about now. And we can maybe talk about them in the future.

Dinesh: It’s been a blast. Thanks so much for having me and thanks for the time. I’d love to come back. Absolutely.

Melissa: Awesome. Thank you so much. [00:57:00] All right, thanks.