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Settle In with PBS News
The media's year of 'change or die'
00:37:12
The media and entertainment industries face a period of great turmoil, including unprecedented business and political pressures. Evan Shapiro, the so-called "Media Universe Cartographer," speaks to Geoff Bennett about those challenges and the future.
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- [00:00]
A
Hey everybody. Jeff Bennett here and welcome to another episode of Settle in from PBS News. There's been a lot of turmoil in the media and entertainment business lately, from the takeover of CBS and Warner Bros. By the Ellison family, to mass layoffs at news organizations like the Washington Post, to allegations of censorship by late night talk show hosts, and yes to the federal funding cuts in public media. Our guest today will help us understand all of this tumult and what it all means for the future of media. He's Evan Shapiro, an Emmy and Peabody winning producer who now writes about the industry on his substack called Media War and Peace. He's also become known as media's unofficial cartographer for his graphic charting the size and ownership of media companies. So settle in and enjoy our conversation with Evan Shapiro. Evan Shapiro, thanks for joining us.
- [00:51]
B
Thank you so much for having me.
- [00:53]
A
Yeah, of course. You've had this really fascinating career that runs from creative work to executive leadership to now essentially mapping and critiquing the entire media ecosystem. How did that evolution happen?
- [01:05]
B
I got fired by Comcast and at that point, you know, I had been speaking inside companies for a while about the changes that were coming and really getting a bit agitated that the change was not coming from within these companies who have all of this power and all these resources, but rather was being made around them and they weren't reacting in real time quick enough. I really, you know, had an existential crisis of why I got into the business in the first place and what I realized it was to make stuff. And so I started writing my own column first on LinkedIn, then on Substack, which really wasn't a thing prior to when this was all occurring. And as I was putting my thoughts out there, all based on data first, by the way, not just opinions based on my own impulses, but based on what I think is the voice of the audience, which is the data around their usage. People seem to be gravitating towards it. And then about six months into that experiment, I dropped this map of the media universe that I still make every month and remake every month, and it kind of blew up into this new kind of creator mindset that I now operate in.
- [02:20]
A
Yeah, I want to talk more about the map in a second. But was there a specific moment when you realized that you were more interested in understanding the media system, the media ecosystem, than working inside it? Apart from being let go by Comcast,
- [02:34]
B
I just really started to appreciate the ability to wake up every day and not have to think about operating a business, but in thinking about the business ecosystem writ large. And frankly, the feedback loop from the audience that I was serving was really satisfying. More satisfying to be blunt, than the kind of internal navel gazing that was really the practice of most media companies up until that point and still today. And you know, so this was, you know, it start. It was an evolution that started about 20 years ago as I was teaching these classes. And I've now taught two different generations of college students, millennials and gen zers, and watching their consumption evolution over that period really just, it excites me. The more I delved into it on an ongoing basis, the more enjoyable I found it. And frankly, after I left or was asked to leave Comcast, the ability to put my thoughts out there without having to run it by HR or a PR department without having to run my thoughts up the flagpole before I articulated them, that really gave me more joy and satisfaction than at any point in my career. And you know, I've won Emmys and Peabody's and I've done all these other things, but so much of the business is about the business as opposed to about the audience. And now my practice is all about really trying to represent the audience's wants, needs and desires to these executives and frankly to the creators who are operating outside the ecosystem. So it started 20 years ago and picked up speed from there.
- [04:13]
A
The media universe map that you mentioned that you created, where did the idea for that come from?
- [04:20]
B
I had been making PowerPoint since before PowerPoint was really a thing. And so I started messing around with it on PowerPoint and then I just threw it all out and started from scratch. And the first one took me six months to complete from front end to finish. And it was my love hate relationship with PowerPoint that frankly gave me the inspiration for it.
- [04:44]
A
And we should say this is a map that charts who owns what in the global media landscape. What about it took six months? Why did it take that long?
- [04:52]
B
Well, first you have to understand what the X and Y axis is and then just determining what the scale was. So, you know, there's a temptation to do it around viewership or user base or any number of different metrics, but those things tend not to be reported very accurately and a lot of them tend to be somewhat subjective. I think monthly average users is a dumb metric. I don't think it really represents anything important. And so it took me a minute just to land on market capitalization as the X axis of the chart itself. And then understanding the groupings, understanding which companies to include and which companies not to include. Then understanding what data to include on each planet. On the map itself. I do include user base and subscribers, but that's not the size of the planet. The most controversial choice I made was putting Apple and Microsoft and Meta and Google on the same map with Netflix and Disney and Warner Brothers. Now Warner Brothers Discovery, or as I call them, Disco Bros. And Paramount, which at the time was called Viacom, you know, putting them all on the same map together, people got angry about that. Why would you do that? They don't really work in media. They dabble in it at a loss leader to steal share from us. And my point was, yeah, yes, that's exactly the race that we're in right now. So, so it was a lot of choosing what to include and what not to include, the shape and all that kind of stuff. And then once I determined that, now I updated the map this weekend for March 2026 and it took me two hours.
- [06:37]
A
When you step back though and look at the map, is there something that stands out to you about who actually owns or I should say controls the information and entertainment economy?
- [06:48]
B
I think the, the larger point is as much as people like to say there are these small number of companies that control the media on the planet earth, it's actually not so much true now as it was, let's say when I started doing this, when truly six companies, seven companies controlled 90% of media on the planet earth. Now because of things like Apple and YouTube and meta and you know, TikTok and Spotify and Roblox and all these other things, you know, I think it's actually more decentralized now than it's ever been. I also have had a theory that since the middle of last year that the public media sector, and by that I don't necessarily mean pbs, I mean true public media. And that's not an offense meant towards pbs, more an offense to the way America treats its public media. But the BBC's, the ZDFs, the, the France televisions of the world, their revenues tend to stay pretty normalized on an ongoing basis. Now there are governmental threats against those platforms around the rest of the world, but the regional masters, so the regional public media still control a massive amount share of voice in the markets where they're at. And I don't think that the Netflixes and the Amazons in particular have necessarily been able to cut into that. So I do think, you know, we have this perception that very few people control the media that is less and less true on an ongoing basis. Especially when you consider that YouTube is now the biggest channel on TV sets in the US and everyone says, well, they're the big tech, you know, they control so much Voice. In reality, YouTube is 4.6 million different channels, you know, and a million of them control a lot of the voice there, but that's still a million channels. So in my mind, fragmentation is now the most important factor in media. And so I think, you know, I like to say that, you know, when I was rising up in media, it was a lot easier because your competition was a few other channels. Now your competition is everybody. All 7 billion people on the planet earth with a smartphone. The good news is that back when I was coming up in media, there were only a few buyers of the stuff that you would make. Now there are 7 billion, 8 billion buyers of the media you make. So the control has shifted from these ivory towers who think they're still in charge to the consumer themselves, who really do control the media in their system settings whenever they touch that piece of glass that they pick up first thing in the morning.
- [09:30]
A
You recently gave a talk called the Year of Change or Die, which is pretty, pretty stark framing. What did you mean by that?
- [09:37]
B
So this is the year that the combination of the creator economy and mainstream media will really intersect in a way that they hadn't before. And you see this in Procter and Gamble producing a microsoap for TikTok and Instagram. You see this in Mr. Beast being on Amazon, Ms. Rachel being on Netflix. And so the folks who operate their businesses by the vanity metrics of eras past, they're going to find it more and more difficult to succeed. The best example I'll give you is last year, all premium streamers on the face of the earth. So these are the paid streaming platforms like Amazon prime and Netflix and Disney plus and Hulu and the rest of the. They gained 175 million new subscribers. Hooray. They also lost 158 million subscribers. The retention has been grow. It's. It's a third of what it was five years ago. It's half of what it was four years ago. They're going to get to a zero retention in the next couple of years. And then suddenly premium streaming, this thing that was going to save television, right, is going to be in the same place. Cable is losing subscribers, revenues shrinking instead of growing. And in reality, at the same time, these social media platforms, social video Things like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snap, these are now where people under the age of 50, not, oh, not, not under 30, not under 20, under the age of 50. They're spending much more time there than they are on other platforms. The fastest growing segment of viewers of YouTube on television are people. 55 plus. I did a report that's going to come out soon on the children's television or content landscape. 88%. 88% of 2 to 5 year olds would prefer to watch YouTube over any streaming service. And so if you don't, I, I gave this speech and I talk about this all the time. In the fourth quarter of last year, Barb, which is the Nielsen of the UK, was reported that BBC surpassed. I'm sorry, YouTube surpassed the BBC in total reach for the entire quarter of fourth quarter. Right now fewer, fewer than half of Britons are reached by BBC News on a weekly basis. 44%, 90% of the public touch YouTube in some form or fashion. And yet when I say that to people in the British UK television system, they tell me I'm out of my mind. As if the data isn't real. That, you know, YouTube is not television. People are. They don't treat it the same way. They absolutely are. Frontline puts its full feature documentaries on YouTube the same week it's on PBS. And they get massive audiences, two, three generations younger than your television audience does. And so when you see that happening, you have to go out there and ring the bell and say, now's the moment. You've been delaying embracing social video as the new form of broadcast. But you can still accomplish what you want to accomplish if you understand the rules have changed and the audience is now in charge. And so this year, where retention in 2025 was 11% for premium streaming, where YouTube is now bigger than BBC, on many given days in the UK, when the number one channel on TVs in the United States is, is YouTube. This is the moment to change. And if you don't, as Paramount and Warner Brothers combine and make fewer movies and fire tens of thousands of people, if you don't change this year, by the end of this decade, you're going to find yourself out of a job or out of a business.
- [13:30]
A
When you say that the traditional media companies are making a mistake in sort of looking at the vanity metrics. What's a better metric if it's not subscribers or viewers? Engagement. How do you measure engagement in a meaningful way?
- [13:47]
B
Engagement is at the root of it. I call it the affinity economy. So it is about love. You're interviewing me, right? Why? I don't have a million followers. I don't have a million substack readers. I have at most 100,000 150,000 people who follow me in any given time of or month. But they love what I do. They are rabid about my content. They talk about me when I'm not in the room. And so that affinity has driven me to a business model that works substantially better for me personally than when I was working at Comcast getting paid and getting bonuses and getting shares of the company. So affinity is to me the key metrics that you need to focus on. Reach is not important because passive reach, it just doesn't buy you anything but cult members, loyalists, passionate people who will wear your brand out in public whether they subscribe and never cancel. Dropout. I don't know if you know what dropout is. It's what college humor became. Dropout recently raised their prices and their million subscribers got angry at them for not asking for more money. That's passion, that's affinity. Angel Studios, which is a faith based family content film studio that made Sound of Freedom. They just came out with David which is an animated film. They have 1.5 million members. The executives at angel do not choose the films to greenlight. The members do. Angel has the highest box office per film release average in an all of independent film on the face of the Earth. Higher than a 24. The studio everyone talk about, right? That's an affinity metric. They did a reg A offering which is a way to offer a security without going public. Last summer they raised $50 million from 40,000 people in 18 days. And they could have raised more but they were capped. That's affinity metrics. So to me it's about the loyalty and engagement of a community. It isn't about pure reach and frequency.
- [16:00]
A
Let's talk about. Because I take your point about the fragmentation across the broader media landscape. But as you know, Larry Ellison and his family now control CBS News. Bari Weiss was brought in. There's been a lot of debate about the editorial direction of CBS News and 60 Minutes. From your vantage point. I'll start with the. With the sort of micro just about cbs. Do you see a longer term strategy there?
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B
Yeah.
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A
What is it?
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B
Fealty to the guy in the White House. I mean that is clear. There is no other logic behind the $110 billion acquisition that they're making of Warner Brothers Discovery aka Disco Bros. There's just no. There's no logic. There's no mathematical logic to is about the daddy and son buying CNN to please dear leader. That is very clear. And the choices they've been making at CBS, whether it's editing and censoring 60 Minutes and the story that they were doing or telling Stephen Colbert that he can't interview a Senate candidate or firing Stephen Colbert. You know, it is. All of media and tech has decided to bend the knee to this guy. I don't know why. There is this quid pro quo that is clearly going on between the Ellison family and the Trump family. It started, you know, with donations, but there are a lot of ins and outs. You know, the current conflict in the Middle east is part of this. Oracle is a major contractor to the military industrial complex in this country. But it goes, you know, the TikTok deal itself, handing the back end of that to Larry Ellison. There's the opportunity to control the data behind TikTok. But in reality, what wound up happening there is $40 billion goes right into Larry Ellison's pocket as a result of that deal. Because Oracle now provides the back end infrastructure and management of that platform in the US and they're getting paid by the company to do that. So that's a. That is an obvious quid pro quo. There is no question that the Ellisons made a deal with the White House to fire Stephen Colbert in order to get their FCC approval for the deal that they were doing to buy Paramount in the first place. I mean, the order of things just dictates it very clearly. So it is about a monolithic set of voices in the news era. David Ellison also has always wanted to be a media mogul since he was in diapers. And so this is kind of a dream realization for. For the sun in that case. But I will say there's one point there, which is Bari Weiss would not be running CBS if she hadn't left the New York Times to start her own substack, which didn't have 10 million subscribers. It just had the right pool of people. So the affinity economy shows exactly the power of a very strong community like that. Sorry, I interrupted.
- [19:11]
A
No, it's fine. I was going to ask. You answered the question. I was going to ask what the bigger prize was for the Ellisons if they're not invested in the editorial independence of CBS News or CNN potentially, if that deal closes. But I hear you say it's getting access to, for instance, TikTok and building this empire.
- [19:28]
B
Yeah, and don't sleep on the Oracle of it all. Spending $110 billion to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, Disco Bros. Is kind of a drop in the bucket to the trillion dollars that Oracle can take in over the next decade.
- [19:44]
A
Let's talk about print media, namely the New York Times. Versus the Washington Post. Because the Times now has more than 12 million digital subscribers. It keeps expanding into games and cooking and podcasts. That is really what is keeping the news side afloat. Meantime, you've got the Washington Post. They've had these layoffs, all sorts of internal turmoil. What explains those two institutions moving in two very different directions?
- [20:10]
B
The New York Times is, to me, the greatest case study of old media transformation into new media. And I wrote about this, I think four years ago, I started writing about the New York Times. It's funny, this past week, they hit the highest market capitalization they've ever had, over $12 billion. And so what they decided. Mark Thompson was the first CEO. Meredith Copy Levitt is now, you know, she's the. The CEO. The two of them together really transformed that business. And when you look at what they did, they made a decision to upend everything without getting rid of the mission. Where they started was with their users. They didn't say, hey, let's get into gaming. They didn't say that. They didn't say, hey, let's get into cooking. They didn't say that. They didn't say, hey, let's get into podcasting. They said, what does our audience like? They got into gaming because their audience is rabid about the crossword puzzle. And so they got into these puzzle games on mobile, which is the. By the way, puzzle games on mobile is the number one genre and way that gamers like to play in the world. And so they started building that, and then they bought wordle for a steal. They got into podcasting not because they wanted to get into pod podcasting, but because they asked their users, how do you get your news beside the New York Times? And they said podcasts. They also changed the nature of podcasting. The daily was the first daily podcast, right? It was much shorter than all other podcasts out there. And so they really upended that. And then they, they. They focused on a lifestyle. This is how they describe themselves. The. The lifestyle suite of services that centers around user passions. Cooking. They bought the Athletic, which filled a massive hole at the New York Times. Their sports section was always terrible. Now it's one of the better ones in the world. It also came with a million subscribers. So they reconstituted the entire enterprise around the needs, wants, desires, and interests of their best, highest average revenue per user users. The Washington Post was about Jeff Bezos proving that his still works. That's the major difference between those two. I mean, it took. It took what was a real brilliant business person and turned them into the divorced dad that everybody hates. And that's how he's treating the Washington Post. Hey kid, let's have a chat. No, no, Jeff, support journalism. You know, back the enterprise that brought down Nixon, for Pete's sake. You know, what Catherine Graham built there was one of the most important journalistic institutions in the history of the republic. And in less than five years he's absolutely destroyed it. Not just from an integrity standpoint, that's, that can be opinion. But the business is just disintegrating. They're bleeding subscribers, their revenues are not headed in the right direction. And so when someone does something out of personal ego or out of, you know, their own belief in their own supremacy, it typically turns into these types of things. Whereas Mark and Meredith have really focused on survival of the enterprise, the transformation of the platform and super, super serving. Remember the New York Times is now at their all time high market capitalization. They don't have 300 million subscribers, they don't have 100 million subscribers, they don't have 20 million subscribers. As you just said, they have 12 million. And they've shifted from a paper product that was mostly advertising delivered by diesel trucks into the, I think the greatest digital lifestyle suite on the planet.
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A
Well, we can't talk about media under pressure without in fairness, talking about public media. What lessons do you think PBS can learn from other just best practices given the defunding situation?
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B
It's interesting. You know, the defunding situation was probably the best advertising campaign that could have ever happened to pbs. If you look at individual donations to PBS over the last year, they're skyrocketing. And a huge percentage of the donations are coming from Gen Z and millennials who are first time donors. And 70% of those donations from first time donors are coming online. Not on the telephone, not during a campaign on air, but from direct outreach, either through email or very often on social media. If you look at the Arthur campaign of Raising the Fist, that was fan created by the way, that's a really good example of that. If you look at what Rainy Aronson is doing with Frontline by putting up these Peabody, Emmy and Oscar award winning documentaries in full length on YouTube the same week that they air on PBS. And sometimes they're getting a much bigger audience on YouTube than they are on, than they are on broadcast or on the app, then you can see that if you go the same content that you've been serving on broadcast will be enjoyed by much younger consumers, the next generation of consumers on social video, if you put it there that is a really crucial element Disney put up the entire, the 20th anniversary of high School reunion was a couple months ago and Disney put the entire movie up in 10 minute increments on TikTok and it blew up. I don't think they expected that, right. I think they thought it was a kind of cute little stunt, but it's turned into this massive thing. And so to me, if you want your next generation of members, if you want, I don't understand what the FCC license means anymore. Brendan Carr is running the FCC as a personal catering crew for his president. The whole Jimmy Kimmel of it all is a great demonstration of that. Prove your loyalty to us. Nexstar and technun. Take Jimmy Kimmel off the air and then we'll approve your deal to merge. Well, that's exactly what happened in that light, when they're taking money back from you. I don't understand what the FCC broadcast license does for PBS anymore, to be blunt, other than limit what you can say and do on your air. To me, I think rebuilding, reconstituting, and I know the member stations are really important here. But when you talk to member stations, their most fervent users, yes, they still have median age 72 on broadcast in primetime, by the way. But there's a next generation of Gen Xers who grew up me, I was the first Sesame street generation. I grew up with Sesame Street. I grew up with pbs. The first time I saw most of my favorite Broadway shows were on great performances. And so, you know, the idea that my generation has lost touch with pbs, that the younger generations are losing touch with it is, is a, it's a real shame. And then you look at what PBS Kids does online, reaching, you know, younger families, and it's really invigorating. So to me, I think kill broadcast, move into pure digital. If the PBS and by the way, the local radio stations, NPR as well, the public media in this country who have good digital enterprises are thriving. St. Louis, Rochester, Kansas City, SoCal, they're really talking to their audiences on a daily basis. The largest growth in the creator economy between now and the end of this decade is not going to come from creators. It's going to come from big mainstream publishers moving their enterprises and their content onto creator platforms. Each one of the PBS and public media affiliates, NPR and PBS in this country, if they chose to be the most important creators in their, in their constituency, in their community, they can, it's very, very doable because they make better content more often than everybody else out there and they can rely much more on the resources of their fan base than they can than they have historically on the. On the government. I mean, you know, look at this for a second. This American Life is one of the most popular podcasts in the world. It's a radio show that transformed into a podcast I never listened to. Wait, wait, don't tell me. On radio, I listen to the hell out of it on podcasts. I do not watch Frontline on television. I watch it on YouTube. So it is a much better one on one relationship. And then you don't have to worry about the Brendan, you don't have to worry about the vagaries of whoever's president dictating whether or not you're in charge of your own fate.
- [29:24]
A
No, I take your point. I mean, PBS News puts PBS NewsHour on YouTube. It streams in real time, and you can watch either the YouTube version or the broadcast version simultaneously. And when I encounter people on the street and they tell me they watch the NewsHour, it's usually the second or third question when I realize, oh, no, they're listening to the podcast or they're watching discrete segments on Twitter or online some the of other way. Or to your point about YouTube, after everything you've seen, both professionally and personally, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of media?
- [29:58]
B
I'm optimistic about it. I'm optimistic about media itself. I'm very pessimistic about these companies who think they're in media today. And in reality, all they are is in the stock market. Too much of the media ecosystem is run by CFOs and shareholders at this point. And not enough is run by audiences and artists. And so you know what's run by audience and artists? The creator economy. This podcast stuff that's made by artists and delivered direct to consumers. That's where the industry is all headed. It's Eli Roth just did a reg A offering on Republic. They raised $5 million. He raised $5 million to make his own film. He didn't have to go around hat in hand to Hollywood asking for permission to greenlight this movie. He did it himself. That is the future. That is where this is all headed. It is not headed back to Hollywood. It is not headed to these big studio systems. It is not headed to Ted and Zaz and Davey and Larry walking around the Warner Brothers lot kicking tires on golf carts. That's not where the industry's headed. I am very concerned about the tens of thousands of people who rely on that end of the sector. That end of the industry for their livelihoods. You know what? I'm not worried about the ability for individual creators to build enterprises around themselves that don't necessarily need 100 million subscribers to succeed. That's going to grow, that's going to thrive. So I'm optimistic about the media because I know the consumers are driving it.
- [31:36]
A
I hear you. And that for me, for someone who came up as sort of a classically trained broadcast journalist, that is depressing. Watching the Golden Globes, there was a Nikki Glaser skit where she's sitting in a car and she goes, podcasts. That's just what we have now. It's just to watch the bottom fall out of television news. To hear you say that, you know, the big studio system is done, and now it's basically millions of people on their phone producing stuff and just uploading it. It's sad. It just makes me sad for the way things used to be and the quality control. I mean, say what you want to about how there are no more gatekeepers, but when you have gatekeepers, there is a certain level of quality that is yielded from that system.
- [32:23]
B
Yes. And I think the New York Times demonstrates that you can have both. I've had conversations with both Beehive and Substack. Most news organizations are now starting their own newsletters on Substack. The quality the cream will still rise to the top. You just have to put the cream in the coffee. And if you take the bloat out of it, the infrastructure that we built kind of irrationally when the profits were so high, then you can figure out this new system to go directly to the consumer. This isn't about individual creators. Like I said, the biggest growth in the creator economy between now and the end of this decade is not going to come from new Mr. Beasts popping up. It's going to come from organizations like NewsHour starting podcasts. It's going to come from the New York Times deciding to get into gaming. It's going to come from big. The BBC doing a deal with YouTube. It's going to come from traditional professional journalists deciding that the bloat is no longer worth it and that they're going to have to figure out how to make a go of it in this new economy. But when Jim Acosta and and all these other journalists move over to these platforms, every single one of them is. I mean, all due respect to Chuck Todd, he was a bit of a joke at NBC when he left. Now he's blowing up on TikTok. Seriously. And so there is a Way to recraft what we had. Even better, because now you don't have to sell advertising. You can sell subscriptions, you can have a Patreon, you can go direct to consumers and have a relationship with them, the gatekeepers, the ones who don't make anything, the ones who are only there to get paid, they are the problem.
- [34:11]
A
Separate from all of this, the through line in your work is really focus has been focusing on what matters and finding the best way to make the best use of your time. And I bring that up because you've spoken openly about your experience battling cancer and the complications that have followed. How did that experience change the way you think about time and work and what really matters?
- [34:35]
B
The errors. I enjoyed my jobs when I was running networks and producing stuff. You know, I got to produce Portlandia and a great film called this Film is Not Yet Rated and a whole bunch of other fun stuff. But even then, I spent most of my days talking about stuff, not doing stuff. And now 100. Other than this podcast, 100% of my day is spent doing stuff. I. I make whatever I make, I decide in the morning to make, and I put it out there without filter. And so, you know, creating a relationship between myself and a community. I want to spend the rest of my life doing two things. Doing the work that I love and being with my family. And now that's all that and rooting for the Eagles are the three things I do with my life. And so, you know, to me, wasting no more time on bull. That became clearer during the two years I really was at the. At the bottom of my health, struggle and the feedback loop from the community that I've built, you know, helped save my life. So, yeah, I think it's. I think it's. You know, no job in media is safe anymore, unfortunately. But if you can figure out a way to build an enterprise around the things that you absolutely love and are great at, you know, follow your passion is one thing, follow your talent is another, and understanding how those two intersect. You know, I love the Eagles. I'm not going to be starting quarterback for them. Right. But I also love making stuff. I love, like, crafting stuff. I love solving puzzles. So I am a workaholic. But I don't waste any time on work anymore.
- [36:26]
A
I want to pick up on probably the least important thing. You said you're an Eagles fan. Where are you from? Are you from Philly?
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B
Yeah. I grew up in Cherry Hill, but my whole family's from Philadelphia.
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A
I grew up in the town right next to you. I grew up in Voorhees, New Jersey.
- [36:39]
B
Oh, yeah, the Echelon Mall. Come on.
- [36:41]
A
Yeah. Did you go to Cherry Hill east or West?
- [36:44]
B
East.
- [36:48]
A
That face. You just made that. The second you made that face. I thought he went to Cherry Hill East. That's.
- [36:54]
B
Yeah, that's the most. Cherry heli. Space
- [36:58]
A
is. That's terrific. Evan Shapiro. A real pleasure to speak with you. Thanks for making time.
- [37:03]
B
Thank you. Nice to meet you.