Robots, Revivals, AI Slop, and the Bolt Conference with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about how an 86-year-old musical is creating a billion-dollar payoff for a bold innovator, how robots are helping 7-Eleven manage the labor crunch, and how AI work slop is damaging the progress AI is promising. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger, and Mile Zero's Robyn Bolton as we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact. Let's get started.

Podcast Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

[00:00:45] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and with me, I have our co-host, Robyn Bolton. Welcome Robyn.

[00:00:52] Robyn Bolton: Thank you. Great to be here as always.

[00:00:55] Brian Ardinger: We were together this week at the Bolt Conference in Indianapolis. This is a conference that's put on by gener8tor, a group of folks out of Madison and Milwaukee, and now I think they run over 300 accelerators around mostly non-tech hubs. They host a conference where they bring together startups and corporates to talk about all the amazing things that are going on. Investors can have a chance to invest in these companies, and two and a half days at the ballpark in Indianapolis to talk about innovations. Love to get your thoughts on it.

[00:01:27] Robyn Bolton: You know, the audience they brought together, as you were saying, of startups and VCs, and corporate innovators bringing all together into a very non-traditional space, which I think led to a lot of really interesting conversations. Because everybody was in a different element. And then a great mix of speakers. They had industry-specific keynotes, but then they also had hot takes, which were, you know, a whole variety of speakers giving five to seven-minute single-topic rapid-fire hot takes.

[00:02:00] Brian Ardinger: You got to do one of those hot takes.

[00:02:02] Robyn Bolton: I did do one of those hot takes, which I just love those little bite-sized nuggets of information and insight and stuff to think about.

[00:02:11] Brian Ardinger: A lot of the conversations were with other folks saying, am I crazy, or is the world crazy? 

[00:02:17] Robyn Bolton: And yes, and we did a lot of reassuring of, you are not crazy. The world is crazy. And you're also not alone. There are other people asking the same questions, and go find the other people. They're not just here at this conference. They're in your organization too.

[00:02:36] Brian Ardinger: Some of the themes that obviously were AI and all the new technologies that are changing different parts of different industries. It was interesting to see different industry takes and being in a venue, a lot of times you go to conferences and you hear only about one side or one industry, and it was nice to be able to sit in an audience and see across healthcare and see across ag and see across manufacturing, and see what was resonating.

One of the biggest things that's resonating is this idea that opportunity exists where there is dissatisfaction. And there's a lot of dissatisfaction in markets, in the politics, in the world around us. And so there's no better time to start build, try and do some stuff. 

[00:03:13] Robyn Bolton: The keynote speaker who kicked off the day, Gary Cooper, he just had some great points, and a couple that I wrote down are chaos is not in opposition to creativity, it is the precursor to it.

There's so much noise out there, and for each of us to try to be the signal in that age of noise of creating tangible, undeniable proof that better is possible and it's being built. And I thought that was just such a great message of yes, we're all feeling like the world has turned upside down, and the world is crazy. And we all have agency to do something about it, even in our small own individual way. 

[00:03:55] Brian Ardinger: Yeah, I like that talk as well. I like the fact that he emphasized that startups and founders should be thinking less about their product and solution and more about their impact. I think oftentimes we forget about that, you know, or we start the journey that way, but then you get into the weeds of like, okay, what feature do I have to ship or whatever. And you oftentimes lose sight of the fact of what's the impact we're trying to do here, regardless of the solution we created around it. 

[00:04:18] Robyn Bolton: In the face of uncertainty, don't despair, build. And I just thought that was a great rallying cry for all of us. Regardless of where we play in this space.

[00:04:29] Brian Ardinger: We've got a couple of different articles that we're going to discuss today, as our normal convention suggests. So the first thing that we wanted to throw out, there's an article in Bloomberg called The Falls First blockbuster is an 86-year-old musical. I stumbled upon this with Trung Phan. He's on Twitter, and he does a great job with a Saturday newsletter. He calls SAT News on Substack.

He outlined what this article was and some of the things that are going on with the Sphere in Las Vegas. The Sphere, if anyone's not familiar with it, it's that big globe new venue that they built for two plus billion dollars in Vegas as a way to create unique, innovative experiences and the article and Trung's analysis walk through the idea of the Wizard of Oz and how the founders of the sphere bought the rights to that film and decided to recreate it so that could play in this unique venue. And the economics in that, that were behind this particular new innovation.

So James Dolan, he licensed the classic, and from the 1939 Classic, spent about a hundred million dollars adapting it for the LED screen there, and since August 28th when it launched, it's making about $2 million a day with a full target run of about a billion dollars over the course of the time that they're going to run it. 4,000 to 5,000 people are seeing it, and they're paying $150 to $200 each time. And it's really taken off, and it's pretty incredible. So, I'd love to get your thoughts on it. 

[00:05:59] Robyn Bolton: The numbers blew my mind. I mean, I knew of the Sphere. It's huge and you see it all the time whenever they show Vegas, but I knew of it mostly as a concert venue. You know, I think U2 has done a residency there, some other performers, and this was like, okay, this makes, you know, this makes sense. This is a cool event venue.

But then we're talking about the Wizard of Oz, which you can watch on tv, but then the numbers of how many people were going to see it and they're paying a $100 to $150 for a ticket to see a movie that they've probably seen who knows how many times, and can see for free on their phone. That this almost a hundred-year-old movie is going to make a billion dollars.

It was mind-boggling. And I think in Trung's post, he had a video from inside the Sphere during a viewing, and the hilarious thing is that everybody had their phones out. Videoing capturing the Wizard of Oz on the sphere, and as I'm watching it, I'm actually getting motion sick. It was just the mind-warping experience to see the numbers and se...