Episode #81: Indoor, Outdoor, In Between: The Real Future of Human Experience

In this episode of Stewart Squared, host Stewart Alsop III is joined by his co-host Stewart Alsop II to cover a wide range of topics stemming from Stewart's recent trip to Tucuman, Argentina for a wedding, which sparked observations about how malls and social culture in Argentina and Brazil still resemble the American experience of the 1990s. From there, the two dig into the broader thesis of the show around the shift from traditional shopping malls to experience-based entertainment venues like Meow Wolf and the Sphere, the struggles facing movie theaters amid studio consolidation and streaming dominance, the rise of world models in AI with companies like AMI Labs (founded by Yann LeCun), Niantic Spatial, and others, the tension between research and applied AI development, venture capital dynamics in an era of billion-dollar AI bets, the future of drone mobility and autonomous vehicles, and Stewart's plans to vibe-code a custom production workflow to replace tools like Riverside.fm for the show.

Links mentioned:
- [Meow Wolf](https://meowwolf.com)
- [Niantic Spatial](https://nianticlabs.com)
- [AMI Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence)](https://amilabs.xyz/)
- [Stratechery by Ben Thompson](https://stratechery.com)

Timestamps

00:00 Exploring Malls: A Cultural Comparison
03:08 The Evolution of Entertainment Malls
05:48 The Future of Movie Theaters and Streaming
08:58 The Experience Economy: Malls vs. Outdoor Activities
12:00 The Impact of Digital Natives on Movie Attendance
14:54 Innovations in Mobility and Experience
17:57 The Future of Drones and Infrastructure
21:02 The Intersection of Technology and Experience
23:55 World Models vs. LLMs: The Future of AI
26:39 The Landscape of AI Research Funding
28:53 Research vs. Applied AI: The Ongoing Debate
32:43 R&D in AI: Understanding the Distinction
36:46 The Evolution of Venture Capital in AI
40:31 The Future of AI Companies and Market Valuations
42:49 Economic Implications of AI and Inflation
45:40 The Role of Humans in an Automated Future

Key Insights

1. Shopping malls in the United States have declined significantly due to overexpansion, but the hosts argue they are not disappearing entirely. Instead, the future lies in "entertainment malls" that replace traditional retailers with immersive experiences, with Meow Wolf serving as a prime example by occupying former multiplex movie theater space.
2. The movie theater industry faces a compounding crisis, as the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger is expected to consolidate rather than increase film output, leaving multiplexes with even fewer movies to show and accelerating the decline of traditional cinema attendance.
3. Streaming psychology has fundamentally shifted audience behavior. When viewers expect a film to appear on streaming platforms within weeks, they lose urgency to attend opening night, meaning theaters must enforce longer exclusivity windows of 45 to 100 days to drive in-person attendance.
4. Younger digital natives are actually attending movie theaters at higher rates than previous generations because they crave the communal, large-screen experience, challenging the assumption that short attention spans are killing cinema.
5. World model AI research is attracting enormous speculative investment, with companies like AMI Labs raising over a billion dollars despite openly promising no products for years, reflecting a shift toward private-equity-style bets on trillion-dollar outcomes rather than traditional venture capital discipline.
6. Niantic Spatial holds a unique competitive advantage in world model development because its globally sourced Pokemon GO location database provides unmatched real-world geodata, positioning it ahead of purely research-oriented competitors.
7. The hosts see parallels between today's speculative AI investment environment and the lead-up to the 1929 crash, warning that widespread belief in a coming technological utopia historically precedes economic Armageddon, and advising capital preservation as a priority before any abundance-driven reset occurs.