Perspectives of the Porn King, Leaps of Imagination, Distribution and Sourcing Alpha
Issue #2 in an ongoing review series.
“Don’t be boring”
“One of the first things I tell people that work for me is I say, ‘Don’t be boring...
…That’s just simple. It’s OK if we fail. It’s OK if we try but don’t quite hit the mark. Just don’t be boring.”
A TYPICAL CEO’s speech, right? Motivate your employees, tell them to go above and beyond. Or perhaps a director’s mantra. Don’t be boring. Try new things. It’s good, solid advice.
But these are the words of porn king Greg Lansky, who is the founder of Vixen Media Group, a growing adult entertainment empire. The quote above is from a very long and detailed profile on him at AVN, which serves as equal parts self-promotion and stylized origin story, but it’s such a cool behind-the-scenes view of what it takes to run a business so deeply entangled with vice.
For example, here are some choice quotes:
“I like to look at porn as a fluid, ever-evolving beast,” Lansky says. “I like to look at things like, ‘How can I disrupt that market a little bit?’ And we’ve been really successful at it by not doing what everybody else is doing. Sometimes that angers people and makes them jealous, like, ‘Oh, you’re doing things different.’ No one says we couldn’t.
“Also Greg has been smart with not just the videos themselves but the metrics behind the scenes—the social media. What I believe he’s trying to create is a new lifestyle brand, like Hugh Hefner did.”
“We just happen to do porn but we’re a lifestyle brand, and in my opinion we sell the hardest product that you can sell,” Lansky reasons. “First of all because we compete with free, which isn’t easy; and second, we create prestige where you normally don’t see it.
“People who don’t normally look at porn see this and they’re like, ‘Wow, that’s a great visual. It’s hot; it’s cool.’ And by the time they realize it’s a porn company, it’s too late. They already like it. They already think it’s a cool picture. So what I did is I’ve challenged the bias that they have.”
Since 2014, Lansky and his partners have grown three major adult porn brands by “combining a glamorous, high-fashion aesthetic with exquisite cinematography, luxurious locations and beautiful performers—without compromising the sexual heat”. Unsurprisingly it takes a lot of work and operational muscle to get to this scale:
As Lansky’s producer, Moz presides over perhaps the busiest shooting schedule in porn, supervising the production of about 35 scenes a month in multiple countries. Each of the four sites updates every five days—or six times a month—so Team Lansky drives a minimum of 24 site updates every 30 days.
Putting morality aside, we can learn a lot from guys like these. The way they approach markets, people and new ideas is equally fascinating. Consider how Greg got into the world of pay-sites back in 2006, by researching a highly profitable opportunity, and finding a wedge into it:
By late 2006, Lansky observed how influential the Reality Kings network was becoming as the industry continued to migrate toward paysites.
“And by digging a little bit in that world because I was very interested, I saw this monster. These guys were just the absolute domination of that market,” Lansky says.
“I do my research like I always do and I come across these guys and I’m like these guys are fucking beasts.”
But not much was known about the online porn behemoth.
“They were in Miami and they didn’t even really want to talk to anyone. And at the time they were not shooting in L.A. at all, or they might have but they didn’t have anyone in L.A. shooting for them. And I was like, that’s my in,” says Lansky, who remembers people saying he was “an idiot” for wanting to shoot for an internet company in relative anonymity.
They would say, “You’re never going to get credit for it, you’ll never win awards,” according to Lansky.
“I almost was like in *Star Wars*—The Force was calling me. I don’t know why, I wanted to work for these guys. Not by the image they were broadcasting, because the image they were broadcasting was nothing. They didn’t want anyone to know about them. They were super discreet. But if you knew a little bit about the affiliate business and the volume, they were owning the internet. It was insane.”
After all, it’s all about the work, regardless of what industry you’re part of:
“And all my life it’s been about nailing a couple of big meetings. That’s what I tell people. I say, ‘Do your fucking homework.’ We live in a time where people are so fucking entitled. They think they’re owed something. You’re owed to prepare. That’s what you’re owed. You’re owed nothing. Come prepared,” Lansky says.
“A lot of times I’m not smarter or better, I’m just more prepared.”
Wise words. I’m fairly certain that Greg has his own operational ‘playbook’ document the way Mr. Beast does for all new recruits.
And now onwards to the rest of the piece.
In this issue:
Leaps of Imagination
Sourcing Alpha & Distribution Alpha
Recommendations + a surprising edit
Leaps of Imagination
Consider the story of scientist Michael Faraday, a principle contributor to the field of electro-magnetism. We came across a letter that he wrote to a fellow physicist that has a charming anecdote on scientific imagination:
“Do not suppose that I was a very deep thinker or was marked as a precocious person. I was a very lively, imaginative person, and could believe in the Arabian nights as easily as in the Encyclopaedia.”
— Faraday to Arthur-Auguste De La Rive (2 October 1858)
Here the Encyclopedia refers to Encyclopedia Britannica, which proved pivotal in Faraday’s life. Having had no formal education, and coming from a poor family Faraday spent his teenage years as a bookbinder, and it is here (so the story goes) that he was once asked to rebind a copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica which a customer brought in, and he glimpsed an entry about electricity—which captured his curiosity, and sent him off on his career.
Faraday’s sense of imagination surely helped him imagine new avenues for science, and this snippet is recounted by Robbert Dijkgraaf, a former Director at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, in his preface for The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge. This short book was originally a pamphlet essay written by Abraham Flexner—the IAS’s founding director and the man who helped bring Albert Einstein to the United States—on the role of scientific creativity, and the power of making progress via ‘blue sky’ research.
The problem is that blue sky research that creates a culture of making leaps of imagination, needs funding. Both public and private. Dijkgraaf notes that due to shifting priorities and politics, basic research is given little consideration and that success rates in grant applications for basic research are plummeting across all disciplines.
Regardless of the broader landscape, tinkerers will continue to do amazing things, and it is up to wealthy benefactors to find them and fund them. After all, the IAS itself was set up by a grant from Caroline Bamberger and her brother Louis Bamberger, a department store multimillionaire who was described as the “epitome of the merchant prince as public benefactor”1.
Distribution Alpha and Sourcing Alpha
Dr. Seyi Taylor gave a talk recently at Columbia Business School on a topic very dear to our hearts: the concept of distribution. He concludes that distribution is the ‘rate-limiting factor for most outsized returns’. In his talk he goes through the history of how brands have tried to monetize traffic in all the different eras so far:
In each of these eras, brands and creators had to shift their strategy as the distribution alpha was competed away or a new platform emerged that siphoned all the traffic. Think about the platform you’re reading this on. Substack didn’t exist pre-COVID, and then it burst onto the scene enabling many creators to make a living and challenging the legacy media sites. Who knows how long until the next disruptor emerges?
So brands, creators and founders really have one of two choices: play the distribution-optimization game in a shifting landscape where platforms have a lot of control, or build something that audiences seek out. Easier said than done, of course.
Which leads us to our second point, distribution alpha and sourcing alpha go hand in hand.
Sourcing Alpha is a differentiated or unique edge in being able to source ideas, and talent. Writers throughout history have prayed to the Muse to source their best ideas, founders and operators continue to read and engage at the cutting edge just so they can source great ideas. The success of the Founders podcast depends on host David Senra’s ability to source the best biographies and diffuse their learnings to us, and the podcast success flywheel depends on us listening to it because we too in turn are sourcing our ideas from it.
Consider the idea of benchmarking, which is a tactic for sourcing ideas and perfecting them. Danaher’s Mitch Rales details this process in an interview where he explains how he would pick the top 50 museums of his reference class and meet with each of their teams to eventually build the brief for his own museum Glenstone:
Interviewer
Talk about benchmarking as it relates to Glenstone.Mitch
Oh, it's a great question and one that we spent a considerable amount of time on, not only Emily and I, but taking our architects, taking our builder at times, the people that were going to be very active in the build-out of Glenstone as a whole, and we actually benchmarked 50 museums around the world.And we had great access to meet the teams, and we would sit down and have a nice conversation to get started with the team before we did the tour. And the first question we would ask is, so if you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently? And the stories they told us were absolutely amazing. The learnings of what not to do was profound.
And for our architects and our builders to hear these things, we got into the minutia of things like loading docks, how would you do your loading dock differently than what you've done today and how they created square footage for entertainment space rather than the artworks and how the sun would shine in certain glass areas that was distracting and what you could do to eliminate that type of thing.
There's 101 different learnings that came out of this, and we brought all of those back with us. That became part of our architectural brief and how we wanted to build this place out.
By sourcing from the best, Mitch created a roadmap that opened up new details, which he would incorporate into the final product. Pair this with Mr. Beast’s strong words to his team:
“If you’re a writer or director you really need to monitor and perfect your information diet. If your diet is not correct, you won’t have a good pulse on culture.
You. Can’t. Get. Inspired. By. Things. You. Don’t. Know. Exist. So how do you learn more about what's out there in the world? How do you stay up to date on the latest memes? How do you know what’s going on with celebrities? What’s trending on youtube? What other creators are doing? What’s popping on tik tok? Your information diet. Consume things on a daily basis that help you write better content.”
A completely different field, but the same pattern applies. In his world, Mr. Beast has sourcing alpha, so does Mitch Rales.
Mortimus Recommends
The Art of Fiction #109 (source). We recommended John Fowles’ The Magus in the last issue, and this is his interview for The Paris Review back in 1989. Lots of great snippets on his thoughts around the novel, diary writing, and being a generalist: “I am opposed to the scientization of nature, the reducing of it all to species, ecological distributions, biochemical mechanisms, and so on. I feel this very strongly about writing and writers too. The world wants us caged, in one place, behind bars; it is very important we stay free.” Now those are words by a clear practitioner of consilience.
“Mensches on a Mission”. Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital recently sat down with Logan Bartlett for his podcast series, and the episode was engaging as expected. Josh had very nice things to say about the future of Lux which he believes is in the right hands—his Principals and Associates—the ‘young brass’ that he describes as ‘kinetic, smart and well-connected’. Link this back to our early discussion, when it comes to talent, Lux has sourcing alpha, and we can learn a lot from how they’ve done it.
Miscellaneous: The Soderbergh Edit
At Mortimus we’re big fans of Steven Soderbergh, director of films such as the Oceans Trilogy, Contagion, Magic Mike and more. Whatever you may think of his approach to filmmaking, the guy is deeply embedded in cinema and loves his craft. Plus, he has some great quotes, check out his comments on his filmmaking choices:
The simplest way that I can describe it is that a movie is something you see, and cinema is something that's made…. Cinema is a specificity of vision. It's an approach in which everything matters. It's the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary and the result is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint. It isn't made by a committee, and it isn't made by a company, and it isn't made by the audience.
Or his comments around how Hollywood has changed:
“The entire industry, has moved from a world of Newtonian economics into a world of quantum economics, where two things that seem to be in opposition can be true at the same time: You can have a massive hit on your platform, but it’s not actually doing anything to increase your platform’s revenue. It’s absolutely conceivable that the streaming subscription model is the crypto of the entertainment business.” (source)
But the best part is that Steven actively maintains his own blog: which is a strange, eclectic experience, making it all the more unique. Case in point: he made an edit of Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of The Lost Ark, in black and white, and replaced the audio with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s soundtrack for The Social Network, to understand film staging:
So I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actually is. To me. Oh, and I’ve removed all sound and color from the film, apart from a score designed to aid you in your quest to just study the visual staging aspect. Wait, WHAT? HOW COULD YOU DO THIS? Well, I’m not saying I’m like, ALLOWED to do this, I’m just saying this is what I do when I try to learn about staging.
We suggest all of you go check it out.
Onwards to Consilience!
