When an 82-year-old Kentucky woman was offered $26 million from an AI company that wanted to build a data center on her land, she said no. Sure, that same company can try to rezone 2,000 acres nearby anyway, but as AI infrastructure stretches further into the real world, the real world is starting to push back.

That tension is everywhere this week, from OpenAI shutting down its Sora app to courts finally starting to hold social platforms accountable. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what it looks like when the AI hype cycle meets reality.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:30 Would you turn down $26M for your farm?

03:56 Rivals Kalshi & Polymarket CEOs are investing together

10:28 Deals for drones: Zipline, Brinc & Lucid Bots

18:17 Kleiner Perkins goes all-in on AI with $3.5B raise

22:52 OpenAI shuts down Sora

28:04 Meta gets hit with dual verdicts

34:56 Outro

Over the past few years, a new category of mobile apps has quietly exploded into a multi-billion dollar business. They’re called “micro dramas” — short-form, mobile-first scripted shows designed to be watched vertically on your phone. Think soap opera meets TikTok, complete with secret billionaire romances, disapproving werewolf mothers-in-law, and cliffhangers engineered to keep users tapping. The leading app, ReelShort, made $1.2 billion in consumer spending last year alone.

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan and TechCrunch senior reporter Amanda Silberling sit down with Henry Soong, founder of Watch Club, who thinks the micro drama industry is still “in its MySpace era.” He has a vision for what the Facebook moment could look like.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

01:11 Why micro dramas, and why now?

04:25 What makes Watch Club different

07:29 The monetization model problem

18:52 Optimizing for intentionality, not engagement

24:23 Why Quibby failed (content, product & business model)

28:22 Defensibility: tech company or studio?

31:36 AI, the WGA, and the future of storytelling

33:44 Outro

Nvidia’s embrace of OpenClaw during GTC may have been less about your need for a strategy to make use of its potential, and more about their need to have a solution of their own for an even greater enterprise foothold.

Listen in on the rest of the Equity Podcast team’s GTC analysis: