Welcome to the Birdcast, the flagship podcast of overall deals.

I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show we're going to talk about YouTube,

and specifically the way in which YouTube is taking over Hollywood.

Over the last couple of weeks, two movies you may have heard of, backrooms and obsession,

have become genuine box office success stories despite the fact,

or maybe because of the fact that they were both made by people who came up as creators

and particularly on YouTube.

Plus, there's this movie, The Amazing Digital Circus, The Last Act, which is just a direct,

basically lifting of a YouTube video and playing into movie

theaters. That over this past weekend was the number five movie in theaters ahead of Star Wars,

The Mandalorian, and Grogu. This has been a trend for some time. You go back to things like

Iron Lung, which was a movie made by a YouTuber known as Markiplier, that movie was a hit.

We've started to see more and more creators, creators in this sort of most internety sense,

begin to take on Hollywood, and it's really starting to work.

And what I want to know is, where is all of this going?

Are we about to see a bunch of new people get their shot in Hollywood?

What does it even mean to get your shot in Hollywood when you've built a huge audience online?

And is the future just watching YouTube videos on giant screens while we eat popcorn?

Julia Alexander, a media correspondent at Puck and my former Verge colleague,

is going to come on the show and talk about all of that and lots more.

But first, here's everything else happening on the Verge. This is 90 seconds on the verge for Thursday, June 11th, 2026. It's World Cup Day. Today is the first day of the world's biggest sports tournament, which means I will be getting essentially no work done for the next five weeks or so. In the U.S., as with all sports streaming, watching the World Cup is far too complicated. But Fox Sports and Fox One have all of the games, if you pay for that in one way or another, and you can also see them on Peacock in Spanish. It's not quite that simple, but it's almost that simple. And as the Virges Andrew Webster points out today, it's still not clear where we're all

supposed to go to talk about the games. Sports Twitter used to be a thing, but it's long gone. And we need a new one. Stat. Please. Meanwhile, I Fixit did a tear down of the Trump phone and confirmed what we already knew and have known for a very long time. It's just a rip-off. It's a rip-off of the HTC U-24 Pro, specifically, with a couple of teeny-tiny changes to the battery and the chipset. HTC used to be a big name in smartphones, but most of the company was sold to Google a while back. So I agree with the Verges Don Preston, whose theory is that HTC probably contracted with a third-party manufacturer to make the U-24,

...