Ryan Seamons

Unilever makes 250,000 job applicants play video games before they’ll even look at a resume. For their Future Leaders program, instead of reading cover letters, they run candidates through 12 neuroscience-based games built by Pymetrics (now owned by Harver) that measure how you make decisions under pressure, how you handle risk, and how fast you learn. The games cut their hiring time from four months to four weeks and saved over 50,000 hours of recruiter time. JPMorgan, BCG, Accenture, Mastercard, and McDonald’s all use the same platform. There’s real science behind this. Researchers at three European universities put 40 business students through Sid Meier’s Civilization, then ran them through a Fortune 500-style management assessment center. Published in the Review of Managerial Science in 2020, the results were clear: students who scored highest in the game scored highest on problem-solving, organizing, and planning. They also had better grades. A 2013 study at Queen Mary University of London found the same pattern with StarCraft. 72 volunteers got 40 hours of training. The StarCraft group showed a significant improvement in cognitive flexibility (your brain’s ability to switch between tasks and think on your feet) compared to a control group that played The Sims. The statistical evidence was 40 times stronger than what you’d expect from chance. SimCity specifically has been used in university urban planning courses since 1994, when a professor named John Gaber started assigning it to teach systems thinking. A 2025 study found students who played it showed a 26% improvement in understanding sustainable city design, and 81% applied what they learned in the game to real projects. The Civilization study was a proof-of-concept with 40 students, not a 10,000-person trial. But the pattern across multiple studies, multiple games, and a $20 billion gamification industry keeps pointing the same direction. The meme is a joke. The science behind it isn’t.

Mortgage lender Better has teamed up with OpenAI to "fully underwrite a mortgage loan" in as little as 47 seconds. This sounds like great news for borrowers, especially if costs are cut and passed to consumers. It doesn't paint a bright future for underwriters and LOs though. Initially, LOs feed consumer application data and documents into the Tinman AI app. How long before consumers just do it all themselves?

Netflix just made the most DANGEROUS move in Hollywood. They didn't buy Warner Bros but instead bought something far more threatening. An AI company, built in secret and founded by one of Hollywood's own. Ben Affleck. The company is called InterPositive and you've never heard of it. And that was the point. Affleck quietly registered it under a shell company called Fin Bone LLC. He filed patents under his legal name. He built a proprietary AI dataset on a closed soundstage, all while making movies. Here's what InterPositive does. It takes the raw footage from a film shoot, the dailies and trains a custom AI model on it. That model can then relight scenes, reframe shots, remove stunt wires, fix missing angles, color correct entire films and add visual effects. Work that currently employs thousands of people in post production. Netflix now owns all of it, exclusively and no other studio gets access. Think about the timing. One week ago, Netflix walked away from an $83 billion bid to buy Warner Bros. Wall Street cheered and the stock jumped 14%. Days later, they quietly acquired the technology that could make traditional studios obsolete. They just bought Hollywood's replacement. And they made Ben Affleck an Oscar winner, a director, a guy people trust, the face of it. SAG-AFTRA's contract expires in June. AI is the single biggest issue on the table and the last fight over AI shut Hollywood down for months in 2023. And Netflix just acquired an AI production company, right before negotiations. They're calling it tools for filmmakers and they say it empowers storytellers. That's what they always say. The real question, how many jobs disappear when a machine can do in seconds what a VFX team does in weeks? Netflix won't answer that but the technology already did.