Alex Mayyasi

Like, there was this point where I Love Lucy got really popular, and they had this incredible moment where they were pregnant in real life, and as Lucille Ball went into labor and gave birth, an episode of I Love Lucy, where there are characters on screen, also had a baby.

And it was incredibly popular.

Everyone loved I Love Lucy.

They were selling I Love Lucy merch.

But then they had this problem, which is...

they couldn't make more episodes for a while.

So Desi Arnaz basically invented the rerun, the fact that you could rerun episodes.

And so now if you created a TV show, it wasn't something you could just make money off of one time.

You could do reruns again and again and again.

And now we live in the world of streaming.

So it's kind of the case that if you work in TV, if you are a superstar, if you make a beloved hit TV show like I Love Lucy or now Game of Thrones,

Everyone around the world can watch that TV show at pretty much any time.

So if you are in the TV business, you are not just competing with other people making TV right now.

You are competing with every person who has made TV ever.

You are competing with the best TV shows ever made.

Now you're competing with the best content ever made.

And so what that means is that the superstars who make the very most famous and popular content, they really make an outsized share.

of the rewards of money you know like so if you are a singer you know it used to be you go back in time you know lots of people got paid to sing uh and so singers you know they could make some good money but maybe they weren't fabulously wealthy even the most popular singers um weren't fabulously fabulously wealthy in the way that say taylor swift is today because the singers of today

people can listen to them all around the world.

And if you're an average singer, you might have been able to make a pretty good living back in the day, maybe 100 years ago, 200 years ago, what have you.