Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. It's bad for writers, bad for actors, bad for directors, and bad for consumers. Right after this ad. Did you send the link to Mike?
No, I sent a fake link to a TikTok.
Cortez, could you give me the link in Slack? Okay. I gotta just text it to Mike. Are we rolling?
Chapter 2: How do the hosts define the current state of Hollywood?
Okay, perfect. Thank you, guys. There he is. So I gotta own what's happened, which is that I thought that Joe had sent you a Zoom link to join, Mike. And it turns out that it wasn't a Zoom link. Here's the thing.
I've worked with Joe for... I don't know, 15 years now. If you ask him for something and he responds... The first thing that you should always think is, whatever I wanted, this is not what I have gotten.
Well, you didn't ask specifically for a Zoom link.
You just asked for a link, and I sent you a link. I just wrote link, question mark, and then we got what we got. Yeah. Which is, to be very clear, what, Joe?
It's a TikTok of a man somewhere in South America wearing Joker makeup.
I can't wake up! Wake me up inside! Say!
and juggling tennis balls while he and a woman nearby sing a Linkin Park song. No, wait, it's not Linkin Park. It's Evanescence, right? Whatever. I don't know. Yeah, Evanescence. Wow. I thought that was Linkin Park, Wake Me Up Inside. No, that's Evanescence, buddy.
Oh.
You and this Joker's culture is not, yeah, it's not your costume.
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Chapter 3: What role does AI play in the future of content creation?
Why so knowledgeable about Evanescence? At the end of this episode, we're going to reveal the thing we promised at the end of the last episode we did together. Joe Mandy, Mike Schur, thank you for coming back on the show in this format together. Yeah, I love it. Our pleasure. So there will be the reveal of that. Should we say more beyond that?
We're going to make Mike guess what is stitched into it.
Yes. On eBay, I found the hat I was thinking of, which is... Minnesota Timberwolves hat with their MT logo from the 90s. So you have some time to think what word. I have like, I have 55 minutes to try to figure out what MT means.
Time that is otherwise being spent, I think, on, yeah, the story that I want to talk to you guys about because I was reading all of the news about this that I could about what's happening to Warner Brothers. And we do a show here on Palpatory Finds Out Show sometimes called The Sporting Class.
Okay.
And it's about sports business from the perspective of these executives, John Skipper and David Sampson.
Right.
And this is kind of like the opposite of that, but for Hollywood is what I want to try to do here because you are, you're labor.
Yes. I'm a peasant. I'm a serf.
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Chapter 4: How are writers and actors affected by industry mergers?
Okay, that's good. I'll take it. As a knight of the WGA, can you explain what your sort of life has been like as we've been seeing who is going to buy Warner Brothers? Will it be Netflix? Will it be Paramount and the Ellisons? What the f*** has your life been like? Tell us, sir, sir.
I don't know.
Yay, verily. So I was a member of the WGA negotiating committee in 2023 when the WGA and then SAG both went on strike. WGA for five months, SAG for a little bit longer. And the issues that we were facing then, which we're still facing now, are a massive industry contraction is the main one. what has now been called peak TV kind of hit around 2018, 2019, something like that.
And since then, you know, long before COVID and the results of that, you know, work stoppage on the industry, everything was contracting. The companies were cutting back dramatically on the number of shows they made, number of movies they made. COVID sort of accelerated that and the strikes were in response to that contraction. And
The companies that make stuff are no different from any other company. They're obsessed with efficiency. They're obsessed with cost cutting and saving. And that means that they were looking constantly for ways to do more with less, as The Wire season five would have said.
So we saw which way the wind was blowing, the unions did, and we said, look, we got to put in a floor here, especially in television. We have to put in a floor for the minimum... requirements for labor to make these shows because AI was starting to poke its ugly head into the mix here.
And we were imagining a world in which they would say like, all right, TV shows are written by one person and chat GPT. And so we had to step in and declare, A, that writers are human beings. That's actually part of the NBA now, which is an incredible thing to have to
have to actually legislate in a contract is that a writer is defined as a human being how hard was that to get agreed upon that specific language that's a sort of the the ai stuff is sort of a almost a separate category it's certainly related to the larger picture here but it's a little bit of a separate category because again ai was is one tool that we fear these companies are going to use in order to try to get out of essentially
you know paying labor for their work so the you know the ai language that was written to the contract and into sag's contract is is it was its own category of negotiation and it was a lot of lawyers going back and forth about how to define things and and how to declare things and anyway we did have to eventually say like you have to say that a writer is a person it's sort of like a bizarro uh mitt romney corporations or people kind of deal
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Chapter 5: What insights do the guests provide about Warner Bros' bidding war?
I don't know. It's a dumb time.
I will say that there is a lot of resistance from the companies about any language regarding AI and partly because when we say AI, it's a little bit like it's too general a category. AI is 50,000 different things right now, right? We think of it as chat GPT, but When people refer to the algorithm that Netflix, for example, uses to determine what shows it's going to push to you, that is AI.
That's machine learning, right? You have entered certain data into your Netflix account. You have watched certain things. They've tracked how many minutes of those things you have watched and to what degree you've completed those things when you start watching them. And then they use that to filter through their library and push you other things that suddenly they think you might like.
And that's partly why they're so successful is because... Remember a couple of years ago when all of a sudden Suits was like the biggest show on Netflix? Like it was a, you know, a USA... kind of light drama from, I don't know, eight years earlier. And suddenly every single person in America was watching Suits.
And it's because their algorithm successfully predicted that that show at that moment would be watched and enjoyed by a large number of people. And so they pushed it out to people through their home pages. And they were right. And it was watched for billions of minutes to the point where NBC actually got a new version of it going. Like they did Suits L.A. And then Suits L.A.
didn't work on NBC because they don't have the same reach. And they don't have the same algorithmic possibilities in terms of making people watch what they want to watch. So AI is about training their computers to do certain things. It's about responding to things, learning, giving notes. It's a lot of different things.
And so the only thing that the Writers Guild can really, for example, can really try to protect for is A, the boots on the ground labor of writing a TV show. And then we've tried, and actually we're not successful in saying, if you use our material to train your AI, you have to pay us. Mm-hmm. That's a fight that everyone is having right now.
There's all those lawsuits about folks who have written novels and books and, you know, historical accounts of different events.
Oh, media companies, Mike. Newspapers, you know? Like, what is the New York Times going to do to protect its own work? Everything that was written, yes.
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Chapter 6: Who are the key players in the bidding for Warner Bros?
That is yet to be settled. So they were very resistant to language regarding AI because it's nascent and because they were using it for a billion different things. And so all we could do, which we insisted on, and which was a major sticking point that was worth striking over, was to say writers are people. And the SAG said actors are people. And it's pretty wild. Two pretty powerful unions.
Like, that's as far as we could get with these companies is to declare that writers and actors are people.
I was going to say, congratulations on the victory. Thank you. But at the same time, like, It's so funny when that is a win. Yeah. And so the thing that, Joe, I wanted to sort of like wonder about with you was what it feels like to be a writer in Hollywood and an actor. Oh, yeah.
I'm known as a multi-hyphenate. That's right. Actor first, I would say. I would say that. Yeah. Yeah.
What does it feel like to just realize, oh, I'm working for tech companies? Like explicitly, I am now basically working for Silicon Valley.
Yeah. Not the TV show. That just, yeah, I... A very different premise. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna take the position that I think this is all cool. I love it. I love it. I think it's very cool. What's the coolest part about it? Just the uncertainty and fear and just general anxiety. I love it. And I love knowing at a certain point I will work for one of three men.
And it's just which one is going to be my guy.
I want to introduce the men because the story of who is buying. I guess I should explain Warner Brothers, Joe. Can you explain Warner Brothers to people who are like, what are we really talking about here?
So there are three, I think, siblings that live in a water tower, and they sort of control a... They love geography.
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Chapter 7: What implications do mergers have for consumers of entertainment?
Warner Brothers is a studio studio.
One of the proudest studios. Yes. One of the greatest institutions in entertainment. I'm saying that like sarcastically, but it's also very sincerely intended as a fact.
Yeah, it is a fact. And there's a bidding war essentially for the studio and their media library. And it's between two awesome companies.
that are are in the mix am i right that's that's that's about it that's the wga's official position is that these guys are awesome we love this mike can you introduce larry ellison as a character and david ellison his son into the proceedings so larry ellison is the depending on what is happening literally right now in the stock market the first second or third richest man in the world
Net worth somewhere around $260 billion, I think, the last time I checked. He owns, among other things, Hawaii. Like, he bought one of the islands of Hawaii, which is an amazing thing to say. He bought Lanai, which was a— Oh, that's one of the good ones.
Yeah, that's a good one.
And he just bought it a while ago and has sort of, you know, made it his house. He lives there now. He lives— He owns and lives in Hawaii. Yeah, he surfs with his surfs. Yeah. So his son, David Ellison, who's I think 42 or so, is a sort of like succession style heir to the throne who has, I don't know what he's done in his life.
Oh, can I tell you one of the things he's done in his life? Please, yeah. So apparently he was gifted, and I'll get this correct, It's Fortune magazine, this is the headline. Quote, when David Ellison was 13, his billionaire father, Larry, bought him a plane. He competed in air shows before leaving it to become a Hollywood executive. Okay, good.
It's one of those planes that apparently can do aerial acrobatics in professional air shows. Was he flying it? Yes. That right there qualifies you to run a Hollywood studio. By the way, I just think the texture of like what kind of rich people the Ellisons are.
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Chapter 8: How does the episode conclude with a unique auction reveal?
We are now going to take on $8 billion in debt and expand like maniacs. And people were like, what are you doing? You just became profitable. This is it. You made it. What are you doing taking on all this debt and expanding? And what no one realized was they didn't want to be the internet's biggest bookstore. They wanted to be the only store that existed... for any product anywhere in the world.
And no one except Jeff Bezos and the people on the inside of the company truly understood that. And everyone thought it was a terrible idea. And jump 25 years later, it's the only store that exists on earth, right? Every single product in every single facet of your life you go to Amazon. Netflix did a similar thing.
Netflix sent you movies in red envelopes, and you could hold them as long as you wanted and send them back. And it was like, wow, they're going to destroy Blockbuster. But internally, they were like, no, we're going to take over entertainment. We are going to replace the concept of television. Kids in the future are they were thinking, we'll no longer say what's on TV.
They will say what is on Netflix. Netflix is input one on everyone's home system. And no one understood that except them. Every time they would release a statement that said, like, we turned a profit of $400 million last year, they would also announce, and we're investing $12 billion in content. And then they would be like, this year we made $1.2 billion. We're investing $20 billion.
And, like, they just had ambition that was far beyond anything that anyone could understand. They were satisfied only when they are the only company. And so this acquisition...
of the library of warner brothers and all of the ip that it controls and all of the movies they release and all the tv shows and all the franchises harry potter and the flintstones and batman and everything else that is part of this that is the latest move in their quest to essentially be the only entertainment company that exists in the world and that's cool
Imagine watching Batman on Netflix. That's so dope.
I mean, the thing that I think about all of the time is whether this is any good for people who want to consume or watch or enjoy anything.
Okay, so this is my next point, and I'm sorry to ramble so much, but this is top of mind for me and pretty much everyone else out here. This is the thing that everyone needs to understand, and this is true whether the winner of this is eventually Paramount Skydance or Netflix or anything else. When companies at this level in this industry merge, it is bad for everyone.
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