The Sporting Class: Why the Future of Live Sports TV Is a Bundle

The future of our live TV viewing habits is ever-evolving: Every week, it seems, there's a new bundle. A new "skinny" bundle. A new merger. Is the media industry ready to help us find all the games we want to watch? Will there ever be one sports streaming service to rule them all? David Samson, John Skipper and Pablo pour one out for the streamer that would have included games from ESPN, Fox Sports and Turner Sports — and look ahead to what's next. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  This episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out is brought to you by McDonald's. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Medium Fries and a Drink is now $8. And look, I've chased down a lot of strange stories, but nothing quite like what's inside a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. It is 100% fresh beef, cooked right when you order it, with no artificial flavors, colors, fillers, or preservatives in the beef. The onions are hand-topped by someone who knows the perfect amount by memory, two slices of cheese and a star, and two pickles, side by side. So every bite gets both. And every time one's ordered, a cowbell sound rings in the kitchen. That's the grill master's cue to put a fresh patty on the grill. My move?

• 0:42Pablo Torre?

  QPC, fries and a drink after a long day of recording. That is my happy place. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Fries and a Drink, now $8 for a limited time only, only at McDonald's. For a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska, and California. And for delivery, fresh beef not available in Alaska and Hawaii. Offer not valid for delivery.

• 1:09Speaker 01

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• 1:54Pablo Torre?

  This episode is brought to you by Apollo.io. A lot of the stories on this show start the same way. Something that looks pretty simple turns out to be a mess once you look under the hood. Well, it's no different in the sales world. Your team has a tool for finding prospects, a different tool for reaching out to them, and a third for keeping track of it all. On paper, that's a system. In practice, it's a salesperson spending the better part of the day copying names from one tab into another, and not much of it actually selling. Apollo.io is a platform that helps sales teams find the right buyers and reach out to them. It brings prospecting, outreach and follow-up into one place instead of several separate tools. It's used by sales teams of all sizes, from small businesses to larger

• 2:39Pablo Torre?

  organizations, and it's built for teams who want less manual busywork and more time with buyers. If your marketing and sales teams are trying to work from the same view of the customer, it's worth a look. Sign up for free at Apollo.io. That's Apollo.io. Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre. Today's episode is brought to you by DraftKings. DraftKings, the crown is yours. And today, we're going to find out what this sound is.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Why can't you just say it one time on our show? Just say it.

• 3:10Speaker 03

  We didn't have any chat.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  We took advantage of the little guy.

• 3:13Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 3:16Speaker 04

  You're listening to DraftKings Network.

• 3:32Pablo Torre?

  I don't, I don't want to ring a bell. It's like, hey, yeah, I am trying to buy lube.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. And Genna, think of how long it takes to get somebody to come over and unlock.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  I've gamed the system. I go to Walgreens and Duane Reade and I go right to the person with the key.

• 3:48Pablo Torre?

  You go to the person with, oh wow. Hold on, are we rolling?

• 3:50Speaker 02

  And I go, and I go with them aisle to aisle.

• 3:52Pablo Torre?

  So.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  And so I hand them a 20.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  Personal shopper.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  And so I have.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  You hand them a 20.

• 3:57Pablo Torre?

  You turn employees into your serfs, into your indentured servants.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Let me explain what I don't want to do. I don't want to press a button and say, hey, we need help at aisle four in cosmetics. I want to get what I'm there to get. I have a list and I have the person give a 20 and then they do not take any of the other calls. They have a key and I'm in and out of there in a chiffy.

• 4:18Pablo Torre?

  You are.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  It was, it was.

• 4:19Pablo Torre?

  Wait, you are turning this into the scene in Goodfellas where you palm a 20 into the hand, into the handshake of the employee who's like, yes, Mr. Sampson.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  I don't introduce myself.

• 4:31Pablo Torre?

  Will it be the same lube today? Will it be?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  I merely say I need some Vaseline. I just, I don't wanna have to ring the button every aisle. So I don't, I can't believe you're making fun of me. This is far more efficient.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  I'm on your side here.

• 4:44Pablo Torre?

  Of course, we're just Rich Guy's OnlyFans. Like, how can we, what if we just paid the guy directly to work for us instead of having to navigate?

• 4:54Speaker 03

  Give him a 20, hand him a list, say, "I'll be here eating ice cream when you get back."

• 4:58Speaker 02

  I like looking at expiration dates.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  So people don't do that. That's why I don't do like Instacart or shopping like that. Because when you're buying milk or eggs or yogurt, whatever, you have to buy the latest expiration date.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  I never look at the expiration date.

• 5:12Pablo Torre?

  If I could summarize, if I could summarize this show in one sentence, it's that David cannot stop checking expiration dates. John doesn't.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  I am not the only one who looks at expiration dates.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  Nobody would suggest it.

• 5:27Pablo Torre?

  It's just typically you get home and you're like, "I bought moldy bread."

• 5:31Speaker 02

  That's how you roll.

• 5:32Pablo Torre?

  That's how I just, that's how I find out.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  No, no, you look at the bread and see if it's moldy.

• 5:37Pablo Torre?

  But sometimes it's like hiding around the corner of the bag and you're like, "Ah, got me again."

• 5:42Speaker 02

  We could, we could do a whole show on this, but the way that I do my refrigerator may stagger you.

• 5:48Pablo Torre?

  What is, okay, what does it look like?

• 5:49Speaker 02

  It's in order of expiration dates. So when you buy, let's say, dressings, you have to, so people tend to do last out, first in. So you take what's in front of the fridge and you use it, then you just put it right back there.

• 6:05Pablo Torre?

  I'm familiar with how people normally operate a fridge, which is whatever you use last is in the front.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  Right. You don't wanna operate it that way.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  Same thing's true of clean t-shirts, right? They put them on top, you just pull it off the top. I bet you don't. I bet you have your clean shirts.

• 6:20Pablo Torre?

  He has a rotation of blazers.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  No, I, I put obviously everything clean on the bottom, but the purpose of the fridge story, and I don't wanna take up too much time.

• 6:28Speaker 03

  It should all be clean. You're putting in the clean stack. You're putting in the clean stack.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  I'm just saying you don't waste food.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  You're putting the freshly clean on the bottom, so you don't end up...

• 6:36Speaker 02

  You know what stinks is when you have a guest at your house and they're in your fridge and they're looking for buffalo sauce, and they look at it and say, "Oh, that's from 2021." That's a position I don't wanna be in.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  I have solved that problem.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  You don't have buffalo sauce?

• 6:49Speaker 03

  I don't have anything. I have almost nothing in my fridge.

• 6:55Pablo Torre?

  I thought David was gonna say, uh, it's a problem when you have guests, period.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Well, there's certainly-

• 7:01Pablo Torre?

  I visited David's home in an undisclosed location, perhaps on a certain island that might be lengthier than other islands, and, uh-

• 7:10Speaker 03

  Strong island.

• 7:11Pablo Torre?

  I was told immediately what not to touch. Don't put your bag on this, don't touch that.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Well, I had a sign, actually. There's a sign saying to not place items on this.

• 7:20Pablo Torre?

  How could I forget that there was an actual sign?

• 7:22Speaker 02

  An actual sign. I do have signs around my house. People are not courteous. They drop their crap everywhere. I find it rude.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Can we start the show soon?

• 7:35Pablo Torre?

  I think we have.

• 7:53Pablo Torre?

  We gather today, um, looking westward in a couple of ways, uh, because the story we're gonna lead with is this massive story, uh, headquartered in part out of the Burbank area. Um, but we turn to Southern California also, obviously, because it is on fire. And this is something that, uh, you guys have to think about because you do business out west quite a bit. Um, so just want to acknowledge that, uh, weird time to talk about entertainment without acknowledging, uh, the metaphor becoming literal.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  It's not just the entertainment business that's been impacted. And, and for some reason, people are focused on celebrities who have lost their homes, but they're not focused on all of the people who don't have the means to rebuild, don't have the proper insurance. It's a nightmare out there. Uh, so I'm heading out there because I want to see what's going on and I want to visit with my daughter. And I feel terribly now because I am struggling with when to make calls to people I do business with in California, because I feel like I have to start every call with, "Are you okay?" But if they're not okay, I would have heard, or they won't answer their texts, so if they answer, it means they are. So I don't know the actual right social rules.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  I think the right social rules are to ask them how they're doing today, as opposed to how you're doing. How are you doing today? I think that's the polite way to start, and I'm sure you do that. And I would just put that while David and I do business there, we also have friends there.

• 9:16Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  And we both know, and every day I hear about someone else who has lost their home, or who has had to relocate somewhere. And it's quite significant. And as always happens, the attention is on Brentwood and Pacific Palisades, because they are prosperous and famous people live there. But Altadena is a very old city, has a very high ownership of black ownership. And probably, you know, historically, it's going to be disrupted. That's where a lot of black professionals have lived and prospered. So I will be interested, as usual, to see how our resources mobilize in what we do.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  Hopefully, it will be better than the Ninth Ward in New Orleans.

• 10:04Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 10:05Speaker 03

  Where they did close to nothing. And Barbara Bush applauded that those people would be better off living somewhere else. I doubt anyone will suggest it'd be better off not living in the Palisades or Brentwood. Though somebody told me a very interesting thing the other day, which is, why you want to get back? You don't want to get back in the midst of ash-strewn ground with lots and lots of homes burned. So it's a very difficult matter to figure out what to do.

• 10:33Pablo Torre?

  No, it is both strangely assuring that going through other, in this case, the pandemic, a global catastrophe is sort of helping us prepare for what to do when yet another catastrophe happens. But even just the basic thing of like, oh, by the way, I talked to my friends in LA. So many of my friends moved out to LA, left New York to go work in entertainment. And it's like, oh, yeah, also, our schools are all closed. Like, oh, well, at least we've gone through that before. But now it's yet another chain of dominos in which you hope that, and I say this, knowing it already has been,

• 11:13Pablo Torre?

  you hope that it's not so deeply politicized such that the people who need help actually might even get it. But I want to make the very-

• 11:20Pablo Torre?

  Very awkward pivot back to what we're really here to talk about by following just the map here towards an entity, a venue, known as Venue. And I don't expect anybody, even the most diehard listeners of this program, to remember what Venue, V E N U, is. I call it Venu in my head all of the time. Who wants to remind people what Venue was?

• 11:46Speaker 02

  I'll try to do it quickly, John.

• 11:47Pablo Torre?

  Sure.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Venue was a collaboration by three huge companies, Fox and Disney and Warner Brothers Discovery, which people may know as TNT. And they all got together, companies who had not really worked together all that much, and said, "We have a great idea. We're all gonna put our sports assets and channels, regular channels, TNT, pick your channel, we're gonna put it into a bundle and we're gonna create its own company called Venue, where if you buy a Venue subscription, you're gonna get Fox channels, Disney channels, and Warner Brothers Discovery channels. And it's gonna be awesome for you, the consumer." That was the original announcement, when John Skipper, during a Sporting Class episode, said, "I have no idea what all the hubbub is about. This is a ridiculous announcement.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  This company does not offer anything new under the sun." He was so bearish on the company. Meanwhile, they were investing hundreds of millions of dollars into the infrastructure, naming CEOs.

• 12:44Pablo Torre?

  Creating an actual new company.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  And guess what? Then there was a lawsuit.

• 12:50Pablo Torre?

  Yep.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  And lawsuits can really get in the way of anything. And a company named Fubo sued, saying, "It's no fair. You're getting all these channels, we want these channels for our customers at Fubo, which is a digital platform." And the judge said, "You know what? You may be on to something. We're not gonna let Venue start." All the employees were in their offices, getting ready to launch Venue, and the judge says, "Nah, hold on." And then Disney and Fox and Warner Brothers looked at each other and said, "Hmm, we have a problem here. We're spending money with no revenue, all expenses."

• 13:23Pablo Torre?

  Yep.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  And so then they decided.

• 13:25Pablo Torre?

  They being?

• 13:26Speaker 02

  They being Disney, as one of the partners, said, here's what we can do. Let's get rid of the lawsuit. Let's do a deal with Fubo. Let's buy Fubo. That'll make Fubo happy. That'll make them drop the lawsuit. And so they did. And so the lawsuit ends up getting dropped. And everyone assumes everything's gonna be great. Except Skipper, who said, Venue is still nothing. Like, what are we doing?

• 13:49Pablo Torre?

  Well, let's bring in John, because the idea of why Venue is gone seems clear to you then? Is it even clear now?

• 13:58Speaker 03

  They don't need it now. Right? It was always a temporary stopgap before they launched Flagship.

• 14:05Pablo Torre?

  Which is the, uh, single tile app that ESPN will...

• 14:09Speaker 03

  Become.

• 14:10Pablo Torre?

  Will become soon.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  This was always a Disney-led effort, in my opinion. I thought that Disney always got the preponderance of benefit. I believe this decision has been overwhelmingly made by the Walt Disney Company. And they have decided that, gee, we'll agree, because we not only have to make Fubo's lawsuit go away, DirecTV is still objecting, so is EchoStar. So we're gonna give DirecTV the channels to put in a bundle that will compete with YouTube TV. We'll, I guess, I didn't read it yet, I guess EchoStar will end up getting the same.

• 14:47Pablo Torre?

  Should I know what EchoStar is?

• 14:49Speaker 03

  Dish.

• 14:49Pablo Torre?

  Dish, okay, sorry, I'm trying to...

• 14:51Speaker 02

  It's the merger that wasn't allowed to happen that would have created some sort of larger satellite company?

• 14:56Pablo Torre?

  I like to position myself as a proxy for the audience. I also have just no **** idea what anything is called anymore. So proceed, please.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  Um, that, that's it. So now, they don't need Venue. They've got My Sports on DirecTV, they have something on EchoStar. Flagship will be coming along before too long. And you'll have ways to get ESPN. What they're just trying to do is aggregate as much of the audience that is left back.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  But you didn't think they ever needed Venue?

• 15:21Speaker 03

  No, I never thought.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  The corporate discussion that happens in the boardroom is they come up with this idea, they launch it, they have press releases.

• 15:28Pablo Torre?

  The Avengers of media are gonna combine for the first time.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  It was amazing, remember?

• 15:32Pablo Torre?

  Magical product.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  And what John is saying is from the beginning, that you questioned it, so it's, it's not the lawsuit.

• 15:37Pablo Torre?

  What did they want out, what did they want to get by the announcement and the hubbub? Just to be very clear, they wanted...

• 15:45Speaker 02

  My view is they wanted to give the consumer another mirage of a choice of efficiency. And that is what these companies are trying to give consumers time and time again. After they started cutting the cord, they want to be the savior. Except really, all they're doing is making you pay the same or more, but to different platforms.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  Uh, agree with that.

• 16:15Pablo Torre?

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• 16:59Pablo Torre?

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• 17:44Pablo Torre?

  Head to dell.com/deals. That's dell.com/deals.

• 17:53Pablo Torre?

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• 18:35Pablo Torre?

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• 19:52Pablo Torre?

  We should talk about just the consumer here because as everything is now feeling like Echo Star and Flagship and it all feels like we're naming Transformers now, like code names.

• 20:03Speaker 02

  Bob Iger has gone crazy for Flagship and Jimmy Pataro. They talk about it as though the world is about to change.

• 20:10Pablo Torre?

  Well, we should just explain again, John Skipper, former president of ESPN. This was a thought, of course, when you were running the company. Now it is an imminent priority in a way because of, again, gaze across the map of media. So I get why this is like the number one, like a number one priority. But what is confusing to me is that while Flagship is being prepared for launch, there are these other things happening. The FUBO's and the venues of the, and I'm like, so what, what is this?

• 20:44Speaker 03

  Well, and you've got leakage that Flagship is not going to fix. So the longer they wait, there are more and more places where there's been leakage of sports rights, right? Netflix has now entered the game more aggressively. Amazon is buying things. So there was a moment where virtually everything you wanted appeared on an ESPN channel.

• 21:07Pablo Torre?

  John Skipper, the number one enemy of leakage of sports rights. Truly.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Because he doesn't like competition.

• 21:13Pablo Torre?

  Well, that's what we're saying.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, he had no interest. I think that is.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  I love competition. It's fun.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  As long as you win.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the, that's the fun part of competition.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  I get it.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  I'm not really in it for the, for the, for the sport. We were in it to be the worldwide leader by a large margin. Still, they still are, by the way.

• 21:32Pablo Torre?

  Yes, yes.

• 21:33Speaker 03

  This is interesting, this is interesting in that while there have been lots of digital disruptions, in some cases you had completely new players or you've, you've ended up with just three players, like the music business. And here, you're going to end up with many, many more players. ESPN is still going to have more rights than anybody else for a long, long time. So they have managed to be smart and prevail. But I think Flagship in some way is less and less attractive because there's less and less it's not on there, right? There's stuff on Paramount, there's stuff on Max, and there's stuff on TNT, and, and you're still going to have to.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  I guess if you buy flagship, question is what you get from flagship that you don't get from, from my sports or? It would be arguably in the name, right? Like the biggest flagship items, like you get the NFL. But you get that.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  Well, you remember what John said from the beginning is, and it got so much attention because people misunderstood it. The Super Bowl behind, first of all, on a streamer, for sure it's coming. Second of all, behind a paywall is a pay-per-view event. We are not far from that. And the question is, is flagship going to be closer to CNN Plus or closer to Netflix? And what Disney is betting is that flagship is going to be closer to Netflix. And my biggest concern is, as a consumer, I don't miss flagship. It doesn't add value to my portfolio of subscriptions or my ability to get things that I can't get until ESPN says, we'll get you to like flagship. We're going to take everything off ESPN. ESPN, and I don't think they're going to do that for years still at the minimum.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  I don't think they will. Now, there is one thing which they have alluded to without very much detail, but I wouldn't provide detail either. And that is the original promise of streaming, right? That you would get more personalization, you would have more choices, there'll be some things you can do. And that is a way they could distinguish flagship, right? Which is to say, well, you can get all those channels on a linear basis or on an archival basis, but you're not going to get the great feature number one, great feature number two, great feature number three that nobody else has. Now, I'm quite frankly skeptical of that and always have been. Remember how many times people have talked about, oh, you're going to get to pick your

• 24:00Speaker 03

  own camera angles? Nobody wants to. Even the Manning Cast, which by the way, I watch Monday night instead of the regular feed. I sample it all the time. Quite fun. Most people don't watch it. And it doesn't really. Compared to the game.

• 24:14Pablo Torre?

  Is dwarfed by that audience.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  And if you add the two together, they're probably not getting a marginal, they're probably getting new people. You just have some.

• 24:23Pablo Torre?

  Same audience being.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Given what they're paying the Mannings, it is staggering to me where they see any incremental benefit. And you've got all these networks with the Nickelodeon cast, you've got everyone doing the alt casts. And now it's the hottest thing because it's like the watch parties.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  And watch parties are of value and that's all the Manning cast is.

• 24:41Pablo Torre?

  The Mannings, I mean, that deal is a bigger deal across production in various ways, but I digress. I want to get to what the consumer allegedly was promised and what now can be expected. So like, if you're a customer and you're like, I don't know where anything is to sort. I'm the host of this show and I have trouble keeping track. I, I have trouble calling Fubo, Fubo instead of Fubu.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  But you have a problem finding a sporting event?

• 25:08Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  You do?

• 25:10Pablo Torre?

  Absolutely.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  I believe Fubu is for us by us.

• 25:12Pablo Torre?

  Well, now it's for us by others because they've sold 70% to the aforementioned Walt Disney Corporation.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Good for them, by the way, they found the next strategy. But I want to get back to this, you really can't find a sporting event, you have that amount of confusion?

• 25:24Pablo Torre?

  It's harder, it's absolutely harder.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  But if you go to ESPN, the link, ESPN.com and you look for scores, they will have on it what channel every game is on.

• 25:33Pablo Torre?

  Oh, no.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  So you know to go to Amazon.

• 25:36Pablo Torre?

  The information is available, it's just not easier because it's just the very basic math of whereas it used to be under one roof or two roofs or three roofs even, let's just call it a ESPN, Fox, NBC, CBS. Now it's like, oh, wait, this is streaming over here. Oh, and that is, I mean.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  This is how we all felt when Fox started, when we all had three channels. Maybe no one remembers this, but John and myself, but we had channel two, channel four and channel seven in New York, which was CBS, NBC and ABC. When Fox started, it was a major thing, like, oh my God, there's a fourth channel. Where, where there's football games on Fox before Simpsons, we were shocked when the NFC package went to Fox.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  I, I dealt with that, I dealt with that pretty well.

• 26:18Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, what was that like, John?

• 26:20Speaker 03

  Cause all it meant was you, by the way, I remember we had to get up and turn the channel.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  So I just don't see the big deal that people are seeing.

• 26:28Pablo Torre?

  Well, you got it, well, hold on, it's not, I think this returns us to the very basic notion of what we're talking about is live television specifically. And now, when I reference, "Oh, it's on Prime." "Oh, it's on Peacock." I'm paying for all-- I am the guy, unlike perhaps many people in our audience, who is paying for all of it because it's my job. Now it's like, "Oh, I don't have this unless I buy it." And so I think we return to the very basic bottom line of the bottom line.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  The bottom line is, A, I hope you write off all of these subscriptions that you have for your job.

• 27:00Pablo Torre?

  Noted.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  Because you just set it to the new ERS, External Revenue Service.

• 27:03Pablo Torre?

  That's right.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  Two, I think that there-- you didn't hear about this? External Revenue Service?

• 27:08Speaker 03

  No.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  You didn't either? No one's heard this?

• 27:11Speaker 03

  You're sure it's not the Elon Revenue Service?

• 27:14Speaker 02

  No, I thought you, uh-- I thought--

• 27:16Pablo Torre?

  Were referring to our internal metal lark.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  No.

• 27:20Pablo Torre?

  Okay.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Donald Trump has announced that he is starting January 25th, the External Revenue Service, which is different than the Internal Revenue Service. The External Revenue Service is charged with collecting money from foreign governments, countries, entities, et cetera, who have not paid their bills to us.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  And is there, is there still an Internal Revenue Service? Is it supplements or--

• 27:42Speaker 02

  It's a separate, it's a separate thing. I'm sorry, I thought that would have been funnier if you hadn't heard of the External Revenue Service.

• 27:47Pablo Torre?

  I just like that you're excited about taxes.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  I'm just excited that, that we're actually gonna charge people what they owe. I think it's very important to pay your bills.

• 27:56Speaker 03

  Wait, you're talking about individuals or foreign countries? Because we're certainly not making individuals pay what they owe.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Which I firmly believe individuals and foreign countries should pay.

• 28:05Pablo Torre?

  I will also believe that all foreign countries will pay what they owe, when I believe that we do not favor certain foreign countries to a degree that makes me laugh at the premise that there's an agency tasked with doing this.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  The ERS.

• 28:16Pablo Torre?

  The ERS.

• 28:17Speaker 03

  The Elon Revenue Service.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  Anyway--

• 28:19Speaker 03

  By the way, we could probably collect more money just by charging that guy.

• 28:22Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  Then we could by fighting--

• 28:24Pablo Torre?

  The ERS should just--

• 28:25Speaker 03

  With Denmark for Greenland.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Did you get an invitation to the, uh, any part of the inauguration?

• 28:31Pablo Torre?

  No, no.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  None.

• 28:33Pablo Torre?

  Heartbroken.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  Now that Biden's out, your invitations to the White House have dried up.

• 28:37Pablo Torre?

  I went to the holiday party.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  And you're done now.

• 28:39Pablo Torre?

  The vibes were bad. A delight.

• 28:42Speaker 03

  And you expected a big time.

• 28:45Pablo Torre?

  A delightful spread.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  Celebrate good times.

• 28:47Pablo Torre?

  A delightful spread of food. They take the holidays very seriously, at least they did. But no, it's been remarkable radio silence, David, if that's what you're asking.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  I'm just saying, are you concerned about your loss of power? There's a transfer of power now to other members of the media like a Joe Rogan.

• 29:01Pablo Torre?

  Oh, that horse has left so many barns already. I am more concerned about being individually audited, though, just for reasons of what I may say on various.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  You can deduct the cost of peacock.

• 29:12Pablo Torre?

  Very good.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  You do know.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  And your sweater.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  We mentioned, I was at the first Donald Trump inauguration.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  I didn't, in 16?

• 29:20Pablo Torre?

  What?

• 29:20Speaker 03

  16. What was there?

• 29:22Pablo Torre?

  Under what pretenses?

• 29:23Speaker 03

  I was in the Disney lobbying office, and we were making calls on congresspeople. And I can't remember Richard's last name, but the main lobbyist for the Disney company said, "Hey, John, would you like to go see the inauguration today?" And I said, "Yeah, of course, I've never been to one." And it wasn't my candidate, but it was okay. I was prepared to give the man a chance. But I can tell you, as an eyewitness, it was very sparsely attended.

• 29:57Pablo Torre?

  Now we're all getting audited.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  It was very sparsely attended. And there's a picture of me, because The Time Magazine did a thing.

• 30:04Pablo Torre?

  Oh, we gotta find this.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Find it immediately.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  Where they.

• 30:07Pablo Torre?

  We're gonna put this on.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  Where you could find yourself, right? They did a 360. And I'm on the, right behind the president, on the back row. There's nobody up there in the last four, or five, or six rows.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  You literally sat next to nobody?

• 30:21Speaker 03

  I sat next to nobody.

• 30:22Pablo Torre?

  That's great.

• 30:31Pablo Torre?

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• 31:14Pablo Torre?

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• 31:59Pablo Torre?

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• 32:44Pablo Torre?

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• 33:27Pablo Torre?

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• 33:51Speaker 02

  Where is the consumer now? If you're looking at keeping track of what you have to subscribe to in order to get the same things you used to get on cable, I think John has been clear and I agree with him that you are probably behind. You're probably paying more per month now than you did to get basic cable. And the question is, what has been the benefit to the consumer? And what we thought it was, was the à la carte? Was the bundling, where you only have to pay for what you want? And what it's turned into is that in order to get what you want, it's been split by the owners of that content in so many different ways to maximize their revenue that it's ended up bleeding down to the consumer.

• 34:28Pablo Torre?

  Right. À la carte seems fictional as a concept.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  It's just expensive.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  Well, and we may, um, we may differ on the nomenclature here. There is no à la carte. You still cannot look at, oh, here's what the cable company, the satellite company offers, and I just want to pick the ones I want. You can do a little better, right? There are more choices, but you can't do much better. You're still buying.

• 34:56Pablo Torre?

  It's a prefix menu economy in media. It's not, oh, I'd like this, that, and that. I'm going to combine my own favorites.

• 35:05Speaker 03

  And of course, the ones who are going to suffer the most are not attached to a great big company, right? I mean, so the, you know, American, I think AMC remains independent.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  Still $9.99 I pay.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  They're there, but they're going to suffer over time, and they'll either get consolidated into one of the big companies, because they're going to continue to bundle, the companies are, and force the distributors to take a large selection of their bundles. There are going to be some sacrifices. Disney's closed some channels. Uh, the, the regional sports networks, as we've talked about often, are going to be a victim of this. Um, and they'll be, so they'll be less available. Uh, niche channels will, will disappear, and there'll be a few big cable bundles.

• 35:53Pablo Torre?

  Do you enjoy, John, seeing someone disrupt what you have called the greatest business in the history of media and the economy around it in favor of clearly the same [BLEEP], but worse with worse profit margins?

• 36:07Speaker 03

  No, no, I'm not amused at it. It's actually, uh, it's difficult to navigate. It's not much fun. You're not saving money. You're not yet getting any benefit from streaming, right?

• 36:17Pablo Torre?

  Well, they're, they're just remaking cable is my point.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  They're remaking cable.

• 36:21Pablo Torre?

  With worse profit margins.

• 36:22Speaker 03

  You know, you hope someday that there will be some benefit from the, the streaming distribution of content that would, did not exist when it was satellite or telephony or coaxial cable, but we haven't seen that. In fact, they still struggle to get it done, right? Didn't Netflix on their first, uh, Christmas Day game, struggled to deliver it to people?

• 36:43Pablo Torre?

  Well, it was the Jake Paul. Tyson.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, on Christmas Day, they actually did much better with their buffering. But I, if you, if you're saying the profit margins have gone down, then where is that money going? Because I don't think it's going to the consumer where it's actually going is to just competitors.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  So it may not be the percentage profit margin that has changed, but it certainly is the amount of profits. And you've seen that with the quashing impact it's had on so many media stock prices, which is causing all this unrest. So it's actually, they're all related. And so what we haven't seen yet is where the consolidation ends. You've seen a bunch of mergers that have been attempted. Some of them have, are still in the process of happening like CBS. And we don't know what will happen at the end of the day there.

• 37:26Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  But I think you are a decade away. And, and we've said this from the start of the show, a decade away from understanding who's going to make it and who's not.

• 37:35Pablo Torre?

  But go ahead, John.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  I just want to say it's interesting because sports has proved to be the glue that has prevented new entrants from running old entrants out. You still got NBC, in fact, broadcast networks are somewhat ascendant here. But it is all sports. It's NFL on those broadcast networks. It's, you know, every, it's Amazon getting some sports, it's Netflix getting some sports. It's Apple getting some sports.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  But it's always been though. So this is something I keep arguing with Pablo about. The reason Fox got into the NFL game at a loss is they wanted to prop up their programming.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  And, and it's worked and it's made them what they are today. Some could argue the NFL deal, the loss they took. So live sports has always been recession proof.

• 38:25Speaker 03

  But now it's proving to so far to keep digital companies from completely disrupting and driving old, old media companies out of business. Right? Nobody's really been driven out of business.

• 38:40Pablo Torre?

  I think it's a matter of when it comes to David and this argument about, hasn't this always existed before? Yes. Has it existed with this level of difference between sports and entertainment? That, that gap is just, it's bigger than it's ever been. Um, and it's just fascinating to see, again, we return to Hollywood briefly here, but like, they're all freaking out. And sports, like you could argue, maybe they should be, but it is ascendant at a time when everything else is descending. And that's what's fascinating about being the sporting class is that this is the business that everybody is saying, at least this is working.

• 39:21Speaker 03

  This sports matters more to more people than anything else. Right? I mean, look at the-

• 39:28Pablo Torre?

  That's always been the best argument for it.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  But look at the dispersal of music, right? There is no centrality to music right now, right? You don't have a top 40 that everybody listens to. It's just dispersed everywhere. Doesn't mean it's bad or good. There's a lot of interesting music. There's people can find what they want. But in fact, in fact, that's actually not true because everybody who uses all these music services actually listens to a less and less wide variety of music.

• 39:59Pablo Torre?

  Okay, but that's a metaphor again for like what we're getting here. We got the illusion of choice, to paraphrase David, and instead we are bundling. We're retrenching, in fact, in fewer as opposed to more.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  When you lose a barrier to entry in any industry, you run the risk of actually constricting and constraining that which the consumer is taking advantage of. And there's so podcasting is a great example. There's no barrier to entry. Anybody can start a podcast, but 99.4% of podcasts get, you know, under 1,000 downloads per month. How many new leagues have tried to start? You're doing one right now, which is starting, I believe, tonight.

• 40:39Pablo Torre?

  Unrivaled.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  Unrivaled.

• 40:40Speaker 03

  No, no, starting Friday.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  Okay, sorry, John. This is airing Friday.

• 40:45Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 40:46Pablo Torre?

  Again, expiration dates, dates in general.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  I'm just such a transparent guy. I cannot bring myself to pretend it's Friday.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  All right, we'll try that again.

• 40:58Speaker 03

  But I wasn't actually trying to do that. I just-

• 41:00Speaker 02

  No, I believe that.

• 41:02Pablo Torre?

  We know.

• 41:05Speaker 03

  But the sports that are there have held up very well for the most part. You don't see a lot of things going away. Music, you see a lot of things going away. We are being algorithmed to death.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  I think more people are in music. More people are releasing songs. More people feel empowered to try to have their voice heard.

• 41:24Speaker 03

  That's because there's less barrier to entry and lots of people can do that. But many, many fewer people can make a good living at it.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  Well, that's, that's 100% the case. And it's also the same with athletes. There is a, a story that we would tell athletes that the number of rich athletes is really very few. There's way more Sunday night athletes or weekend athletes.

• 41:45Pablo Torre?

  They're about athletes as a, as a class of.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  As a thing that you do. In order to get paid to do that, you have to be unbelievably good. In order to be rich and do that, you have to be out of this world. It's the same with acting. Not every actor is Julia Roberts making 20 million a picture or Tom Cruise. The 99.9% are doing the TV on your, when you fly and they're saying, please fasten your seatbelt. Those are actors who are at the sort of bottom end of the pay scale.

• 42:15Pablo Torre?

  Those aren't flight attendants?

• 42:16Speaker 02

  No, they are actually actors. Paid actors.

• 42:19Speaker 03

  I think he's talking about the video.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  I am.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  He's talking about the video.

• 42:21Pablo Torre?

  You're saying they don't actually use the flight attendants. They hire actors to play flight attendants, even though flight attendants are actually doing that very job.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  You're hearing this for the first time?

• 42:29Pablo Torre?

  I just thought it would be cheaper to just have the actual flight attendants.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  No, but they're not actors. Haven't you ever seen your flight attendant on Flight 880? They're not going to be able to be on video.

• 42:38Pablo Torre?

  And he or she is great.

• 42:40Speaker 03

  They're great. The, uh, by the way, the best buckle your seatbelt ad is always on British Airways. Have you seen the new one?

• 42:50Speaker 02

  I don't watch them.

• 42:51Pablo Torre?

  I'm, I'm.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  I know how to buckle my seatbelt.

• 42:53Pablo Torre?

  I have breaking news from, it goes out of the glass. Matthew Coker, um, has now weighed in. David is totally wrong. And his source is the flight attendant he has lived with previously.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  Are you going to tell me that your flight attendant does the videos?

• 43:11Pablo Torre?

  They work for the company.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  They're paid actors.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  I would, I would bet there's some combination.

• 43:16Pablo Torre?

  It would be Alex Jones.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  I would bet there's some combination of both.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  There's a line on it. There's a, there's a proviso.

• 43:22Speaker 03

  I, I think this is probably that deep dive into something

• 43:27Pablo Torre?

  This is an episode of

• 43:28Speaker 03

  that just about nobody else cares about right now. I feel confident. I want to get us back to our, our wonderful listeners who probably don't care.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  I'm saying I've never felt worse than when you're flying and they tell you how to, how to close your seatbelt. I can't stand it.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  I keep wondering why it is necessary still. The other thing I like too is we're beginning our initial descent. I'm like, I only want one descent.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  I'm interested in one.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  I just want one descent. What do you mean the initial descent? Why are we going to try this? We're going to try this till we get it right.

• 44:01Pablo Torre?

  I would like.

• 44:02Speaker 03

  The initial descent did not go well. We're going to be trying it again.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  The secondary descent is going to be fantastic.

• 44:08Pablo Torre?

  I would like to just keep track, Coco, if you could, of just all the times that David says, there is no worse feeling than. And then we could just have the list of feelings that are at the very bottom of David's list of feelings he would like to have.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  There's a lot of things.

• 44:22Speaker 03

  Let me raise one other thing. Why do you have to disarm the doors?

• 44:26Speaker 02

  That's actually very important. Yeah. It's actually when it goes from red to green, it's so they can't be opened in the life and the, uh, what's the thing where you float on when you're in the water?

• 44:36Speaker 03

  Raft?

• 44:36Speaker 02

  The raft. There's a raft as a part of every emergency exit on the plane.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  So forget it.

• 44:41Speaker 03

  It's a raft of vocabulary going on here.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Just remember, sitting in front is the worst place to sit on a plane. Right.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  Well, no, no, it's the best place to sit on the plane.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  Unless it crashes.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  It's the worst place to be in a crash. But since I'm not planning to be in any crashes.

• 44:56Pablo Torre?

  Another great distinction between John and David is that David is planning.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  Are you sitting in the back for safety?

• 45:02Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 45:02Speaker 03

  No.

• 45:03Pablo Torre?

  But I want to bring us back to, uh, the question of population and how many people are actually into the things we are talking about or watching. Hulu Live TV, okay?

• 45:11Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:12Pablo Torre?

  If you were wondering, around 4.5 million subs. Fubo TV, the protagonist, you could argue, in this story. Around 1.6 million subscribers in North America. YouTube TV, over 8 million subs. And so, I guess I'm bringing that all to the table, just to give a sense. In case you were wondering about the fragmentation of all of this, it's just...

• 45:34Speaker 02

  But give the number for cable, John. The cable, the number of people who had cable at its height. I want to say 125 million?

• 45:42Speaker 03

  No, it was never 125 million, but it did peak at, uh...

• 45:46Pablo Torre?

  68.5.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  That's it?

• 45:48Speaker 03

  Well, that's what it is now. At its peak, it was about 100 million.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  So just 100, okay.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  100 million out of about 115 million households. So think about that. You had, you know, 87, 88% of every household in this country. Shows you how much we value television.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  You want to know where the numbers have gone? And why there's a problem with rights deals and regional sports networks? Think about just what we said. You just gave the numbers for streamers for these platforms.

• 46:14Pablo Torre?

  Can I briefly, can I briefly just blame? I hate, I say this all the time. Google has replaced search with an AI overview, which has said the following sentence, which I know to be, to not be true. According to available data, the peak of cable households in the United States occurred around the year 2000, with approximately 68.5 million cable subscriptions at that time.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  That's, it's wrong on every count. It peaked in...

• 46:38Pablo Torre?

  Correct the record, please.

• 46:39Speaker 03

  It peaked in the end of 2000, beginning or end of 2012 is when it peaked. And again, this was reported data, which was industry measurement, likely somewhat exaggerated. But it was about 100 million homes. ESPN was in about 95 million of those. It also depends on how you calculate hotel rooms, bar televisions. I mean, there's a, so there, it's not just...

• 47:06Pablo Torre?

  It's a whole thing, we talked about before, yeah.

• 47:08Speaker 03

  But, but the point was, it was ubiquitous, right? Close to nine out of every 10 households in this country had a pay television subscription. No other country in the world came close to that. England, I don't think ever crossed 50%. You were in other places in Europe, we would be 35%.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  And watch TV as much as we do.

• 47:30Speaker 03

  No, no, we're, we're a TV craze.

• 47:32Pablo Torre?

  Worldwide leaders in watching television.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  We certainly are. So I just would say that because of that, you give numbers for the streamers and the platforms. There is so much market share left that it's hard for anyone to give up on the business. So when you ask why Fubo is trying to get money because they ran out of cash. They get an infusion of cash from Disney when Disney buys them. And it gives them the ability and what Fubo has said is, we're gonna go out now and do more deals. We're gonna get more channels. We're gonna try to expand to get more subs. But we need money to do that.

• 48:08Speaker 03

  Well, Fubo, let's see, says Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. will make a $220 million payment. Disney's committed to $145 million term loan. So you're getting, you're getting close to $400 million for 1.6 million subscribers. It's a, it's an expensive acquisition.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  Well, the market seems to think it's an outstanding deal for Fubo. Because if you look at Fubo's stock, you will see that they have skyrocketed. Which means what the market is saying is, this is the type of growth Fubo needed to attain. And to do it, they needed to get money. To do that, they needed to file the lawsuit in order to get the injunction, in order to get the deal with Disney, in order to get venue to go away, in order to then be able to get more market share, which in turn will keep pushing up its stock price.

• 49:12Pablo Torre?

  So the question, as I clarify also, 1.613 in North America is Fubo TV's subscriber base. The question of who won here?

• 49:22Speaker 03

  The CEO of Fubo is the biggest single winner.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  Why not all stockholders?

• 49:28Speaker 03

  Well, he probably has more stock than anybody else. And I was just being more specific. And by the way, he's a quite good CEO. Uh, who has hung in there, worked very hard to make this company work. Pivoted when he couldn't do the original sports light bundles. So, you know, he, he did everything right.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  It was your fault. You wouldn't give it to him and you don't agree to give it to him now. You, you did not like giving just ESPN to anybody.

• 49:54Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, we very seldom gave it to anybody. We were for sale for everybody and had they wanted to pay us what other people were paying us.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  Would you have sold them one channel?

• 50:07Speaker 03

  No.

• 50:07Pablo Torre?

  Can we recap what this was about? So Fubo wanted from John, meaning ESPN at the time to carry ESPN. And they wanted to do it at a reduced price is what you're saying? That was the dispute?

• 50:22Speaker 03

  They wanted, they wanted to bargain and we don't do bargains. We had a single price. We did not negotiate price. We started every discussion with, this is going to be the price. And now let's talk about what the arrangements are, when we're going to do it. And no.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  You're such a bully because you were able to do that because you also, that's the way you propped up all your other channels. ESPN two, three, four, five, eight, 10, by saying you have to take it. So you could show they have all these subs, which in fact, no one wanted the channels.

• 50:51Speaker 03

  We had the most desirable content for consumers.

• 50:56Pablo Torre?

  Curling?

• 50:58Speaker 03

  We had the most desirable content for consumers. The college football championship, all the conference basketball games, the US Open.

• 51:06Pablo Torre?

  LeBron James, maybe you've heard of him?

• 51:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, NBA on Christmas and it was.

• 51:10Speaker 02

  It's not on the deuce.

• 51:11Speaker 03

  What, what we charged was a reasonable price and we did construct a bundle that says you're going to have to take all this to get this price. You want to take it out? We were required by law to sell everything individually. But of course we'd say, oh, you don't have to pay the 10 bucks. We can take you out and pay $9.80 for ESPN.

• 51:34Pablo Torre?

  And what was your guy at Fubo? And I say your guy jokingly, but also David, you did, you have. Interviewed him on Dan's show, yourself, the CEO of Fubo, the winner of the story. And just to recap, he wanted to pay less. Why? What was the argument he was making?

• 51:51Speaker 02

  Because he didn't have the cash or the number of subscribers to actually give him money every single month that he could then turn around to give to the content providers. He was going to go bankrupt, so he couldn't afford to pay ESPN's rack rate.

• 52:04Speaker 03

  His, his original proposition, I believe I remember this correctly. His original proposition was that the greatest point of friction in the cable universe is the cost of sports and the inability to just get sports. So his theory, which is abstractly an outstanding theory, was I'm going to put all the sports stuff together. But of course, we wouldn't do that. We wouldn't say, oh, we'll just take all the sports stuff out and sell it to you.

• 52:31Pablo Torre?

  It was like, wait a minute, we're all the sports stuff together. Why do you get to be this?

• 52:35Speaker 02

  Stand up our non-sports channels as part of this bundle, which nobody wanted.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  So I wouldn't suggest that nobody wanted them.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  The four people who wanted the channels that you were pushing were being paid for by the four million people.

• 52:47Speaker 03

  We exercised this, we exercised our leverage because of the quality of what we had.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  Why can't you just say it one time on our show? Just say it.

• 52:57Speaker 03

  We didn't have any.

• 52:57Speaker 02

  We took advantage of the little guy and now I'm an absolute.

• 53:01Speaker 03

  I didn't take advantage of any little guys. I may have taken advantage of some big old distributor mofo's because we didn't sell directly to consumers.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  But they passed the costs on right to the little guys.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  That was their decision.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  Oh, that is, that's how he stays clean.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  Now that I'm just having fun with. We knew what was going on, but we believed that, that nobody knew what they were paying for ESPN. They knew what they were paying for the cable bundle.

• 53:27Pablo Torre?

  Correct.

• 53:28Speaker 03

  So yeah, we were in an advantageous position that we absolutely took advantage of. And I know you to be a man who believes that your only job as an executive at a public company is to make the most money for your shareholders.

• 53:42Speaker 02

  Let me be clear, I love you.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  We were doing.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  I've already told you that you are the greatest businessman I've had the honor of doing business with and. Being in your life, but your lack of of willingness to acknowledge it publicly makes me smile.

• 53:56Speaker 03

  That's all. I'm a company guy.

• 53:57Speaker 02

  No, you were you were a bulldozer.

• 54:00Speaker 03

  I'm a mill.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  You were a rude, mean ogre.

• 54:02Speaker 03

  I'm a mill willy.

• 54:03Pablo Torre?

  I was gonna say, there are so many other syllables after mill that could have applied, and instead it was willy.

• 54:10Speaker 03

  Well, that's what you should call. I grew up, you know, near some.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  Here comes North Carolina.

• 54:15Pablo Torre?

  No, that's right.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  Near some mills.

• 54:16Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 54:16Speaker 03

  And you called a company guy a mill willy.

• 54:19Pablo Torre?

  That's right. The question, okay, so so but this is useful to me because I want to get actually to the beginning in some way, working reverse chronologically of like.

• 54:30Pablo Torre?

  On some level, sure, you could argue that John flew too close to the sun by extracting value from the cable providers, who then got their subscriptions canceled by the customers who are like, this is way too much money, leading to the rise of the à la carte desire. But like,

• 54:51Pablo Torre?

  why are we here? Like, why, why, how did we get here? How will historians look back and think about, wow, this got real different because?

• 55:01Speaker 02

  We're in the middle of a disruption, and the disruption is caused when you've got people who work for in for companies and for huge institutions who want to keep doing things the same way because there is imputed profit margin, and there is fantastic stock price results, and there's great bonuses and great salaries. And but then all of a sudden, the customer base has a different version of what they want, and then you have to adjust. And some companies go Kodak, and they just can't adjust. Some companies, Blockbuster, couldn't adjust. Some people, Netflix, instead of selling DVDs, they start a streaming network, and all of a sudden, they're producing content. So what that's to me where we are right now, we're in that middle space, which sort of it's it hurts because you don't know where it's going.

• 55:46Speaker 03

  Though in a lot of those examples you gave, there was a very superior product, which overtook a product that didn't keep up, right? I mean, Kodak went out of business because how why it's cool to take a a one-shot photo when you can do it all digitally. It's a dramatically superior and less expensive product. When you buy three million, four million, five million songs for $4.99.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  Really better financial proposition than spending 20-plus dollars on a CD. And so those were inevitable. They wouldn't get killed. The most interesting thing to me is that sports didn't get killed. Nobody has really come up with a better way to consume sports. I was always a skeptic of 3D sports and reality TV sports. The two-dimensional, on a great big screen with HD is still the best way to watch sports.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  I think it's live versus not live. I think if you want to break it down, the reason why sports is recession-proof and why it will survive, it's because it's the notion of something being live and it's why networks are trying to do all sorts of live content.

• 57:00Speaker 03

  And it's exclusive, right? It works because you're not competing with somebody else's movie, or somebody else's situation comedy, or somebody else's reality show. You're the only one that has the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers. The only one. And that has power.

• 57:16Pablo Torre?

  At the risk of sounding like the worst feeling that David Samson claims they've ever felt, we are beginning our initial descent. We've reached the end of the show, maybe not yet the end of the business. I thank you both for extending our expiration date for one more day.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  That's great. Were you fed that by coca?

• 57:38Pablo Torre?

  No.

• 57:39Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 57:52Pablo Torre?

  Pablo Torre Finds Out is produced by Walter Avaroma, Ryan Cortez, Sam Daywig, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McCray, Rachel Miller Howard, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, Chris Tumanello, and Juliet Warren. Our studio engineering by RG Systems. Our sound design by NGW Post. Our theme song, as always, is by John Bravo. We will talk to you next time.

• 58:33Speaker 06

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