Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out The Bizarro Sporting Class: How to Buy a Hollywood Studio About this episode What happens when the richest people on Earth thirst for content? Sir Mike Schur and mere serf Joe Mande de-code Silicon Valley's playbook for Hollywood in the bidding war for Warner Bros. — and start an auction of their own.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Pablo Torre? Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're gonna 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.
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2:18 Speaker 03 Did you send the link to Mike? No, I sent a fake link to a TikTok.
2:25 Speaker 03 Cortez, could you give me the link in Slack? I gotta just text it to Mike. Are we rolling? Okay, perfect. Thank you, guys.
2:33 Speaker 04 There he is.
2:35 Speaker 03 So I gotta, 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.
3:05 Speaker 04 Well, you didn't ask specifically for a Zoom link, you just asked for a link. That's a good point. I sent you a link.
3:11 Speaker 03 Yeah. I just wrote link, question mark, and then we got what we got.
3:16 Speaker 04 Yeah.
3:16 Speaker 03 Which is, to be very clear, what, Joe?
3:19 Speaker 04 It's a TikTok of a man somewhere in South America, wearing Joker makeup.
3:29 Speaker 04 And juggling tennis balls while he and a woman nearby sing a Linkin Park song.
3:40 Speaker 03 No, wait, it's not Linkin Park, it's Evanescence, right?
3:42 Speaker 04 Whatever. I don't, yeah, Evanescence.
3:44 Speaker 03 Wow.
3:45 Speaker 04 What, I thought that was Linkin Park, "Wake Me Up Inside"?
3:48 Speaker 03 No, that's Evanescence, buddy.
3:51 Speaker 03 You and this Joker's culture is not, yeah.
3:54 Speaker 04 Yeah.
3:54 Speaker 03 It's not your costume.
3:56 Speaker 04 Why so knowledgeable about Evanescence?
4:18 Pablo Torre? At the end of this episode, we're gonna 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.
4:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, I love it.
4:28 Speaker 03 Our pleasure.
4:29 Pablo Torre? So there will be the reveal of that. Should we say more beyond that? We're gonna make Mike guess what is stitched into it.
4:35 Speaker 04 Yes, there's, I, I, I, um, on eBay found, uh, the hat I was thinking of, which is, um, Minnesota Timberwolves hat with their MT logo from the 90s. So you have some time to think what word.
4:49 Speaker 03 I have like, I have 55 minutes to try to figure out what MT means.
4:53 Pablo Torre? Time that's otherwise being spent, I think, on, yeah, the story that I wanna 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 Public Radio Finds Out, Joe, sometimes, called The Sporting Class.
5:10 Speaker 04 Okay.
5:10 Pablo Torre? And it's about sports business from the perspective of these executives, John Skipper and David Sampson.
5:15 Speaker 04 Right.
5:15 Pablo Torre? And this is kind of like the opposite of that, but for Hollywood, is what I wanna try to do here, because you are, you're labor.
5:23 Speaker 04 Yes, I'm a peasant. I'm a serf.
5:26 Pablo Torre? You are a serf. And what is Mike, in your estimation?
5:29 Speaker 04 I think Mike is a, that would make you a, a vassal, right? Like a, a lord? You're more of a lord.
5:38 Speaker 03 Not quite, not quite like a feudal lord, but, uh, like, uh, who, who is in charge of the, of like, making sure the serfs did all of their daily labor? And then reported up to the, to the lord, you know?
5:54 Speaker 04 Yeah.
5:54 Pablo Torre? Barry Weiss, I think, yeah.
5:56 Speaker 04 Yeah, she's a lord.
6:00 Speaker 03 She's in charge of all of it.
6:01 Pablo Torre? I did just Google, who was serf's boss?
6:04 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
6:04 Pablo Torre? And, uh, the lord of the manor is what the AI overview that is increasingly at the heart of this story, uh, has indicated to me.
6:12 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
6:12 Pablo Torre? But in all seriousness, uh, Mike, you had to get clearance to talk about this because your role in this is not merely as a lord of some manner, as a showrunner who's made many, many very good and successful shows that I've employed.
6:25 Speaker 04 You're a knight, Mike's a knight.
6:26 Pablo Torre? Oh, yeah. Okay, that's good.
6:28 Speaker 03 I'll take it.
6:29 Pablo Torre? As a knight of the WGA.
6:31 Speaker 04 Hmm.
6:32 Pablo Torre? 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 Ellison's? What the has your life been like?
6:46 Speaker 04 Tell us, Sir Sher.
6:50 Speaker 03 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, you know, 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
7:33 Speaker 03 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, you know, requirements for
8:13 Speaker 03 labor to make these shows because, you know, AI was starting to poke its ugly head into the into the mix here. And we were imagining a world in which they would say like, all right, you know, 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.
8:45 Pablo Torre? How hard was that to get agreed upon? That specific language?
8:49 Speaker 03 That's a sort of, 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 that, you know, the AI language that was written to the contract and into SAG's contract is was its own category of negotiation. And it was a lot of lawyers going back and forth about how to define things and how to declare things. And we did have to eventually say, like, you have to say that a writer is a person.
9:31 Speaker 04 It's sort of like a Bizarro Mitt Romney corporations are people kind of deal.
9:35 Speaker 03 Yeah, yes, that's it. That's we actually talked about that. It's funny. It's like, we're trying to essentially invert the the the argument made by certain folks that like companies are people. We were like, well, also, people are people at some level, right? Fundamentally.
9:53 Speaker 04 I think the creative process has been so condensed with like AI, you can just tell it like I have an idea for a TV show, right? It seems like a lot of people now, when you present decks to executives for like a TV show, that it would be very easy just to use AI to present your idea. And then I'm sure the executives use Chat GPT to summarize the AI summarization. So it's just at some point, it's just computers talking to each other. I don't know. It's a it's a dumb time.
10:27 Speaker 03 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 like 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.
11:09 Speaker 03 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 homepages 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 boot they did suits LA and then suits LA didn't work on NBC because they didn't they don't have the same reach
11:52 Speaker 03 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 you know 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 in saying if you use our material to train your AI you have to pay us
12:30 Speaker 03 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
12:40 Pablo Torre? Oh, media companies, Mike, newspapers, you know, like what is the New York Times gonna do to protect its own work?
12:46 Speaker 03 Everything that was written, yes, things that were written by humans have been used to train these computers and our argument was you have to compensate us for that if you're using it to train your machines and they would not agree at that moment to that language we did reserve our right to go back and negotiate In future years, possible compensation for the training, but that is, that's still on the table. 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.
13:26 Speaker 03 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.
13:37 Pablo Torre? I was gonna say, congratulations on the victory.
13:40 Speaker 03 Thank you.
13:41 Pablo Torre? But at the same time, like, it's so funny when that is a win.
13:46 Speaker 03 Yeah.
13:46 Pablo Torre? And so the thing that, Joe, I want, I wanted to sort of like wonder about with you was what it feels like to be a writer in Hollywood and an actor.
13:56 Speaker 04 Oh, but yeah, I'm known as a multi hyphenate.
14:00 Speaker 03 That's right. Actor first, I would say.
14:01 Speaker 04 I would say that, yeah.
14:03 Speaker 03 Yeah.
14:03 Pablo Torre? 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.
14:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, not the TV show, that just, yeah, I.
14:15 Pablo Torre? Very different premise.
14:16 Speaker 04 I'm, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna take the position that I think this is all cool. I love it.
14:24 Speaker 04 I love it. I think it's very cool.
14:26 Pablo Torre? What's the coolest part about it?
14:28 Speaker 04 Just the uncertainty and fear and just general anxiety. I, I love it. And I love knowing at, at a certain point, I, I will work for one of three men. And it's just which one is gonna be my guy.
14:47 Pablo Torre? I want to introduce the men because the story of who is by, I guess I should explain Warner Brothers. Joe, can you explain Warner Brothers to people who are like, what, what are we really talking about here?
14:56 Speaker 04 So there are three, I think, siblings that live in a water tower and they sort of control a.
15:04 Pablo Torre? They love geography.
15:05 Speaker 04 Yeah. Warner Brothers is a, a studio.
15:10 Speaker 04 And they-
15:10 Pablo Torre? One of the proudest studios.
15:12 Speaker 04 Yes.
15:13 Pablo Torre? One of the greatest institutions in entertainment. I'm saying that sarcastically, but it's also very sincerely intended as a fact.
15:20 Speaker 04 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 in the mix. Am I, right? That's about it.
15:37 Pablo Torre? 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?
15:49 Speaker 03 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-
16:14 Pablo Torre? Oh, that's one of the good ones.
16:15 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's a good one.
16:16 Pablo Torre? That's a good one.
16:17 Speaker 03 And he just bought it a while ago and has sort of, you know, made it his house. He lives there now. He lives-
16:24 Pablo Torre? He has actual serfs.
16:26 Speaker 04 Yeah, he surfs with his serfs. Yeah.
16:29 Speaker 03 So his son, David Ellison, is, 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.
16:40 Pablo Torre? Oh, can I tell you one of the things he's done in his life?
16:42 Speaker 03 Please, yeah.
16:43 Pablo Torre? 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."
16:59 Speaker 03 Okay, good.
17:00 Pablo Torre? "It's one of those planes that apparently can do aerial acrobatics in professional air shows."
17:05 Speaker 03 Was he flying it?
17:06 Pablo Torre? Yes.
17:07 Speaker 03 That right there qualifies you to run a Hollywood studio.
17:10 Pablo Torre? And Larry Ellison, by the way, I just think the texture of like what kind of rich people the Ellison's are. Like Larry Ellison, who tried to buy the Warriors and didn't, which is very funny in retrospect because he is the richest man on the planet. Couldn't do it, Joe Lacob bought it, they won all these championships. Larry Ellison never did. But what he did have instead-
17:29 Speaker 03 And this is one of the great headlines that I also need to just make sure I get factually correct because he is very wealthy and this is a very delicate subject. Larry Ellison employs a man who follows his $160 million super yacht in a speedboat. And his job is to retrieve the basketballs that go overboard.
17:48 Speaker 04 [laughing]
17:49 Speaker 03 Because he has basketball courts on his super yachts.
17:53 Speaker 04 Yeah, you gotta save those balls.
17:55 Speaker 03 I mean, he's a, he's an environmentalist.
17:57 Speaker 04 Yes.
17:57 Speaker 03 David, his son, is, was the guy who essentially backed by his dad and others, bought Paramount Studios through, and Skydance is the other sort of entity. And very quickly after that acquisition, Paramount had declined significantly in value. And so he sort of scooped that up and took on a ton of debt. And now he's trying to roll that into buying Warner Brothers under the Paramount/Skydance banner. And in order to accomplish that, he has assembled a true, just legion of doom of financial backers, including, I believe, the Saudi Royal Wealth Fund, the Qatari Royal Wealth Fund, maybe,
18:41 Speaker 03 the folks from Abu Dhabi, and also, very importantly, Jared Kushner, son-in-law of current-
18:48 Speaker 04 My guy, yes.
18:50 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's Joe's guy, yeah, Joe loves Jared, who is very clearly part of this bid because they believe that part of their advantage here is an inside track to President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, who has announced boldly and publicly that he intends to essentially decide how this all plays out.
19:11 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
19:11 Speaker 03 It's not a job typically undertaken by the sitting President of the United States to just, to just rub his hands together in glee and say, who's, who wants my approval here for a deal like this? But he's made it clear that that is the case. And so they, that group believes that they have the inside track through, among other things, Jared Kushner and his side door access to the Oval Office.
19:36 Speaker 04 Yeah, it maybe bears, I guess, just stating aloud as often as possible that Donald Trump is truly just operating in a transparently corrupt manner. Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, well, he's the king, he's king. Barry Weiss is, yeah, she's queen.
19:54 Pablo Torre? Yeah, there's an org chart. There's an org chart for all of this. But by the way, like, speaking to what happened, so the shock, given that pretext, is that the Ellison's, at first blush at least, did not get Warner Brothers. Instead, it was a scrappy upstart.
20:13 Speaker 04 Yeah.
20:14 Pablo Torre? Yeah. And I forget the name of this company. How do you pronounce that?
20:17 Speaker 04 Nefly.
20:18 Speaker 03 It's ne- it's, yeah, Nefly. I think it's a French company.
20:24 Pablo Torre? And in the reporting around this very obscure startup, it was, it was made clear that, of course, Ted Sarandos, the leader of said company, had also met personally with Donald Trump in an attempt to woo him. And sort of set the stage, because this is, again, transactionally, what you do because, spoiler alert, at least for now, it works.
20:45 Speaker 04 Yeah.
20:46 Pablo Torre? Did you have a thought, Joe, when you saw, like, Netflix? Oh, Netflix is, because they came kind of out of nowhere.
20:50 Speaker 04 I was like, this is so cool. I love this.
20:56 Speaker 04 I, yeah, that's, that's all I can say is that, um, I thought the, I thought the Ellison thing was cool, but then I was like, this is even cooler.
21:04 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's your official position on all this stuff.
21:07 Speaker 04 Yeah. I want, I want my remote control to have three buttons.
21:13 Speaker 04 And I hope to work for, you know, one of those three buttons.
21:16 Pablo Torre? I would like both of you guys to give a sense of just like, what, for people who aren't fluent in just like the ecosystem, the food chain of Hollywood, what is Netflix relative to everything else now? Just to give a sense of just like where they are in the hierarchy of who is running things right now in entertainment.
21:33 Speaker 03 I want to draw an analogy, if I can, because this has happened twice now in the, in recent past with companies where, that are like disruptors, capital D disruptors. I don't know if you remember this, but- Twenty something years ago, the big question was whether Amazon was ever going to be profitable. Right? They were like an internet bookstore and it was cool and you could buy books from Amazon. And, and they would show up at your house and everyone was like, oh, this is so neat. And they were, you know, had a massive accelerated launch and, and it was sort of internet 1.0. And there was a quarter where they were going to announce their, um, their, you know,
22:16 Speaker 03 profit statement or whatever. And for the first time ever, like they turned a profit. They turned like a $3 million profit and the stock like shot up in the air. And I believe in the same announcement, they were like, uh, we are now going to, um, take on like $8 billion in debt and like expand like maniacs. And people were like, what are you doing? You just became profitable. Like this is the, this is it. You made it. Like, what are you doing? Like 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.
22:58 Speaker 03 And no one, except Jeff Bezos and the people on the inside of the company, truly understood that. And they, everyone thought it was a terrible idea. And jump 25 years later, it's the only store that exists on earth, right? Every, every single product for every, in every single facet of your life, you, you go to Amazon. Netflix did a similar thing. Netflix sent you movies within 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. Your kids in the future, they were thinking, will no longer say, what's on TV? They will say, what is on Netflix?
23:43 Speaker 03 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
24:28 Speaker 03 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.
24:40 Speaker 04 And that's cool.
24:43 Speaker 04 Imagine watching Batman on Netflix. That's so dope.
24:50 Speaker 04 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.
24:56 Speaker 03 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. And I literally mean everyone. It is bad for writers and actors and directors and crew members who work on shows and movies. It is bad for the executives who work in these companies because many of them are about to lose their jobs one way or the other. Like, these are the "right sizing, efficiency, redundancy"
25:37 Speaker 03 kind of buzzwords that you always hear. There's a person who's the executive VP of development at Warner Brothers. There's an equivalent person at Netflix or Skydance, Paramount. And when the companies merge, someone gets fired. It is also, and this is really key to understand, it is terrible for consumers. People who just like to watch things, people who watch TV shows and movies, it is terrible for you. Because A, less stuff will get made. And B, the stuff that does get made will be the same as all the other stuff. Like, these places have playbooks that they run, and they have things that work for them on their service or platform. And everything gets kind of squished to the middle.
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28:07 Speaker 04 But imagine seeing Bright in theaters instead of on your TV or Red Notice.
28:14 Pablo Torre? Imagine if Fred Flintstone was also a character in the Red Notice cinematic universe.
28:20 Speaker 04 Yeah, imagine, there's a possibility when this happens, there'll be a function where we could watch House of Cards, but Fred Flintstone instead of Kevin Spacey.
28:30 Pablo Torre? Yeah, that's definitely possible.
28:33 Speaker 04 And for that, I say we do it.
28:37 Pablo Torre? Well, you think it's cool.
28:38 Speaker 04 I think it's cool and you're naming all these things that it's bad for, but it's good for Israel.
28:46 Speaker 04 If Ellison gets it, this is great for Israel.
28:49 Pablo Torre? I do want to bring it back to David Ellison and the Ellison's, by the way, on that note, because one of the funny things that these, again, literal richest people in the world are being reduced to because they thirst for content, which is a synonym, not to be so grandiose about it, but for our culture, right, is that David Ellison is texting David Zaslav, who is another big character in this story. He's the guy running Warner Brothers Discovery, which contains many things, including CNN, which is also floating in the geopolitical stew that Joe is describing, as well as HBO. David Zaslav, who you may recall from the time he clearly bought a Knicks cap and wore it courtside, having never worn seemingly a cap before in his life.
29:34 Pablo Torre? What David Ellison texted David Zaslav was, quote, have you guys seen this text exchange?
29:38 Speaker 04 No.
29:39 Pablo Torre? No. This is according to the Financial Times and the first word is David because it's D-A-I-V-D. He immediately misspells David.
29:50 Speaker 04 Dude, all these people who are so powerful cannot spell. Like the Epstein emails, that, I mean.
29:59 Pablo Torre? It's a big takeaway. Honestly, I mean, it's a big takeaway. How, how these people are communicating in real life is insulting to anybody who takes a second to look at their email.
30:08 Speaker 04 Yo, use your AI to spell correctly, you fucking idiots.
30:16 Pablo Torre? I appreciate your underwater today, so I wanted to send you a quick text. No, despite the noise of the last 24 hours, I have nothing but respect and admiration for you and the company. This is the last ditch personal appeal that he made. Continuing on. It would be the honor of a lifetime, and honor is spelled the British way?
30:32 Speaker 03 Aneer.
30:34 Pablo Torre? Oh. Again, owing to the feudal system.
30:37 Speaker 03 Yes.
30:37 Pablo Torre? I didn't realize that David Ellison had that in him, but he does. It would be the honor, aneur, of a lifetime to be your partner and be the owner of these iconic assets. If we have the privilege to work together, you will see that my father and I are the people you had dinner with. End quote.
30:54 Pablo Torre? That's how the sausage is made.
30:55 Speaker 03 Yeah.
30:56 Pablo Torre? Is that you had dinner with your dad, and now you are appealing to this guy in a way that indicates you will do anything except for spell his name correctly in the first word of the message.
31:09 Speaker 03 You know what's interesting about these folks?
31:10 Pablo Torre? His own name. I mean, it's also his own name. He would spell his own name.
31:17 Speaker 03 I, let me say something.
31:18 Pablo Torre? There's a certain poetry in that, now that I just want to sit with it for a second, Mike. Yeah, go ahead.
31:23 Speaker 03 There is something about these folks that if you want to be sort of, I don't know, benefit of the dowdy or glass half fully or something, like David Zaslove, who, you know, took over this iconic company, like, he, like, bought Jack Warner's old desk, and he sat, and he moved that into his office. And he met with folks, Joe and I both work on Hacks. Joe's been writing for Hacks from the beginning. It's a show I produce. It's really run by our friends Jen, Paul, and Lucia. And like, he asked to meet with them early on. And he was incredibly complimentary about the show and talked about how much he loved the show and how great he thought it was and...
32:06 Pablo Torre? And said his favorite character was Ray, the hotel clerk, which I...
32:11 Speaker 03 Joe's character, yeah, who worked at the hotel. There is an aspect of this where this, this class of person...
32:22 Speaker 03 They do genuinely, I think at some level, love Hollywood.
32:26 Speaker 04 Yes.
32:26 Speaker 03 They love it. It's like, because Hollywood's like fun and it's glamorous and it's exciting and there's, and making movies is fun and TV shows and actors and like, parties on rooftop bars in Hollywood like this, it is, there isn't, they're not, uh, they don't think of it necessarily in the coldest possible terms. I think they genuinely, a lot of them have a genuine affection for Hollywood. I think it's probably the only reason Hollywood still exists at some level is because they, the, these folks still think that it's cool and, you know, that is, that, it seems like a wild thing to say, but like, it is a prerequisite of owning one of these companies. You have to like it. You have to think that movies and TV shows are cool and want to genuinely keep making them.
33:11 Speaker 03 What gets in the way is their like sort of ruthless, business sense of like, how can we make everything as efficient as it can possibly be and, you know, Hollywood is by definition an inefficient business. You're trying a bunch of stuff and you're throwing a bunch of ideas at the wall. You never really know what is gonna stick and the, the whole world of, that we're in now of algorithms and predictive AI and all that stuff, is their attempt to apply a sort of tech ethos to an industry that is fundamentally not receptive to that ethos because no one can predict how, like when The Sopranos came out or Breaking Bad or Mad Men or any of those shows that we now consider to be classics.
33:53 Speaker 03 Seinfeld or Cheers or any of those things, like no one watched them at first and then slowly the creative teams behind them turn them into these wonderful beloved things. That's the kind of thing that like ruthlessness and efficiency and AI will, will drum out of Hollywood because it'll be like, well, the completion rate for the first four episodes of Cheers or Seinfeld or, or Breaking Bad was very low and we're gonna cancel it and move on and try to find something that has a higher completion rate. That's the fear that we all have.
34:25 Speaker 04 Everything will be a reverse engineer. They'll see, you know, like Suits is doing really well and people like Avatar, so can we make a show like Suits but underwater or whatever, you know, it's like.
34:36 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
34:37 Speaker 04 Go on.
34:38 Speaker 03 And that's why, that's my personal fear about the world that we're in is. Because they are, as you put it, like sort of retro engineering. They're going out to the audience and they're gaining data about the audience's viewing habits. And they are then making things that they think will comport with what they have said they already like. And the whole point of Hollywood in its history and storytelling in general is that people push the envelope outwards. And if everything is retro engineered from what has already been approved, you don't get that. And that necessarily like sands off the edges of what is possible and what is creatively exciting.
35:19 Pablo Torre? Wait, but I did just think of a show idea called Wet Suits.
35:24 Pablo Torre? And it's just suits underwater, but.
35:26 Speaker 03 It's a legal, a legal drama that takes place underwater.
35:29 Pablo Torre? Yeah, wet suits. Uh, Mike, you care about the University of Michigan, right?
35:33 Speaker 03 I do, yeah. I was born in Ann Arbor.
35:36 Pablo Torre? So you're familiar with Larry Ellison's role in the NIL budgeting for.
35:42 Speaker 03 I'm not sure. Well, I, I, I know about like Bryce Underwood, current quarterback of Michigan.
35:48 Pablo Torre? That's what I'm referring to. Can you help tell the story? Because what I know at the highest level is that no one, so Larry Ellison has, and this is not a judgment. It is merely a statement of fact that sets up what we're about to talk about. Six marriages, zero known prenups. Cool.
36:04 Speaker 03 Yeah, that rocks.
36:06 Pablo Torre? Amazing. He was not known to have been in the relationship that came to the fore when it was announced that Larry Ellison had called up Dave Portnoy, the proprietor of Barstool Sports, to get involved in the recruiting of Bryce Underwood, who was a top quarterback prospect. And he was doing it at the behest and the encouragement of his partner, who was a woman who no one knew existed, it seems, but was revealed, Mike, in the course of their funding of, oh, Larry Ellison's now underwriting University of Michigan's football team. And it was a thing that I don't totally understand, except to say that it seems to have worked.
36:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, he play, he plays for Michigan, so I guess it worked. I don't, I didn't follow it very closely. I will say though. That of all of the things that we want our billionaires spending money on, this is by far the best, in my opinion, right? It's like the college athletes in general being conscripted labor for organizations and groups that have made billions and billions and billions of dollars and have never gotten anything, no healthcare, no salary, nothing. The NIL era has at least made it so that they are profiting from their own work. And when I read this, I was like, yes, Larry Ellison, focus on this. Focus on the University of Michigan quarterbacks and the problem.
37:31 Speaker 03 And while you're at it, go pick up a few offensive linemen. Go see if there's a running back who needs some money, and I fully support it.
37:41 Pablo Torre? I want to just give you the last paragraph of this Fortune story, because I think it's a time capsule we should consider for a bit. For Michigan, Landing Underwood was also about proving they could compete with the financial firepower of SEC programs in the new NIL landscape. As Portnoy said on his podcast, quote, "When Larry Ellison targets someone, it's essentially a foregone conclusion," end quote. End of story. Footnote: For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with the initial draft.
38:10 Speaker 03 Great.
38:10 Pablo Torre? An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing, period.
38:13 Speaker 03 Oh, gosh.
38:14 Speaker 04 Nice. Love that. Oh, that rocks.
38:18 Pablo Torre? This is good. It's exactly how I want information.
38:23 Speaker 04 Also, it's so sinister to be like, when he targets you with his fleet of drones,
38:30 Speaker 04 his private drone army, he'll find you.
38:33 Pablo Torre? Except for Warner Brothers, potentially. Mike, I wonder if you have a rooting interest? Like, who do you want to win this contest? Who would you rather own Warner Brothers and all of its assorted assets as a raid across news and entertainment?
38:52 Speaker 03 I would rather Warner Brothers own Warner Brothers, frankly. That doesn't seem possible. It was bought by Zasloff and Discovery and saddled with, I think, $45 billion in debt, which meant it was only a matter of time until he stripped away and sold off the copper wiring and then flipped it to someone else. I believe he also paid himself $250 million as a bonus finder's fee when he bought the company, which is pretty amazing. The report I read a couple of days ago is that by the time this is over, he will be a billionaire, which is probably all that he really ever wanted at some level. Time Warner and Warner Brothers are old venerable entertainment companies.
39:37 Speaker 03 And it has been passed around like a stinky plate of hors d'oeuvres at a crummy billionaire cocktail party for 30 years now. AOL bought it with fake money in the late 90s, early 2000s, and then it chugged along and then Discovery bought it and saddled it with debt and stripped it for parts and buried a bunch of movies. The Batgirl movie famously was just thrown in the garbage. Other TV shows and movies were made and then thrown in the garbage as tax write-offs. And now it's being flipped to someone else. And the crazy thing is, is that this whole time, what is the single best brand in television? HBO.
40:17 Speaker 03 HBO has managed, through all of this stuff, to just plug along and make great TV shows and great movies and great mini-series and great documentaries against all odds, while their parent company was just absolutely buffeted by various billionaire wins. And to that extent, the answer is, I don't want this to happen. I hope that somehow it doesn't happen. If you have Joe's job or my job, you have an idea for a TV show or a movie, there's, what, half a dozen places that can buy it? And when two of them merge... That means there's only five places who can buy it now. There's 16% less opportunity to sell an idea you have.
41:02 Pablo Torre? Like wet suits. Where do we take wet suits?
41:05 Speaker 03 Wet suits has a very slim chance of being bought now because of this murder. And so I don't want anyone to buy it. I will say, though, that, you know, at the very least, I guess you would say Netflix just makes stuff. They make a ton of stuff. They might make too much stuff, but they do make stuff and they have a platform, a global platform to actually distribute it. And I think on balance, the best of two bad outcomes would be that Netflix gets this to work in their favor. But again, I can't emphasize this enough, either way, it's not good. It's bad for writers, bad for actors, bad for directors, and bad for consumers.
41:50 Pablo Torre? It is farcical that Warner Brothers can't exist on its own. I mean, the question of like-
41:54 Speaker 03 Well, think about this. Like, this is the thing that you have to think about, right? Again, HBO and HBO Max, like, that brand means so much to people our age and to people of most ages. HBO Max is the same thing as Netflix. It's an internet streaming platform for content. What happens if Netflix buys this? Does HBO disappear forever? Is that it? Is it like a tile within Netflix? Do they get to keep Casey Bloys and all the folks at that company who have been responsible for some of your favorite shows and movies and mini-series and documentaries? Or are they announced as redundant and shuffled off to Buffalo?
42:34 Speaker 03 Like, there are people whose job it is to still, even in this era of AI and of predictive viewing and all that stuff, whose job it is to program places, to figure out what are the stories we want to tell that are good and how can we get them to people? And those people are in danger, just like writers and actors and directors and crew members are. Those people, the executives who program things, are in danger by mergers like this. I'll raise it one more time as an example. Hacks exists because Jen Paul Nocchia had this idea and they worked on it for five years. And we went out and we pitched it everywhere. We pitched it to Netflix and we pitched it to Hulu and we pitched it to HBO. It was a tough sell because it was a show about-
43:19 Speaker 03 A 70-year-old woman who lives in Las Vegas and who is a stand-up comedian who takes on a 25-year-old apprentice to write jokes for a stand-up routine. It was not the kind of idea that AI would suggest had a big chance for success, right?
43:37 Pablo Torre? It's on land. The whole show takes place on land.
43:40 Speaker 03 Yeah, not a single underwater legal drama.
43:46 Pablo Torre? Dry as hell.
43:48 Speaker 03 Dry as hell. And the woman, there was a woman named Susanna Makos who worked at HBO Max, who just got it. A group of humans used their human mouths to communicate an idea for a TV show, and another human person heard that idea and understood why it was good and said, yes, I want to do this. The more we get into this merger world and this AI world and this kind of collapsing universe where everything is predictive based on previous viewing habits, the less chance there is for a show like Hacks to ever exist again. And that is sad. The reason Hollywood is fun, the reason that those billionaires want to buy it and hang out and live in this world is because it's glamorous and exciting and fun.
44:31 Speaker 03 And it's like the essence of what it means to be a human being is telling stories. And the fewer places there are to tell stories and the less chance there are for those human stories to be told, again, for the millionth time, I'll say, the worse off everyone is.
44:47 Pablo Torre? Yeah, the term I think of when it comes to like, what should this slogan politically be? And I think about this because Lena Kahn's been a guest on our show a couple of times, and she has been the most effective, both political figure as the former chair of the FTC, but also, I think, one of the most effective communicators. Because her whole thing, the reason why she is very bizarrely really liked by like Steve Bannon and people who claim, at the very least, populism, as well as, quote-unquote, you know, whatever, the left, the libs, is because competition is the thing that we have forgotten as this priority for what it means to have even a vaguely functioning capitalist system.
45:32 Pablo Torre? The question of what happens when there are two buyers or one buyer? Like, the prices will go up. They will have to care less about the product they're delivering to you because you don't have the alternatives.
45:44 Speaker 03 Right.
45:45 Pablo Torre? And so what is the lesson from sports that can be applied to entertainment? Again, it's that more competition is probably a virtue when it comes to what anything resembling a marketplace is like. And then, to answer the question Mike posed, Joe, Ted Sarandos was speaking, answering the question of like, what about HBO? What about the brand that earns the things, awards that I can't just buy? He's speaking at the UBS Global Media Communications Conference.
46:13 Speaker 03 Oh, I missed that. I was gonna go.
46:17 Pablo Torre? What Ted Sarandos said was, quote, "This is a prestige television brand that people really love. I would say that they have been doing gymnastics to make themselves into a general entertainment brand. And I think under this transaction, they don't have to do that anymore. We're already a very well-established general entertainment brand. And we want HBO to double down on the things that people have loved for 50 years about HBO." End quote.
46:38 Speaker 03 To put a fine point on this, no matter who buys it, like HBO is in the business of making a small number, a relatively small number of very expensive TV shows and movies, very expensive. Like, you know, things that are extremely high quality, that take a long time to shoot, and that are, when you watch them, you're just like, man, that, look how good that looks. The level of filmmaking of an HBO product is incredibly high. And that is the kind of thing that, no matter who buys them, you have to just say, "Okay, keep doing that."
47:19 Speaker 03 It is not the most tech-efficient, streamlined kind of production, but it is worth doing because it's artistic. And it's, you know, the imprimatur of HBO means a lot to viewers and to the world of Hollywood.
47:37 Speaker 03 And so, right now, anyone can say, yes, we're gonna let HBO keep doing what they've been doing. After four years, when they've had a couple of shows or expensive projects that didn't work out so well, will they still maintain that? Will the tech guys who run those companies still say, you know what, I don't care that we're losing money, or that we're not making as much money as we could. Keep going HBO, because you're great and we love you. They've had that protection for years, decades even, because they win awards and because that brand means something. If they're bought by a tech company, any tech company, if Amazon bought them,
48:18 Speaker 03 would they still maintain that? I don't know. And that's the scary thing. Like, the landscape of TV used to have a lot of different outlets that meant a lot of different things, and different shows could go to different places for different reasons, and they all had brands. And, you know, you wanted to make a fun, you know, down the middle of the road multicam comedy, you put it on CBS. You want to make a super high-end, like, you want to make I May Destroy You, you go to HBO. And at some point, when these companies all merge, and they all became the same people, and they're run by algorithms, and they have massive, you know, institutional shareholders
48:56 Speaker 03 who demand a certain profit level, do they still allow places like HBO to make I May Destroy You? And The Wire, that nobody watched, ever, no one ever watched The Wire, and The Wire's maybe the most important TV show of the last 50 years. That's my fear as a writer and as a producer, is that the mergers and the consolidation ultimately just drives everything to the middle, and you don't get the kinds of shows that make a lasting impression on us as a human species, that we lose the far edges of creativity, and everything just gets crunched into like chunk. That's why they call it content, right?
49:36 Speaker 03 It's not shows, it's not movies, it's just slabs of a gelatinous substance. It's like the stuff that they eat in Snowpiercer. It's just like a gelatinous... It's cute and they cut off a chunk of content and they give it to you and it's all just the same stuff. And if we lose the ecosystem that allows both the Big Bang Theory and I May Destroy You to exist and be successful at the same moment in time, then we're losing Hollywood and we're losing storytelling.
50:06 Speaker 04 Yeah, but like, and I love The Wire, you know I love The Wire, but imagine if Omar was Fred Flintstone.
50:13 Speaker 04 Like you have to, the viewing pleasure of that content, oh.
50:18 Speaker 03 Instead of walking down the street and whistling the farmer in the dell, he's scrambling in a car by running his feet on the ground through the hole in the car.
50:27 Speaker 04 Yeah.
50:27 Speaker 03 And there's a giant, and there's a bronto burger in the back.
50:30 Pablo Torre? What if instead of wearing a wire, uh, someone had to carry around a bird?
50:35 Speaker 04 A big bird with a cord attached to its [BLEEP]. Well, yeah, that's.
50:38 Speaker 03 Who then looked at the camera and said, it's a living.
50:41 Speaker 04 Yeah. I mean, I see, like, I see a silver lining here.
50:48 Speaker 03 You really do. That's what I love about you, Joe, is you're so optimistic.
50:50 Speaker 04 Yeah.
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51:29 Speaker 06 Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.
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52:33 Pablo Torre? So at the end here, we promised Joe a big reveal that as we talk about what rich people want to buy that they can't quite get and have to elbow each other out for. We explained that you are yourself a very human craftsman.
52:50 Speaker 03 Right, well, actor first, actor, writer, embroiderer.
52:53 Pablo Torre? Yes, and we'll throw on the screen again a gallery of the works that you made during the pandemic. If you didn't watch the first episode we did, you should get a tour of Joe Mandi's personal psychology.
53:04 Speaker 03 Yeah.
53:05 Pablo Torre? What was your favorite one of the previous batch? Do you have a favorite of the Joe hats that he had embroidered?
53:09 Speaker 03 The Dershowitz one is hard to beat. Was it Detroit Tigers? Who was it?
53:14 Pablo Torre? Detroit Tigers, yeah.
53:16 Speaker 03 So for those of you who didn't see it, it was just he would buy baseball hats that had the letter usually of the team or the logo and then embroider in that font a word using that letter. Yeah. Usually nonsensical, just the first thing that kind of popped into your head.
53:32 Pablo Torre? Right, just flow state, yeah, exactly. My favorite hat for the record was the New York Giants' Coney.
53:38 Speaker 03 Coney 2012, yeah. Coney 20, yeah, that was a good one. Can I guess? So this is an MT we're about to look at.
53:45 Pablo Torre? Oh, yeah, let me, let me.
53:47 Speaker 03 All right, well, don't show me yet, because I want to guess.
53:48 Pablo Torre? Never, never. Joe, if you could just, I'll hold it. You could show the back.
53:53 Speaker 03 This is the back, NBA. Okay. Here, I have four guesses, five guesses.
53:59 Pablo Torre? Okay. I'm so excited.
54:01 Speaker 03 Madame Tussauds.
54:03 Pablo Torre? No.
54:04 Speaker 03 Okay. Meatball time.
54:08 Pablo Torre? Interesting. I will, okay.
54:11 Speaker 03 More tickling.
54:16 Speaker 03 Magic turkey.
54:17 Speaker 04 Okay.
54:20 Speaker 03 And mini taquitos. There's a food theme, I guess.
54:22 Speaker 04 Yeah, there, I will say you were kinda off the mark.
54:26 Pablo Torre? Well, I should clarify that we are going to do something that we have not done on the show before, thanks to Joe's actual generosity, which is auction this hat off for a good cause. St. Jude's, David Sampson, Mike, you're a frenemy. His daughter is waging a very valiant war against a thing that, in her own very minimal way, wanna help the fight towards. So this hat will be auctioned off for, to St. Jude. And, Mike, the word is chemtrails.
55:02 Pablo Torre? So, you were kinda off, cuz I...
55:05 Speaker 03 I, you know what? This is 100% on me. I did not think about the artist. I should've, this is a, it's a good lesson for whoever wins the merger. Think about the artist and let the artist do their thing.
55:29 Pablo Torre? And as for where you can actually bid on this truly handmade piece of art, Joe Mandi's chemtrails Minnesota Timberwolves cap, this actual one of one item, something that no large language model could ever imagine. We have a new website for you to visit, ptfo.betterworld.org. Again, that is ptfo.betterworld.org. All proceeds really will go to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in honor of our good friend, David Sampson, and his daughter, and every other family fighting cancer. So, Pablo Torre finds out, duly thanks you for your bidding, and we are produced by Walter Avaroma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McCray, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris
56:14 Pablo Torre? Tumanello. Our studio engineering by RG Systems, sound design by Andrew Bersick and NGW Post, theme song, as always, by John Bravo, and we will talk to you next time.
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57:06 Speaker 06 Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithgemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithgemini.
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