A More Civilized Age: A Star Wars Podcast - 68: The Office Next to the Buffalo Wild Wings ft. Adam Conover

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

In case you haven't heard via our Patreon or various social feeds: AMCA is about to PIVOT. SAG-AFTRA recently released new guidelines for podcasters. Though Rebels is not a guild production, it is hosted on Disney+ and tied closely to the ongoing promotion of Ahsoka. As such, we've been figuring out how to best continue the podcast without crossing the picket lines or promoting struck material, which we feel covering Rebels does. To help us unpack some of the background of these strikes, we invited Adam Conover to come through this week. We dig into Hollywood labor history, the internal politics of the entertainment industry unions, and the ways that the modern influencer economy fit into all of this. It's a great conversation, and we get into some details we've never heard anywhere else.  We also end the show by talking through... and potentially deciding... what comes next for A More Civilized Age

Let us return once more to a... Well, we're not going to be returning just to... Anyway, this is a more civilized age, formerly a Star Wars podcast. I'm Rob Zakeney, joined by Ali Akampura, Austin Walker, and Natalie Watson. We are, as always, supported by you are listeners via patreon.com slash civilized. So head over there if you'd like to support the show and get access to all our Q&A episodes. Today, we welcome our guest, Adam Conover, a comedian and a friend, but more importantly for our purposes, a member of the Writers Guild of America West Board and a member of the Negotiating Committee with the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers, as well as a sag after member, two guilds currently on strike, which brings us to today's topic. The strike, and the strikes that have sort of brought production in the entertainment industry to a near standstill across.

most studios and the way that has sort of touched on our work here and what we're going to be doing for the duration of the strike. So Adam, you've been on the round, you've been making the rounds to unpack this for a lot of folks. So I'm very grateful that you've consented to join us here today and go through what I'm sure at this point is a topic you are very familiar with sort of rehashing for people who are just getting up to speed and what's going on. Yeah. This has been my life for the last couple months and, you know, that's why I entered into it because I enjoy doing it. It's a pleasure to be here as a fan and a listener of the show. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you have for coming. And thank you for saying you're a fan. I took a sip

of a delicious apple like seltzer and it went down the wrong pipe as I was trying to say thank you. So, I mean, I listen to, I listen to you guys after watching every episode of Andor and it improved my enjoyment of the show immeasurably. I do not really consume much other Star Wars content. That's like the only arc that I listen to, but it was really fantastic. And so I appreciate your guys' work. Well, I think that like the response we got while making that content is part of why we kind of take seriously the idea that like you can't just say you're not an influencer. because you don't take cash from Mr. Disney, from Bob Eiger, who sucks. You would, what we did was influencer type business during that in terms of like,

we brought out a bunch of new listeners and we like did our best to help direct a conversation. And we, you know, I think most influencers aren't talking about, you know, Italian Marxists necessarily. But I appreciate that you listen to that stuff. And I think those episodes that we did were really good. and I would love for, you know, solidarity with the people who made that show is what I will say at this moment. Well, because they, I mean, the people who made that show are some of the best people. They're making incredible television, right?

And we can talk about, you know, all the different ways to break down how you guys think about what you do and what the union is asking of folks. Yeah. Because there's a lot to get into there as well. But where would you like to start? So in general with situations like this, I like to. cover sort of the, you know, the pre-war situation, right? But before, like, the strike was called, you know, even before, like, the round of negotiations began, what was the landscape that, you know, writers, but then people working in the industry more broadly were facing,

heading into this, like, current round of negotiations that have triggered the strike? So, for the last 30 years, creatives in the entertainment industry or Hollywood, we could use those semi interchangeably, although Hollywood can refer to L.A. Tinseltown. We're also talking about people in New York, Atlanta, right? People who work for the entertainment industry more broadly have just been under assault by the people who run the companies for the past 30 years who've, you know, waged a war to reduce our income to make our, to make us work more precarious and turn our careers into gig work effectively. And this is something that people are going through throughout America,

throughout the world. And we've just sort of reached an inflection point in this industry where it's become so brutal that workers from every union, even non-union workers are like stepping up and saying we have to do something about it. And what form that takes is different depending on who? You said that started 30 years ago, and I think that it's like an interesting background that I don't know that everybody, I think it's easy to think, oh, this all just happened

yesterday, oh, this is just streaming, oh, this is just AI. But what you just said suggests that there has been, let's say, like, the larger changes in the labor market that everyone has faced for decades, that's not something that you've been insulated from in the entertainment industry. Is that fair to say? Yeah, totally. I mean, I think there's a lot of things. It's a general trend in America, in American labor.

You know, you could date that to the Reagan era, which is about 30, 40 years ago. It's also things that are specific to the landscape of labor in Hollywood. Like, you know, we could, if you want, go into the history of, you know, what happened, you know, how unions turned this into a town where people were able to make a middle class income, how the studios fought back, how they created a regime. starting around the 80s that was designed to reduce the power of labor and to make it more difficult for workers to win gains. And then essentially it worked too well. And, you know, they were able to suppress wages long enough and deeply enough and make the work precarious enough that not only you have historically militant guilds like the Writers Guilds stepping up, you also have some kind of sleeping giants like SAGAFTRA, which is a union that hasn't gone

on strike on this contract in 40 years. You know, their members are, standing up and say, holy shit, we need to, we need to do something. We can't make a living anymore. So let's talk a little bit about the, when we talk about like making a living in this business, you know, I don't know how far we want to go back, but like I know that certainly as somebody who just follows this industry from a distance, like I know that, you know, one of the things that used to be a huge part of it is if your series makes syndication, you know, that's kind of, that's kind of a golden ticket where this, this, this, you know, provides like passive income through residuals for years that like this was a this was a big

hurdle that like you know showrunners and writers and performers would would cross to sort of guarantee future income like what like how important was that stuff in the business model versus like the the rates for doing the work itself I'm just curious about the when we talk about making a good living in this business uh you know 25 30 years ago. What did that look like in terms of work being done and then, you know, receiving payments moving forward and how did that shift in these last 30 years? Well, if I was going to give you a full accounting, it would take a while, right?

Because there's about like, yeah, we got time. We cover the entire Clone Wars. It's this now. You're joining the show. You understand that, right? That was, this is perfect. We're just going to keep going until it's over. Dude, this is what we're, this is what we're.

This is what we're in it for. This is why we love your constellation of podcast because when you got some time to kill, baby, you got to, you got to build a desk. Do you have an IKEA project? These folks will help you out. We need to put that up. Thank you. I think you just found the tag line for the broader like Walker Waypoint Verst podcast. You got time to kill?

I'm being quite, I'm being quite literal that I. was listening to Waypoint Radio while building the standing desk that I am talking to you on, which was, which took me three days. And I was like, thank God they have a lot of episodes because it was like I had to screw it, unscrew all the legs again. It was a big,

wait a second. Adam, you're a big Hollywood actor. Don't you have people who build desks for you? What happened in the last 30 years? Not anymore. Thank you, Austin. I have people for that money.

That is wonderful setup. happened to all of the assistants who had built our IKEA furniture. Well, that's a, that's an interesting story. Let me tell you. Uh, no. Um, so look, uh, there's, uh, a number of things have happened. Um, one is that, uh, okay, I'll give you what was the version like a couple decades ago, right? Um, say you're writing a show in the 90s. Um, you get hired to write on a television show. Very difficult to get that job. But once you have that job, um, you are in the writer's room for maybe 10 months out of the year, eight or 10 months, something like that. And you get a relatively good weekly rate for being in the writer's room.

And when you see, by the way, people who are like anti-labor go, oh, look at how much the weekly rate is, like the weekly rate does look high if you were to make that every single week of the year, right? And if you were to be able to work, you know, 52 weeks a year. But in reality, most people like, you know, it takes you a year to get the next job, right? So you have a pretty high weekly rate. The other thing that happens is that you're paid residuals every time the program, airs. So that means like the first time it runs on television or cable, you receive one pretty

big payment. And then every time it airs, the payment goes down a little bit. They're sort of like a long tail, right? Uh, and just because, just to be clear, it's because they run advertisements and make money against that. To be like, I know that that's a silly thing to call out, but like it's it, the world is busy. To live a life is hard. It, you may have missed why people who work in the entertainment industry get residuals. And I mean, part of it's because they negotiated for it to historically but the thing that's happening is you rerun that episode of Seinfeld they're running ads against that episode of Seinfeld again it's making more money for the distribute earn it for the for the what's the word I'm looking for the person who the

broadcaster right yeah the the the platform and the studio right uh are both likely making money off of that and another key piece of like just the moral justification for that compensation not that the moral justification matters that much but but some people do care about it um one thing that's unique in the entertainment industry is most of the time when somebody write something, they retain the copyright. If you're a novelist or a playwright or often even a journalist, you keep the copyright to your work. Um, you keep the right to, you know, write something, write something for the New Yorker. You keep the right to, uh, publish that in your later work or to have something adapted, you know, or whatever. Um, and uniquely in the

entertainment industry, when it got started, we assign our copyright to the producer. Um, and that was something that like literally in the first days of the writers guild in the 1930s those writers were like why aren't we fighting to retain copyright like playwrights have because theater was still a very big business back then and it was decided that oh we're not going to win that battle the thing that we receive instead is participation when they make money off of it okay you get the copyright you can do whatever you want with it but like when you run our work we receive some kind of payment that's that's the moral justification now that payment ends up becoming part of our compensation you know so also again it can take a year or two between jobs because it's very hard to get those jobs and so you know a couple times a year you receive a green envelope in the mail that is payment for every time that the episode ran so when I wrote I created a show called Adam Ruins everything on true TV every season that that ran I would receive a check for about $25,000 for that show running on cable now that's a pretty good chunk of change that's not a living right but that helps me pay my mortgage that helps me you know whatever that's that's like a that's part of a living right

that's a piece of a living um then you know in future years like now they still rerun it on true tv twice a twice a week and once or twice a year i receive like two grand great that's like another little piece because it's been years and they've run them hundreds of times at this point um so what's happened is uh what has happened to those two pieces of compensation at least for writers First of all, in streaming, they have engineered the writing calendar so that they keep writers on for less weeks. So a job that used to be, you know, you're on for many months. Now you're on for three months out of the year. Still took you a year to get that job.

Now you're only working for three months. And people are working less weeks like per episode. There's a lot of, some people like to make a meal out of, oh, seasons used to be 26 episodes, now they're 10 episodes. It's not really that. It's that the number of weeks they're asking people to write episodes in are less or fewer. And they have started refusing to send writers to set or into post, which has a problem, A, because it reduces the length of employment. And B, writing is still done in those places. You know, there's writing being done on set because, oh, hold on a second, that actor's line didn't make sense coming out of their mouth.

We need a quick rewrite. Writing happens in post. Lost the location, like, like just production changes. Like, Natalie, you know this, yes. Yeah, there's, I mean, we got no, we, no rewrites for us, but, but, but that is like a justification, like that is something that, a traditional film crew that, uh, that are a film crew that was used to doing films and not our weird video game things, they were like,

oh, well, you know, just because we lost this location, we can write it out. We can, uh, you know, they're used to finding these kinds of shortcuts, um, but that does require changing the story to make that make sense. Or, you know, there's a famous, we'll do it in the edit, but that's never good. Well, and the edit has writing, too, because, you know, you might say, okay, well, the episode's five minutes too long. We need to lift out this scene. But then how do we get the information across?

Oh, we'll write a line for the actor to do in VO. Exactly right. No, we watched the Phantom Menace and the other prequel movies where George Lucas decided that's how you make a whole movie. So, yeah, we're familiar. Yeah, I mean, I now have way to attuned a sense for that. When I'm watching something and there's a line that someone gives just off camera, I'm like, that's, that, they came up with that later.

Somebody said, we need a joke here and they hired the writer to write one joke and then said, let's pop it in real quick. The second you hear anything that sounds like punch up, I'm back to the Pat and Oswald bit. Yes. Like, it is just, this is where I learned this. Pat and Oswald did a joke about this, yes, where he was hired explicitly to write, uh-oh, someone fell in a vat a Kool-Aid just off camera or whatever. And his point was in animation, there's never any reshoots either because you just,

it's locked for Pixar or whoever. Allie and I, we just went and saw Mission Impossible and there was a sequence in the most recently, fairly recently, it was just like a character walking away and it's like, oh, the last scene did not make sense to test audiences. they just got Tom in a booth to have him restate what the thesis of that last scene was because it didn't make sense otherwise. It's so easy to see you once you start seeing it, you know?

The test audience was not wrong in that case. That was one of the stranger scripts I've ever seen in a movie. But so what the companies have done, and I'm going to get into a little bit of detail here, but I think your listeners will enjoy it because I think that's the kind of people that they are. So it used to be writers were hired for that whole period. hired to be in the writer's room and then also to go to set and also go to the edit.

What the companies did recently is they said, ah, here's what we'll do. Instead of doing a pilot and then we're going to hire everyone to write the whole series, we're going to hire the writers to write the entire series before the show's officially greenlit. Right. So we actually want eight to ten or twelve scripts, but the show is not in production yet. Because the show's not in production, there's no set to go to. And so they are not hiring any of the writers to do the work of producing, of writing on set.

It's like brilliant if you're a business affairs executive because you just figure out how to separate writers from like half of their income and you're still getting the scripts. But the writers are like, we are doing 70% of the work in the writer's room, right? Now the showrunner is having to do everything on set all by themselves without any writers as help.

And writers are no, you know, that job that used to last eight to 10 months now lasts two to three. And so suddenly there's this drop off in pay. This is like a thing you do if you're playing Crusader Kings and they're very evil. You know what I mean? Like it's like a master stroke in a grand strategy game to have found this little loophole. But it's evil. It's a hundred percent of

yeah. It's completely evil. And so that's why one of our proposals is preserving the writer's room because, well, sorry, it's actually a slightly related issue. These are called mini rooms. The rooms are also, they're making them smaller and smaller. And something that we've learned that they're actually doing now is they're offering showrunners. Sorry, go for it. Maybe smaller and smaller. I assume we're not in a clown car situation, but we're talking about like literal size of the like writing staff. Yes.

Less writers writing less weeks for the same number of episodes. So, you know, instead of having, hey, I don't know, you're doing 12 episodes, here's like eight writers and you've got, you know, months to do it and you're going to go to set while the episodes are shooting, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now it's like, okay, for those 12 episodes, you've got four writers. what we've learned they're doing recently is the studios are literally

offering showrunners in their deals we will pay you a bonus if you hire no writers at all in a writer's room and instead you write the entire season yourself you can farm a couple scripts out to freelancers who don't get a weekly rate they just get a couple grand to write the script

but you know and so we're looking at the writing on the wall going okay they are trying to reduce what a writer is they're trying to make the work more precarious they're trying to eliminate the writer's room entirely and so we have all these proposals in to you know preserve the writer's room say that when a script, when a show is being written, there must be a writer's room of some kind, et cetera, et cetera. That's one piece of the compensation. The other

piece is residuals, as you mentioned. Because an unfortunate fact of the way our industry works is that the union contracts only applied to a particular media, right? Like it, we, you know, every time something new is invented, television is invented, cable is invented, streaming is invented. We have to go in and get the terms again. Even though we're doing the same work, it's just going, you know, over your Roku rather than your cable box. We have to go get the terms again. And the residuals in streaming are practically non-existent. It depends on what part of the business you're in, but like whether it's narrative or whatever it is. But just to give you my personal example, I told you I made about, you know, would make about $25,000 for

the first year of a season of Adam Ruins, everything running. I created a show a year or two back called the G-word for Netflix, six episodes. Same show. I, about a month ago, received my first residual check, and the entire first year's residual payment was $500 for a year of those six episodes, which is like, I was happy to have the $500. Yeah, sure, dude. But this is a tiny percentage.

And look, I was paid well for those first six episodes because I'm the showrunner and the star, but I had people working on the show who, you know, I know rely on those residual payments for their rent. You know, this is a lifeline to them. And so that has basically been eliminated. And, you know, and it's a decline in people's real income, you know. A really good example of this, just to give one more,

is I'm friends with a lot of daily show writers because that's the kind of comedy I do. And the Daily Show, the Daily Show used to be re-aired twice every day on Comedy Central. And that was, so those residual payments were like something that those writers counted on. But in recent years, you know, Comedy Central now just reruns the office. all day, only ones that only runs the daily

show once. Why? Because everyone's watching it on Paramount Plus and YouTube, which they are profiting from. But those writers, now that those re-airs have been removed from the calendar, their real income has gone down. Like, it is effectively for them a pay cut. Now, that's not even getting into the stresses that actors

are under, which are, you know, somewhat separate, and I could get into those as well. You know, they're different issues from writers. But, you know, this sort of pressure is something we've seen across the entire industry. It's this sort of creative deal-making,

the Crusader King's example that you use. And then the fact that, you know, we just need to go back in and get terms in streaming that match what writers and actors have had for the last 70 years in more traditional forms of media. So one of the other things that I sometimes hear about just the impact all of this has had across the industry and not purely from a labor standpoint, but just overall, like the financial health, like the business of show business, these pivots to streaming to platforms have not really proven to be as healthy a core business model as television and theatrical release.

Now, that hasn't stopped executives being paid quite a bit, but it does seem to be a through line in some of the, you know, discussions around the state of show business that like the business like this has not been healthy certainly for creating healthy working conditions and like better creative output but might also not be creating a particularly sustainable or stable business the way that show business has been constructed historically yeah you you hear about this a lot and I have a little bit of a nuanced take on this because this argument when made badly can be an anti-labor argument because it can be,

it's being used sometimes by the studio executives to say, hey, the business is doing so poorly, how could we possibly afford to pay you? And so I agree with it to a certain extent, which is that the companies willfully destroyed a successful business model that the public loved, right? People watched TV. Like, we were, it was, when Netflix and all of them came around,

when they switched to streaming, we were at peak TV. People were watching. We call it that. That's what we called it. Literally was peak TV. Like not just in like a Mimi on you're on Twitter. You're on YouTube.

Yo, peak TV. We called that era peak TV. That's how people were golden age. We were tuning in. It was Sunday night and we had to watch our shows. Like slugs mattered. Like the time your show aired mattered so much. This was like six years ago.

It was so recent. Remember that? People were like, I got. We got to sit down to, I mean, the walking dead. We got to get the family together to watch TV. The Walking Dead had bigger ratings than football. Like, it was fucking nuts. It was, it was crazy.

You know, Mad Men people would stop for. HBO was raking in money, right? It was all going great. So Netflix comes along, right? And Netflix makes what's frankly like a fake pledge to the audience. The pledge that the audience got, they never said this explicitly, but this is sort of the pledge that the audience got was $15 a month.

You can cancel your $200 a month's cable subscription. $15 a month you can watch every show ever made for free, no ads, right? And people were like, wow, that's amazing. This was like, you know, an Uber style, oh my God, I can $10, I can go across town, like, whenever I want. Like, this is how great things could be for you. This is the Amazon Prime, you know, this is everything is great. There's no downsides. And it got a lot of attention, got a whole.

whole lot of investor money. Obviously, they get a ton of subscribers, but they did a lot of it, by the way, by licensing content from all these other networks. All the other networks say, oh my God, they're using our content to build their business. We got to build a Netflix. And so these companies started destroying their existing businesses in order to fuel everything onto these streaming services. Look at what, you know, I used to be on true TV, right? At the time, when I was on true TV, there was also TBS, TNT. These were multiple cable channels that people watch. They each had multiple shows. They were under one parent company,

but they were separate brands. People knew what the brands were. You know, TNT is drama. TBS is comedy and True TV is, I don't know, the Impractic Jokers and Adam Runes. Everything's on that channel. But, you know, they had brands. Like, True TV had a president of the network

who was in charge of making sure that people watched it, right? It was a real business. There was like an office with people also, presumably, right? Yes. There was literally an office that I went to with 100 people in it who all worked to, make my show successful. They cut promos. They did marketing, right? They were competing

with Comedy Central. They were also competing with TBS because they like fucking hated each other. It was like Game of Thrones in the boardroom. So like the true TV president was like, fuck those TBS people. I'm going to get them and I'm going to beat them using, which is great for me in the public, right? It's even

it's competition. That's how capital is supposed to talk. That's what they keep telling me. It's supposed to work that way and I don't know. Right. So these companies what they did was they destroyed that. They, first of all, there were multiple rounds of merger. Turner, its parent company, Time Warner, went through multiple mergers with AT&T and then with Warner Discovery, merging into one big company. Oh, Time Warner getting weird mergers?

Crazy. And so they, so first of all, all those people in that building were all laid off. Like now, TBS, True TV, TNT, and all those other channels, they're all just feeders for HBO Max and they're, sorry, Max, and they're run by one. So, yeah, I know. They're run by one executive, right? Who, who, like, feeds the whole thing. And yes, they took HBO out of the fucking type of the thing that everybody. I'm so mad about it.

It's so infuriating. It makes it. That's the brand. That's the brand. HBO had been convincing people to pay $15 a month for premium ad-free content for 50 years. Just call it HBO. What the fuck is your, okay, sorry. I watched the kind of a side problem.

Have I mean? Go ahead. You have a real point. I have a fake point. You go ahead. But let's be fake. No, let's get your real point. I'll wrap back around, I promise.

Okay. My thing initially just when you were saying, you know, they, was it the circumstance, were they, did they enter into licensing agreements with Netflix that they felt like were cannibalizing their live, like their cable TV? And that's why they felt like, oh, in order to compensate for. these, you know, streaming contracts that we've ended up in that we signed ourselves away for that took off much more than we were expecting them to. Now we need to get into streaming. Can I append a question to that? That's exactly what happened.

And let me just add before you do, Rob, that the reason they did that was because for decades, the entire business has been built on resale of the content. You make one show and then you put it on your channel, sure, but you also sell it to the other, you know, to the other networks. You sell it to syndication. you sell it on DVD, you sell it to foreign. And so here comes Netflix and says, hey, yeah, exactly. And, well, I mean, a lot of people watch Adam ruins everything just because it was on Delta for like two years.

Right, sure. Like, great. And I got a fucking check for that. I got a check for the Delta thing. Airlines is like a very legitimate, like, form of recouping. Like, it sounds silly, but like this is like, again, these are like so, what I want to exude to the listener is these are so established business model. Like these are so tried and true and tested and like they were so solid for so many years for a reason And and and and that's why streaming was so unbelievably catastrophic because it disrupted so many things that were just working like you could bet on

Making a production because you knew you could sell it to the directed DVD or the I the airline or the whatever or the hotel TV whatever like it it they were just like established ways of recouping production costs that yeah so absolutely right so here's what i don't get though so if you have i can understand how netflix arrives and you don't know the value of the thing the rights you're signing over to netflix in the first in the first round negotiations someone's showing up an unproven model and they're allowed to give you money for a bunch of series and you do that and then you realize like oh there's gold in them hills but we kind of got screwed on the rate and it's cannibalizing our parts of the business

I don't understand why, like, you would think the next thing to happen is that, well, we're just not licensing the library any further. Like, this is not, this is not adding up. You're running a loss leading strategy, you know, to begin with, against us and the other parts of our pipeline. We're closing the tap and sticking with the proven model, like until you showed this model can match or beat the, the, the rate. we're getting for licensing this this content elsewhere instead of that happening something else happens and that's that's sort of one of the first things I don't I don't fully understand is you know you would think the the thing would be once you understand you sort of gave away the store you'd stop giving away the store but instead why would you try to build your

own store right store too like did they buy the hype do you know what I mean they didn't see through this immediately and go on that Netflix can't be that's a lie there's no way that model works. I think they did. I think they did buy the hype. I mean, I think it was a lot of Silicon Valley fueled investor cash and and this idea that, I mean, Netflix had the Uber business model, which is we are going to establish a monopoly. We are going to disrupt you. We are going to destroy you. We are going to become the only way that anyone watches anything. Now, in retrospect, that's clearly impossible. They don't make anything or I guess that was the pivot, right? As they started to make something because of this.

But you can do that if you make the thing you're selling. But they're exhibiting things that they get through contract with these other companies. There's going to be a deadline on how long that strategy works. And that's why they started pumping stuff out. I mean, if you, you know, look at Netflix history, they're like, okay, we have to, there's this line, we have to become HBO before HBO becomes Netflix. Now, unfortunately, there's just no HBO at all anymore. Like, they just killed, they both killed it together.

But I think part of the reason that, like, in retrospect, this looks stupid, is that there used to be, like, multiple, like, platforms were different. Okay, like, if you had cable, or if you're just talking about television, right, there was broadcast, which is free over the air, but has ads. There was cable, which is pay comes to your house, but has ads. There was HBO, which was $15 a month, no ads. There was on demand. Like, there was literally an on-demand button on your remote control at this point. The cable box just kind of fucking. sucked yeah um like i still use cable on demand sometimes it still exists sometimes you know

when i want to watch a comedy central show i mean it happens right it's like someone says like oh do you want to watch a thing and you're the someone is your mother and you're in front of her tv and you go yeah i guess let's see what's on demand you know it's a little easier yeah they're on they're on amazon and they're on netflix and shit now i mean it's still there Natalie if you want it it's you can use it um but so and there were variety of of programming, right? In addition to just like narrative series and reality shows, there was,

and documentaries and stuff, there was live sports, there was live news, there was local news, all this kind of stuff, right? So it's like, in retrospect, very obvious that the future of entertainment was not going to be one

or even a half dozen Netflix clones where everyone's just paying $15 a month to watch it without ads. And we realize that quickly because all these services that took that strategy, that they destroyed cable to build, quickly topped out

with their subscribers. Netflix and Disney Plus are currently topped out in the U.S. They're fighting churn every year. They're just trying to make sure that they don't have more unsubscribes than they do subscribes in the United States. And so what are they doing to fight that now that they've reached that ceiling? Well, they're starting to add new types of content, right? They're all competing over sports now. You know, Apple TV has major league soccer. And they've got a pregame show and a post game show and a wraparound show. What are they going to want pretty soon? They're going to want local news. They're going to want live news. They're going to want, you know,

they're going to, hopefully they're going to want to watch, they're going to want late night comedy because I would sure love to do one of those shows, right? And they're also doing free ad supported, pay ads supported. They're starting to bundle more, right? So that, you know, why is it harder to unsubscribe from HBO than from Netflix? Because it's attached to your cable account, right? So, you know, they're starting to attach it to your Verizon bill. They're just rebuilding cable television.

Right. And if they're Apple or Amazon, they're also doing music. They're also doing your banking. They're also doing everything else in your life, right? That squash is real, you know? Yeah. And like, you know, I don't subscribe to a lot of these services anymore except that, well, okay, I have Apple TV because that's what Major League Soccer is on and I watch that. And also it's just like attached to my phone and I got it free for the first year. So like, that's not even really count as a subscription. I just kind of have it, right? Or it came with my fucking. iCloud and i just paid for the whole maximum thing so uh what's happening is this sort of five year like folly of everyone has to destroy their businesses to build a netflix we're coming out of it and they are first of all they've been profitable the whole time but they're rocketing back towards like a much more profitable model which is essentially rebuilding cable um at warp speed and so there's no reason to accept oh the business is doing poorly they did go kick over some sandcastles that didn't need to be kicked over. Absolutely.

And that's part of the problem here. But there's no reason for them to plead poverty as a result. That's my slightly nuanced take on it. Right. This is a real. This is a real. It's a day before you get your paycheck and you owe someone 500 bucks. And you're like, oh, dude, I'm just so broke.

Can you give me until this time next month? And it's like, no, you're going to have the money tomorrow. Like, give me the 500 bucks that you owe me tomorrow. So before we get into the strike itself of the new. negotiation. Let's talk about just the the contract cycle and how that works, how these things unfold. When was the last, when was the last pair of contracts for SAG and for the writer's guild? So the, uh, we, we renegotiate our contracts every three years. Um, and the director's guild, and I believe IOTC and Teamsters, which are the other two, uh, big unions, um, uh, do theirs

every three years as well. Um, and there, and hours, the directors, sorry, I won't say hours because a number of two of them. The Writers Guild, Sag after, and the DGAFTA, all generally go the same year. And an important thing to know about that is the AMPTP structures the order of the negotiations in order to diminish labor power. So what they like to do is negotiate with a union that they think they can cut a favorable deal with. That's historically been the DGA and try to impose that deal upon the other union saying the DGA took this, so you should have to take it as well. Why isn't the DGA has been historically easier to negotiate with? I mean, I think I know, but I'd love to be right and hear from you.

The Director's Guild, I want to say this in a very polite way. Oh, Politician Adam has entered. Yeah, I mean, yes, this is Politician Adam. I'll say that the Director's Guild has taken a stance over its entire history of not using the strike weapon or the strike threat weapon.

So the Writers Guild has a philosophy, and this is the sort of militant progressive labor union philosophy of when you go to the bargaining table, you bring a strike threat. you say, hey, if we don't get what we want, our members are not willing to work for less. And, you know, we're going to keep that on the table. The DGA takes an approach of not doing that

and feeling that, you know, they can sort of use excellent negotiating and, you know, smarts and savvy in order to get the deal that they need. They also may be protected somewhat because, you know, different jobs have different amounts of structural power. Right. And so the structural power of the writers is that we, every project begins with us.

There's no project before it start, before we start. Structural power of the actors is they're the ones who are on the camera, right? But you imagine, like say, PAs, production assistants have less structural power and it's been harder for them to win gains. They're actually only semi-unionized, but very, very, very poorly unionized, that is. And so the directors, I think, have that belief about their position. Now, they also represent assistant directors and second assistant directors who are people who are perhaps being less well served, but, et cetera.

Um, that, that's the strategy that the DGA has taken. Um, and one might ask, well, if the unions could all get on the same page about a strategy and negotiate together, wouldn't that be great? And I would say, yes, it would be. And that is, uh, you know, that's the, that's the difficulty of, of, of, you know, labor politics, right? It's, um, it's, it's, it's, it's people working with each other. You have to have unanimity among tens of thousands of people about how to go forward. Um, it's already hard to get that among one body of people, let alone different bodies of people who have different interests and different rhythms in their, life and everything else. Yeah. And unions in many ways are, they're really comparable to nations. They have different political structures that, you know, our democracies work differently. They have different histories. They have different like past remembered traumas. Like, if you talk to people from a union, say, why does your union operate this way? They might say, oh, in 1988, let me tell you what happened, you know? And that's, that shit is real. I mean, the Writers Guild had a pair of failed strikes in 1980 and 1988, I believe, were the years. They were strikes that ended poorly. The strike fell apart without gains being made and there being a lot of pain. And then

for 30 years after that, or, sorry, 20 years after that, the Guild never went on strike. And it had a much more company-friendly leadership. It said, you know, we don't do that. That's too messy. It went too badly less time. Let's not do that until there was a political revolution at the Guild in 2007, which led to the previous writer's strike. So there's all this, I mean, literally, I've thought many times about starting just a podcast about Hollywood labor history, because I find it fascinating. But, yeah, that's true. Now's the time, but I hear there might be some income needs.

Get some guests on, perhaps the hat around, you know. Perhaps. It's so true. There's so much history to both of these unions. And it's so tight up in in Los Angeles itself, in the expansion of the entertainment industry to places like Atlanta in more recent years. It's like, and it's so, it's so wild to me how little is understood or known about the process of a thing that we consume constantly every single day all the time. it is our main entertainment like you know one of our main entertainment sources are our main sources of content and so little i mean this is true of lots of creative industries the games industry

is often talked about in this way as and you've made uh efforts to help like uncover the the making of and the processes behind uh making games um but especially with tv and and film it's like it's just, it's so, there's so much history that end in, that's misunderstood. And, and so little of it is covered. Like, I've read book, I literally read a book about the history of the Writers Guild and I'm like, there's a lot of shit that this academic labor historian doesn't know that I know. And like, she wrote it five years ago, but I'm like, oh, she didn't know about this happening because that's the whole reason that went down, you know, that kind of thing.

It's, it's hard to find it. It's like literally, you know, we have oral histories in the guild that like, I'm People should fucking go listen to them, you know. Yeah. My next one's like who's archived, like who's tasked with archiving this kind of stuff? Like, you know. We actually, there's a foundation called the Writers Guild Foundation that has a library that I actually went into it because we shot some videos. And they've got like all these archival scripts on the wall.

I like literally opened up a book of scripts. It's awesome. They had a, they had like shelves of Johnny Carson monologues from the early 70s, which as a late night guy, I was like, oh my God. Like I opened them and had like notes. scribbled in the margins and shit. Jokes that were completely unintelligible to me. I had no idea what they were about. But like,

really cool shit. So they, for instance, they literally did an oral history project at some point, interview a whole bunch of people. That stuff goes into an archive and then just waits for some historian to come along and go like,

what really happened in, you know, 1980 or whatever. And, you know, hopefully they're doing that archiving now because, you know, we're right now making a new history.

I literally am like saving our newsletters because, I'm like, I might want to look at these in, you know, 30 years. Yeah. It's cool shit to geek out about. Well, even the, even the, the, I've caught you on a live stream, like, early on in the WGH, like, we were talking about how some of the pickets that, like, people brought where there were, like, their signs from past strikes or somebody had one from, like, the 80s.

And, like, that, like, there is such a pride in that history and in bringing, yeah. Oh, there's literally picket signs that you only come across them occasionally, but that where the stick itself survived and people have like written, you know, like 2007, their name and like when they held the sign. There's not many of those surviving, but there's a couple. It's really cool. So going into this negotiation, what were the major, like, you know, points of contention, what were the major priorities, you know, heading into it?

it. And do you have a feeling about these things going in? Like, was it, was it pretty clear this was going to be a hard negotiation and that a strike was highly likely here? Also, just when, Rob says, like, going in, when is going in? When do you start conceptualizing? Here is what we're looking at next at this upcoming negotiation. Is that how many months, is that a year beforehand that you're like, all right, like, we're at the war table. Well, let's start plodding this out. Let me just thank you guys for asking these questions because literally this is the first time that anyone has, I've done 100 interviews about this. The first time anyone has said, hey, how do you actually do this?

Yeah, how do you do it? It's interesting. Okay. So we have, first of all, we have an incredible staff of professional researchers and labor folks. Some of these people, I'm like, they could be working in D.C. They're some of the best policy brains, you know, that you know. And so they are all the time looking at, you know, how much income writers are making. What are the trends in the business, et cetera, just tracking what's happening.

We also do every three years a member survey. We read literally every single member response to see how people are doing. From that, we start getting, you know, a view of here are the issues in the industry. Here are the issues our members are facing. And we start talking about what the proposals are. We talk about those in the boardroom. We then put together a negotiating committee, which is a separate body that I'm also serving on this year, that, you know, starts talking about proposals itself. Our staff brings a whole bunch of proposals.

We talk about which ones are important to us. There's a lot of guidance from staff. You know, we have some professional negotiators at the top who are saying, you know, we really think this is the one that you should consider, you know, but we as the member leadership, the democratically elected leadership, always have the ability to say, hey, our members aren't going to. like this or our members really care about X, Y, Z, that sort of thing. It's a deliberative process, right, that we, that we use to come up with what our proposals are. And, you know, we in the Writers Guild, approach it incredibly democratically, where we think, okay, we are going to literally have to defend the proposals to the membership, right? So are the members going to like them? How are we going to, how are we going to sell the proposals to the membership? How are we

going to say to people, this is a proposal that's worth going on strike two if you, going on strike four, if we need to. Then we enter into negotiations with the AMPTP with those proposals. In terms of what was your question, Rob, it was, oh, what did we think that, do we get an inkling about the negotiation? You know, we can sort of like read the tides as well as anybody else. And, you know, so the sort of thing we were saying was, this could be a conflict negotiation, right?

This could be not a business as usual one. This is one where we think that there might be a fight over it because of the, you know, sort of macro picture because of how, you know, how much are our members suffering, how angry are our members, and how recalcitrant are the employers, how much of the employers want to hold us back? And so looking at things like there's a bunch of, there's been rounds of merger. There's a bunch of new CEOs. You've got a guy like David Zoslov running a company that used to be, like David Zazlov's a reality guy.

He doesn't know unions, you know, that sort of thing. You've got Ted Sarandos in there. You've got, et cetera, et cetera. And then it's sort of us knowing how big are our asks, which of these asks do we need to have, and are they going to make us go on strike to get this ask? And we had a pretty good sense that they were going to. And the reason for that is, since we're really getting into the nitty-gritty, the AMPTP that we negotiate opposite from, is in many ways,

It's really a cartel. It is a group that was set up by the companies, by the studios and streamers, as an outsourcing organization, to handle all of their labor negotiations for them. And the deal that they sort of make is, well, if you invest all of your labor, you know, power, all your labor negotiating power in the NPTP, we'll make sure that your labor costs never go out by more than 3% a year, 4% a year, whatever it is. We don't know what the agreement is, but there's some sort of agreement along those lines. And then you, Bob Eiger, Ted Sarandos Davis-Ozlov, you never need to think about labor negotiating. We handle all of it for you. What that means is there's a box that they keep us in, right?

Where, you know, they know the dollar amount that they can offer, and they can't go above that without calling their bosses, right? And if we're asking for more than that amount, or not just dollar amount, but structural changes that they might not like, then they literally, this organization, the A&PTP literally cannot say yes to us. And, but however, this organization doesn't run the, the entertainment industry. It's not like Major League Baseball where like Rob Manfred can call and say, hey, fuck you, you know, Yankees owner or whatever, right, to whatever extent he does.

This is just some group of lawyers, right? So they are, so if we're asking for something like preserving the writers room, we need to require that every time there's a right, that every time a show is green, let there be some number of writers hired. They don't have the ability to say yes to that. They also don't have the ability to call. Randos and Iger and all of them and get them to agree on what they should give us because that's not what the organization is said to do. The organization is set up to be the no machine. Hang on. And so that's why we might have to go on strike to get that. Sorry, Rob. So I just need like, so people are you negotiating with? Brick wall. Are they in the business of like doing any, like, are they in the picture business as it were? Or is this like a mercenary army that shows up every three years? that you have to talk to that, like, doesn't, when this, when this breaks up, they don't go back to their studios and, like, back to heading creative or, like, this is just, like, a mercenary negotiating team.

Yeah. They will go work a dairy case after this or something. They go do, like, so they go work a dairy case or something after. They go work for another industry. Are they, like, what are they on retail? Like, truly, what do they do? Yeah. Yeah.

So they literally. Yes, where are they? Okay, so they, I'm so glad you're asking about this. This is so fun. This is the part that people never ask that I get to share. Okay, I'm so excited. So they literally just do that all day long. All these people's only job is to sit in a room in the Sherman Oaks Galleria, which is a mall.

That's so weird. We all know. That's weird. What? It's really, it's literally next to the Buffalo Wild Wings. What? I'm losing my mind. The thing is,

you work at McDonald's. You work at McDonald's. Natalie, go look at building E. That's the fucking Death Star. What the fuck? Imagine you work at McDonald's or Home Depot or the Levi's Outlet store. And you go, I'm going to go ask my boss for a raise. I killed it this year.

My sales numbers are off the charts. I'm pushing milkshakes. And I'm here every day on time. you know everything and you go and you're like oh sorry you're not allowed to talk to the boss you got to talk to bill who's bill well bill lives in a different building in town and you're going to go ask bill and we pay bill to say no you can't get a raise can you get a promotion no bill's paid until you can't get a raise can you talk to me after this no you can't talk to me you have to talk to bill can bill talk to me after this no bill has to sit in the room and say

no and sometimes he goes to the buffalo wild wings next door this is madness this is it What are you talking about? Why aren't you leaving with this? It's insane. It's insane. They literally negotiate with about 50 different unions. There's the, you know, there's the Federation of Musicians. There's the Lyuna, the laborers who, right.

There's the, there's like, I don't even know the number of different unions they negotiate with. They sit, these motherfuckers sit in a room all day long. They're just, you know, one labor lawyer from each country. One person from Amazon, one person from CBS, one person from whatever, they all sit in the room and different unions come in and they say no to the union over and over again. They're just like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's their whole job. And the reason they are there is so that Bob Eiger never has to think about this, right? Right.

It's outsourcing to such a brutal extent. And so our goal as the Writers Guild, our sort of theory of the case, our philosophy of what we need to do and we need to win a game like this is we're, We need to go on, the reason we go on strike is because we are elevating it to Bob Iger's level. We are elevating to the level where guess what, Carol, Carol Lombardini is the woman who runs the AMPTP who we were negotiated across from. I've been in the room with her.

We need to exhaust her. We need to get rid of all of her moves and have her fail and then we're out on the picket line so that Bob Iger has to go, okay, hold on. What's going on? Get me up to speed. I haven't been listening to this. Okay, what are they mad about?

All right, you know, okay, let me call to, oh, Ted, let's get, what are we going to do? You know, like, Adam, I got to tell you, I know you were being political earlier, but this really shines a different light on the director's guild position on having strikes on the table. I don't have to follow up on that necessarily, but. I mean, that they have their strategy and we have our strategy. And, you know, look, it, yeah. I don't worry about it That's all I should probably say

Um So but you know that It's just that So then it raises at that point At that point The the you get past the guys at the gallery Because you could Whatever the name was the name of the company again

Was the name of the I guess the AMPTP That's what it is Yeah You can pass them simply by making enough noise that the people above that And causing enough attention and stopping work You know preventing the foster it from being on for long enough that the people who refuse to engage with this have to engage. But they've made a conscious decision to destroy the pipeline of communication

or the phone lines between you and them so that it's that much harder for them to engage with you across the table in any sort of good fixed way. They've broken the table so that they don't have to look in your eyes across it. Exactly correct. Yes. When I was making reference to the 80s, right, to the regime that started in the 80s, of suppressing labor, that's when the AMPTP was formed. It was formed by this guy named Nick Counter, who is sort of an evil labor lawyer,

who is very famous in Hollywood for doing just this one thing, which is that he convinced all the companies which we used to negotiate against separately to all band together and create this strategy where we are the Death Star and we, it's a Star Wars podcast,

and we play them off against each other, right? We play off the Directors Guild, against the Writers Guild, against the writer's guild, against that, da, da, da, da. And we structure everything. so that, to keep their gains as small as possible. And it's worked for, you know, ever since the early 80s. The Writers Guild won a big gain in the, in 07 when we won coverage of the internet, went

on strike that year. But what is sort of remarkable about this year is that this is the first year that that that strategy of there seems to be falling apart, that, like, the structure has really broken, specifically because the Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild are both on strike at the same time. And now those CEOs really are having to get involved. Right. That's on top of everything else that's been happening with them, needing to address the shift back to the old model or something like rebuilding, something like that, et cetera. Yes.

So where, like, the strike was called and one of the theories of the strike is, you know, presumably this one's going to be different. This is going to affect the pipeline. eventually the content coming out of the faucet is going to dry up and you're going to need to get ahead of that but I think one of the things that has been striking is this sorry for that horrible pun but one of the like salient things here that's emerged

as this has gone on is a few weeks ago there were some really incendiary anonymously sourced quotes coming from the production side of this that basically amount to, like, you know, the probably the money quote is this is going to go on until people start to lose their houses. But like it was sort of a statement of strategy and intent that on the production side,

the goal was now to effectively crush the unions and do that by like literally rendering membership, you know, broken homeless. Yeah. And did that? did that surprise anyone on the on the strike like what was was staking that position out and seeing that quote was that a surprise that you would see that that sentiment uh pulled out i mean i think it was a miscalculation by them to put that out there um so it was a surprise to me for that

reason i mean look the the companies always want to break the unions that's always their goal that's part of why we had to go on strike in 2007 to get coverage of the internet what we now call streaming because they knew that if they, you know, were able to create an entire new business that wasn't union, then the unions would become a thing of the past. And why are they trying to eliminate the writer's room and, you know, diminish the power and compensation of writers, it's because if, you know, the writers are a militant union and if they can, like, squeeze us in that way, we'll have, if they can reduce our structural power, then we won't be able to fight them.

So that's always their goal to do that. And they also have specifically a strategy of when the Writers Guild goes on strike, we then hold them off and go talk to the DJ. and then sag aftra, and then impose that deal upon the Writers Guild. So their goal already is to hold us out because they're like, well, the writers will get tired, they'll get cranky, they won't, their membership will start saying to the leadership, we don't want to be out here anymore, just cut a deal. And that did happen to a certain extent in 07, that the DGA took a deal, and then members

after 100 days were like, God, this has been going on long enough. We want to get back to work. Right. And so the reason they leaked this, this is part of their communication strategy. The AMPTP almost never talks to the press officially. Instead, people who work for the companies just anonymously phone reporters and talk shit. And so that's what they were doing. They were sort of, again, playing this 07 playbook of like, we're going to say some real

shitty stuff to the press to, like, frighten the writers. It's going to go on deadline. And a bunch of, deadline is a blog website that is read by a lot of people in town. The writers are going to read this. They're going to get frightened, and it's going to break their resolve. they seem to have forgotten that like they're on the internet now though like 2007 was a different internet and now like when they said that first it went national like it was covered in many other publications and it actually caused an outpouring of support to the entertainment community

fund which is a fund that we are supporting which you know is basically a mutual aid fund that that goes to other folks in the entertainment industry work people find that adam Entertainment Community Fund.org. And if you donate under film and TV workers, that'll go to not just actors and writers, but anybody in the entertainment industry who needs emergency help paying their bills. It gives cash grants.

And it has for 140 years. It's a wonderful organization. And we've raised like $3 million for them because we're in solidarity with people who are not in our union but are still affected by the strike. So they had like an uptick of donations because of this because people were appalled.

Also, it was definitely, say the quiet part out loud moment people were like I cannot believe that and by the way this is from multiple sources called this reporter and said that and it was pretty fucking stupid also to go back to the thing you said earlier

which is that they've pushed so hard at this point that like it's a breaking point in some ways they've trained you to be afraid of losing your house already that's not news do you know what I mean like when that is the problem that is already the problem on the table. Oh, word, I might lose my house. Yeah, that's why we're on strike,

because I might lose my house. So, it goes back to what you said to begin with, right? Which is that, like, they took too much. They actually had a pretty, you and I were talking about this last week, and you were telling me, or two weeks ago or something now, and you were saying, like, the thing is, like, they already had a really good deal on their side. They're already making big money in unfair ways. And if they just continued that deal, as was, they would continue to screw us on this. I'm paraphrasing you.

And instead, they want more. They want, they have all this other. I mean, I think that we haven't said yet. That must have been a sort of late game, a switch up or a development is the tech part of all this is in love with AI right now, which again is like, the stuff that came out of the early SAG,

once the strike started and people said, oh yeah, they want to pay extras a couple hundred bucks or a hundred bucks for their, like this forever. And that's just like instantly obviously bad press. Yeah, like you'll never have to hire background actor. I feel like the like the general sentiment of like most people when they're receiving this is no long, like nobody wants to side with the bosses. Like nobody like there is so much animosity between like the general person on the internet with these like exact CEOs. like when they're talking about cost cutting

and like how great is this that we can replace people like replacing people is a general concern that a lot of people Americans across industries have right now they're afraid of being replaced they're afraid of their jobs you know not not being sustainable and etc so it's like they totally misread

how people like would read it's just it's it's a cartoonishly evil And, like, they look like cartoon characters. And that's why it's, like, laughable the way they're going about this. It's just, like, it's just, and this was ahead of the SAG official move to strike as well, right? And this was, that statement? Which part? That statement.

Yeah, that statement. And this, and correct me, like, the fact that SAG is in on the WGA, like, is striking as well at the same time is, pretty critical for gaining additional movement on, for both contracts. Is that? It is. Yes. The last time the Writers Guild and SAG AFRA went on strike together was 1960. And actually, at the time, it was just the Writers Guild and SAG, which was a separate

union at the time from AFRA. They merged in, I think, like 2013, something like that, into a much larger union, which in many ways is a lot more unwieldy organization. but, you know, so the number of people who are on strike right now is massive. In 1960, when it was just the Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild, that was the year that we created a health and pension plan and that residuals were invented for the first time. It was like the most important negotiation in the history of those two unions.

And so it looks like we're set up for a historic kind of year as well. And, you know, I'll say that having both unions out at the same time, and both of us ask, for, you know, some sort of success-based residual, right? Starts to make more things possible than were possible. Like, it was just the Writers Guild, we were still going to win, right? For all the reasons that you're saying. And the main reason being, Austin, what you said a moment ago, that people are more afraid of going back to work without winning these gains

than they are of being on strike. In 2007, people were, you know, the industry was a lot healthier. And so we won coverage of the internet. But after a certain point, people went, look, let's just go back to work. Everything's pretty good. It was like literally the strike ended like six months before the 2008 financial crisis, right? So it was like, everything's great in America, except for the Iraq war, right?

But, you know, things where everyone was happy. Now people are like, I literally. We'll figure it out. You know, we'll make TV about how that's bad. Yeah, we'll make, I don't know, we'll make 24, right? We'll make that show 24. That was the period we were talking about. But right now, people have not been able to make a living for years, and so no one is going,

hey, I just want to go back to work. Can we wrap this up, please? That's the only time a strike ends poorly, is when that happens. So we were already going to win just because of that fundamental. But now both unions being on strike simultaneously, it just exponentially increases the pressure on the companies. And it turns it from, you know, it makes it a historical. historic year. And it makes it what I believe is like a realignment in Hollywood labor where, you know, the regime for many years has been the Writers Guild is the only militant union. We fight to win these gains. Other unions benefit from them as well. But we're under this regime that's sort of keeping labor down. The two unions going on strike at once is like, wait, something deeper might be shifting here. There might be a potential to shift the relations between capital and labor in a deeper way in this town. At least that's my hope.

now when we see it like for instance the the incomes of the studio executives are well publicized at this point like one of the things when you look at the the lines being drawn up and one of the advantages that management and capital 10 have over labor is that because of the inequitable distribution of like the revenue and growth of the value of these companies you know they're sitting on a dragon horse of both, you know, presumably cash, but also, like, equity and, you know, stock. And so they come in with an inherent advantage in terms of unlike the people they are negotiating against, theoretically, they shouldn't be precarious. They, you know, you can see where they would adopt a position of and why an executive would confidently say, we'll wait until people will start losing their homes, because that sure is hell isn't going to happen. us. Why isn't that going to work?

I mean, it's because, like, honestly, they need us more than we need them. I mean, people, look, these companies, all they do is make television and media, right? I mean, a couple of them have, you know, Universal has a theme park, Disney has theme parks, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? But these are entertainment companies. Netflix makes nothing other than entertainment. Company like Paramount makes nothing other than entertainment. And, like, they don't have any product coming out. I mean, this is like, if you're GM and you don't have any cars to sell, like, who the fuck are you? What are you doing?

And so they can try to, you know, claim that everything's going to be fine. Oh, we've got a big library. We've got, you know, we got foreign shows we can put on the air. We got reality shows, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, the, this is where we get back into structural power. The fact is that American narrative scripted television and film is the most valuable media property in the history of the world, continues to be. People will pay more to see it than they will pay to see anything else. And they want to need that money.

And that's pretty much it. And they can't get it without going through us. Because we have, as a union, coverage of the labor force. Like there is not, I am afraid, some other force. of, you know, well-trained, practiced television writers and film writers out there who can deliver the product that it's easy to say, oh, why not just get anybody to write it? It's a lot harder once you actually want to spend

$100 million filming something and you need that script to be filmable, right? You are going to have a hard time finding that person unless they work for the Writers Guild. And, or sorry, unless they're a member of the Writers Guild. And they, you know, at the end of the day, they need us. Now, writers, on the other hand, we have a strike fund, we have the entertainment community

Fund and people have had to take other work, you know, for the last couple of years. Like, people have gotten used to, yeah, sure, I do, you know, here's what I do nights and weekends. I'm a stand-up comic, you know, I'm on tour. I have a podcast, et cetera. I have friends who, you know, they have their other little revenue streams. Now, people are making big sacrifices. But the reason that they're happy to do that is because it's existential to us. We have that resolve.

And so I actually believe that we have, I don't just believe it, I know it. We have more resolve than they. do. Like, we aren't able to, we are, you know, they are not, in fact, the reason I thought this statement from them about we're going to wait until they lose their houses was a miscalculation is because they are not starving us out. We are starving them out in literal fact. And that's, that's the way it's going to be. Like Ted Sarandos does not get more stranger things, right? That is his Super Bowl. Right. That is when he gets all subscribers for the year. He has to bargain with us before he gets more and he's eventually going to have to. Is there a way in which, so correct me

if I'm wrong here, but SAG-AFTRA at this point also has interim agreements with independent production companies, independent studios, who are not part of the ANPTP. WGA, in this round right now, as announced, has no interim agreements. Is that also a thing that you think helps the membership of SAGAFTRA, who has historically not been as radical, stay in this fight longer because they can go take work from places like 824, I think is one of the big ones that's on that list. maybe I'm wrong about that. You know, please correct me if I'm wrong.

But yeah, do you think that that's part of the, or generally, how do you feel about that? Because I know that some folks have come out and said, like, I don't know about these interim agreements. I'll say that that's a strategic choice that SAG after has made. It's one that there's disagreement about, about whether those are going to be helpful. SAG after leadership is like made a strong case for why they feel that that is,

that that's a good strategic move. in the Writers Guild we tried that in 07 we had interim agreements Lionsgate and some other places I want to say right couple other places we tried it

we didn't feel that it put extra pressure on the AMPTP and it also had some side effects of causing some division and so a good example of this actually was that David Letterman got an interim agreement because he owned his show at the time

he was the only one of those guys who was able to make that deal himself and so he went back on the air what happened when he did that all the other hosts who had previously been staying off the air, said, oh my God, our biggest competitors back on the air. We have to go back on the air too,

but they went on the air without writers. And then you had Jay Leno, he was, like, writing his own monologue, or he was like, he was writing for himself, so he thought it was okay. It was a big fucking mess, right? And we sort of came out of it going, you know, it would be better just if everybody was in it together, right? Rather than having this sort of piecemeal approach.

That's the Writers Guild's current philosophy. ultimately I don't think it's going to there's a lot of hay being made of it right now I think it's not going to matter that much one or another one way or another Sag after has granted you know maybe a hundred interim agreements there's tens of thousands of projects that are not in production right now and projects that are not even don't even exist they're just a glimmer in the eye of some writer that are not being pitched and so you know that that's what they felt they needed to do I also think there are some legal reasons for some of the overseas productions that they felt they had to do it In the case of there's a show called Tehran, they've said that. So, you know, that's, yeah, it's a little bit of a lot of hay being made out of, I think, what is a pretty small point of difference in strategy between two unions. So there's some nitty-gritty, I want to get into a bit later about some of the things that happened as the strike was called and some stories around like the show that's near and dear to our heart and or.

But I do want to touch on, like, one of the reasons that we're sort of putting a poll. on continuing with Rebels coverage. Now you said you sort of got off the train after and or I understand why you might do that. But Rebels was pretty cool. I think that's neat. But I was, is it one of the, is it

one of the, I shouldn't even say. Wow. Oh. Wow. No, shoot your, you got to. I was like, I was like, let me, is it one of the 3D animated ones or no. Yeah. It is. Okay. I, I watched like a good five minutes and I was like, not for me. Of the animation style.

I was just like, I'm not, it's not going to happen for me. I bet it's because Adam saw that slingshot. I saw that slingshot was like, I'm done. I don't need this shit in my life. This ain't Star Wars. So one of the things that emerged in all this is that, so sag after put out guides for podcasters. Yes.

And who they met by podcasters is one of the things that is under discussion. Podcasts, but also influencers. Mm-hmm. Yeah. and then calling for people to not promote struck work and what they mean by promote a little bit up in the air struck less so this is one of the things

that's very clear so let's begin with the easiest part of this when you say like don't promote struck work don't touch struck work that doesn't mean crossing a picket line to an active production that has been halted when we're saying struck work that means what So, struck work means work that we are literally on strike from. So in writer, you know, the case of writers, that means writing, et cetera.

Whether or not promotion is literally struck work is a little bit fuzzy here. If you're an actor on a movie, I would say that it is. But if you are, I'm trying to figure out how to get into this without like really parsing it. still struck work is the thing that like, like, even though Andor is already released, that would, under the guidelines as we understand them and as they were written, uh, counts as struck work even though that's an already exhibited show. Yes. Well, so let's go, let's go down the chain of what SAG after asked. So, so here's the first thing that's very important to understand. Okay. If you want to support a union, you do only what the union asked you to do,

nothing more, nothing less, right? So, for instance, people are like, should we all cancel our Netflix? No one has asked you to do that yet. If you feel like doing it, go for it. But sometimes people are like, I'm going to start a boycott campaign to support the writers.

We have not asked you to do that, so please don't do it, right? If you feel like you don't want to give them your 15 bucks this month and you feel that's an act of solidarity, go nuts. But, you know, always look to what the union asks of you.

And so the Writers Guild asked of its members, obviously, you know, don't do any work while we're on. strike. We also have an additional ask, don't promote, don't do work that the, don't, if the company asks you to promote something, do not do that, right? Now, we said you can tweet about your show, hey, my show's out, I'm excited about it, or something like that, but don't go do a press junket, right? Something along that was the line that. The cast of Oppenheimer like left the

red carpet, uh, yes, when, when it was announced that the, the, the, that sag was going on strike. Um, correct. Of the, of the premiere of Oppenheimer. So like, that kind of promotion I can imagine the people who are in Oppenheimer just live on a red carpet generally every day they find one to be at they just not Killian Murphy he didn't get his due till just now

Now Sag After went a little bit further And for good reason Because Sagafra members are critical to promoting the movies far more than the writers are unfortunately I feel writers are very important but, you know, actors, of course, are much more important for that.

And also, SAG AFRA does, in fact, represent influencers. That is an area of growth for them. And when I say influencers, let's imagine for now I'm talking about people who are literally paid money by brands to do shit on TikTok, right? That is a class of person who SAGAFRA, you can, if you're an influencer right now, you can go sign SAGAFRA's influencer agreement, you can pay into the pension plan. You know, that is a area of growth for them. And so they were concerned, well, not only do we want to have the actors not promote the work.

What if the companies go and pay, you know, Bob TikTok, right? Right, you know, five grand to go to the Oppenheimer premiere, right? And so, and these are people who we want to represent. These are prospective union members. So they made an additional ask of influencers generally. Please do not, you know, promote movies in this way. They also asked existing SAG AFR members, a big thing. is rewatch podcast, the Scrubs

rewatch podcast, the Office rewatch podcast, they said of their members, please, we are making an ask of you, do not promote that work because that's all existing on the streamers and we want to, you know, we want to reduce that promotion. That's a big ask of their members,

but they asked it. Now, how far does that go? How far doubt? Who do we call an influencer or who do we not? I'm in complete agreement with all these policies. I do think there's an issue on the internet where on the internet

the line between an influencer and a member of the public is very fine and so you do have this problem now where 13 year olds are yelling at each other on TikTok and calling each other scabs which I find because they mentioned the Barbie movie in a TikTok you know what I mean?

Someone got like 200 views on their on their Barbie TikTok and their friend is like you're scabbing. Now A, that's very funny. I find it funny that that's happening. It's also funny to be in that world when like this is also the world where three years ago I was reading articles about how Gen Z doesn't believe that selling out is a thing. Do you know what I mean?

True. Yeah. And so, oh, wait. And people would do fake endorsements. People pretend that like they got a brand endorsement because it was like, now you're a real one. But now we live in the world where, yeah, 13 and 15 year olds are mad about scabbing. And that's, I mean, maybe you can contact a worldview that holds those two things are part of the same worldview. But I think perhaps you should take some, that's a dub for labor, that that has become.

the case that people care enough that they don't completely agree and unfortunately interacts a little bit with you know the worst tendencies of the internet you know like I've a friend of mine has a show coming out I'm really excited about it it's it's on the bubble to be renewed I know I would love to just say hey it's one of the best shows

on TV but I'm not tweeting that because I'm like this is going to cause confusion because the public is like it's going to interact with the internet thing of like jumping on people about it right that's a problem with the internet not with the industry or with labor, there's just been a little bit of an odd interaction there. And it has put folks such as yourself in a little bit of a difficult position, which like, look, I don't know if Sag Afterra has a position on, you know, podcasts such as yours. It comes down to a matter of,

more a matter of personal conscience. Well, the nice thing is that they have responded to some emails, right? And so like, oh, that's great. We have an email out now that they have not responded to us quite yet. But I'm on another podcast called Shelf by Genra. That is a book podcast. And on that podcast, we do some movie rewatches as like bonus content. And what they told us was discussion of struck, I'll just read the whole thing. Any TV show or film past or current that would have been covered by our TV or theatrical agreements is considered struck work unless that project appears on our interim agreements list. There that is. Discussion of struck productions is promotional and can drive viewers to struck companies platforms to watch the shows promoted by your

podcast. If you're comfortable holding off on producing while our members are on strike, that would be a wonderful show of solidarity. Here's the link of the podcast fact. Da-da-da-da-da. And so that's like a soft ask, right? They didn't double down and say the thing that the FAQ, the FAQ explains like, hey, what if I'm a non-union podcaster? And of course, what Sag After says is, listen,

any non-member seeking future membership in Segafra who performs covered work or services for a struck company during the strike will not be admitted into membership in the future, right? But they didn't reiterate that in this email. They didn't say, now remember, we'll be mad. at you, but it is still an ask. They said, don't push people to Disney Plus right now. Don't send people to Netflix. And I think it's like fairly easy if you're a podcast like us who are in the process of making a show that was covering Rebels, which is tied very closely to the upcoming

live action Asoka show, right? Soca show is effectively a sequel to Rebels. There are lots of people out there pushing watch Rebels right now so that da-da-da-da-da-da. You're ready for Assoca. We mentioned this on our Patreon episode, but like there are new toys. Rebels-focused toys that are coming out in preparation for the Asoka show. Like, it is absolutely intertwined with an upcoming production of, yeah, yeah, totally. And it's just not that hard for us to find something else to talk about, even inside of the world of Star Wars, that doesn't go to the same reporting unit as the Disney Plus bucket. Do you know what I mean?

I think that that's not too big on ask to make. I also think that there is probably, it's probably worth saying that I think if you're out there doing a podcast for like a thousand people about, I don't know, lost, about, about homicide life on the streets, a show you can't stream. Coincidentally, if you were, yeah, if someone was making that show and it was really good, please let me know. But like, you know, that's on a show that's available on TV or it's not available on streaming anywhere as far as I know outside of your less legal sources.

I don't think that Sega after is going to come kick down the door and tell you you're a bad person you know no um so i think that there's a lot comes down to a matter of conscience you know yeah totally i think i think like generally we know where we're at on that and i think we're pretty confident our decision on this um in this context i am like in in this like amca i am i am i like felt that with remaps position with uh like we were doing armageddon this week for some reason I don't even remember why Patrick drew a line to Armageddon, but like there was a case where I was like, I don't know if we, like,

I don't know if the bat signal's gone up that like, hey, we need to stop talking about like old movies all together. And my position- That's a max, right? That's a max picture, isn't it? That's like, you stream it on HBO? Without HBO. Well, and their point is,

was it made under the TV theatrical contract, right? Like, it's not necessarily where it airs. It's was it made under the contract that's currently being struck, which is the TV theatrical contract. Sure, sure, sure. But look, I, yeah, Rob, I agree with you. Like, it's, you know, gray areas do in fact abound in life and one makes a decision that they're comfortable with

and that your audience is comfortable with. I, you know, the only thing that I... There was the crux. The audience was not comfortable with it. And at a certain point, I was like, yeah, if it is being perceived this way, then it is not worth drawing the line. Like, my preference was when the union makes a clear ask,

like, do it immediately. that'll be to the to the point of like when unions call for things and people respond to them that is also a point pointed lesson and like we can we can move people and I was I was a little less I was like I was very wary of like doing the thing where it's like I don't even go here and that was that that was certainly that was certainly part of part of my reticence but it's just it's it's been an odd thing in particular because not Everyone is getting the same email from Seg Afterra. I mean, that's 100% true, right?

It's like, I can go read you three other emails from Sag Afterra that say different things, right? You're doing a non-promotional rewatch podcast? Have at it. Have fun, bud. And I, part of my read on it, and this is hypothetical, or this is supposition, right? Like, it feels like they started getting these emails from podcasts and had to make, you know, one, different people are sitting at that email across different times and we're sending back different things. or they're making judgment calls based on the podcast. And then it feels like bit by bit, it's hemmed in closer to what I just read,

which is like it'd be a great show of solidarity, if blank, which was not what some of those first emails look like. A lot of those early emails look like what Rob said, which is like, you're not part of the guild. Just go ahead and do your re-it, like, have fun, you know? And I think that to some degree I wonder if there is an opportunity that was noticed. It was like, oh, yeah, why wouldn't we say yes to this part of it, right? Like, if people are willing to do that and show a solidarity in this way and go to their audiences and say, oh, actually, the conditions right now are really bad and support us.

Why wouldn't we say yes to that? It would be a great show of solidarity if X, Y, Z, right? Yeah. I mean, if they email us and they say, please, if they say, dear Austin, Ron, Natalie and Allie, big fans, we've all out in the room and voted and said, yours is cool. We're sending you this interim agreement. And we got to know what happens to Edmund Richards and the crew of the ghost in Rebel Season 2. Then I'll do it, you know?

But I bet we don't get that email. Yeah, Austin, you're right that a lot of this, you know, these, Sag Afterra is just a building with people in it and who are figuring things out as they happen. And by the way, you know, the Writers Guild prepares to go on strike all the time Sag After hasn't gone on strike in 40 years. So I think they had a little bit more of a getting up to speak. process.

Sure. So did the, so did the Writers Guild, right? Yeah. When we got started with the strike, there were answers to questions that we figured out three weeks in because we kept getting the same question. We have to have a meeting and go, what do we think? Is there an example of something like that? I'm just so curious about the, like, truly, I want the blowback style podcast about

these union histories and I want all of the nitty gritty about how this works. Is there something you can talk about that you were like, oh, shit, we didn't think about having an answer for this type of thing or a policy in place for this? Is that stuff too private to talk about at this point? We should come back in a year. Yeah. There was some stuff about like, you know, people making, you know, short films, stuff like that. Sure.

Members doing that or, or, you know, I think there was, I think a refinement that we had was look. And again, this was just the Writers Guild. Yep. This part does not apply to SAG after it. But, you know, the piece of don't do company sponsored promotion, but. If you want to say, my show is coming out, it's very important to me. Then you can, of course, say that on Twitter.

And a lot of this is just having a better answer to the question. You know, I would tell people, I started telling people, dude, do a friends and family screening and, like, talk to your community about it on social media. A hundred percent. No one doesn't want you to do that. Like, please celebrate yourself and your art and your work and your colleagues work and all of that. Just like, you know, don't go do a press junket because, you know, are for, you know, Sony asked you to.

And so that, a lot of it is like, you know, figuring out how we answer the questions. Now, I do think, you know, Sag Afterra's, that process created a little bit of chaos in the influencer community. But also, you know what, I'm kind of there for the chaos. Like the fact that so many people, so many people were like on board is that we want to help. How do we do it? And it took them a couple of weeks to figure it out.

I think it's a good problem to have, as you said. because there is we should say there are people out there who are on the other side of this who are like fuck them they're all rich or why don't they get another job then or you know you see that stuff out there or fundamentally like right AI touters like calling the rest of us Luddites because we don't want chat GPT to write television because that makes no fucking sense yeah I think it's just to just to the point real quick uh How real threat do the, does the guild regard AI? So, uh, AI is, uh, a marketing term that bundles together a whole bunch of different technologies, which are semi related. And frankly, I think it's overrated how even fucking new they are, right? Because, so when actors talk about AI, what they're worried about is their likenesses

being stolen, right? Um, now, they could have done that three years ago before, I mean, who was, This is Star Wars. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Harry Fisher and they've done it three or four times now. You know what I mean? Vader's voice in recent stuff is not actually James Earl Jones.

It's a James Joel Jones composite voice, you know? Yeah, exactly. The dude in the last feature, I forget the Admiral guy. You know who I'm talking about. It's Grandmoth Tarkin, right? Was he not? Peter Cushing. He was one of those, right?

Peter Cushing. So, I mean, what we're talking about is VFX, right? This is, it's just good VFX. they can do it more quickly because they came up with some generative models. I mean, this is just like standard tech stuff, right? And so that's a real threat that actors are facing. The stuff about scanning in their bodies and, you know, for one day's pay and they can own their likeness forever and put them in the background of scenes.

That's real. That was a real proposal by the AMPTP, and that would destroy, you know, background performing, which is a real, you know, it is a real profession that people can, people, they're a full-time background actors in LA who make a living just do it and by the way they're good at it. They have to take direction they bring their own wardrobe. Good background actors are so important. You know this

Natalie. You've clipped it. Like they it's so hard not to like I can't emphasize this enough. They are such a critical part of a production and a good one is amazing because you don't notice

like there's a point to it there's a there is an art to it there is like there is talent to it it's not a nothing job i fucking couldn't do it i'd be constantly like oh there's camera the camera's over there yeah yeah oh she just hit that guy you know and by the way they do crowd scenes they do like imagine people running from stuff like these are these are professional you know they know how to be a doctor versus being someone at a restaurant like these are real actors right yes and so by the way what you know all right it puts them out of work what's the problem with that?

It would also make the fucking work worse. Like if you're not seeing real people back there, a big transition we've seen in Hollywood that's been under-remarked upon, I think, is the difference from technology used to be used to wow the audience, right? Oh my God, Toy Story, the Terminator and Terminator 2, right? Now they use it to cut costs.

No one leaves a Marvel movie now going like, oh my God, the VFX were so good. They leave and they go, that looked like shit, actually. No offense to those artists. This is half of what we talk about on this show when we do the live action Star Wars stuff is like, wow, like the first season of Mandalorian, we're all like, oh, wow, they really did a lot with a little with this,

this thing, the volume where they're shooting inside and did it, and now half of the episodes we do is like, this looks like a bad stage production. This looks like trash. Like, yeah, and that's a shame. And what, you know? And one of the things that's great about Andor was the reliance on practical effects and built sets. And by the way, real background actors in awesome costumes, yeah, in locations. And that's one of the things I loved about the first J.J. Abrams Star Wars movie. I was like, oh my God, practical effects.

Fucking the little BB8 guy is like a real practical little robot they built. Amazing, right? People know, I want to watch Tom Cruise actually jump the actual motorcycle off the actual fucking thing, right? Yeah, the shit rips. Yeah, it rips.

We know this. And so, you know, these companies intend to use this technology to not just put people out of work, but make the product worse. They want to do the things. where they replace the customer service department with chat GPT, which they know

and we know it cannot do the work of the customer service department. It will make it worse for everybody. It will hopefully backfire to such a degree they need to reverse it. But, you know, the public doesn't actually want it. Do they know? Because the picture I get from these companies,

not even the AMPTP, the next to the Buffalo Wildlings, the people in the executive suites feel like toddlers who are walking around the world permanently, learning about new things as they touch them. Oh, what is, oh, it's a, oh, it's a microphone. Can we make this cheaper? Can we, oh, it's a camera. You point this at people. Can we replace the person who holds the camera with a robot? It feels like they are for the

first time constantly, and you, they don't engage with, if you use chat pet, GPT, or any of these other things, you would understand why. It could never be brought up as a potential fix to write something. It doesn't work like that. It's hard. It's harder to write a real thing through those like implements than just doing it yourself. I'll link you to the academic paper about how ChatGBT knows 21 jokes. That's the jokes it knows. It cannot make other jokes.

Like those are the 21 jokes. If you ask it to write you a joke, it will come back with those. Those are at the root of its comedy sense. Because you have a comedy sense. It's not real. It's what it is. This is my favorite rant of this whole thing. Please.

Is that writing, writing is not simply outputting text. And once I say that, it's so obvious, right? You'd have to be so ignorant to think that writing is simply outputting text. It is not. It is certainly not, though, in Hollywood, right, in the entertainment industry. Writing, in point of fact, is pitching in the room to somebody, taking their feedback, incorporating it writing another document, incorporating it again. Then it's going and talking to the actor, talking to the director, talking to the line producer, to make sure that the show isn't too expensive. It's knowing before you don't need

to go talk to the line producer because you're like, we can't. I know this is too expensive. Right. Exactly. do this let me figure out a creative way to do it blah blah blah blah then it's going to set and doing all that shit we talked about then it's going to the edit and doing all this shit we talked about that is what it means to be a writer um and the you know the people at the top though are ignorant and stupid enough to think oh the writers those are the people who just output pages right that's all that they do and so our fear in in the writers guild is separate from what the actors are concerned about with technology our fear is that they're going to say hey guess what

ChatGPT wrote this script. We love it. We love it. We just have a couple notes. Could you punch it up? Could you talk to the director? Could you talk to the actor? Could you go to set?

Could you go to post? Oh, but you're not a writer. You're just a fucking associate producer. Because Chat GPT is the writer. We put in the prompt. We got the pages. You're just some other fucking idiot. And we're going to end up doing the same work 90% of what we did.

What does screwing around to that credit mean? In terms of what does that? What does that? What does that? What does that? Oh, I mean, that's everything. Well, first of all, the credits are why the Writers Guild was established in the first place. Was simply to have your work be represented on screen because it mattered so much to your future employment to have it, to have written by on, literally on the screen.

That was the impetus for all the Hollywood guilds. And, you know, since you guys, I'm sure have video game related listeners when every time I see that headline saying, oh, this video game studio, these video game studios got employees got screwed on the credits. I'm like, fucking that's what the union's for. you know. Like, you guys need to talk to an organizer, hit me up. Like, this is what we do, baby. This is what it's all about. If those Metroid programmers that had a union in whatever, 2001, whenever that game came out, then they wouldn't, then they'd be credited today. So there's that. But also the credit is determines residuals. It determines, you know, a whole bunch of others. Better to be a writer on something. thing than an associate producer. Correct, absolutely. I mean, then you're in the union.

Associate producers are not even in a union. And there's a certain number of duties that we classify in the Writers Guild as being writing duties, but can be done by people outside of the union. A script supervisor, a line producer, people can make, can do little bits of writing. You know, it's called A through H in our contract, very technical. But, you know, cutting for time. Like, an editor can cut for time, and a writer can too, right? an editor can say, we don't need this scene.

What if we do this instead? But if we define, you know, if we allow this to happen, those duties will never be done by a writer. Those people will not be in a union anymore. And, you know, we're going to like see the majority of our work be completely unprotected. And so, again, I think that, like, it's sort of ridiculous to call what actors are worried about and what writers are worried about both AI because they are such disparate mechanisms and technologies. but, you know, I think the final point is that the technology is not even the problem.

The problem is the business people and what they want to do with it. Like, there were automated text generation algorithms starting in the 40s. Like, it's a choice by a person if they want to use that to try to undercut another person's work and make the product worse. And we are trying to stop them from doing it. Right. And then you have a system that pushes people towards, pushes the people who have their on the levers of power and creation who have their hands on the means of production

towards making those decisions which will make worse art which will put more people out of jobs which will cut the income of the people who remain in the industry you know it is it is it is late capitalism all the way down yeah and and you know we're fighting we're fighting to keep the industry healthy we're fighting to you know keep this product that people love i mean when you just bringing this back around to andor right what do we all love about andor it's it's such a human show, right? It is, when you guys talked about, here's the thing that blew my mind the most, when you talked about how Mon Mothma's shitty husband was wearing a Jedi reminiscent clothes, that he was like, it had become fashionable, like a form of orientalism to dress up

in Jedi clothes, which, by the way, is also in the real world. It is what the Jedi originally fucking... Yes, that's where they come from. Yeah, 100%. It's all there. idea for the Jedi is Orientalism. Holy shit, what an idea, right? The number of artists who have to come up with that idea, the number of writers, directors, the pride that the wardrobe

that the costume department took in that work, that they were doing madmen level costume, storytelling through costume work on a Star Wars show is so beautiful. That's what people love about media. And that's what they are trying to eliminate and we are fighting to save.

You know, the longer I do this show, I increasingly think, like, do people love George Lucas's Star Wars or Ralph McCorries? Uh-huh. You know what I mean? It's like, the concept art is, is the heart in some ways. Which of these really caught the imagination of the world. It's, it's hard to say, but one person gets all the credit and a lot, like, the reward for that. And yeah.

Lucas Ranch. The other is a, you know, great concept artist. Thank you, sir. Uh-huh. Move on. The thing that I was going to say way earlier, and it is my last thing here. when I was like, oh, I have a fake point to make. Natalie, let's do your real point.

Oh, yeah. Was it about a hole I found out recently about the 1983 HBO opening credits. Have you all seen the opening credits to HBO? Is it the one where pans over the town? The town. So it opens and there's like you see the HBO like fuzz come on, you know, the static screen. And then you see a little family go over and turn on their, their, you know, cable box to HBO and it zooms out of the window. and it slowly starts going through this city and you see like the movie theater.

You see all these little cars. You see the train going by and eventually. Oh, my God. This is Tati-esque. Yeah, you lift up and you're leaving the city behind. You're in the suburbs and you're out in rural America. The sun is setting behind the mountains. It pans up and you see a star, a single star light up.

It's fucking 2001 for a brief moment. HBO itself flies towards you and it's glistening and gleaming and chrome. And it's all physical. There's an 18 or 19-minute documentary about making this, about making the practical model of it, about filming it, about how they had to rotate this chrome giant HBO logo around, how they had to, they hid little things in the city. There's like someone getting a blowjob in there, right? Like they had fun, they're doing art, right? And it's gone, right? It's Max now.

I mean, HBO is still on your TV. like I truly this is just we used to make things in this country right but we fucking did the love that went into producing something like this has been replicated or has been not replicated but it has been squashed right has been pushed out and has been replaced with the quick fixes with you know what's the cheapest way we can make the biggest splash with the secret invasion uh quote unquote AI intro because that's supposed to like mean something uh which which mostly what it meant was that it looked like shit. And, like, obviously, it's easy to find a microcosm when you start looking for one. But falling down this rabbit hole, the AV, the AV club had a piece about this intro a few years ago, about how much it just rules and how much work went into it. And it's just like, hmm, people like making things. We like to make stuff in the world.

We like to tell stories. Actors love, go listen to an actor, talk about acting. No one who's on strike doesn't want to be doing the work. They want to be doing the work and they want to be able to live a life while doing the work. And most of the people who are on strike

aren't making big amounts of money. They're hoping that they get casted enough things and they get into enough writer's rooms to where they can like pay their rent and maybe one day buy a house and like maybe one day get to show something to their family that they got to make. And that's like, that's it.

And I think for me like that is, it's pretty crystallized around this. I think where I think Adam, you keep saying, like, we're at a pretty big, potentially historic moment in labor in the entertainment industry and maybe in the world. Because I think it keeps coming back down to this thing. People generally want to go to work

and have a good time and make stuff and do the thing that they like. And again and again, we keep getting screwed. And people want to see the work of people. You know, people like people. That's the point of the entertainment industry is I want to look at pretty people, charming people. Right.

I want to see, I want to learn about people. funny words that someone smart wrote on a page? Yeah. Like no one's just watching computers do shit. It's always people in there somewhere is what people like. That is what we are in it for, you know? And so the idea of replacing human, I mean, whatever. Like, that's what we are.

It's so like anti-tautological. Why even bother to make this point? But it also isn't just the AI stuff, right? Because it's, it's the attempts to get rid of the writer's room. is this, right? It's not just the replacing actors. It's changing the relations such that actors can't make a living doing this anymore, except for the very highest paid percentage, right? And everybody else gets replaced. All that stuff is contributing to the fact that people don't get to make things that are cool to look at anymore. So, I think we will wrap up in a

moment after we let Adam go. But Adam, thank you so much for joining us and taking us through the ends and outs of the strike and, you know, we wish, it doesn't, it won't take luck, but we wish a speedy and successful resolution and a victory over, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the Sherman Oaks Galleria. I can't thank you guys enough for coming and letting me tell you that piece of it, which again, in the 100 interviews I've done, no one has gotten to the detail of the Sherman Oaks Gallery. You're the first ones to hear it. You got to lead with this.

It's so good. Adam, it's so sharp. Does Ron Perlman have this information? Does Ron Perlman know? There's a lot of ways to lose them all. Well, both of us have worked through all of them, but we still got a few more. Adam, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, guys.

And we can't wait to talk to you again. Hopefully on the other end of successful, striking negotiations. And once again, if people want to support Entertainment Community Fund.org goes to support crew members, actors, writers, anyone who's affected by the strike. Really appreciate you all. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming through.

Okay, so, you know, one of the things that, you know, we covered there is the fact that Star Wars, Rebels, it's all Disney Plus. They're currently actively promoting rebels as a precursor to the Asoka series. And so we don't want to, you know, the Sag Afterer made clear that they would appreciate people not recording a podcast like ours.

And also the buckets that we fall into are pretty close and maybe are the buckets that sag after is describing in their guidance for members and influencers. So we're not going to continue with Rebels or Star Wars. stuff, well, Star Wars film and TV for the duration of the strike. So what are we doing? Rob, you said that like you had an answer, but we don't have an answer quite yet. Well, thank you to everyone who submitted lots and lots and lots. Like an astounding response, first of all, which was really, really cool.

I'm glad that, you know, listeners out there that you feel like you want to engage with what we're talking about. So that's awesome. So overwhelmingly, it seems like most of you want us to talk about Star Wars stuff. Also, if you have not done this poll, I think we've probably closed it at this point. I mean, we haven't literally, but I guess if you were like, I have a link to the most, to like the arc of the covenant. And I need to, we have other ways if you can send us that. And also, it's weird that it would be digital. But it is up on patreon.com slash civilized.

Like, that's a public post. Anybody can go see that there, you know? And, you know, I don't know, keep an eye on it. But, Natalie, you were saying. I mean, we don't know how much time we're going to be doing this. That's right. Like, there's, you know, we might get through a couple of things on that list. So who knows?

Also, please use the poll. we have a lot of people who responded in the comments to that I ain't reading all that we got to pull we got to use the That's exactly how we got wish to Be really this seems like a place to put a put a vote Nope That's not that's not that's not the vote part of the ballot

You got to use the ballot You got to use the ballot I know I'd be confusing But you just got to really check twice And make sure that you're you're marking out What you want here I think earlier he's also, it is clear, the people want Star Wars. Surprisingly, a lot of people, Austin, you were saying a lot of people did want Kurosawa.

A lot of more people, I think, Allie, you crunch some of these numbers, right? More people just, you know, I was surprised to see it that there was like a Kurosawa. I'm not mad about it. I'm happy. Kurosawa Hives. Yeah, I do think there's, I would like to think our audience because. There was a little bit of a, like, I would have said the thing that they put into a microphone, or I want to write in the thing that it seems like they would be excited to cover.

Right. And I appreciate that. That's very nice. But the fact that they, because, like, we, we even come out and said, like, oh, I'd be sick to do a Corosawa podcast. You know, I think we implied it, though, with that botched seven samurai. I mean, where it was like we're dying to talk about, like, you'd love to unfuck. Which botched seven samurai in the one were there at the back to fields. Okay, yeah, uh-huh.

God, that could have been so good. But anyway, I like that they picked up on that, y'all picked up on that. Enough of you picked up on that, that was like in the running. It wasn't top five or anything, right? But, you know, it does. But some Star Wars is what people want us to talk about. And it does feel like there's a lot of enthusiasm around some, like, a game we've alluded to a lot here, and that's the old republic.

People are stoked about that. But, you know, a thing that comes up a lot. is, you know, the, what do we call the series now? The Jedi Phone Order Survivor Series. Rob, are you saying, wait a second, we didn't vote on this. Rob is maneuvering. Go ahead and make your maneuver. The Calcestis saga.

Oh, the Calcester. Right. There is another. Double jump he can. He does double jump he can. Yeah, exactly. I feel, what other games cropped up that people were, like, stoked about? Like, it was like, Cotor, the recent ones.

Force Unleashed, presumably? Was Force Unleashed? Force Unleashed? Yeah. The old Jedi Academy slash Dark Forces stuff, which has book tie-ins. People are interested in that. A lot of comics also came up. Yeah, that makes sense.

There's like the Vader stuff and Dr. Afra and stuff like that. I imagine the original Thrawn trilogy came up, but like the Faloni movies called Air to an Empire. We're not doing that. We're not going to do that. But it's not the throntrol. He's not Canada anymore. But we don't know what his version of it's going to be. And it could be this.

I mean, listen, they come out on the other side of this strike. And we've gotten into a good rhythm on some shit. Maybe we end up doing it then, you know? We should tell Eiger that. Tell Eiger, we'll do the air of the empire trilogy if they meet some of these fucking writers and actors demands. And if he resign. And if he resigns. That's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And give me your house. Yeah. Yeah. And also let us record the show in the Star Wars Hotel. Just give us the building. Give us the hotel. We're not using it anymore.

That could be our building. Let all of our friends come. All of our listeners can go for free to the Star Wars Hotel. During visiting hours, but then it will close and it will be ours. And then it's just hours and we chill. So, Rob, what's your case for the Calcestis song? I'd love to hear it. Rob is playing it right now.

Most of the, most of that's track. But you all also just played. I didn't finish two I didn't finish it I didn't get back Zelda but I'm saying it's right there I'm saying like it's like it's right there The only thing I have with

the Calcester song is it is in this time it is in this like time world It's so true of rebels is what you're saying Of rebels is what you're saying Perfect well placed Okay counter argument

Kotor is foundational to I feel like there's so many times that Cotor gets brought up and I'm like Who's Cotor? And I But Natalie that's a ton of things for you. It is And I want to learn. This is why we watched the solo

movie. This is and we watched it and I learned. Who's that man? That's Han Solo. Shit. And now I know. And now I know. And I simply would like to know more. I'm a bigger ask. Is it? Yes, it is. I'm not doing

another. Sorry, this is remap and waypoint business, but I would love to just have a little break between the system shock scale endeavor. 50 cent voice, what the fuck what you say fuck me for? I think we could do it. I have no, I think, first of all, I think we could do it. You'll finish system shock. Yeah. Yeah, you just check it out.

We chapped it out. Well, it's the same thing for, for, uh, uh, Jedi Survivor. Yeah It's a better game It's a playing a video game Yeah, it's either doing Like, uh, turn-based combat Or me sliding down the same

Ice Tuddle for 40 minutes Because I can't get the jump Is there a middle ground? Is there another thing we could Play or read or watch? Let's fucking go We This is the thing with the old republic MMO

We would all be in a party together, influencing each other's plot lines. You're going to, you've given too strong of a pitch, Natalie. And also, you've given too strong of a pitch in other ways, which is the thing we probably cannot do is commit to doing a let's play of an MMO together. That's a job. We need that that's, that's, the nice thing about doing the show that we do is we can do it on our own pace. Maybe Allie has time at 4 p.m. and I have time at 7 p.m. to do the watch. To watch this half hour show. To watch a half hour show.

Do you know how long that MMO is? It's an MMO. It's still going. It ain't done yet. Well, I can run rates on my own time. You can reach conclusion states of your character, right? Or it's like this is a big quest line that we're done. You can.

You can. It would be like we're going to do the initial story of blank. Right. And there are ways to maybe just play the main content and skip side content and stuff. It's feasible. You have to do some research into like what's the easiest way to do it. Okay. So you're saying it's possible is what I'm hearing.

I'm just imagine this. Imagine. I'm there when you're talking to someone. Okay. First of all, we're not going to play the Cotor. I don't know, before you play Cotor. And we're going to stream it. I was yeah I the guy that I'm going to be in Cotor is not going to be better than

candor's or no you're not going to understand what I mean what I think is what I'm saying you're not going to understand what I mean I feel like I I fundamentally don't have like a part of the language like I I need to learn new words you're going to be like who's Satell Sean why don't I'm supposed to care about this and we're going to like oh it's Bastilla's grandchild and who's Bastilla and that just You got to know who Bastilla. The fact that you don't know, you don't know who Darth Revin is.

Who's Darth Revin? I also don't know this. I'm just, I am just watching. There's an opportunity. I'm watching the walls of the garbage compactor. Like, squeeze tighter and tighter. This,

this was me watching positions like come together around Sag Aftera, where it was just like, oh man, this is getting, this is a weird territory. This is now like you're going to be forced into Cotor. Another, okay, well, there's other options I would put, I would pitch, right? We could go read high Republic stuff, right?

I don't know what that, what that hit list looks like. I've heard mixed things about the books. I've heard ups and downs. It's a timeline that's kind of interesting that we like in some ways. It's pre prequel movies, but it's post old republic. It's the clearest, biggest section of still canonical stuff. It's coming out right now. I think it just may have finished.

Phase three, I think just. happen. So that's the thing. There's a bunch of books people would love us to read, right? There's the Revenge of the Sith book. Yeah. There's Shatterpoint, the Mace Windu book got some votes. There's a bunch of books. Yeah, that's a comic, right? And there's classic book stuff that Rob, I know you, would love us to go read that maybe isn't directly connected to an upcoming Faloni project. But is, you know, we can go read those Han Solo books. We can go read, you know, whatever those the boba fett books and talk about how bad boba fett is in those books it's doable but i don't know i don't know what people feel like

kotor is the obvious is the obvious one but we'll turn it around i think we're not committing yet do we we don't want to do a follow-up poll i don't think we i think we need to decide no no i think what people believe is is pretty clear on these numbers there's a clear winner is the thing I think I was trying to be diplomatic overwhelmingly in favor of one of like if we're just

talking numbers people love Calcustus what can we say what can we say people would just like give me that redheaded boy the little redheaded Jedi who could let's let's see how his

story ends or continues that story's not going to end that story's going to end with a and then there's another game coming out in five years. Right? You know what's done?

Knights of the Old Republic. What I hear, extremely done. Extremely done. They're remaking happening. Isn't there Cotor too? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's Cotter, but that's it. That's my point.

I see, I see. And they were going to make, there isn't a remake announced, but. So here's the thing. So Cotor. Yeah. This was BioWare, right? It's BioWare. Mm-hmm.

Now, at this time, one of the things that I skipped over, so there are a couple of reasons I never got to do. to it. One was I was like, it's just all the Star Wars ship, but it's like 10,000 years in the past. This doesn't make any sense. Why are there Imperials wandering around? You got a play to find out. Yeah. It just felt like they didn't want to touch any cannon, and it just felt like they were like, let's have all Star Wars shit just like moved off here in the safe little story silo. Yeah, but I mean, like, that's LucasArts telling them they have to do that. So I think that you're right to some degree that like, it's not as dependent as clone wars, right? Where it's like,

Oh, there's a, that means, Darth Vader has to happen. But like, you know, the galaxy doesn't blow up at the end, you know? Right. I always felt kind of like, so like Star Wars is always like Star Wars feeling in 10,000 years in the past. It's the same vibe. I feel like the vibes are, the way that the vibes are different are important. So things like, who are the Mandalorians is a different question. Are Mandalians in Kotor?

Mandelor is in Kotor. And you don't know who that is. You didn't know that there was a person named Mandeloran. Wait. What are you, Oron? Yeah, dog. There's a guy? Yeah.

What if I'm going to talk to a... I almost spoiled some shit. Wait, can I just say this? Could both of you say out loud what you think the plot of Kotaur is? Oh, I love this. Knights of the Old Republic. The title. That's the title.

That's as far as I got. I really don't know shit about this game. I know people... I know there's an evil. lady that I'm supposed to like. That's Cotor 2, but sure. There's evil ladies in the world generally. That's all, that's literally

I don't know anything about those games. I know nothing. I genuinely 0%. Like, I know the title. I kind of can see the box art in my head. There's like purple on it. That's about it. It's high. It's old republic.

Yeah, it's old republic. And there's knights. So. With a K. That's what I'm. Yes. And presumably stuff happens at night too. I can't say for sure, though.

I haven't played it. So the other thing, just I'll say this is an aside. Like, I had, like, people had hyped up Neverwinter Nights to me so much that I was like, I don't know that this BioWare shit is where it's at. Is different. Neverwinter Nights sucks. Okay. I think that the NeverWen Nights.

I was badly misled by a PC gamer editor's choice. There are some Neverwinter Nights expansions that are pretty. okay, but it's fundamentally D&D, 3, 5, and there are limits, I think it might just be 3, and there are limits to what you could do in that system and in that world especially. We are not fond of those things

the way we are fond of the Mandalorians. The way we were find of, what would a world be like where Jedi exist and like deal with farming disputes? Because you're dealing with farming disputes. Okay, see, my assumption was it was like you're going to be uncovering a Sith plot and foiling it.

It's more complicated than that, Rob. Are you uncovering a Sith plot, though, in foiling it? Oh, well, it's on a Sith plot because there is, this is the thing that you hate, which is like, the, there is a Sith Empire, right? Or there is a, the Sith are occupiers, you know, the Sith are not two guys in the same way that you think of them, you know? Okay. It's, they have, have, have you not seen the armor of the, the guys in this game? The Sith armor? I think we did.

I think we recently showed you it's like silver and chrome and we should just Let's look into it What are the what are the Yeah, go ahead. Where I was just going to say

What's the best way To play Cotor right now? It might be on your Xbox It might be the best and simplest way Fucking damn it But I played on Wait, hang on the

The current Xbox? Yeah, I think so Yeah, it is on PC. It is on Switch. You could play it on those. It was a console game when it came out. I played it with a controller when it came out. It's not like it's like a top down.

Yeah, I ended it down a 360 copy when I played it in the... Best platform to play Cotechore. I bet it's good on Switch. I mean, Cotor 2 didn't work on Switch when it launched, but that's just classic Cotor 2. Okay. According to Ooh Uh-huh

Okay According to Reddit first Best way to play Kotor in 2020 I have Xbox 1S Nintendo Switch and PS4 Switch All right

I'll play that show Switch I'm going to switch right there I am a mobile phone Okay well I think we're not doing that Okay I don't if you have an iPad maybe Yeah What about

Mods Important Not important. Okay, so the screen rant says... Okay, here we fucking go. Screen rant says that the first Cotor has a litany of mods to improve a player's experience of the title, but the PC version suffers in ways not present in Cotor 2.

Cotor 2 Steam version updates... has... By Asper Media include wide-screen support, controller compatibility, and full-steam workshop support that makes the game much more intuitive and user-friendly through the base game and installation of mods. Mods for Cotor 2 We don't want to

We just need one to begin with Talk about two if the strike is still going on I'm downloading Cotor 1 The Xbox and Nintendo Switch releases are left with content That fans are unable to access Of Cotor 2 No no no this is for Cotor 1 Oh really? Says who

Leaving them at a screen rant Awesome's got a screen rent face on I fucking hate screen rant I don't I think it probably doesn't really You play on whatever Right Does Cotor work on switch Okay here's here's a good one

From a Reddit user I bought it on Xbox 1 Wife bought it on the switch I have the option of Darth Bandon's Lightsaber She gets the circle of Serish and a couple of other I don't know what any of that means it doesn't mean anything it's nothing words to me and a couple other items I can't purchase and we both did a Jedi Gunslinger build and Pone Revin okay stop reading things close your computer okay should we look at how many hours it takes to be Jedi Fallen Order and the new one and do a

play through of Cotor and sort of plan out our strike here. We're going on strike? In our strike solidarity. We're typically striking. How long to beat Cotor is 29 hours? Here we go.

Somebody just clicked start stream. You did. I'm watching. I'm watching. Yeah, what's up? Oh. We could just play. Here it is.

Is this Cotor? I downloaded it from Steam. It works. Wait, he just launched into it. Yeah, I just launched into it. Who's that? Who's that? Actual play of Night of the Old Republic.

Featry Gossip Walker and Rob's asking. Wait, Austin had to minimize. We're already off the rails. It's fine. Don't worry about it. You had this show-stopping bug seconds in. Well, normally you're not streaming it to other people. We should invent.

investigate and make a decision off mic all right so see how it goes yeah so we're gonna we're gonna consider our consider our options plan out god you've ever been in manon you've never been you've never been to you don't know what terrace is true who that's what i'm saying who's wait but what about masters of terrace cussie no unrelated you don't know about dantooine of course i know about Dan Tuan. There's nothing there. Yeah, Dan Tewan's been... Oh, but there used to be. Oh, but there used to be.

All right, well, next week, I guess I'll find... I wouldn't tell you about that, wasn't they? After all, that is where they committed one of their most fiendish sins. I'm being serious. They do something

deeply fucked up on Dantuin in Cotor 2. It's revealed. So, in the next to you just do a little Yoda Deeply Farked up it was Believe this shit You would not

Oh there's a little fake Yoda In these games by the way What? There's freaks Yeah There's little freaks And he got a last name You'll have to play to find out

Yeah I've already started downloading it Okay So in two weeks time You'll hear you'll hear us digging into whatever it is that we choose to tackle next probably Cotor

If it takes us an extra week Give us some slack Between this shit This is like hey how do we do this What's our breakdown? We'll need some extra time for that I think Ali and I both have travel coming up this month We'll both be out of town for a little while

So we may have a little extra gap Also just planning it out is going to take a second It's summer break And making sure it works Because there's a real chance That we can get on the other side of this and be like, uh, it just, we can't get it going. And we have to break it up in an interesting discussion chunks.

Yes, that's the other. It really is. I'll look at a fact and think about what the, and also how long do we want to go? We have to talk about that, you know? So. Much to discuss. True. Thank you for joining us.

As you can hear, I got to go. I hear it. Yeah, so thank you for joining us. Thank you for rolling with us as we changed tack here. And thank you for continuing to support the show at patreon.com slash civilized. Until next time, please rate and review us on a podcast platform of choice. And feel free to pass along your insights about what is the ultimate Cotor experience. Oh, God.

Weeaner! Oh! The Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Thank you.