Factually! with Adam Conover - AI, Mergers, and This Week's News Onslaught, with Dylan McKeever and Jason Koebler

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

The news is relentless in pace as well as issues, isn’t it? This week we’re trying something a bit different: Adam sits with previous guests Jason Koebler, tech journalist from 404 Media, and comedian Dylan McKeever to wade through the muck of this week’s biggest stories. The trio talks about the government’s stiffy for AI-powered war machines, the whoever-wins-we-lose Warner Bros. Discovery merger, and a glimmer of hope for trans rights. SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. Hey, everybody, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thanks for joining me on the show again. We're trying a little bit of a different format today. You know, normally on this show, I interview an expert about their work specifically. Lately, I've just found myself wanting to talk about the experience of being alive in 2026. That's what's going on in the news and just like have a good time discussing it with people who I find funny and interesting.

So that's what we're doing on the show today. we're testing this is a new format. If it goes well, we might do more of these in the future. Sound off in the comments, et cetera. And real quick, if you want to support the show, head to patreon.com slash Adam Con. Over five bucks a month gets you every episode, ad free.

We'd love to have you. And if you want to come to see me to stand-up comedy on the road, March 20th through 22nd, I'll be in Hartford, Connecticut. April 2nd through 4th, I'll be in Sacramento, California. April 10th through 12th, I'll be at the La Horde.

Comedy Store in La Jolla, California. April 18th, I am recording my new comedy special at the Den Theater in Chicago. Don't miss it. And then in May, I will be in Kansas City, Missouri. Head to Adamconover.net for tickets. I'd like to introduce today's panel. Should we call it a panel? Panel is good, I think.

I think it might be a panel. From 404 Media, we got Jason Keebler, one of my very favorite tech writers and reporters. Welcome. Thank you for having me. I'm shocked. You said to that we're funny and interesting. We'll see. We'll see.

I'm shocked, too. And we have Dylan McKeever is one of my very favorite comedians and artists and women about L.A. Yeah, it's me. Dylan. Hi. Welcome. Great to be here, Adam. How are you guys adjusting to daylight savings time?

Oh, I haven't been sleeping a lot at all lately. So it just kind of made the night go, like, staring at the ceiling a lot faster. Yeah. I didn't sleep until like 3 a.m. somehow. I woke up, I ate leftover stir fry at like 2 in the morning. That's how insomniac I was. Are you up thinking? What are you doing?

I have a very dark. Let's start on a dark note. My dog has dementia at the moment. So he's like up and about barking. You know, and so I'm like, oh, cool. But he's doing okay. Okay. I'm sorry.

It's okay. How old is he? He's 14. Okay. He's doing very well. I mean, like, he's on some meds. It's improving situation will be okay. 14 more years.

Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm thinking. Okay. Are you up thinking? Yeah, I was mostly spinning out about like, how's this podcast going to go tomorrow? We're doing it at 10 a.m. That's a little early for me. It's 9 a.m. based on the time zone I was in a moment ago.

How am I going to handle it? And, you know, that was that sort of thing. And you lost an hour. And I lost an hour. That's what I'm talking about. I did have my favorite internet radio station on, which is a radio station called Ambient Sleeping Pill that I listen to every night. and it's just like some guy put together

an ambient music playlist that you can find and Siri knows about it so every night before I go to sleep I shout at my Apple HomePod Siri play the radio station ambient sleeping pill because if I don't say play the radio station

it plays like some Apple music playlist and so I have to I don't know order a robot around speaking of ordering robots around let's get into it talk about what's fucking going on with Claude and Open AI and Anthropic and the Pentagon. Jason, you want to kick us off? Yeah, I was so happy that you asked me to explain one of the most complicated things going on at the moment to start,

to start. So essentially Anthropic, which is the effective altruism coded AI company runs Claude, et cetera, is in a beef with the Department of War. Let's use the correct nomenclature here. And essentially Pete Hegsteth a few weeks ago was saying that Anthropic needed to cut a deal with the Pentagon to allow for the use of Anthropic and Claude in like basically like no restrictions on what the Pentagon could use it for. And Dario Amadeh, who is the CEO of Anthropic, said, okay, we want to cut a deal with you. Like, we do want to work with the Pentagon. They have been working with the Pentagon for a long time.

But there's like two restrictions that they didn't want. They said, we don't want our technology used for mass domestic surveillance in the United States. And we don't want it used for autonomous targeting of weapons. So basically like killer robots, no humans in the loop. And the Pentagon and Trump said like, no, we can use it for whatever we want it for. And this has become a big to do, basically about the terms under which American AI can be used in war. Yeah. And so they set, the Pentagon set like a Friday 5 p.m. deadline to sign a deal.

This was now like a week or so ago. Anthropics said, no, we're not going to do it. We're going to like stand by this. And so then Pete Higsef got very mad at them. And then like five seconds later, Sam Altman and Open AI was like, we'll do it. Like we're in. It was like the same day. It was the same day.

They did like a notes app post about like, we'll do it. Yeah. And so now it's become this thing. where like Open AI and Anthropic hate each other. They, I was actually at this conference, a national security conference last week. And this had just happened. And that was the only thing that people were talking about was like Iran and Anthropic

and Open AI. And there were actually two executives from like one from Anthropic and one from Open AI and they were on the same panel. And it was insane. Like the sort of like thinly veiled hatred between them. Like they were all sort of being very kind. And like at these things, no one talks in specifics at all. They're being like so general.

Like, oh, we're working on frameworks and guidelines and trying to figure out like how we're going to work with the Pentagon. And essentially what Open AI is arguing is that they got the deal that Anthropic wanted. They're like, we are not going to allow the Pentagon to use our technology for targeting of like automatic targeting or for domestic. or for domestic surveillance, but then basically if you go one step below that, that's not actually in the deal. What's in the deal is that right now it says the Pentagon can't use their AI for illegal purposes, and both of these are currently illegal. But the hope among like the military is that they will be able to eventually use this

for like autonomous targeting. And if you like zoom out, like Israel has used AI for. targeting, for example. And it's, you know, I don't know. I don't know if y'all have used AI to mess around with it. I know you both know quite a lot about it, but not super accurate at the moment. Don't know if we want it targeting. Yeah. I mean, in what context. So I saw that despite, you know, the Pentagon kicking Claude out like it was or Anthropic out, Claude was like still used to strike Iran like in the beginning stages of the war. And the thing that I can't figure out is like how how exactly are they using it?

Like it's still a large language model or like a token transformer, right? Well, this is the huge, huge question is like how are these tools being used by the military? They only talk in generalities. They say things like they use it to run simulations. They use it to do like data analysis. they use it to, I mean, that's basically what they say they use it for. What that means, like, who knows? And how that's being used, who knows?

At this conference, I was at Open AI was saying that they are basically going to embed some Open AI employees to, like, sit next to the military members at their little terminals to, like, oversee what they're using it for and to like make sure nothing goes wrong, which, I mean, gives me tons of confidence. Wow. Yeah. But I mean, and then there was also this reporting that Anthropic was used in Venezuela. And it was like, well, what was it used for?

Like, how is it being used? And I have done a fair bit of reporting about how Anthropic and OpenAI tools are being used in the government more widely. And for example, they've been used to like analyze contracts for woke essentially to like cancel DEI contracts. That was like a big thing that just happened recently. And there were all these like grants and contracts that were canceled that should not have been because they were so bad at analyzing it. But they just like threw it through the. This is essentially just like using it for search and replace. Like let's find all the woke words in the contracts and then take action on them.

Like this is something that someone could just do with like command F, but they're running it through an AI. They're using it for that. The National Archives is using. it to like um translate and do oCR to like really old documents so basically like these civil war letters and stuff they're just like running it through this which is like OCR is optical character recognition where it just analyzes the handwriting and stuff like that and it's like that technology is really old as well like the the sort of large language model part of it um i don't know like uh rfk junior launched a website that uses grok where you can like ask um like should i eat should i drink raw milk

And it's like, oh, yeah, like definitely, you know, it's like, it's not being used for like good things. Yeah, what I can't figure out is like every time I use a large language model, no matter what I use it for, it kind of works the same way, you know, it's like, oh, interesting. I see you've uploaded an image. Well, in this and then that like breaks it down. It has about the same error and success ratio. It's like okayish at giving me a useful answer. honestly, I use it most often. I use the Siri chat GPT integration in my car to ask it really like weird questions off the top of my head,

which is like occasionally amusing and occasionally semi useful. But like, I've never encountered a use of these tools that is like fundamentally different from that. So when I imagine the military using it, I imagine them like uploading an image and being like, are there any terrorists in this picture or some shit like that? Like, is there anything more sophisticated than what the average person can do with Claude? Again, that's the big question because it's like, we know what these tools are and how they work. And they work exactly how you just said. And so I don't think that there is like a secret version of Claude or a secret version of ChatGPT that has like wildly more functionality where, yeah, you can like connect it to a camera on like a missile or something and be like constantly analyze what you're seeing and then use it.

to target a school or use it to target like a data center or or you know an oil refinery or something like that and it's like I guess you could imagine a world in which that would be possible but it's like these tools are still pretty slow and like you know if you're firing a missile and you need to target it or whatever it's like oh let me think about that for a while and get back to you and the missiles flying through the air so I mean I think that right now there's as I'm sure everyone this knows, there's just like so much hype around AI. And I think that the Pentagon does write a lot of code and programs and things like this. And like Claude Code has really taken off in the last few months. I mean, from what I understand, it's like quite good. I haven't messed with it. I'm not a

software engineer. But I could imagine them wanting to use it to like write different like software programs and things like that. But then again, it's not a fundamentally different like thing. I have a question. Why do you think they gave it to the rest of us? to like make selfies and make Miyazaki like photos? Like did they, why did they, why did they give it to us to mess, was it to like get us on board, our consent and then have it in the military? Like, why? I mean, it's the everything machine.

You can use it for anything and everything, but also kind of like nothing. That's what I'm saying is that like the defining feature of large language models appears to be you can put anything in and you'll get something out the other side. and it's something that might have the appearance of being useful. So you can kind of just throw it at literally anything and go, I don't know, you figure out what it's for. But you'd think that like the Pentagon of all places, even under Pete Hankseth, right,

would be more specific in what they want than that. A lot of the promise is also like, oh, we can do it cheaper, faster, like gain efficiencies, whatever. And it's like the Pentagon has more people and money than any other entity. like on planet Earth, you know, like you'd think that maybe they wouldn't need it as bad. I don't know if y'all saw this, but did you see that, like, since Anthropics said that they wouldn't work with the Pentagon? Actually, they didn't say they wouldn't work with the Pentagon.

They just said that they haven't yet. Like, they haven't figured out a contract yet. But Anthropic is, like, pretty horny to work with the Pentagon just under its own terms. But basically, like, Claude has really taken off. Like, people have been canceling chat GPT and they've been switching to Anthropic. because Anthropic is like the quote unquote, like ethical. And it's just like it's not. There's so much wrong with that.

There's so much wrong with that. This is like the really dumb version of like resistance brain of like, oh, Pete Hegseth said that Claude is bad. So I'm going to download it to like get back at Trump or whatever when it's that's the opposite of what is happening. My kill by doesn't have red eyes. It has blue eyes. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, like, how far does, like, is Anthropics whole thing about being ethical just like a veneer?

So I think it's marketing more or less. Like basically the origin story of Anthropic is that the CEO, Dario Amadeh, used to work at Open AI, like long ago. And he was basically like, these guys aren't being very thoughtful about how they're building this. They're building like an AI god that will kill us all. they can't be trusted. Therefore, I'm going to make my own company that's going to make an AI god that I shall control. And I will be the one to keep it all safe. And so a lot of their marketing has basically been like, don't worry, we are building the

horrible AI that we're all scared of, but we can be trusted because like we're going to have the safeguards on it and that sort of thing. And that serves to kind of just like propel this idea that AI is going to be this everything machine and is going to, you know, replace all these workers and is going to do all our thinking for us and can be really dangerous. And I think if you talk to anyone about how, anyone who knows what they're doing and doesn't have a vested interest in these companies succeeding, like LLMs are probably not going to get us there. And it just sort of this, this like, oh, we're building the scary machine, but you can trust us, has really gotten anthropic very far

with like lawmakers, with people who are like, oh, we can trust them because they care about us. We're the trustworthy, scary God machine builder, but they still want to work with the Pentagon. Like, I just interviewed yesterday, episode is going to come out next week, the two computer scientists who wrote the AI as normal technology paper. And one of their points is, like, as opposed to all the, you know, doom and gloom, like, AI is going to take over the world and, like, launch missiles and everything. they're like, we're in control of what we connect AI to. Like, we can decide whether or not we want to connect it to missile systems.

And that's like a really good point, except that the two main companies who are building it are literally trying to do that right now with like the thinnest of safeguards. Like, if they think it's so dangerous, why pursue the Pentagon at all? Right. And I mean, these two safeguards that they've chosen to decide on, like master domestic surveillance and autonomous killing systems are like, the worst things that you could imagine the military doing, I guess. And it's like, well, why did you choose those red lines and not like many others? Like there's many other things that the Pentagon does that are like war crimes, et cetera. And it's like, how about some of those?

Don't do those. Or don't work with them at all. Like there's no need, there's no reason that anthropic needs to work with the Pentagon. And I guess like the last piece of this just to bring it up to kind of today is the Pentagon classified Anthropic as a quote, like supply chain risk, which is something that it has previously really only done for foreign companies like Huawei, where they're like, oh, there's like spy technology in here. So we are going to cancel the contracts and you can't use it. And so Anthropic has sued the Pentagon over this designation. And, you know, my honest thought about how this goes is that

Anthropic had to sue over this because it's like going to cost them billions of dollars in terms of just like losing government contracts and things like that. But it's like they're going to work out some sort of deal. Like that is what. They'll be in there. Yeah. Like it's just like a lot of posturing. And it is like the thing that people in the AI world are talking about so much right now.

And it is super important. It's like not good what is happening. But it's fun for them to pretend to take a stance, you know. It feels good to go through the actions. It's been great for them in terms of just like getting publicity and people to download things and look like. they are like the one moral AI company and it's like in the end they're they're just going to sign something I'm sure yeah because I mean they have so much they need so much money to keep doing the build out like it's this constant uh fire that they have to keep fueling and I mean they see the federal government is like are the biggest source of funds for them so like yeah they'll do whatever Trump wants ultimately and like that's clearly the point of the designation is to is to just create a a confrontation that then they'll eventually have to resolve. That's like how they fucking do do business. Yeah, Dylan, I think to answer your earlier question again, it's like, why does

everyone have this? It's because these companies need everyone to use it because it's so expensive. They need like mass, mass adoption and they need to eventually kind of like drive the cost down of doing this. And so they're all just seeking like as much scale as they can possibly have. So they're not saying no to anyone. It's like anyone can use this stuff. for basically anything. They do have like some guardrails. Like they claim that they are like, oh, you can't use it to develop a biological weapon or a nuclear weapon.

And it's like, cool. Great. Thank you. Like, is that even true though? Can you, can you get around this? Well, that was a big topic at this conference I went to where it's like what's happening is they do have some safeguards. People are always trying to get around the safeguards.

And then especially like other sophisticated AI researchers like, especially like Chinese open source AI folks are then just it's called distilling the model and they basically like take it and they remove the safeguards and then they release it more widely and so it's like we've reached a point where a lot of these a lot of the frontier models which are like the open AI the um anthropic ones they're sort of trying like they will at least pretend to attempt to not let you generate like porn of Taylor Swift on there. But then, like, the open source models that are kind of like, for lack of better term, stealing from these LLMs that have all stolen from the collective sum total of human knowledge, because that's how these things are built, are then removing those safeguards. And so it's like, cool.

Well, like, to what end are we even doing this at all? Yeah, I mean, it's like when Open AIA put out SORAD and it's like, oh, you can't make Pikachu. All anybody is trying to do is make Pikachu. like and they're like trying to get around every single safeguard and then they're using like the off brand model that lets them make Pikachu fucking or whatever they want to see it like how do you know about that? How do you know? Look man, Reddit's got a lot of great stuff on it. Honestly, what I see the one unambiguously good use of AI that I have seen is I think people with really specific porn fetishes like are really. benefiting because it's like finally we can make media for ourselves cheaply.

You know, like we don't need to hire an animator. We don't need to like resort to just fiction. We can like make a five second clip of, you know, King Cooper pregnant, whatever you want. And I think that makes it worth it. It does. It does. I've been covering this quite a lot and the state of the art right now is to see like how many boobs you can give to a human shaped woman.

It's like, we couldn't do this before. How about three was what about four? Yeah. Could we do five? How much can a torso a hole? Yeah, exactly. It's good tech. It's good tech.

And I honestly, I think that's probably what Pete Higgseth is using it for too. I can imagine that that's, yeah. Yeah, he wants unfettered access to the guard rail list, uh, clawed. Do you feel like there's like a naivety in tech where they're just sort of like, we made this thing and anyone can do anything? and like let's just let's just let it rip and then there's something like oh no someone made a biological weapon

like I feel like a lot of other tech sort of like that too of like you're just breaking in you're absolutely right and with AI it has been porn for the most part and like non-consensual porn and violent like sexual content and child sexual abuse material

and things like this because there there's so many AI startups who are like you can use this technology to storyboard your movie your upcoming movie and then you like look at it and it's like, oh, no, they're only making like porn of dragons. Like, that's like, that's like 98% of all uses of it.

Or like, uh, it's like, you can make Selena Gomez and Sabrina Carpenter make out. It's like, cool, great. This is literally like what people were using the internet for in 1998. Like when I first got it was like photoshopping like, you know, celebrity nudes. Like making animated gifts or whatever of, uh, uh, uh, uh, I don't know. Yeah, like Britney Spears naked was like a big thing on like AOL. And it still is.

It's what people want from it. Folks, this episode was brought to you by Alma. You know, a year from today, who do you want to be? What version of yourself would you like to meet? Do you want to feel less anxious or feel more like yourself? Maybe your relationship is stronger or the grief feels smaller? What if that thing that you've been secretly worried about just took up less space in your mind? Well, the right therapist can help you get there and Alma can help you find them.

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and use code factually for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash factually. Code factually at checkout. the merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers. If you guys were following, you might have seen that like Netflix made a big offer for, to purchase Warner Brothers from David Zazlov, who basically,

let's actually rewind a little bit further. David Zazlov was the CEO of Discovery, purchased Warner Brothers a couple years ago, essentially like really plainly always as a house flipper. Like he was like, I'm just going to cut a bunch of shit. I'm going to paint the door orange. I'm going to try to sell this for more than I've,

bought it for. Didn't he very famously oversee like 16 changes of the name to HBO Go? Yes. It was HBO Max. Then they changed it to Max, which was just a true desecration of, you know, HBO is like the cathedral of television. You know, it was like truly the place where this is where the best television is made. We've been doing it for decades. We know how to do it.

It was one of the best brands in American media. And they're like, let's take that out of the name. Let's just have it be max. You know, like, what if Apple Plus? What if it wasn't called Plus? What if it was just called Plus? The 16 Max. Why not?

And like famously like canceled all of these movies. Coyote versus Acme and like the Backgirl movie, presumably for tax writeoffs. He also all this happened right before the writers and actors strike, which he just sort of like bumbled through as like the biggest doofus in the CEO pool. Just sort of go, what's going on guys? oh, there's a stretch. Can we stop this? I don't know. You know, like completely out of his depth. But, you know, basically tears the company to pieces down around him, but manages to spruce it up just enough that Netflix made a pretty big offer to buy it, which freaked out everybody in Hollywood mostly because people were worried this was going to kill the theatrical market because Ted Sarandos is on record saying.

He hates movie theaters. He hates it when people leave his house, leave their house. And like, this is the guy who's on record saying, you know, that their Netflix's main competitor is sleep. Like, they literally just want people to be continuously watching the Netflix algorithm and doing nothing else. And if you look at the movies Netflix has released, they're very, you know, they're basically non-theatrical. They're sort of like hallmark movie level films is like what. Netflix is reducing the movie experience down to. So this freaks out everybody in Hollywood, but then the only other suitor is Paramount,

which is run by David Ellison, who's the mega billionaire Larry Ellison's son and is also like a right-wing Trump like ass licker who in purchasing Paramount put his company Skydance purchased Paramount just like a couple months ago. They put Barry Weiss in charge of CBS News, which is immediately like... It's going well. It's going really well. That could be a whole segment of this. People love it. People are just, you know, all of the 75-year-old liberal grandmas who have been watching 60 minutes for 40 years are really excited to see it make a hard right-wing turn.

They're really excited to watch a new shittier Fox News. So that's what's been going on there. after Netflix made the offer, David Ellison wanted to purchase Warner Brothers so badly. He basically threw what seemed to be like a two or three month long, like Kendall Roy, like temper tantrum about it. Like how dare you take away the toy that Daddy was going to buy me and started,

it really did feel like one of those succession episodes where he was just frantically calling everybody that he could trying to like muscle his way into every boardroom shouting at people over the phone. to try to close the deal, managed to get his father to backstop the deal, took in all of this crazy debt from crazy sources. And the result is like about a week or two weeks ago, they managed to make an offer that was so ludicrous Netflix was like,

you know what, fuck it. Like this is, you guys have overpaid to such a ridiculous degree. It's no longer worth it. And all the reporting is that like, David Ellison was like, oh, whoa, whoa, oh, okay. Wow. We got to do this now.

Oh, we bought it. All right. Just like when Elon bought Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of story about like that they had poured warm champagne into paper cups like in their office because they weren't like prepared for it to happen. They just like, oh, here's some champagne. And then just had to like get about like, okay, who's going to run the fucking company now?

Adam, I'm very curious how you feel about this. Like, who was a better suitor? Because I, you know, from what I read and podcasts I listened to and things like that, it was like people in Hollywood were very scared about Netflix, you know, maybe not releasing as many movies in theaters. But then with Paramount, there's like a lot of redundancies and also the like Netflix has a lot of money, whereas Paramount's money comes from Larry Ellison, and comes from like debt from the Saudis and things like that.

And so like the only real path here looks like mass layoffs. Yeah, I mean, they have to cut $6 billion a year according to them. Netflix estimated it was more like $16 billion a year, which means, yeah, mass layoffs. It means, I mean, look, this is the death of Hollywood is what it is. What I have been telling people is this is like Ford buying Chevy and saying we're going to stop making Silveradoes or whatever, right? like we're just going to shut down. Like, Warner Brothers and Paramount are two separate studio lots in Los Angeles where they make movies. They're not going to need two, you know, like there's going to be gaping hole in the center of the industry.

And yeah, the fact that like Netflix at least had, like, is a viable going company that seemed like it could actually raise the money to do this was like slightly better. but the truth is both were catastrophically bad. And so, like, at least, you know, in the Writers Guild of which I'm a member, our position has been like, we need to stop either of these. We have to fight tooth and nail against every merger in order to make them as difficult as possible and as painful as possible to try to stop them because, like, there is no good outcome here. And, you know, people will say that Warner Brothers, Ozlov might himself say that,

like Warner Brothers was not working as a company. It had to be sold or was going to collapse. That's because that's how he fucking ran it. He bought it and gutted it and painted the door orange and like did a fucking, you know, restaurant nightmares like quick, uh, reno job like you see on a reality show in order to spruce the price up to sell it. Like if it Warner Brothers is a hundred year old company. It's one of the big five movie, movie studios.

It has a slate of IP that's rivaled only by Disney. They have like all of D.C. They have all these other properties. It's of course possible to run that company as a profitable enterprise. Yeah. If you fire everyone, it's, you know. Well, they had a good year in 2025, right? Yeah.

Like they had big movies. It had Superman and sinners and weapons. And one battle after another was one right? Yeah. Yeah. It felt like a killer year for the pit was this year. for them. Yeah.

The new Game of Thrones show is popping off. I don't know what's going on. Yeah. Like any other company would be like, this is great. We're doing well. Yeah. And Zazlov is like,

oh man, it's going so bad. I gotta sell you guys. Like, I have no choice. But I mean, he personally, by the way,

after this deal closed, sold $100 million worth of stock. Like, which is apparently completely legal. Just, uh, you know, yeah,

now that the company's being bought, he can cash out. He will also personally profit, I think, another like 600 million or so. It's just to profit him personally at the expense of all of Hollywood, you know? And like to zoom out even further, like, it's the death of Hollywood. That is such a shrinkage of America as a cultural force in the world.

Like movies were a huge part of American soft power globally. if you want to look at it in terms of foreign policy, there were also just the highest form of art made globally, you know, like comparable to what opera was like 200 years ago, right? Where don't tell Timothy Chalamey, I said that. Like, you know, this is the art form where we spend like $100 million to have the best writers, write the best script, and have the hottest people make out and have the big explosions

and have, like, great music and, like, have the highest, you know, like a hundred different artisans working at their highest possible level to make something that, like, millions of people want to pay $20 to see. The fact that capitalism could support that level of art making at all was kind of remarkable, considering how many forms of art capitalism does not support. But, like, that was one of the things that made people around the world go, whoa, America's kind of cool that they were able to make this in, like, no other country, has, you know, like there's other movie industries around the world, but none of them have

compared. And like, that's going away. It's simply dying. And, you know, 30 years from now, is there going to be an American movie industry that is in any way comparable to what has existed for the last hundred years? It seems like less and less likely. I also feel like, obviously, COVID really killed theaters in a huge way and was horrible for Hollywood. But I feel like the last few years have there's been like some bright spots you have movies like sinners you have like uh one battle after another like you have almost like after years and years of just being like shoved uh superhero movies down our throats i feel like we've gotten some like mid budget breakaway hits and i'm like oh cool and then to your point it's like scudding all of that and

and why people love movies right like they they continue to love them uh the movie industry has done a really good job of just like shooting itself in the balls over the past couple decades. Like something I say about, um, stand up comedy is it's a durable business because like at the end of the day, people do occasionally want to leave their house, go sit in the dark with a drink in their hands, with a date and like laugh with other people. It's like a fundamental thing humans need to do. The same thing is true of movies. Like people complain about movies that have gotten more expensive. It's still one of the cheapest forms of entertainment you can engage in. One of the reasons the Super Mario Brothers movie was a really big hit

a couple years ago in 2023 was because there had literally not been a family movie released for like 10 or 12 months prior. So parents were like, oh my God, something I can do with my children. Oh, it's only 25 bucks a kid. Yeah, we'll see it six times. Yeah.

Like, there's air conditioning, fantastic. Like people want to have this experience and the movie industry has sort of stopped giving it to them and has honestly embraced this defeatism of, well, no one's going to go to the theater. Like, no one really wants to see the move. Whoa, we're supposed to make movies still? Come on, you guys.

And the public is banking them to give them what, who doesn't watch a movie from 1998 and go, my God, why won't they make movies like this again? You know? Yeah, it feels like they almost don't want to succeed. Like, I feel like the two biggest hits of last year came out of nowhere. It was like K-pop Demon Hunters, which no one believed in. Sony sold it to Netflix for like nothing. And it was a huge mistake.

No one was prepared for that success. And then heated rivalry, which is like, what the fuck is Craved TV? Some Canadians made this. But it's like they weren't, like these things weren't, it doesn't seem like they were believed in. They weren't invested in. And like they still became hits in spite of not, you know, not being believed in. Yeah, I mean, that was a Canadian show heated rivalry that like you could not have pitched in America. No hour than was.

predicting these things would take off. But it's, yeah, it feels like they don't want to, they don't want to succeed. Or it's like, you guys have these great, these great things just hidden, you know, amongst the rubble, but you're not even looking for them, you know? Yeah. It feels like Zazlov specifically was in the business of profiting from failure.

That by purchasing the company and running into the ground and like sprucing it up and then selling it for parts, like that's his MO. And it seems like it's kind of. of the M.O. of Paramount, too. Like, the amount of debt that they have taken on is, I think the number I saw was seven times. I don't understand how debt ratios work. But what I read was it's the same level of debt that private equity firms that end up bankrupting and selling the company used. It's the same level of debt that, like, the private equity firm that bought Toys R Us used. And then, like, a couple

years later to shut down the entire thing and somehow profited from that. Like, that's how capitalism works now. Yeah, I think to bring like some of this stuff together is like, yes, there's this, or it feels like there's this defeatist attitude in Hollywood. I'm not in the industry, but I live here. I pay attention, I think. And it's like the hope seems to be that they will be able to fire like so many people and they will somehow like figure out how to use AI to like make movies way cheaper. But at the same time, they're like, how can we possibly compete with YouTube and TikTok and vertical video and things like this? Even though to your point, it's like people are desperate for good movies written by humans that have like good acting and all that sort of thing.

And there are these increasingly like really small studios and really small productions that kind of come out of nowhere. But it's like in order for for them to like be able to make money on this, I feel like they're going to have to take their existing IP, run it through some sort of like AI slot machine and just like shit out so much content that is like hyper personalized to people in some way. Like that that seems like as like an AI reporter. That's kind of like what I see happening.

But that's giving up their natural advantage, right? Like because everybody has an AI slot machine. anybody can do that. What the movie studios have that other people don't have is like an incredibly high level of talent and money that they can invest that other people don't have. Their competitive advantages, they can put $50 million into a movie, right? The pit is such a perfect example of this. Like the pit could only be made in Hollywood as it, you know, as we sort of commonly understand the term. It's the best actors in the world. It's the best cinematographers. It's the best writers. They built a standing set in Hollywood, like, they couldn't even made that show, like, in Atlanta or Nashville or one of these

the production hubs, because you couldn't get, like, that many of the highest level, you know, artists in Hollywood to all move to one of those places for the amount of time it would take to make those 16 episodes. Like, you know, the success of the pit is the best, the best to me testimony of, like, do it the old-fashioned way, make quality television or movies and people, it's a critical hit. It's a commercial hit. It's like, you know, the biggest thing on Max. It's also not that expensive, right?

Because they just shoot it all in that one spot. And there's like the, there's a lot of episodes, a lot of content. Like you're not waiting three years for the next season or whatever. That's them returning to the broadcast model, right? And saying, like, I think they're doing like 16 to 18 episodes. The original, you know, Hollywood TV model was like 26. So they're like inching their way up there. Yeah, I mean, it's basically a new version of ER, right?

Almost literally they, in fact, created it that way because they were trying to read. I really love this story. Do you know this story? There's like lawsuits involved at this point, right? Yeah, yeah. Like, yeah, but they, they wanted to do a reboot of ER. They could come to terms with the estate of Michael Crichton, who I guess owns ER, which I was not aware of. Um, so they were like, all right, we'll just do a different show set in an emergency room because like, he doesn't own the concept of emergency rooms.

We call it RE. Yeah. Room emergency. And then the estate of Michael Crichton sued going like, no, you guys did ER again. Yeah, because you fucking. But also they use the same. actor. As in like Noah Wiley was also in ER.

Yes. But now he's Dr. Robbie. He's not the other guy he was before. Yeah. I wanted to go back to one of your, your previous point about the AI slop because I feel like the studios have this envy towards social media where they've created a system where people will just make content for free and put it out there and they get to gather all the all the profit.

Yeah. And if you're a movie studio, it's like, well, I would like to be able to make movies and shows without paying anyone. Yeah. You know, and it's also, but the thing that's further crazy is that with social media, they're trying to like make AI slop where it's like, you guys are already getting all the benefits for free. We're all, all the influencers are making stuff for you guys for free, but you want more somehow?

Like, what's? You can watch Bowser fuck Sonic. Yeah. And it's like, now we don't have to pay any, but like, I should watch the Sonic movie. Instead of having a human work for free, we've got a robot working for free. What makes me angry about it is how much these companies don't realize that they gave up, you know? Like, yes, YouTube has taken over. It's the most popular streaming app on television sets.

And so the channel surfing experience, when people are like, I want to watch something. Well, I don't care what it is. I'm just eating lunch. They open their Roku. The thing they go to first is YouTube, right? And what are they watching there? They're watching food content. They're watching people talk about that.

They're literally watching us right now. I'm watching a fact show with Adam Conover. Thank you very much. Like this is, but what we are doing right now on here is what people used to watch on like daytime TV. They used to watch the view for this experience. And what the legacy media companies did was they gave up on all those forms of content. They said, okay, we're going to start streaming services. But all they made for those streaming services was high-end narrative scripted.

They stopped making topical comedy. They stopped making news. They stopped making food, travel shows. Like, you literally cannot pitch a travel show to Paramount Warner Netflix. They, like, won't buy it. You know where travel shows are super popular? YouTube. They could have competed, like, rather than just give up.

Like, they could have kept making the shit, but they stopped. I mean, look at, like, the late night shows. More people are watching them than ever, but they're watching them on YouTube where, like, literally Paramount has been posting the Daily Show to YouTube for 20 years. And now more people watch it on YouTube. than ever watched it on cable, but they didn't fucking monetize it on YouTube. Fucking have John Stewart read a me undies ad.

Like, how hard is this to, like, figure out how to make the transition? They didn't even bother. And now they're going, oh, no one wants to watch the stuff that we make anymore. I guess we have to sell ourselves to private equity and cash out. Even with the late night shows, they're saying, oh, it's too expensive. Like, we have to end them. We have to end Colbert. Like, the daily show may be next.

And it's like, obviously there's the whole, like, politics of it all, too. but like the the like stated reason is like oh it's like too expensive to make and it's like millions and millions and millions of people are watching this you can't do some yeah some product integration or something like I mean my understanding is that John Stewart has most recent contract like re-uped for one year but wanted to do more but they were like no just a year for you like and they literally have the most famous beloved guy in late night begging to do more. more time with them. And they're like, no, I don't know. We can't really figure it out. Like, you can't, you're going to let, you're going to let that walk out the door, you know? Like, you, you, you know what you, what you have? It makes me, it's, it's, it, they're, they're allowing, you know, one of the, like, crown jewels of American capitalism to just, like, die on the vine, you know? Yeah, you know, I saw my parents, uh, the other weekend and, uh, they, have a TV,

they're subscribed to all the streamers, but they don't have it on their main TV. They don't have it all in their laptops and their, and their devices.

And I was like, well, let's put it on the TV. You guys can watch whatever you want on the TV, Netflix, parent, whatever. And I was setting it up and I wrote out the instructions.

Like, you change the input. You can watch Netflix now. And my mom just looked at me and she was like, listen, I can't learn anything new. And I feel like that's where we're at

with media. You know, they're like, I can't, I can't learn a new thing. I can't learn a new thing. I'll just give up instead. You know, I'll just, I'll just live like, like how I've lived. Just sell it to the Oracle guy and see what he does. Exactly. It's so, it's so sad.

We haven't mentioned very briefly that as part of this, it's like, Barry Weiss is going to run CNN too. Or like, you know, it's like CNN is part of WB and it's going to Skydance in the same way that CBS did. And so not that I have like much love for CNN or anything, but it's like kind of yet another bad thing that's going to happen from this. I mean, I think we look at CNN as, you know, if you look at it just as a channel on your television, like yeah, kind of who cares? Like, I often will turn on CNN to find out about the news and it's just two heads yammering and I turn it off, right? But when you compare that to like it as a news gathering organization that we are,

are going to lose a major news gathering organization because it'll be on some level combined with CBS News and turned into a propaganda outlet. Like, that's bad for America overall as well. That's just journalists out of work. That's us knowing less about the world. It's like equivalent to, you know, shutting down labs at the NIH when it comes to like, we will know less about the world around us because there will be less people like noticing shit and writing it down and then telling us about it.

And the crazy, so just to talk about to wrap this up, the policy piece of it is like under, so we haven't had like antitrust enforcement in this country in like 40 years. Yeah, what is that? That's what we used to have this idea that when one company bought all the other companies that that was bad for the economy and democracy and we would stop them from doing it. Petty Roosevelt was famous for this. He was the trust buster. You ever see one of those political cartoons in school where he's like...

He's right around a moose. Yeah. And he's like huge and he's like standing across our railroad track and he's like breaking a train apart or something in his giant hands. Like that was cool shit. That was what we used to do in this country. Is he available? I think, I think AI version. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. Maybe he has like an extremely degraded. Great great grandson. son who's a right now. Okay. Let's try to think positively, guys. Yeah.

There's always through this. So since the Reagan years, we basically haven't had antitrust enforcement of any kind, but like that was starting to turn back in the last Biden administration. It was like one of the things that the Biden administration doing was doing that was like unambiguously good. Lina. Lina Kahn. Antitrust Bay. Our queen. Queen.

Queen. We love her. RIP. RIP. Well, she's doing great work out of office now. She's like, she's like, spreading the good work. Oh, he used to work for Mondani, yeah. Past guests on the show, hopefully future guests on the show.

But like even under like, I have to believe, you know, the Obama administration or even maybe the George W. Bush administration, CBS News buying CNN would have raised some eyebrows and would have had some antitrust enforcement going, hey, one news organization buying another is like one of the things that is like maybe deep in the bones of the American government as being like this is a bad thing and we still have rules about it. But under the Trump administration, because, like, they are literally just trying to set up a media oligarchy. Like, they're just going to give it the thumbs up because it's their literal policy goal. Well, now the antitrust is like, oh, all existing antitrust lawsuits like Live Nation Ticketmaster just got settled. And it's like, oh, you pay a bribe to the administration and we give you a slap on the wrist and you do whatever you want. Yeah, they settled that one so fast. The judge was like, what the fuck?

Like they, like, the, the DOJ was just like, ah, we're out. I don't know. Sell a couple of amphitheaters and we're done. And the judge in the case was pissed at the DOJ for like, you know, making that happen in like six hours. Yeah, they're just not doing antitrust at all. The only hope is that there's a bunch of state attorney generals. Attorneys general. Sorry.

Correct. Yeah. I've got like. You saved yourself. That was a close one. I've got the notes of like William Sapphires on grammar. column that I used to read the New York Times Magazine when I was a child in my head. The estate attorneys general, including like Rob Bonta from California, are like going to be

taking a look at the merger. I don't know that any group of state attorney estate AGs have been able to stop a merger of this size before, but like at least they're going to try seemingly. They're like a justice league or something? What is this? I don't know with it. Sometimes the state AGs will like team up to bring a suit against a company. like this. And it works better when they're also doing it with the DOJ, obviously. But it has been

the case that like state AGs have been able to do shit before. Like, uh, it'll be like California, Illinois, New York, like Maryland, blah, blah, blah, will all sue in their own states usually and be like, oh, this violates our laws. And like, they, it's all the same lawsuit, but they like send each other emails and I'm like, what if we all sue? So, that's cute. You can also make it a federal lawsuit. Can they or no? I think so. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because they have standing because they're like, oh, we are in the United States. Yeah. So I mean, at the very least, they can hopefully make it more painful. But, you know, if you're David Ellison, you have to think, like, the president is my friend. I don't

think I'll have a problem. Well, to stay positive. You know, if this mega merger happens, we may finally get like a SpongeBob Green Lantern Yellowstone movie. That you could buy through ticket master. Does that sound appealing to? The live experience. The live experience. It doesn't even have that. At least when Disney bought shit, it was like,

hey, at least Spider-Man can hang out with the Muppets and people had some level of weird excitement for that, you know? Oh, we're reuniting the Avengers or whatever. But in this case, it's such mystery meat of IP. It's sad. One other point I have to make about this merger is that,

Like Warner Brothers might be the most merged with company in American history. And it's always a disaster. Like you might have in the back of your mind, Time Warner as a phrase. That's because like decades ago, Warner Brothers merged with Time Life magazine. Obviously not a business that's doing great anymore. Then there was AOL Time Warner. That's what I always knew them as.

I was like, oh, AOL Time Warner. That's not going well. Put yourself at a time in history when America Online was such a big deal that they would merge with Warner Brothers, the television and record label and movie studio makes absolutely no sense. AOL obviously now dead. Then it was spun out again. Warner Brothers then merged with AT&T. That was when I was making the show Adam Ruins Everything at True TV, which was unconstitutional. which was under Turner, which was under Warner Brothers.

Warner Brothers mergers with AT&T. That merger is a disaster. They lay off tons of people. I've talked about before publicly. They just fired everybody at True TV, shut down the entire network, canceled every show, including mine. That merger went so badly that as soon as the merger was closed, they were basically immediately trying to unwind it

because it was such a drag on AT&T. It's also crazy because, like, there's no, like, more extractive business than, like, telecom. It's, like, the margins in telecom, like, AT&T and Verizon and Comcast just, like, print money. They couldn't figure it out. Also, what I'm hearing is, without these mergers, we could have been on season 17 of Adam ruins everything. 100% we would have been. I mean, the show was making money. It was making money for them, as was, like, most of the other shows on the network.

Like, it was a cable channel. And, you know, when they, AT&T bought it, they said, okay, we're going to consolidate. They fired everybody who ran true TV. There was a president, a vice president, had a marketing, had a programming, 100 people. They fired all them. They canceled everything.

They put it all under TBS, TNT, right? So now that's being run by one guy. The new guy who ran those three channels called me to tell me the show was canceled. Then they unwound that merger. Then Warner Brothers merged with Discovery. And they consolidated again. So that guy was fired. And they put all of those channels under.

HBO Max later Max. I have a thought on the discovery merger, which is like, this is an exaggeration, but is my memory, which I worked in the discovery building as like an intern for some other news outlet at some point that was in the discovery building

in Silver Spring, Maryland, which I believe is their headquarters or was their headquarters at the time. And there was like 17 people working there. So it's like, how did this occur? Like, how did discovery like get, like, what do they make besides Shark Week? Yeah, I mean, they were like a good conglomeration of cable channels, right, of like these nonfiction cable channels.

But they were, I believe, smaller than Warner Brothers. And like, I don't understand the financial, you know, magic trick that these, that happens where a smaller company buys a bigger company. But I'm pretty sure they just borrow a bunch of money. And then to service the debt, they have to, you know, fire a bunch of people so they can pay the loan back because now they have this giant loan on the books. It is bizarre. It feels like the smaller. fish, or eating the bigger fish.

Yeah. Even with the Paramount one, it feels like, like Warner Brothers has such huge IP. They have DC and Game of Thrones and all this legacy TV. And Paramount has like SpongeBob. Is that? Paramount is much smaller than Warner Brothers.

It's way smaller. Like in terms of like number of people who work there and that sort of thing. I was looking it up before this. It's like they have like several thousand fewer employees. Yeah. And so it's, like we've gone through wave after wave of this in Hollywood. It always results in mass layoffs.

It always results in making less stuff. It always results in the companies themselves performing more poorly and the merger being unwound slightly later. The only person that ever benefits is the house flipper themselves. That's why I keep using that metaphor is because like everybody knows that house flipping sucks. The house is worse after it's been flipped, right? because they've just like put a shitty coat of paint on it. The only person who profit is. They put down those gray floors too.

Yeah. Yeah. Think about that. Fucking gray floor TV network. That's a world. People move in and they're like, this isn't, the light switches don't even work. Like the wiring is bad. There's, you put your hand through the wall and like a, you know, you just, a hole is there.

Like, it's, it's, it's very sad. And what's the sad is. thing about it is we keep doing it over and over again, and the same thing keeps happening. When your company is growing fast, order fulfillment can make or break your success. ShipStation's platform brings order management, rate shopping, inventory, and returns, warehouse systems, and comprehensive analytics all in one place, saving customers 15 hours per week on fulfillment. Shipstation compares rates across all major global carriers, USPS, UPS, UPS, and FedEx, including

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Well, I'm more of a comedian, so I got to look at the actual facts here because I can't, I'm worse that bringing up the actual fact. But basically, you know, after the 2024 election, there was sort of a moratorium for the Democratic Party and a lot of people were saying like maybe, you know, a lot of Democratic operatives and advisors were talking about how maybe like we need to abandon trans people.

Maybe that was too weird. Maybe if we shift a little to the right, you know, cut off some slack on the left. We'll move to the right. We'll get more voters. And recently, this is a very small window, but in the North Virginia, no, sorry, North Carolina primary for the Democrats, Valeria Levy, who ran on a pro-LGBQ platform, ousted Nassif Majid, who was one of these Democrats who was helping, you know, move these anti-trans initiatives forward. And it's sort of, you know, this is a small window, but it's, it's feeling like we're sort of moving back towards supporting trans rights in the, in the Democratic Party. And there's, there's, it seems like there's maybe a viable path to like being electable and being popular and still, you know, standing for your, for your values and your rights. Do you think that the national Democrats are going to, like, pay attention to what happened in North Carolina, you said? Oh, no way. There's no way. No, I, you know, you do see.

Like Gavin Newsom, like suddenly, you know, switching over being like, oh, like, I got to go talk to Hassan Piker. I got to. Oh, is he doing that? I know he's talking to Hassan Piker, but like, is he backing off of, you know, his disavowal of trans people? I don't think he's backed off of it yet, but, you know, he's a weather vein, which is what we love. We don't love it. But, you know, I think he'll blow with whichever way the wind goes, which is not. Not good.

Yeah. You know, you want someone to affirm in their beliefs. Yeah. And, you know, I think it's also showing that, like, just like throwing a marginalized community under the bus is not going to help you win elections. Yeah. You know, because it looks bad for both the Republican side and the Democratic side, you know. It's like, it's like, you have this, this, like, sniveling kind of, like, like, spineless,

feckless person. Mm-hmm. It's not appealing to either party, right? Yeah. Well, at least like the Republicans like seem to believe in their hate. Whereas like the problem with Democrats for so much is like they're trying to calculate like the perfect position that is like going to be popular. And also ignoring what is actually popular. Like trans rights are popular under every poll.

And it's like turns out it's not so good of a message to be like, oh, we hate what this administration is doing. We're going to protect human rights, but not trans people's human rights. And like maybe not immigrants human rights, depending. on like the type of immigrant. It's like people just want a clear message and like for human rights in general to not be something that some people get and other people don't. Right. I also say that this North Carolina thing is a small window, but there's other people that are that are working towards supporting trans rights and it's working. You have like James Talrico talking about how he believes every child is a child of God and that supporting anti-trans

legislation will hurt the children of Kentucky. You have Graham Platner talking about how it's just a wedge issue that billionaires are funding and that it's not a real thing. You know, it's really crazy that we're even talking about it because it feels like trans issues.

It feels like the new pineapple on pizza. It's like everyone has an opinion on something that doesn't affect anyone in their daily life. Everyone has an opinion and nobody cares at the same time. Yeah, and it's not not important, but it's like you go on a date and it's like the first question. It's like,

do you care about pineapple and pizza? And it's like, why the fuck are we talking about this? I mean, it was such, I didn't understand the discourse in the Democratic Party in the first place when like, for Gavin Newsom types to be like, oh, we lost the presidential election because we supported trans rights too much. But the Democrats did not support trans rights in the election. Kamala Harris did not in fact ever say anything in support of trans rights. people, apart from like one clip they found from like five years earlier where she was asked a very specific question that they took out of context. And then she refused to even explain what she meant by that one. She was like confronted by it about report. But I think about like, you know,

gender affirming care for prisoners. Right. They weren't even coming out swinging. They were very like tepid about this. And so for then Gavin Newsom to be like, oh, the good political move for me is to invite conservative is on my show and say that I don't think trans kids should play sports. It's like, well, that's not why you lost in the first place. And then in terms of the flag waving in the wind, all the reporting I saw or a punditry I saw on the right wing side was like, look at this fucking cuck. Like that's what they think of Newsom. Exactly.

Oh, he has Ben Shapiro on his show. Ben Shapiro says, you don't like trans people, do you? And Gavin Newsom says, no, I don't anymore. No, I don't like them at all. And then they react with like, what the fuck? This guy, oh, he just concedes. He rolled over. Oh, okay.

So he sucks. He's a stupid cuck. As opposed to what if, what if like Newsom or any of these other people said, do you think trans could play sports should play sports? What if their answer was, you're asking me about children's sports? Like, that's your biggest concern. Oh, you're upset because like a 12 year old might not win a gold medal. Like, what the fuck are you talking about?

I thought they all got participation trophies now anyway. So what's the problem? Totally. Also, for Gavin Newsom to say that the Democrats need to be more culturally normal, I feel like Gavin needs to work on being like more culturally not a Batman villain. You know, from Batman forever. I saw a post, you know, I probably on Blue Sky or something, but it was like, Democrats are like twisting themselves into knots to be like, oh, like, I don't know,

like maybe kind of support trans rights, but all. also like not. And then like the entire rest of the world is like fucking love RuPaul's drag race. Like most people don't care. Like it's such a tiny minority of people who who have turned this into a wedge issue, have turned this into like just shouting. It's like there was one trans athlete in the Olympics this year that there's like there's so few. It doesn't, to your point, it doesn't affect it doesn't affect me.

It doesn't affect anyone except for trans. people who are being attacked. Yeah. I would love to hear a politician say, because I think almost everyone to agree with this, sports don't matter. It's a game. Like, it doesn't matter who wins. In fact, the entire point of sports is that it doesn't really matter who wins.

It's fun. You lose and you go, oh, man, I lost. Oh, geez, well, at least I can still have food to eat or whatever. I'm still, like, living a life. And I understand that, like, in America, a lot of people, all they really care about day to day is who wins the football game. But like if you go to them and you say, hey, you don't, this doesn't really matter though, right? They say, oh, yeah, no, of course.

It doesn't matter that. And like, the fact that like the Democrats would just concede to this extremely pernicious framing that's designed to make them look bad is, like, think about the propaganda that you're being confronted with and then figure out what the answer, the actual answer to it is, not just rolling over. Like, what fucking make an argument about, and stand up for your shit, you know? Yeah, it's some real Charlie Brown shit of, like, kick, you know, the football. I'm going to kick at this time. Yeah. They pull it out. It's sort of, you know, the classic question of like, hey, how long have you been beating your wife, you know?

And they fall for it every time. You know, they're like, I don't beat my wife. Me? Excuse me. And it's like, it's like, you guys fail for it again. We're now we're having a conversation about you beating your wife. Like, what? And it's every time.

Yeah. It's also just like so many democratic politicians are robots to the point where it's like when they're asked about this question, they're like, you know what? I actually don't think that we should be talking about this. We should be talking about the price of eggs. Like or it's just like they pivot in such like a like where it's clear that they don't have an opinion and they haven't thought through their like how they actually feel about this. They've like talked to, you know, the like focus panels and tried to figure out like what is the perfect thing that I can say. that I don't have to actually say anything at all. Yeah, and they've also forgotten that they have the ability to change public opinion.

You know, so I was at a couple of weeks ago, I happened to be doing stand-up at the Democratic convention, oh, sorry, in San Francisco, where the California Democratic Convention was also happening. And so I was hanging out with some people I knew who were there, and we started talking about this. And some of the political people, who are very good, smart people, but they're sort of in the bubble a little bit, you know, they were like, well, what are we supposed to do about the fact that, like,

some people just have like a kind of religious belief where they like hate trans people. That was basically the argument, you know, like we want them want to win their votes and like you can't convince them otherwise. And I'm like, that's incorrect. Like five years ago, those people did not care. They were propagandized via like a concerted political effort to change their opinion when, you know, how long ago was the revolt against the North Carolina bathroom bill? Like, what? So like 2016, I want to say, or 17? Yeah, so 10 years ago, the entire country rose up in support of trans people.

The NCAA canceled basketball games or some shit. Right. Or was it the NBA. Some, they lost the basketball games. I know this. North Carolina cares about basketball. Yeah. It's a pretty basketball-focused place.

And so then, like, there was a concerted right-wing campaign to, like, drive a wedge in and, like, demonized trans people. and like they realized as political actors, we can change public opinion. Why do Democrats not realize that they are capable of doing the same thing? It's how politics fucking works. Well, Dylan, sorry. Go.

I'm sort of like, you know, in admiration of like, because I, you know, as a writer and storyteller, I'm like, the Republicans are incredible at just like pulling something out of nothing and riling people up and be like, this is what you're going to be angry about. And people like, this is what I'm angry about. I mean, how do, the Democrats aren't doing it, you know?

it's like what do we do it feels like we're always on the defensive I was going to say to your point though this is the good news segment yeah but no as in like that might be changing because now there are there is a new like wave of politicians who are running who do have like coherent like moral arguments that they are making in a way that is convincing voters many of whom aren't that hard to convince because like still most people support trans rights. They support human rights. And it's like, that's good. So we have been talking about like the Democratic Party of the last few election cycles. And of course, there's still so much of that element around. But it does feel like maybe that tide is starting to change.

Totally. When I said no earlier to the Democratic Party adopting these things, I was being, I was just trying to be funny. I was just trying to be funny. I want to say hopeful. I want to hope that they can adopt these new strategies. I mean, you have to imagine. like the success of Zoroamam Dani in New York is like hopefully teaching Democrats around the country what to do because I don't even know. I've never heard him be asked about like trans issues, but I know what his answer would be. He'd be, he'd say, yeah, I support trans people. Yeah. And I'm running for mayor of New York.

And I'm like, let's talk about that instead. He would like state his position and then move on just like he did about like, you know, Gaza over. over again. Yeah, yeah. No, I stand with the Palestinian people and I'm running for mayor of New York, so let's talk about that. And people have a fundamental respect for that. Like, that's why I think a big reason when Dauron goes to like meet Trump, Trump is like, oh, this guy's a real dude. Because he believes what he believes and he doesn't apologize for it. And people do respect that. And that's why people don't respect Kevin News. Right. Like I said, weather vane. Like what are we doing? Yeah.

Just to go on a tangent, I wish I could be in those meetings where Mom Dani was going in, talking to Trump and just wrapping around his finger. What do you think those first words were when he enters the room? You know, was it like, hey, there's my New York Brooklyn Pizza Boy. One New York or another, whatever. You know, hey, I printed a picture of you. The fake newspapers were just like incredible, incredible movement. Hey, I'm fucking walking here and I see you're walking.

and two, two New Yorkers. Two New Yorkers who are best friends. I think it's such good psychology because it's like, look, everybody has that place that they used to, like, whether it's your college or like your high school, where like if somebody who you thought was important at that time, even if like now they suck, if they came to you and they were like, hey, good job now that you're like 42 or whatever, you'd be like, oh, thank you. That matters to me.

And for Donald Trump, that's like the mayor of New York. Like, all he ever wanted was important people in New York to like him. And like Zoran knew that and exploited it. Yeah. Those posters said like Trump saves New York or something. Trump to New York. Let's build. Something like that.

So good. It's just like if you're, yeah, if your high school bully was like, you know what? You're all right. You'd be like, thank you. Even though you matter more than that. Yeah. And then he immediately like leverage that to get. things that he wanted. He got that

pro-Palestinian protester freed. Crazy. Biggest tragedy in America is that Zoran was not born in America and can never run for president. Isn't that like such a I know. The left is cursed. Right. Yeah. As much as

he's like laying out like a prescription policy. I'm like he's also maybe a generational talent. Yeah. It'll be pretty hard to replicate. Yeah. Yeah. He's a, he's like, he definitely seems to be so far Obama level in terms of generational talent and the fact that he is disqualified from ever seeking the highest office in the land is pretty brutal pretty brutal okay I would like to wrap up with again we're trusting a new format here but being that we're talking about a lot of bummer shit I want to give people a reason to live and to continue to live on earth so I'd love to just like talk about a recent recent piece of art or media you guys have seen our experience that was powerful to you in any way.

Because that's honestly what keeps me going. So I'm a journalist and for the last like decade I have just been like reading news, consuming the news. And then I listen to audio books that are also journalistic in nature like nonfiction books only. And I tried something very novel recently, which is to read a novel. I didn't do that on purpose. And so I read this book called Piranesi by Susanna Clark. I don't know if you are aware of it, but a friend recommended it to me. And it's very like bore haste in nature.

It's like magical realism. And it's about this person who is like trapped in a fictional house that is infinite. And also the ocean is in the house. So like the tides rise through the house. And it's just like pretty quick read, fantastically written. I felt like I really needed to not be so 24-7 jacked into the news. And it was an amazing escape for me. So highly recommend.

I think it's like two, three years old. It's pretty recent. It's an incredible book. And it's one of these books that like as a work of like fantastical fiction, it gets really concrete. Like it's sort of written this really realistic way where it's like this guy is sort of living this infinite house and has lost his memory, but it's really concerned with, like, where he gets his food and, like, how he charts the course of time. And, like, it could be a lot more, like,

abstract and impressionist, but you do get a lot of answers about, like, what happened and why is he there? But it still really works on a really clear symbolic level. That's what I really liked about it. I'm not, like, a big fantasy guy, but it was like, it's, like, magical realism, basically. And so I'm like, oh, this is, like, very ground. kind of, even though this world is so wacky. Yeah, it's sort of like Borges combined with the readability and concreteness of like a Neil Gaiman without the serial sexual abuse. I love that book.

I think about it so often. That's a great pick, Dylan. Cool. I saw a movie be called Nirvana, the band, the show, the movie. Yeah. And it's great. In the early aughts, there was this web series where these two Canadian guys would hang out and try to book a show at their local pub called the Rivoli. Later, that was an HBO show, I think, or no, sorry, a vice show.

Yeah. And now, like, 20 years later, they made a movie. And it might be too niche if you're not familiar with it. I started in the theater. I had never heard of it. Okay. And you enjoyed it. I enjoyed it.

I was, like, somewhat baffled by the beginning of it because you really, you are, it is the effect of you're watching episode 200 of something that you've never heard of before. Yeah. But that was kind of part of the charm. Kind of fun. You can still get into it. Because it sort of just comes down to it's like about two friends like goofing around. And it's very like pure.

You know, they're Canadian. They're constantly like apologizing to people in their, like, because they're doing all these antics around town and they're like, sorry, sorry. Or like, it's where they like they like check in on tourists like like, like, like, like, just like midway through the movie as they're running around, like, trying to do these hijinks. They're like, hey, like, are you enjoying, like, your time here? I think they're in, like, Toronto or something. Yeah, the entire movie. You just made so many Canadians mad by saying, I think they're in Toronto or something.

They're all the, it's all, they have like one city up there. Torontoians are like, this is the most Toronto movie ever made. Yeah, I mean, the whole movie was shot by, like, four, like, it's just them, the two of them and I think two camera people just, just like running around the city of Toronto. shooting it live in front of crowds and stuff. So there's lots of times where they're just interacting with real people who happen to be around. Right. Because they're not closing any sets. And they do, I think you're bearing the lead a little bit because they do some absolutely,

like, unbelievable stunts in the movie that make you go, because the movie is very clearly just four people running around, it makes you go, how the fuck did they do that? I didn't gather that there were stunts in this film. There are some incredible stunts. Like, parkour we're talking about, or is it a different type? Oh, well, much bigger. I mean, should we do a minor spoiler for the first 20 minutes of the movie? Yeah.

Okay, spoiler alert for the first 20 minutes. Do you want to say what happens in the first 20 minutes? Oh, I forgot what the name of the tower is. Okay, they climb. So they go to the top of the CN Tower, which is the space needle of Toronto, right? Which has an observation deck where you're like chained up to. you know, a safety harness and they take

bolt cutters, cut themselves free of the safety harness, jump off with parachutes, and then parachute onto the roof of the... Skydome or something. Yeah, where the Blue Jays play, which is like right below. And

like maybe 15% of this was done in Adobe After Effects or something, right? Like maybe they did some amount of digital shit, but a lot of it clearly was not. Right. I've heard an interviews, they didn't get clearance or anything to go up there. Hey, can we go up on the CN Tower?

Will you guys do a fake, you know, walk with us? The whole, like, there's a security moment and they find the guy's box cutters or, sorry, like, clippers or whatever, bolt cutters. Yeah. And they're just like, oh, this guy has bolt cutters. Can you bring them up? And they're like, yeah, sure. And they just brings them up.

It, it, it, it, it, it, it, there's so many levels that make you go, how the fuck was this. And that's one of like 10 things like that in that movie. The other thing I really loved about it is that it has the effect of so many pieces of Canadian comedy specifically where like once every 10 years a piece of Canadian comedy will like bubble up in America. And you'll you'll be like, what the fuck is this? And you're like three Canadian friends will be like, oh yeah, you haven't heard of letter Kenny or whatever. And it's something that, oh, these like two maniacs have been screaming into DVD. cameras in stupid outfits in Toronto for like 15 years and are so good at what they do because they've been doing it for so long, but we've never heard of it here. And it's a very strange thing

that happens over and over again with Canadian comedy. Right. They do some incredible stuff with like their old footage from when they were like early 20s. Yeah. And to now, they like, they like split it up in this like really incredible way that's also very like endearing and you're like they've been buddies for so long. It's very sweet. This is like, like in 2008, I was also shooting comedy on DV cameras with my like college sketch group. This is like, what if I continued to be in that

college sketch group and then we all grew up? And if your goals were still the same goals from, 25 years ago. Yeah, we could cut ourselves into the old footage. Really fun. Really spectacular. I think it's just out of theaters, but maybe you can find it somewhere if you live in a city that has such things.

Last night, I've been, really my respite from the news has been the Criterion Channel streaming service, which is like one of the only good things that you can pay five bucks a month to left in America. I feel like last night I watched to live and die in L.A., which is a classic noir action thriller from the 80s directed by William Friedkin. one of the most, like, in the first five minutes, I was like, this movie fucks. Like, it's, have you, you've, I haven't seen it. I'm very sorry. But it's high on my list.

Tell us about it, Adam. Yeah, tell us, please. It like has every, it's like every cliche from an 80s cop movie dialed up to the max. Like, in the first five minutes, the main character's grizzled, like, senior partner goes, I'm retiring in three days. But I need your help. on one last job. Like that's,

it's like, that's where it originated. Yeah. I think it did. It literally did. There's a lot of like, McBain. There's a lot of like neon block printing

combined with like squiggly handwriting fonts. There's a lot of synth music. The main cop whose name I'd never learned. But he wears like really tight jeans and he's always kicking open doors, jumping into rooms and then popping like a slutty little squat like in an abandoned warehouse. Willem Defoe plays a counterfeiter. The entire movie is about them trying to bust Willem DeFoe, who's a counterfeitter,

which is not a very important, like, person to have to make. Yeah. But, like, they, like, they got to stop this guy. He, like, tears up the screen playing a very, like, uh, sort of evil, sexually ambiguous, you know, villain. Um, it's just, it, it's like, the whole movie is so extra in a really delicious way that I, uh, strong.

Strong recommend. Who directed it? William Friedkin, who I think also directed, like, the French Connection. It also has a one of those car chases about two-thirds the way through where they just destroy so many, like, late 70s, big American cars, like, just straight up drive cars into the L.A. River. Like, I love an L.A. car chase, like, both in real life and in film. Yeah.

I mean, it really makes you go, why in movies are they not destroying cars? Destroying cars today. Like, destroying cars is not that expensive. It's like every car is what, 20 grand or something? Blow up some fucking car, like, demolish their shocks, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Shoot out the back window. Yeah, no CG.

We want them to actually explode. You can tell. You can tell. You can tell. You can feel like people hiding behind glass, like on the other side of the camera. Yeah. Yeah. Very exciting.

You want to feel the heat from the fireball, you know? Totally. I want to see the film melt a little bit. It's a blast. You'll have a great time watching. Do you now find yourself driving around L.A. Being like, this whole city's rotten. And you're just like going past the tartine on sunset.

It has that feel. I mean, most of the movie seems to take place down by like the docks or something like that. Like there's a lot of like chemical refineries. And largely in El Segundo, just primarily. It does have that, it does have that like, yeah, weird L.A. feeling where, you know, you're just always in back of a warehouse somewhere, you know, on some alley. Great places for shootouts and car blowups. A hundred percent. Thank you guys so much for coming on the show. Was this new format fun? I had a good time. Personally. Okay, great. Well, thank you guys for doing it. We'll do it again sometime.

Thanks. Oh, wait. We got new plugs. Fuck. I almost forgot. We got to do plugs. Shit. Yeah, Jason, I'm a co-founder of 404 Media, which is a journalist-owned tech journalist outlet.

We're at 404Media. 404Media, like, on all social platforms. And Dylan, where can people find you? You do so many amazing things. We're going to be able to find some of it. I'm at DMakes on the internet.

I'm going to be in a bunch of the Joy Who Lived shows in early next month, early April. So I'll post about them at DMACs. makes. That's great. And you also do great stuff on social media and you wrote for an awesome animated show this year. Yes. Called Super Mutant Magic Academy, which is coming out soon. This fall, I think. Amazing. Fall winter. On cartoon? On, uh, on Warner Brothers Discovery Paramounts. Netflix. Oh no. You know the one. We'll look for it there. Dylan and Jason, thank you guys so much for being here. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Well, thank you again to Jason and Dylan for coming on this show.

I hope you had a good time. I certainly did. If you'd like to see more episodes like this, let us know in the comments or shoot me an email at factually at Adamconover.net. And, you know, we'll do some more of these. Don't worry, we'll keep doing the expert interviews as well.

But, you know, let us know if you'd like to see more episodes like this one too. Of course, if you want to support the show, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. We would love to have you there. If you want to come see me live on the road in Sacramento, California, La Jolla, California,

Hartford, Connecticut, in just a week and a half, April 18th of the Den Theater in Chicago. I'm recording my new special or in May, Kansas City, Missouri. Head to Adamconover.net for all those tickets and tour dates. Thank you so much for being here. I want to thank my producers, Tony Wilson and Sam Roudman.

Everybody here at HeadGum for making the show possible. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time on Factually. That was a HeadGum podcast.