It Could Happen Here - Inside the WGA Strike

Episode Date: July 25, 2023

Robert sits down with old friend and WGA writer Soren Bowie to talk about what Hollywood writers want and where their struggle against the studios stands today.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking music, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and

influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and you know when things fall apart one of the few things that can keep you on an even keel you know keep you feeling like there's something that makes sense in the world it's good tv you know i think we can all agree no job more important than making television because it's really for a surprising amount of the population the only thing keeping them on the ragged edge of sanity um and obviously if you're at all aware of

the news uh both the writers guild uh the wga uh and the actors guild sag after uh have both separately uh although they are now you know on strike at the same time have both kind of independently announced strikes after a breakdown in negotiations with the major studios um and to to talk with me today about what's going on what's it like being a writer on strike um is my friend and uh one of the people who makes a show that helps keep me on the ragged edge of sanity soren bow Bowie. Sorin! How you doing? You're simply the best! Hey, everybody! You're better than all

the rest. Oh, stop it, Tina. Stop it. Thank you. Nice. Very good. Very good. Hi. How's it going? Sorin, you are my former colleague at cracked.com.net backslash AOL. Don't send anyone there now.

And you are also, or at least before the strike hit, were a, have been for the last several years, a writer on American Dad. One of the most consistently funny animated shows of like 20 years now, almost. It's been on the air. Stop it. Stop. Oh, thank you. Robert, Tina, you guys are the best.

That's very nice of you. Thank you very much for saying that. It did cost a lot of money to get her in the studio today. That's very kind of you to say. Yeah, we try very hard, but it also has like a feel at the show of like the warden isn't watching. Like we're kind of allowed to do what we want

and it's been great. You love your job. It's very obvious that I think probably everyone there loves writing for that show. Most of the people I know who write for TV have the same attitude of like, wow, I can't believe I get to do this. But that attitude is great. And it makes life livable. But what doesn't make life livable and what makes the enjoyment of the job harder is starving to death, which is an increasing reality for a lot of writers. Over the last

like 10 years, so a decade ago, about 33% of TV writers got what was paid like the minimum rate, which is kind of the minimum rate you get paid to get staffed on a union show. And the WGA says that about half of TV writers are at that point now. Writer pay has declined about 14% over the last five years. And that's with – that's like if you kind of take out inflation, right? Everybody's making – Yeah, with inflation, it's like 23. Yeah, it's about 23% writer-producer pay over the last decade with inflation factored in. So that sucks because people aren't watching 23% less TV.

In fact, I think we're watching more TV than we ever have before. Yeah. And if you listen to the kind of numbers given by streaming platforms about how many people are watching, it sure doesn't seem like TV writers have gotten 23% worse at their jobs. So anyway, the WGA went into negotiations earlier this year, and basically to kind of shorten it, we're asking for more money, more money in residuals, more money in upfront pay, changes to some policies that streamers were using to kind of avoid. There's been sort of this effort by streamers for a while now to kind of kill the concept of a writer's room in a lot of shows.

And they have a couple of different sort of fucky ways to do that. I've got to say, Robert, it is a dream to come on a podcast with you because you do your fucking homework. Usually I'm the one who has to explain all this stuff, but this is great. I'm loving where this is going. Go on, you're absolutely right. Can you walk us through kind of what's been happening? Because that's a thing that I think is sort of,

you missed that on kind of the big level sort of like discussions of this is like, what a writer's room is and sort of what streamers have been trying to do to change that. Because fundamentally, like one thing people who know what they're talking about will point out is that like movies are, you know, not that scripts don't matter, but it's like a

director's medium. That's like the big sort of like guiding, you know, through the vision of like what a film is going to be. And TV is a writer driven medium more often. You'll at least hear that a lot. And I kind of want to talk about like what is a writer's room and what has been changing in terms of how studios have been trying to edge that concept out? Great, great question. So, so writer's room traditionally, like you think back to

broadcast television in its heyday, the way a writer's room worked is you had probably, first of all, you're going to have like 20 to 22 episodes a season. And then within that, you've got a block of anywhere from like 10 to almost sometimes 20 writers. And the reason that you have so many writers on a show like that is because while you're working on it, it's also in production. So as stories are being broken, and that means that there are rooms where people are creating a story

together as that's going on, there's like six other things going on. Like you're going to have, they're probably filming during that time. And if that's your particular written by episode, like that's the episode with your name on it, you might be on set for that because you're going to be having to make changes on the fly while that's going on. There's table reads happening. There's joke punch-ups happening. So there's generally a separate room for that. And so you need like a pretty big group of people to just make a show, to just write a show. And that's to keep the hours

within like, to keep them bearable. I mean, it doesn't even, you wouldn't even turn that into a nine to five generally. That's still a lot of hours with a lot of people, but at least it's bearable for everybody. Now streaming has tried to change that because they're tired of hiring so many writers and they're tired of paying writers. And so with streaming, there's different loopholes that they can get into, which is if you start creating a show, um, before it's even technically greenlit, you can start having writers write episodes, but because it's not greenlit, you're not beholden to the same rules through the WGA. You can start hiring people at their, at a minimum, even if they are, should be making more than that.

And depending on what your position is as a writer, like you start as a staff writer, then you move up to story editor, then executive story editor, and you move up and up and up from there. Generally what happens is if you leave a show as an executive story editor, you don't then go to another show

and drop back down to staff writer. You maintain the position that you have because you've now learned the trade enough that usually you have a skill set that's valuable enough that you should be being paid for being an executive story editor. So what they're doing is they're making sure that people are not being paid for the roles that they generally have because they can do that before a show has been greenlit. And then they will say, we're going to write like, let's just write, uh, 12 episodes. And that's a lot, like that's a whole season of television, but they're doing it before it's green lit. And then what happens is you will have these writers who are burning the midnight oil, trying to get this thing done and calling in a lot of favors from friends. Cause you have a,

such a small group of writers you have maybe like in a in a pre-greenlit room you've got like three or four people trying to write an entire season of a show yeah and as they're writing it they're like they're calling in favors from friends to be like will you come edit this and stuff because you don't have enough people for everything you have to break all these stories simultaneously you have to know what's going on in each individual room but you don't have enough bandwidth for all of that so you're calling in favors from other people like do we just come and like look at this will you just take a look like we need like eyes on this and so you're calling in favors from friends students have figured out that they can they can yeah you can ask people to do this essentially it's like it's

a natural part of the writing process every writer in every form of writing does a version of this and they're like what if we did this to help to make it easier to starve people yeah yeah exactly and then and then what they would do there's different tactics beyond that which is like once those are at once those episodes are written then maybe the studio will will uh they can kind of pick and choose when they want to release that they don't have like a uh it's not like a broadcast television where everything gets released in the fall it's just like you can choose when you want to release it so maybe you wait a year or whatever you release it and then you can release it in two seasons so if you have 12 episodes you can cut those into six episodes which i fucking hate this is a little bit of a distraction but like we miss by because we're not doing seasons the

way they used to there's so much good shit we miss. Think like half the best episodes are Star Trek. We're just like, we have $40 to shoot this episode on. What can we do with like three guys in a room? You know? I know. You miss out on those bottle episodes, those like little ones where you're just like,

or like that, if you think back to Breaking Bad, like there's the fly episode. Yeah, the fly episode, yeah. Oh, it's like the best episode of the show because you've got room to stop and breathe and like build just characters. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. It's like you lose out on all that. Then you can also, because you're breaking it up, you don't have to pay people to like advance them to the next season.

And then that would also be released over the course of like two years. And so you have a writer who's written for maybe like 11 weeks on something, on a show. And then they don't know that they have that job again for another two and a half years. And so there's no consistency. And nothing is stable. And that makes it very, very difficult for writers to keep their jobs and like maintain a writing job it's this really fucked up situation in which i think the streaming era in freeing sort of television from some of like the the way that sweeps used to work the way that a lot of like kind of the way

that you would have to like run shows and the way that they aired when you were you were doing it on like fucking cable and their ad supported has allowed for kinds of TV shows and structures of shows that you never could have had, right? I was just, we're just watching The Bear. Probably the standout episode of The Bear from season two is this like episode about a family Christmas party that's just this absolute like anxious nightmare that's an hour long episode, twice the length of a normal episode. And oftentimes that's kind of a mixed thing with tv but it works in this one and the fact that it's so much longer actually like helps with like trans you could you

could only do that with shows that work the way they do in streaming that wouldn't have been a thing that you would have gotten to do in in 1993 probably but while i think like there's a lot of cool stuff structurally that's gotten to come out of that it's also it's it's made the compensation so much worse it's made the job so much less reliable like it's it's like it's really stark how much more difficult it's become to make a living in tv yeah yeah 100 while tv is more popular than ever yeah yeah that's like it's making more money than it ever possibly has in the past. And certainly through streaming,

like they're not, these, these studios are not moving to streaming because like they, they're early adopters of technology. The money is there. So they're going to streaming. It's like, they're making way more through streaming,

but writers are getting paid less and less because they're finding these like wild West loopholes in streaming. Residuals is another one. That's like a, it, the way that residuals work is it is if you have a show that then gets played again uh through syndication or through streaming you should then get a residual check for every time the episode that you wrote shows up on television

um and it was very easy to track that as it would show up on like our show on American Dad. Yeah, I know that it's going to get played on Cartoon Network. I know that it's going to get played at these other spots. The TBS will rerun it at some point. And I know when those are coming in. With streaming, it's much more difficult to determine when somebody watched something. Not because those numbers don't exist, but because all these platforms that are created by studios will not give out that information.

That information is like in a black box where you have no idea how often a show gets streamed. There's a couple of reasons like people are speculating as to why that might be. One is that either shows are getting watched way more often and people are not getting the proper residuals that they should be, or that the whole business model doesn't quite work. Yeah.

That it's all a con. Yeah. And if you found out how little people were actually watching television, you, this whole, all investors, everything, the whole thing would collapse. I don't know which is true. I don't care. I just want to know what the numbers are. It's like a big part of a big part of this is, is the WGA asking different streaming platforms. You gotta, you gotta be more transparent. You gotta tell us how well our show is doing so that we know if people are getting paid properly. Yeah, and it's, again, it would be one thing

if like writers were getting less than ever and TV was just like dying as a thing, as a creative thing that people want. But there is the money. We know where the money is going. The eight major Hollywood studio CEOs in 2021 made nearly three quarters of a billion dollars in annual salary, which is more than the value of what the WGA and SAG-AFTRA want to take out of them and increase compensation for their members. for their members. For those eight guys,

I'm going to guarantee you, Ari Emanuel, the highest compensated of these CEOs over at Endeavor, $308 million. Like, I don't think he made any of your,

he's not responsible for any of your favorite shows. Whatever like Lion and the Great, you know, made you laugh or cry or like whatever, whatever joke

from American Dad keeps you, you know, makes you suddenly start like bawling out laughing while you're driving down the highway. That was not Ari Emanuel. You know, neither of those shows were Endeavor. Whatever. You know what I'm trying to do here, right?

Yeah, yeah. Ted Sarandos, whatever. Fucking, you know, Bob Iger. All these guys. Like, they're, I mean, fundamentally, like, Bob Iger, one of the big things he did was push the uh the flash movie out into theaters really put a lot of money into that thought it was going to be

important for the brand going forward lost so much money lost like probably about as much money as like the writers guild is asking for an increased compensation this year like if they just hadn't made that movie welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to

be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

Hey, I'm Gianna Prandenti. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down.

I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're gonna get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise.

Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Let's Talk, you guys went on strike. What is it? Has it been like two months now already? Yeah, it's like day 84 or something like that. 84. Yeah, so a little more than two

months. How are you feeling? Like, what does it mean, like, physically to be on strike? Like, going out and picketing and stuff? yeah it's like day 84 or something like that yeah so a little more than two months how are you feeling like what what does it mean like physically to be on strike like going out and picketing and stuff great questions robert uh it's uh it's actually really nice i don't want to say like it's um i enjoy it because i'd rather be getting paid and not being freaking out about the fact that i don't have a job. But, um, going out, it gives me, it gives me a sense of purpose first of all, each day to like get up and go out to the, to the picket lines. Um, and you're out there, you're marching around it. You choose your studio. Like from the majority of the time I go to Sony or I go to Amazon and I know the people

there now it's like going to the gym every day where you get to know the people there and then you build your community. And so I've got this group of people that like i go there these are just people that like i happen to talk to because like we'd see a truck going and we're like oh i hope that's not a teamster truck or whatever and then and then you just like strike up a conversation with somebody you start talking and then you find out that this person like ran malcolm in the middle for eight years and you're like oh. You know, people talk a lot about how the last writers strike, which was kind of like right when I was getting

out of fucking high school. They're not far from that point. Like a year or two later, how the last writers strike was kind of what gave us the birth of like a lot of reality TV. You could almost argue there was a degree to which it like was part of Trump's rise to prominence,

right? Because that's why The Apprentice gets on air because that's a way the studios can get around paying writers. But I also wonder on the opposite end, like how many shows do we get because of connections people make out of the picket line?

Because like folks meet each other and get talking and like, I do wonder if that's like a thing. Yeah, I guarantee it is. I mean, it is shocking how like, how quickly you just chum up with people and like the contact, I shouldn't call it, it's not supposed to be a networking experience, but it chum up with people. And like the contact, I shouldn't call it.

It's like, it's not supposed to be a networking experience, but it just ends up being that. Like you can't help it. Like you're just talking to people and then all of a sudden your jobs come up and you start talking about your work. And then people are like, after a little while, like, well, like send me something, like send me some of your writing.

And then you just become buddies and like you start working on stuff accidentally together. And I guarantee that like by the end of this there'll be writing teams that didn't exist before and there'll be people who want to make stuff together plus the the studio pipeline will be empty so like they're going to want to like fill it with they're going to want to fill it yeah when the strike ends and guaranteed there's going to be people from the lines who came up with stuff on the lines who are going to be like we've got lots like there What about this? And be like, yes, that, buy it. We'll take

that. And just kind of in general, the fact that that's sort of the hope, right? That's actually the thing that can defeat these giant industry colossuses, not just writing TV shows with other people, but the solidarity like the fact that you're building connections with people, the fact that you, there's an understanding of shared interest. You're seeing this, especially like now that like SAG-AFTRA has joined the strike. There's a lot of, a lot of people who are very famous and prominent talking about issues that go well beyond Hollywood, right? The, the, the, the incredible amount that executive pay and compensation has increased over the years. The fact that a lot of companies that used to do things of value and employ people and good jobs have been hollowed out for the short-term profits of vulture capitalists whose job is to fucking suck money out and hand it to shareholders and shit.

Like this is not just a – you know, a lot of this started in the fucking 90s. We've talked about like Jack Welch and GE and kind of like how that company was turned from something that made stuff to something that produced stock value and fired people. And you're getting that

all across entertainment right now. And I think this is, I think, and this is something I think kind of everyone knows on some level, this is an inflection point, right? You know, AI is a part of it. The fact that we're about to see them try to use this technology to cut down the number of people they have to pay even further. But it's like, this is bigger than, than Hollywood. Hollywood is just getting a lot of attention because actors know how to get attention that is the job yeah

yeah that's yeah writers are good at building the narrative and actors are very good at getting attention exactly exactly yeah it's like it was a it's a worst case scenario honestly for like for the studios just and just because it's no coincidence that ups uh is going on strike that all these companies are going on strike right now because the same thing's happening across the board where it's like this consolidation of power and then consolidation of money. And then it's just like, all that you are beholden to when you are at the top of these companies is the shareholders and like getting them money. And so whatever way you can do that, you do it. And a lot of times the way you do that is that you just fuck everybody at the bottom

and figure out how to carve out money from them and bring it, rise it to the top. bottom and figure out how to carve out money from them and bring it, rise it to the top. And so, yes, I think that it's what happened was the WGA went on strike. The WGA is a very strong, good guild,

good union that like does not blink. And, and everyone saw that. And immediately people were on the side of the WGA in a way that I think no one anticipated that all everybody else in unions is like, no, this is wrong. Like we should, we're dealing with the exact same stuff. And universally, everyone seems to be on the side of unions right now. Then that's like, we should use that. Like we should, we should ride that wave a little bit. Um, and absolutely they should, because there's, there's so many things that are systemically broken right now.

Just happens to be the entertainment industry is the only one that i have yeah i have skin in the game on we had this moment about a week or so ago where you know um a couple of weeks ago that it came out that like some anonymous uh studio executive told a writer at i think it was deadline that their plan was to that the wga's demands were unreasonable and we're just going to kind of wait out until they lose their homes, right? Until they're on the street, and then we can get them to accept it. And, you know, this was right around when SAG was, you know, deciding to strike, and Ron Perlman gets on and makes a little video where he basically says, you know, we can burn your houses down.

Like, there's more than one way to lose a house. And I thought the important thing about sharing that, because one of the ways, you know, media works is that there's people, the things that people are willing to listen to and that can like affect them

and change their minds is partly dependent on the situational context at the time. This is why so many of like the journalists, much of the journalism I've done in the far right, like has been articles that I felt like I had to get out

within an hour or two of a shooting because people will pay attention to these these things that are problems that are important they won't leave if i do a deep dive on how this specific kind of radicalization works normally but if somebody's just been shot they'll listen you know and that's like unfortunate but that's the way people are and um there's this i thought what i thought was important about that is that not that you, you know, Ron Perlman threatened to burn down a guy's house. That's just kind of funny. But what he was doing there that's really valuable that I think more people need to think about is accepting that when you're saying something like, well, we just need to wait for writers to lose their homes. That's a violent

threat. That is a threat to harm somebody for your own personal gain. And we shouldn't view that as like fundamentally morally different than saying I want to go rob a guy with a 38, right? I don't feel like there's a big moral gap between them. And you can get people to actually kind of – who maybe wouldn't think about that to think about that this way. And I think that's an important thing to transmit in this time. Oh, man, 100%. way. And I think that's an important thing to transmit in this time. Oh man. A hundred percent. Yeah. The fact that, that what it gives, like gives you real context for what they're actually saying when they say, we just got to wait them out until they don't have any more money. And like, it's really starts to, uh, hurt their health and wellbeing. Like you have somebody

else being like, oh, I can hurt your health and wellbeing. And you're like, okay, I get how those are the same thing, but, but, but that's not what I, the way I was saying it was, it was more removed, you see. And so you're absolutely right. Like having Hellboy come out and be like, there's lots of ways to lose a house. It's like, oh shit.

Yeah. Yeah. There's like potential right now that I'm glad to see recognized. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field.

And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to

understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hey, I'm Gianna Pardenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. Mm-hmm.

But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually

a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. how are you doing like just in general with this because it is you know we've talked about all the good parts there's a lot that's good this is like this is a stressful time like i'm wondering like you wake up and like you hear thanks for acknowledging that yeah that's it's like how you be, uh, it sucks. It sucks real bad. It sucks particularly badly because I loved my job.

Um, I, when I talk about all these things, a lot of this wasn't happening at my job. My job was, I had working for an animated show that ran 22 episodes a season. That was, it would get,

uh, we knew when we were getting our pickups generally, uh, and it was a system that worked and I was really, really enjoying it and very happy at my job. I was getting paid well, like I liked everything about it. I felt like it was financially stable and I was getting what I deserved and I was just happy. And that's not what's happening across like 80% of other shows right now. not what's happening across like 80% of other shows right now. And so like we left, we left our show in solidarity of other writers because at some point, you know, this, I maybe won't have this job anymore and I'll have to go get another job. And also for all the people who are working

those other jobs and it's really, really struggling right now to even make ends meet. We know they're watching, they're working on three different shows a year and like they came and pay their rent. Like we're working on behalf of them but more importantly like we're striking on behalf of all of the other writers who are going to come along after this like the fact that the 2008 strike happened was the reason that my show is so good and has such good benefits and like why the show is is comfortable for writers because they fucking went to work and like they got what they needed uh from the studios even though it was hard and it was bitter and a lot of them lost their jobs over it and so now it's just like even though it sucks and i'm not happy about it it's it's our turn to do it it's

like our turn to make sure that everything works yeah that's such an important detail that like a lot of the people striking when you there's been this kind of like bad faith thing i've seen i've seen some people on the left do it online where like they'll post some video of like an actor, you know, talking about why they're doing the strike. Like this person's net worth is this many millions of dollars. And it's like, well, they're not striking for them. Like Ron Perlman is going to be okay. Ron Perlman is not going to be forced out of his home. Like that's not why they're doing this. Right. I mean, yeah. That you can have a good job, but also have a sense of the bigger picture and like a greater good. You can just like care about the art form. You know, we're watching journalism get fucking eaten alive right now.

And AI is going to is has been a part of like people have already lost their jobs because of this shit. AI is going to is, is, has been a part of like, people have already lost their jobs because of this shit. And like the thing that keeps getting brought up to me when I'll, I'll talk about it to like family or whatever is like, well,

you know, they're using it to replace these low level jobs, you know, sum up sports articles or like, you know, this kind of coverage or that kind of coverage. Like it's not the kind of stuff you do. It's not like investigation. You can't have a machine do that.

And it's like, well, yeah, but how do you think people learn to do what I do? Like part of it is like doing the, like that's the feeder, right? It's part of what you're saying about like TV writing. It's like they're trying to kill the way in which people learn how to continue this art form.

A hundred percent. Yeah. No, it's, there's so many parallels between this and what's happening with journalism in terms of like, it's turning it essentially into a gig economy, which is exactly what destroyed the news. Yeah. Or is destroying the news. But like, yeah like yeah it's it's the same thing and and when you talk about ai like you if you were to write an episode of a show and you have a written by credit on it you get a script fee for that and ultimately like what the studios want is to just have a piece of shit ai written script to begin with and then they're not paying a script fee to anybody and then writers just fix

that and so like yeah it's a it's all these different like cost-saving measures that ensure that no one will ever come up through this industry again and learn all the things yeah there will still be people who become writers but there'll be people whose parents are rich and so they can afford to work for free for forever and then and then you know what we don't get? The bear. The bear and its curiously jacked leading man. Where's he get the time? When's he putting down the protein? We're not seeing him chug a protein shake every

20 minutes. You complained about this on Twitter and I agree with you. The structure that requires to get a body like that, the structure you need in your life and the regiments that you need to follow need to be like to a T every single day. And there's just, he's too spontaneous.

There's too much going on in his life. He doesn't have time. He doesn't have two hours to carve out to go to the gym every day. No, this is my only issue. Like this is what's really threatening my support of the WGA. I just needed an episode of the bear

where all it is, is going through his workout routine. He's in the back room he's doing some curls you know yeah he's got bags of rice back there he's doing squats with him on his shoulders i even even i want to see him at 3 a.m in the morning and i'll buy it i'll be a five at 3 a.m in the morning and he's like going to an anytime fitness or fucking whatever and he's like work it out a little bit i could be like okay there it is okay that's when he's doing it there we go that's how it fits it in let me see him get

his bcaas you know have fucking richie be like you taking your pre-workout today yeah give it give me a little bit you know yeah um all right soren you got an out here um do you have anything you want to plug uh before like perhaps a podcast with our with our other former colleague, Dan O'Brien. No. Yeah, no. Fuck it. Fuck it. Yeah.

Yeah, I got a show called Quick Question with Dan and Soren. No, Soren and Dan. Oh, God, I'm a headliner. Yeah, Quick Question with Soren and Daniel. You can check that out anywhere that you listen to podcasts. It's basically just Dan and I catching up because we live on opposite coasts and we're good buddies. And that's about it yeah excellent check out quick questions with soren and dan special show um just a thank you just a wonderful time soren

thank you so much and uh you know good luck out there on the picket line to you to all of the other writers and to everybody at SAG-AFTRA. Thank you. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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