Offline with Jon Favreau - The Strike to Keep Hollywood Human, with Adam Conover

Episode Date: July 30, 2023

Comedian and Writer’s Guild negotiator, Adam Conover joins Offline to talk about how the ethos of Silicon Valley has affected the livelihoods of writers, actors and everyone in the entertainment industry. He gives Jon a behind the scenes look at why Hollywood’s workers and bosses have been so far apart in these negotiations. And they talk about the way streaming era jobs differ from cable era jobs, why, after a decade of streaming, studios look like they’re starting to rebuild a version of the old cable model, and why he’s not afraid of being replaced by artificial intelligence anytime soon. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Just a quick reminder that an ad-free version of Pod Save America can now be yours when you join the Friends of the Pod subscription community. Head to crooked.com slash friends to join today. What we do in the entertainment industry is we make the most valuable media property in the world. We make the luxury car, right, of media. We make when it's a Friday night and you want to go see a really handsome person and some big explosions and some great writing, you know, and you want to see some daredevils. You want to see Tom Cruise actually jump that fucking motorcycle off that fucking mountain, right? You pay $15, you go to the movie theater, sit in the dark, right? And that is going to continue to exist. And part of

the reason I believe that is because new forms of media never eradicate the old form of media, right? We still have theater. We still have radio. We still have movies. We still have television. And, you know, now we have video games. You know, none of those things were killed, right? You could say, oh, why are people still watching the NBA when I can control LeBron James? Well, it's a different experience. And, you know, people still want that older experience. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest this week is comedian and Writers Guild negotiator Adam Conover. Last week, we started our conversation about the writers and actors going on strike.

I talked to Madeline Ashby, who wrote a piece for Wired about how the Silicon Valley ethos came to Hollywood and led us to this moment. It was a great conversation, and if you haven't yet listened, you should go check it out. This week, Adam and I talk about how that Silicon Valley ethos has affected the livelihoods of writers, actors, and everyone in the entertainment industry. You might know Adam as the host of True TV's Adam Ruins Everything, or the host of Netflix's The G Word. Today, he hosts a great podcast called Factually, and more important to this conversation, serves on the board of WGA West, where he sat on the negotiating committee throughout the writer's strike. I invited Adam on to give us a behind-the-scenes look into the strike

and explain why Hollywood's workers and bosses have been so far apart in these negotiations. We talked about the ways working in the streaming era differs than working in the cable era, why he believes the studio's greed rather than technological trends have led to this moment, and why, after a decade of streaming, studios look like they're starting to rebuild a version of the old cable model. Adam also told me why he's not afraid of being replaced by artificial intelligence, and why he doesn't think the writers or actors will be leaving the picket line anytime soon. As always, if you have comments, questions, or episode ideas, please email us at offlineatcrooked.com.

And a quick heads up, Max is on vacation, so we'll be talking all things Twitter, I mean, X, when he returns next week. Here's Adam Conover. Adam Conover, welcome to Offline. Thank you so much for having me on the show. So, writers and actors guilds, both on strike for the first time in more than half a century. On last week's show, I talked to Madeline Ashby, who wrote a great piece in Wired, about how the transition from cable to streaming brought a Silicon Valley ethos to Hollywood that's caused what she calls the unbundling of the American storytelling machine.

From your point of view, someone who is in both guilds and on the writers negotiating committee, how and why did we get here? Look, I think what's happened to the entertainment industry is what's happened to most industries in America, which is that the people at the top, meaning the CEOs and the investors, have worked for the last 20 years to take all the money out of the system that used to go to labor, also used to go to a lot of sort of middle management or, in our case, mid-level producers, people like that, and centralize it in themselves. And they've come up with a lot of different ways to do that. They've used the transition to streaming to help make that happen. They've, in our case, exploited loopholes in our contract to sort of break norms of how the industry has worked for 50 or 60 years and come up with new ways of doing things that separate us from our income and our livelihood. And, you know, it's the job of a union to fight back against that when that happens.

How has the changing business model changed the way writers are compensated? So can you just walk us through like how a writer was compensated back in the days of cable and pay TV and then versus what's happening with streaming now. Sure. So in the, we'll be combining a couple different like changes here into one, but I can piece apart what they are. So the traditional way that television writing has worked for decades is that there's something called the writer's room where, you know, after you get the job, and by the way, as a writer, it can take you a year or more to between jobs because you're you're applying to them, you're writing spec scripts, et cetera. You finally land

that job and you're working for, you know, 10 months of the year and your weekly pay is quite good. And one of the reasons it's quite good is to last you during that lean time. But, you know, you're in the room every single week or work in nine to five or often much later into the evening. And then you're also paid every time you write a script. So you have a weekly pay and a script fee. And then once the script is produced, you receive a residual every time it airs. The last piece of the puzzle is that writers also historically have gone to set. So after you write the episode, you go to set to help produce the episode. That means there's writing that happens at every stage of the process. So when you go on set, you're like, oh, hold on a second.

That line that we all love so much doesn't actually work coming out of this actor's mouth. And oh, oh, the actor has a better idea for what the reading should be. So let's tweak the line. You know what? Let's have the line be this. Yeah, exactly. And that's part of what you get paid for. And then you go to post.

And in post-production, in the edit, you sit there and you go, oh, hold on a second. The episode's five minutes too long. and we need to cut part of it. And how do we stitch these other two scenes together so that the story still makes sense? Oh, let's write a new line of ADR dialogue for the, um, uh, for the, an actor will come in and they can read one line in voiceover that we just wrote, et cetera. Right. And, and so through that, it's like, you know, writing has been part of the process. And then you also participate when the show is in success, when it airs over and over again. So on, you know, Adam Ruins, everything that was a show I created for True TV, for the smallest channel on basic cable, literally the smallest channel on basic cable,

I would receive, you know, first of all, I would be working, you know, 12 months out of the year and for which I'd be paid as a writer. And second of all, you know, after months out of the year and for which I'd be paid as a writer. And second of all, you know, after the season aired, I would receive a residual check for somewhere around twenty five to thirty thousand dollars, which is, you know, that's good. Right. That's not I'm not getting rich. That's part of a living. Right. But that that helps pay my mortgage or my rent or whatever that is. And the residual checks come from every time the show is aired on a rerun or syndication or in other countries,

then the studio makes money on that because they get to sell ads against that again. And so the deal that you guys had struck in previous negotiations is that writers would get a piece of that. Exactly. And so do actors and so do crew members, although their residual goes to fund

their health and pension fund. And yes, that residual was established in 1960, which was the last time that writers and actors went on strike together. That was the previous most historic negotiation cycle in labor history. So what has happened since then? In the shift to streaming,

the first thing is that the way our contracts are structured, every time there's a new piece of media that the work is being done and we have to go renegotiate our contract. So, you know, the Writers Guild used to only cover movies. Then television was invented and we had to get coverage of that. Then cable was invented. We had to get coverage of that. HBO, pay cable, and now the internet. Last time the Writers Guild won on strike was in 2007, and that was to win coverage of the internet at all was to just get that get streaming covered as union work now we have to go back and get the money because the fact is that uh residuals for uh streaming are far far lower than they were for broadcaster basic cable

so when i've created a new show uh that aired last year on netflix The G Word. It was six episodes. It aired, you know, on the largest platform in the world outside of YouTube, right? Like literally, this is available to hundreds of millions of people around the world versus the smallest channel on basic cable. My total residual for that season, I got the first check a couple months ago, was $500 as a writer compared to about, you know, $25,000 to $30,000. I was happy to have the $500, but that's not helping writers pay their rent. And by the way, this is not just me. Every writer on Adam Ruins Everything used to receive that income, including our staff writers, the people on the bottom rung.

The other thing that's happened is the companies have used the shift to the new media as a way to separate us from most of the work that we used to do. So what they've started to do is say, instead of having you all write the show and then immediately go to set and produce the show. Actually, we want you to write the show before it's been picked up. We want you to write every episode of the show in what we call a mini room before we've actually greenlit production. Why did they do this? The reason was, well, if there's no set to go to because the show hasn't been greenlit yet, then there's no show to produce.

You can't go to set. We can pay you a fraction of what you used to make to do most of the same work, to write the entire season. Then when the show is actually shot, they just send the showrunner and they say the showrunner is not allowed to bring any other writers. They can't have any other help with them. And so this is something that, you know, our contract allows. But it's a fundamental breaking of a norm of the way television has been made for the last 50 to 60 years that separates us from from a huge amount of our work and has caused writer actual real income to plummet so i'm trying to separate out like how much of this is structural changes

because of streaming and how much of it is and i'm sure they're intertwined the studios and streaming companies just taking advantage of this technology it's entirely the second one it's entirely the second one well because i'm just so on but unlike residuals right so residuals and streaming one of the reasons it's harder to do that is because when a show is a huge hit on netflix right and it's getting like a billion hours of views around the world that is not making netflix any more money with the added views because their whole model is based on subscription so it's like they're fucking you guys it's sort of like it fucks every there's just the model where the more a show is watched either in other countries or repeats or syndication is just

gone now and so now you have all of these because you're not running ads against all of these shows on streaming that are doing really well and so so I just wonder if there's something fundamentally broken about a business model that is based on subscription fees. Well, a lot of people think that. I think that it is a dangerous and mostly wrong analysis to look at it that way. And the reason is, first of all, they are selling ads against these shows. Netflix has an ad tier. That's where all the growth of their business is, right? It's in this lower tier where they're selling ads against it. And if you look at where the growth in

streaming is, it's freebie, it's 2B, it's these various ad-supported models. So advertising is flooding back into the business. And that means that they will profit every time that the show is sold. But also, even if it was just pure SVOD, subscription video on demand where there's no advertising, what used to be the HBO model and then became the Netflix model. You pay a monthly fee, you get to watch all the shows without ads. They still have success metrics in there. They're still hiring and firing the executives based on whose show performed best.

They know which shows drive the most subscriptions. You know, I was told once colloquially that the most important statistic to Netflix is how many people subscribe to Netflix simply to watch a single show, right? If you subscribe to Netflix and then the first thing you watch is Stranger Things, they know you subscribe to watch Stranger Things. They know that's why they have your $15, right? But they don't want to share that data with anybody else. They don't want to tell anyone else what the basis for their success is.

Of course, look, Netflix is profitable. Their profits are going up every year. They're one of the largest platforms in the world. Their stock price is rocketing. They're doing well by every metric. They are just refusing to tell anybody what the metric is because that allows them to obfuscate and allows them to not pay anybody. And also, but also, that they, they fucked up in a way and that like,

so the way this whole thing starts is, and tell me where I'm wrong here, 2013, Netflix throws House of Cards on there, all the episodes, the binge heiress begins. And then they start, because that's successful,

they start spending a ton of money on content and then all the other studios start following. They want a streaming service, too. They want a subscription service, too, because Wall Street looks at Netflix. And they start valuing it like it's a tech company. And they're basing that value on subscriber growth and not necessarily profitability, even though eventually they become profitable. And it does seem like the business model now of spending a ton of money on a lot of shows to add subscribers with the hope

that you jack up the stock price has started breaking down and started breaking down even before the strike. There were a ton of layoffs, canceled shows, cuts all across the industry. Netflix now again seems to be doing fine, but there seems to be this streaming correction going on. Like, how do you see that? but there seems to be this streaming correction going on. Like, how do you how do you see that?

I agree that there's a streaming correction going on. I think that it's immaterial to what to the strike, frankly. And I think there's to a certain extent, two different stories. It's the case that Netflix lied to the public and lied to Wall Street about what their business model was capable of. They essentially told the public, hey, guess what? For what for 15 a month you can cancel your cable subscription you don't need to pay 100 bucks to the cable company anymore you can pay us 15 a month you'll be able to watch every show ever made ad free that was literally the pledge of netflix at the beginning they actually say that i mean that was the implication right that was that was what people thought netflix

was providing oh my god i can watch arrested development and friends in the office and new shows and every movie because they were licensing movies from everything right um now this becomes so popular it creates a frenzy right in the industry the entire industry shifts to follow netflix right and so you look at look what happened to uh what is now warner discovery right you had, this company is made up of what used to be 25 successful, profitable cable channels that they murdered. They assassinated these channels to put all the content onto this one service, right? Like I used to make a show for True TV.

There also used to be TBS, TNT, all these different channels, even fucking HBO. Now HBO isn't even in the name. So, and by the way, TV was good. People liked it. You know, people were watching it. You had an on-demand button on your cable box tv was good people liked it you know people were watching it we had you had an on-demand button on your cable box you could have been you know you could watch that shit whenever you wanted um and it all it all worked and they they destroyed all of it to chase cord

cutting to chase to chase netflix and it was a lie i mean by the way cord cutting is such a fucking lie there's still a cord going into your house. You're still paying the cable company $100 a month. Like it was, what the fuck? Comcast isn't sitting around going, oh no, people aren't subscribed to cable. They still are. But now you're paying for Netflix too. So it was, so the pledge to the consumer was a lie, right?

And also I think the fundamental pledge to Wall Street was a lie because there is a place for the $15 a month service with no ads, right? HBO existed. That was HBO's business model for 30 years. Right. But it's not the case that every single platform is going to have that business model because what existed before that? We had broadcast, which was free and ad supported.

We had cable, which was pay and ad supported. And guess what? They realized that. They realized that not every, that, you know, Max and Peacock and all these services, we're not going to be in a world

where there's just like five Netflix competitors. We're going to have services that are free but have ads. We're going to have services that are pay but have ads. And so look at what they're doing now. They're adding live sports.

They're all competing for live sports. They're doing pregame shows, postgame shows. Soon they're going to want late night shows. They're going to want daytime talk shows. And the main thing that they're fighting now is churn, right?

Like people unsubscribe from Netflix. People subscribe to Netflix a month at a time. You know, there's a, oh, new Stranger Things is out. I'll buy one month of Netflix to watch Stranger Things. So they're fighting that attrition. How are they going to deal with that? They're going to start bundling it together. They're going to attach the subscription to something

that's more difficult to cancel, like your phone bill or your cable bill. They're rebuilding cable television at warp speed because they realize that this, you know, five to 10 year little blip of everyone chasing Netflix, like was not ultimately the stable business model, but they are moving towards the new thing so fucking fast. And yeah, sure. Some of the companies took losses because their Netflix competitors didn't work as well. And yeah, sure, some of the companies took losses because their Netflix competitors didn't work as well. And some of them took losses because they underwent these massive mergers, which are harmful to the industry and to their businesses. But that's no reason that we, the people who make the content, should accept less money when they are making more money than

ever. And again, they're growing and rebuilding their business model at warp speed. How much of what's happening feels like what's already happened at some of these overvalued tech startups like Uber and WeWork? Look, I think that Netflix had a little bit of an Uber strategy, which was we will be the monopolist, you know, two things. First, we will be the monopolist. And second of all, we'll do it by undercutting everybody else, by undercutting labor, paying the people who actually make the thing less than everybody else. At first, Netflix paid really great, just like Uber used to give really good bonuses

at the very top. People were like, oh my God, this is so good. Right? 10 years later, everyone's like, I can't make, literally if you drive for Uber, you lose money on gas insurance and the depreciation on your car.

And we're going through the same thing with Netflix where they tossed people a bunch of money at first, seemed really nice, and then they started restructuring deals so that everyone who makes the content is making less than we ever were um and they did it with wall street money with financing and the reason they got that wall street money is because they told wall street that they would be the monopoly that they would literally replace all of television was like the pledge and yeah i think that that's the that was another piece of the lie

so let's talk about the strike uh what were the writers' major asks at the beginning of the negotiations? So the biggest asks are, we are trying to put in place the norms that have protected writers for decades and decades and decades. We're trying to have those reified into our contract. We are just trying to maintain the basic workplace protections that writers have had for many years. So one of those is the existence of the writer's room. The writer's room has never been codified into our contract. It's been just a norm, a practice.

But the companies have made it very clear that they are trying to eliminate the writer's room. They are literally starting to offer showrunners a deal where they say, we will give you a bonus if you don't hire writers. If you write the entire show yourself, just like Mike White or Taylor Sheridan does. But we know that if we allow that to happen five or ten years from now, there are not going to be any bonuses anymore. If you get hired as a showrunner, they'll say, you have to write the whole show yourself. Here's five grand you can use to farm out scripts to a couple of freelancers if you like.

Other than that, it's going to be you. They squeeze the writer's room now. Later, they'll squeeze the showrunners. Oh, yeah. And showrunners are being squeezed right now because showrunners want the writer's room. There's a couple of writers like Mike White and Taylor Sheridan who sometimes enjoy writing without writers, but they are the very, very vanishingly small minority. And most showrunners are not interested in being forced to work like those people do. So that was one of our asks. Another ask was, you know, screenwriters who write films are under immense pressure to do free work, to turn in drafts that they're not paid for. We have protections to protect from that. And then, you know, one that's really close

to my heart and maybe some of your listeners as well is in what is called comedy variety writing. That's late night. It's also daytime writing, sort of informational comedy. Currently in streaming, we have none of the terms that we have in television. So when I was on, again, the smallest channel in basic cable,

every one of my writers had a guaranteed 13-week contract. They had a guaranteed minimum wage that they could make, and they got that nice residual. When I made a show for Netflix, I was sitting in a room with the executive producers. Um, when we were talking about the, the, the writing calendar and the staff and they said, Hey, good news, because we're on Netflix and we're doing this comedy variety show. We can do anything we want with writers. We can hire and fire them by the day. We can pay them $1 a week if we want. Isn't that that great and all the other executive producers like oh wow flexibility that's what we love as managers you know as a writer my blood ran cold because i was like this is how they talk about

the people they who really get fucked right this is this is how they talk about the pas and people who don't who don't have a union you get writers that way though like well how do you get writers and say i'm gonna pay you for a day for you know well we have a little bit of protection because the writers who we hire right now, you know, they say, well, on the last show I made this amount. And so I should make that amount this show. So their agents are able to say that. But it's like individual negotiations. Exactly. And we're somewhat protected for that right now. But again, five or 10 years from now, if we don't get those basic protections put in place. A really good example of this is,

you know, Seth Meyers show on NBC. All those writers had that protection. Amber Ruffin's show, which airs on Peacock, shot in the same studio. The writers are doing the same work. They make far less. Their contracts are for far less. There's no parody whatsoever for doing the same work. And so we're trying to get those terms extended. And they refuse to negotiate over these issues. Yeah, gonna say how far were the studios willing to meet you on not at all yeah like what talk about talk about like the the last weeks or or days that the negotiations finally broke down like what happened well so negotiations are very uh formal it's a formal process you know we have in the negotiating room we have our caucus room where we as writers meet and talk about what our needs are and what our next move is going to be. And then we have the negotiating room. People go sit. We all troop in

and sit down. And then it's very it's sort of like foreign policy. You know, it's like, yeah, it's like we will advance. You know, we we offer to remove writer proposal 23 if you will add this to producer proposal 22, like that kind of thing. Yeah. And in the last week, they just stopped making moves. You know, the way the process is supposed to work is like okay we'll offer this well how about this how about this how about this how about this how about right you do that yeah and they just started being we were like this and they were like no and we were like okay but you should make a counter offer and they were like no and we're like but a counter offer is the next step and they said no and then we said okay i mean we're we're gonna call the strike and they were like, no. And we did. Right. And that by all

accounts is what happened to the actors as well, that at some point the companies just stopped talking to them, stopped making moves of any kind and refused to accept the fact that, you know, this is what their workforce is telling them that we need just to survive in this town. Why do you think they walked away and that they just wouldn't counter? Why do you think they're being intransigent this time? I think this is a little bit technical, but it might shed light on how labor negotiations work. So we bargain across the table from this organization called the AMPTP. It's the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

This is essentially like a cartel and an outsourcing organization that all of the big companies outsource all their labor negotiations to. So Netflix, Amazon, NBC, Paramount, all these companies, they all assign this task to the AMPTP. So when we go sit across the table from the AMPTP, we're not talking to Ted Sarandos and Bob Iger and the people who can actually make us a deal. Why do they do this outsourcing? It's because the AMPTP made a deal with the studios. It says, if you assign all your labor negotiations to us, we'll make sure that your costs never go up by 2% or 3% a year.

We're the no machine, right? Our job is to say no so that when these unions come in and they want all their big raises, we keep it to a nice, reasonable amount, and you never even have to think about it. Right. That means that this organization, the AMPTP, literally does not have license from its bosses to offer us what we need. So when we were saying, hey, we need to preserve the writers room, they didn't have the say so. They didn't have the ability, the mandate from their bosses to make that offer. They also, however, didn't have the ability. Now, if we come in, we make that big offer, that big proposal. We're going to go on strike if we don't get what we need.

Right. Well, then the MPTP should probably go to its boss and say, hey, these guys are going to fucking go on strike. Like we could could you like open my window a little bit? Right. Could you could you like could we get some political agreement among the CEOs about what we could offer to forestall a strike? They weren't able to do that either because I don't know, they're bad at their jobs or the CEOs fundamentally don't agree and they actually hate each other's guts. I don't know what it is. But it was a fundamental failure on the part of the labor organization that all the companies set up between themselves. They were unable to make an offer that was what we needed. And it was because of their outsourcing strategy, which is designed to keep labor down. So you might have read that big

vulture piece from the other week about streaming being broken. So they have a high level agent, did not go on the record, but this was his quote or her quote. The Writers Guild delusionally is hearkening back to a day when there were 25 episodes of Nash Bridges a year and repeats and residuals. The real issue is that the medium has changed. Instead of getting a job as a staff writer on CSI Miami for 46 weeks a year, now it's a 25-week job working on Wednesday, which is a better show. That's just progress. I can't imagine you think highly of that analysis, but- No, that's just false. What would you say to it? so first of all you know agents who give anonymous comments to reporters uh they simply hate the unions um because they see them

as competition um and because uh the writers guild you know we took an action against the agencies a couple years ago because they had a conflict of interest uh they were being paid by our bosses while negotiating our salaries and we said hey we think it's bad for the people who represent us to be paid by the people that we pay them to negotiate for us with. And they were very angry that we took that step and we eliminated those conflicts of interest. So I have to imagine that this agent holds a grudge and is talking shit in order to make himself feel better.

That's the first thing. And by the way, it really is that just personal and petty and dumb. That's why people go in background. But say, yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah. I got a reporter. I can call and talk some shit. I'll have a good time. And, you know, if he wants to blow off some steam, that's fine. But also the analysis is simply false. It's not about the number of orders of the of the seasons or of the episodes. It's about per episode. We are being brought on for less weeks and we're being paid a lower amount

and we're receiving less in residuals at the end, like vanishingly less in residuals. So, I mean, that's just, that person just doesn't know what they're talking about. And I feel bad for their clients because they've got a real shitty agent who hates them.

It's certainly not focused on getting them gigs. I know there have been a lot of details reported around some of the AI negotiations. I have a broader question about this technology that studios may use to create everything from digital actors and full scripts to like entire shows. How concerned are you that audiences might come to embrace or at least tolerate ai generated content oh not at all okay not at all i mean so look will it be possible for ai to create some sort of like digital chum that like you can have on if you need something to look at you know like like instead of your instead of watching a off-season like a spring training baseball game, you don't care about, you might like flip on some like garbage AI perhaps.

Right. And there's plenty of media that works that way. I mean, look at your average Twitch streamer, right? It's extremely low cost, low effort content, right. That people have on the background while they do their homework. There's a place for that kind of thing. But what we do in the entertainment industry is we make the most valuable media property in the world. We make the luxury car, right, of media. We make when it's a Friday night and you want to go see a really handsome person and some big explosions and some great writing, you know, and you want to see some daredevils. You want to see Tom Cruise actually jump that fucking motorcycle off that fucking mountain, right? You pay $15. You go to the movie theater, jump that fucking motorcycle off that fucking mountain. Right. You pay $15.

You go to the movie theater, sit in the dark. Right. And that is going to continue to exist. And part of the reason I believe that is because new forms of media never eradicate the old form of media. Right. We still have theater. We still have radio. We still have movies.

We still have television. And, you know, now we have video games. You know, none of those things were killed. You could say, oh, why are people still watching the NBA when I can control LeBron James? I'm like, well, it's a different experience. And, you know, people still want older experience. So I agree. I mean, I don't think audiences will tolerate it.

And if they won't. They already hate it. Right. So they know. And if they don't, if people are not going to end up watching AI because these AI shows are shit, then what's the main concern that you guys have about the technology? So the main concern is that the companies are going to use AI as a way to undermine our wages and working conditions, that they're going to try to use it to make the same product while paying people less. So a really good example of this is that one of the AMPTP's actual proposals to the actors was that when a background actor,

and by the way, background actors, these are often called extras, right? These are the folks who are in the background of scenes. These are professional actors. You know, these are people who, it's not the most highly paid job in Hollywood, but these are folks who show up early in the morning. They bring their own wardrobe. They know how to follow very detailed, complex instructions.

They know how to hit their marks. They're professionals. And this is a job that you've been able to make a living at in Hollywood that a lot of people do. It's honest work and it's work that deserves to be done with dignity. The AMPTP proposed that when these actors show up to set, they be paid a half day's or one day's wages. They'd be scanned into an AI or whatever you want to call it. And then the company would own their likeness and performance in perpetuity and could use it in any film

until like after the actor is dead, right? Now, this is a recipe for, first of all, eliminating an entire profession. Second of all, for making the work worse, right? Like, do I want to watch something where there's, you know, a rom-com with Jennifer Aniston, but there's fucking fake people walking around in the background? I don't think that improves

my experience as a theater-goer. I don't think it improves anything. The only thing that it does is it perhaps allows these companies to save a couple hundred bucks on a background actor. And so can you blame SAG-AFTRA for saying, go fuck yourselves? I'm very happy that they did to that proposal.

So that's them. That's the actor problem. What are you guys worried about on the writer side? So it's a different problem. And the first thing I'd like to flag is that AI is a marketing term that the tech industry has come up with in order to make this sort of loosely connected bundle of technologies seem like some sort of inevitable threat that you have to do something about. Right. That you have to, like, do what they say. Sam Altman's out there saying, well, if you don't do exactly what I tell you to, AI might become super intelligent and take over the world. Right. And like, well, I wonder why he's telling me that. You know, I wonder why he's telling me this specific story.

So when we talk about AI for writing, we're talking about something completely different than with actors. We're talking about large language models, completely unrelated to the ability to like, which is essentially VFX to steal someone's likeness. We're talking about chat GPT and things like that. These pieces of software cannot do the work of a writer. And I do not believe that they will ever be able to, because what this software does is it outputs text, right? You put text in

one end, you get text out the other end. Now, that is not what a writer does in point of fact. What a writer does, first of all, a writer has experiences, learns things about the world, right? Has a point of view. That's all the artistic shit. I'm not even talking about that, right? What does the writer literally do in Hollywood? The writer talks to the head of the network or the executive and finds out what they want and takes their note, right? The writer gets yelled at by that person. The writer goes and talks to the director to make sure it fits their vision. The writer goes and talks to the actor. Oh, Tom Cruise doesn't like his line because this makes him seem like kind of a wimp. So he's got some pitches.

Tom wants to get on the phone with you. I know writers who've had that experience of literally getting line notes from Tom Cruise. Chat GPT isn't taking notes. Exactly. It's not getting notes. And then the writer goes to set,

as I said, right? And the writer goes to post. All of that work needs to be done. It needs to be done by a literal human. Until they have invented data from Star Trek, right? The android who can walk around and is literally an artificial general intelligence, they're not going to be able to, you know, ChatGPT cannot do that work. So why are we concerned and

why do we have the proposals? The worry is that the companies are going to use this mediocre technology that does one thing kind of well, and they're going to try to use it to undermine our wages and working conditions. They're going to say, hey, guess what? Chat GPT output this script. Couple problems with it, though. Would you punch it up? And would you take our notes?

And would you go talk to the director and the actor? And would you go to set? And would you go to post? Except that you're not a writer on the show or movie. Chat GPT is the writer. You're just some fucking associate producer, right? And we'd be there going, no, I is the writer. You're just some fucking associate producer, right? And we'd be there going, no, I'm the writer. Rewriting is writing, right?

That is the process. And it is very clear that they want to do that. And the reason it is is because we put in our proposals, two very straightforward proposals about AI. We just said that we cannot be forced to adapt the work that an AI, that a so-called AI produces. And we cannot, it cannot,

their, its work cannot be passed off as our work product. Right. Right. Two pretty simple proposals. They refuse to even discuss them. Not. Did they just give you guys like a meeting?

They said, an annual meeting about AI. Their offer was, we can have an annual meeting to discuss advances in technology. Right. What is that? What is that meeting going to look like? Hey, welcome to the annual meeting. Sure have been some interesting advances in technology lately.

Well, see you next year. Like, that's fucking nothing. Right. And so since they refuse to negotiate, that must be their plan. Right. Because it's like if I were to ask you right now, hey, I've got a proposal. Would you agree not to pull out a gun and shoot me in the chest? Right. And you were like, I don't agree to that.

But what if we have an annual meeting to discuss gun violence? I'm like, hold on a second. I'm a little bit worried about what John's going to do now. You know. I've been thinking about this a lot. I'm a writer in a former life. I have used Jachi BT. Not very impressed.

It's a tech demo. Where the large language models are right now, I think, is not a substitution for creativity. I think we all, we as a society, have a very poor track record of stopping or even slowing down new technology. I'm wondering if like, do you think AI could have any legitimate place in the creative process if there are the right rules, safeguards, standards in place? Because like I think to myself, AI is never going to churn out something that I'm going to write. Could it someday churn out like a rough draft of something that I can then go in there and you know, the blank screen is the scariest thing, right? And then you like, you have something and then you edit it, you revise it and you work with people like, are there ways that it could make people's lives easier in the entertainment industry,

that as long as you guys have the right labor standards and rules in place then that's okay i mean maybe i i frankly don't give a shit right unfortunately i'm sorry to no that's i'm sorry to say so but like look i the technology is not the enemy right and i when i first saw large language models i I was like, wow, cool. I've never seen something that can do this before. And I think there are interesting uses for it. For instance, there's a very cool game called AI Dungeon, where someone is using a large language model to like have a text adventure that'll respond to what you say, right? I'm like, that's a really cool use for that. I think there's probably some other cool uses out there as well. Does that matter to me as a writer when I'm looking at the page and trying

to come up with a joke that is going to make the audience laugh? They're quite bad at jokes. They're quite bad at jokes. I mean, you know, anyone who writes a joke knows if you want to make someone laugh with a joke, it's one of the hardest things to do. And every joke that you write has to be a new joke, right? It has to fundamentally be a joke that the person hasn't heard before if they're going to laugh at it. And the only way to write it is you think about, you know, what's happening in the scene or what happened in the news, right? What did Ted Cruz do and who's my audience and what does that make them? Okay. My audience is like 25 to 45 year old people, you know, sitting in front of their TVs. What do they think about Ted Cruz?

What does that remind them of in their lives? What comparison can I make that will be like a surprising thrill of recognition for them? And then I need to do that, you know, 60 times in a half hour if I'm writing an episode of The Daily Show. It's one of the most complex cultural things that we can possibly do. I don't see, again, chat GPT being able to do that unless it's literally an artificial general intelligence. I also don't see it helping me do that because at best what I've gotten to do is regurgitate shit that literally I wrote earlier, which is not helpful to me. So now look, in 10 years, are there going to be some writers who say, yeah, my first step is I open up my custom large language model and I have it output some shit and whatever. Sure. Fine.

You know what? There's actually people I know that for a fact that there are folks who do like self-published romance novels on Amazon. That's like a big business. Yeah yeah and some of them use it for that purpose oh interesting and i'm like and they and then they clean it up because their audience wants them to write five books a year and you know fine that to me sounds like the chum i was talking about but that's fine if they want to do that the concern to me is not the technology and not what is going to be done with it it is the companies and the people who run the businesses using the technology as an excuse to hurt people. Right.

The problem was not splitting the atom. The problem was deciding to build a fucking bomb. Right. And I think that that is exactly the problem with AI. And when you listen to the people who are promoting the technology, what they always do is they decry responsibility. They say, oh God, the technology is so scary. Oh, we can only hope, but to not destroy the world with them.

Like you're the ones fucking building it. You're in control, right? And you are going to Congress and saying, please put in the regulations I tell you to put in because I'm telling you that this is so scary. I think if someone comes and sells you that bill of goods, you should say, no no you're the problem you're the person that i'm worried about right yeah i am not i'm going to stop listening to you and i'm going to stop worrying

about the technological you know boogeyman that you're throwing up at my path and i'm going to start trying to put in place social protections governmental protections contractual regulations to protect me from motherfuckers like you. That's that's my POV. I the thing that worries me about it is just like I think that Americans appetite for chum as you as you call it. I want to believe that it's not great. But like having seen what people watch and what people like and just even the trends of like, you know, last time there was a strike. That's when like reality TV took off and the studios were like, well, this is cheap to make and people will watch reality TV. That's actually a myth that the studios promoted. Like reality TV took off like two years earlier.

If you look at when Survivor and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire came out, it was like around 2005, 2006. The strike was in 2007. There was not, in fact, a gigantic boom of reality television as a result of a three month strike in 2007. thing is though i think that it's very easy for us to conflate our disdain for the entertainment choices of other people for thinking that no effort goes into making that you know um like it's very easy to turn on top 40 radio and go all this music is shit people like shit right except that it's extremely highly skilled work to make what oh yeah it's called shit no that and muzak has existed for 30 or 40 years, but people don't listen to Muzak on the radio. They're like, I need a new pop song. I need some fucking Justin Bieber. And regardless of what we think of Justin Bieber, Justin Bieber comes out with new shit every day. You know, he comes up

with a new song that is going to drive people nuts. Yeah, look, pop music is a different category. People who like CSI, that's great. That's a lot of work that goes into those shows. I'm thinking like, you know, we just talked about on this show a couple weeks ago about the yum yum ice cream lady on TikTok. Like, we've got people. It's just like the tastes of people right now are concerning me that these studios who like to fuck with you guys and make a lot of money are just going to figure out're just going to figure out, like, what is the cheapest shit we can make

that can still make us money? And can we use technology to help us make cheaper shit that, eh, maybe it's not that high quality, but, like, if someone's on one screen and then they're looking at the other screen, they're fine, that's all we need, and that's that. I mean, this isn't about your negotiations. It's just sort of a concern I have

about, like, the broader future of the industry. Of course. I mean, look, the problem that I have with that is the first part it's the company that decided to make that model i mean that that lady who's doing the yum yum yum yum that thing right ice cream yum yum that that and by the way she's very good at that first of all um and she's a highly skilled frankly making money it's good salt yeah it's working with she's not doing it because the audience was like, we would love to see a lady say yum yum. She's doing that because TikTok set up a business model where the only way you can get paid is if people give these little gifts.

And she has figured out a way to game that system with, like, frankly, her own creativity. It is actually a very hard thing to do to figure out what people want, like what people want to watch and listen to. And I don't think that you can just, you know, systematize it now. So, but my version of your fear is that these companies want to destroy a successful business model that creates art that people love and for which the artists are well paid in order to create a shittier, worse product that people actually like less. They're watching it because they have no alternative, but they like it less. But the only reason it was created was because the CEOs at the top make more money that way. Look at VFX, right? Look at CGI. When CGI was first invented,

it was all about wowing the audience. Oh my God, the Terminator turned into silver shit, right? And like, oh, Jurassic Park and whatnot, right? Now VFX is used to save money. It's like, oh, guess what? If we just ship this shot off to a thousand people building in Korea where people are paid poverty wages

to like rotoscope shit, right? It's not even high tech. It's literally just a bunch of people sitting there with After Effects, like tracing, right? And being paid almost nothing for it. Then we can make this stuff cheaper, right? And the audience doesn't like it.

When you go watch like a Marvel movie or a DC movie now, you're not like, oh my God, great special effects. You're like, that kind of looked like shit, didn't it? But that was all that was playing this weekend. I sure wish there was a better movie to see.

Yeah, I know. And go look at how people reacted just this weekend to Barbie and Oppenheimer when there were two movies that were made by actual directors starring actual stars that had actual original ideas that were actually filmed well. Still works. I'm going to say, I mean, okay, so like Oppenheimer is, you know, they're doing the IMAX 70 millimeter presentations in film. They are sold out in every theater in America. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know. Right?

Because people are like, I want the top flight experience. I want the best thing. And so I'm not worried about the audience. I'm worried about the CEOs cutting off their nose to spite everybody else so that they can sell their nose and make an extra buck. Does that metaphor make any sense? It totally makes sense. Totally makes sense. I like it.

So what's the plan now? You hear people talking about this going until the end of the year. How are you and WGA and SAG thinking about strategy? Sure. So the strategy is extremely simple. The companies don't get any more product until they make a deal with us and they need us in order to make the product. Like, you know, they're looking at Barbie and Oppenheimer did great. There's nothing else coming down the pipeline. Ted Sarandos doesn't get any more

stranger things, which is his Superbowl, right? That's Netflix. That's when they get all their subscribers every year is when new stranger things come out. They don't get any more stranger things until they make a deal with us. They don't have the ability to wait us out because they don't have shit without us. And we are going to be on the picket line until they come back and make a deal. And I don't have a prediction for how long that's going to take. Anybody who has a prediction is lying to you. But it's going to, what I do know is that after SAG afterstruck, which again was the first time in 63 years that both unions have struck together, and no one expected SAG-AFTRA to strike. It was like, SAG-AFTRA striking was like Trump getting elected for them.

It was them, they were like, what, what, what? So they spent the first week just shitting themselves, right? Then they have to start calling each other up and going like, yeah, Ted, it's David. Yeah, what are you? Oh, yeah, strike, what are we going to do? Okay, should we go talk to? Okay, I mean, let's call Sherry Redstone. That's going to take them a couple weeks just to make those phone calls, right?

Then they're going to come in, and then we have to actually get down to negotiating, which also takes a little while. So all those things are going to happen, and it's going to go through the process. But as far as I'm concerned, we've already won because I know that, A, they have nothing without us. And B, I know that we're not going to leave the picket line until we get what we want. The only way that a labor union ever can lose a strike is if its own members say, this has gone on too long. We just need to go back to work. We got to pay rent. We got to feed our kids. And we're willing to take, you know, not a great deal in order to go back to work. And that's happened.

That happened to the Writers Guild in the 80s once. Happens to unions sometimes. That's not going to happen in this case because every writer and actor knows that if we don't win the fight, we're not going to have careers to go back to in five years. They're going to have eliminated the writers room. They're going to be scanning the actors into body scan devices. They're going to have eliminated the writers room. They're going to be scanning the actors into body scan devices. They're going to be downgrading people's role statuses. We're not going to be making residuals. And we're going to, you know, right now people are having to take day jobs right while they're on the picket line. We're going to have those day jobs forever if we don't win. And so we're going to be out there as long as it takes. I have not seen an iota of weakness from any of our members on the picket line. Despite the fact that writers,

we've been on strike for 13 weeks and people are still like, we're going to be out here as long as it takes. It's just taking the CEOs a while to realize that. And once they do, they're going to come back to the table and make a deal and this will be over. Because the end of this is not, we're not going to stop making American television and movies. Again, we make the most valuable entertainment property in the world. And these companies make massive profit off of it. And half of them have no other product whatsoever. So they need us. They're going to come back to the table.

And it's just a matter of when they feel like putting on their big boy pants and doing it. Last time the writers were on strike was the earliest days of the social media era. This time, you guys particularly have been heavily vocal on Twitter and other platforms. Last time the writers were on strike was the earliest days of the social media era. This time, you guys particularly have been heavily vocal on Twitter and other platforms. How has that changed the dynamic? It's not called Twitter anymore. Don't call it that. Yeah, X. With the seat yeets.

I don't even know what the fuck to call them. Has that helped? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, first of all, it's been a really dramatic way for folks to tell their stories, for writers and actors to, you know, share photos of their residual checks, to tell their stories about how, you know, they were asked to write an entire show without a writer's room, that sort of thing. That we're able to share those stories with each other and with the public. And one of the really stunning things is there's been an outpouring of support from the public. Do you think public support matters to the outcome? So it doesn't matter to the fundamentals because all that matters in a strike is how long people stay on the picket line. That's, you know, all that matters is your own membership when you're talking about a union, except that having the public support buoys our spirits, you know, it,

it reminds us that we're on the right side of history it lets the ceos know that they are on the wrong side of history um and you know a a good part of it also it stops misinformation from coming out like um the the studio playbook this year is the same thing as it has been as it was in 2007 which is they like to whisper to reporters stuff like oh we're gonna we're so strong and we're going to wait them out. And the writers and actors don't know what they're doing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they've been doing that.

You know, it's like their only pushback has been, you know, in Deadline Hollywood or The Hollywood Reporter. It'll be anonymous executive says to the press, blah, blah, blah. And they say that shit. And this year, nobody believes it because we're all sharing our stories with each other and we can immediately go. We have the best rapid response team, right? In political terms. Yeah. Here's a really good example of this. While the Writers Guild was

in negotiations, literally while we're in the negotiating room, the AMPTP put out a leak that said that our AI proposal was the opposite of what it was. They said that the Writers Guild wants to allow AI writing. Now this was the opposite. Again, I don't know how they got to this tortured interpretation, but they called a reporter and they said this. And so, you know, a couple of people were like, oh, my God, the Writers Guild is oh, maybe the Writers Guild isn't as good as we thought it was. Right. And then all the Writers Guild had to do was put out a statement on Instagram and Twitter saying this is the opposite of our proposal. Our proposal says that we are trying to ban the use of AI writing to undermine our contract. And then that became the story.

Right. We fucking kicked their asses. Like suddenly, you know, every single outlet was reporting our version. And, you know, across social media, people were like, wow, that first story was a load of shit, right? It spread like wildfire. We had erased the fake story in like six hours. And that's been the story the entire time. Because the public, nobody gives a shit about the CEOs. The public does, in fact, like the media. And as a shit about the ceos the the public does in fact like the media yeah and as a result they also like the people who make it and they give a shit about it so last question um people want to support you guys and the actors what should they do uh very good question so um one thing that we are keenly aware of is that the strike action doesn't just affect writers

and actors also affects other crew members who are um you know out of work right now because nothing is shooting. And so we are supporting a fund called the Entertainment Community Fund. There's a wonderful fund that's existed for 140 years now that gives cash assistance to anyone in the entertainment industry

who needs help paying their rent or their medical bills, especially during a work stoppage like this. We've raised $3 million for that fund. Those funds are already going out to people who need it, but the demand is really high. So if you head to

entertainmentcommunityfund.org and donate to that, donate to film and TV workers, your money will go to support film and entertainment worker in need, whether that's a writer, an actor, or a crew member, an IOTC member, a PA. And that helps us stay

on the picket lines longer and that helps us win. Awesome. Adam Conover, thanks forATSE member, a PA. And that helps us stay on the picket lines longer and that helps us win. Awesome. Adam Conover, thanks for joining and good luck out there. No problem. Can I plug something real quick? You sure can.

One of the only pieces of work that I can do right now is as a stand-up comedian. I'm on tour right now. Oh, nice. So if you live in Buffalo, St. Louis, Providence, Rhode Island, elsewhere across the country,

head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates if you want to come see me. Get a ticket. Go see Adam. Thanks so much. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher.

Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, Thank you. and Rachel Gajewski, who film and share our episodes as videos every week. Ohioans are expected to vote on a ballot measure to codify reproductive freedom in the state constitution in November. But Republicans created another ballot measure for August that would make it way more difficult for constitutional amendments like this abortion protection measure to pass. Currently, you need over 50 percent of voters to pass an amendment. They are trying to up the threshold to 60 percent, which is why you've got to make sure you vote on Tuesday, August 8th. Don't let them get away with it. Head to votesaveamerica.com slash Ohio to find all the information you need to vote no on August 8th.