The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW Strikes in Film Industry About AI as Much as Inflation

Episode Date: August 17, 2023

Radical changes in distribution, as well as AI's replacement of screenwriters and actors are part of the impasse. "Hollywood" is a massive industry that impacts the economy far beyond California, but the impact of AI on labor, especially white collar jobs, is just beginning to be felt. Nicole Brener-Schmitz, Former Political Director of the Teamsters Union, joinsFind out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

All right, welcome back. And joining us now is the former political director of the Teamsters Union, Nicole Brenner-Schmitz. And I wanted to get her on to talk especially about what's happening in Hollywood with the writers and the actors and the sticking point of how artificial intelligence is there. But there's a much broader issue that is a product of the inflation that we're just talking to Tony Arterman about, and that is the impact on wages and how do wages keep up with inflation. So that's why we're seeing this massive number of strikes. Thank you for joining us, Nicole.

Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me. Let's talk a little bit about, before we get into Hollywood and AI, let's talk a little bit about what's going on with UPS. What is the current status of that? I saw they had changed a new, looks like they've headed off the strike, or is that still something that is in the works? It looks like they've reached a tentative agreement. So that's great news. Looks like there won't be a strike. There still has to be a vote amongst the membership, but looks like they've come to a deal and should be moving forward with that.

And, of course, what I saw put out was something like a total pay package for drivers of something like $170,000, which looks very attractive. But, of course, depending on what inflation is in a few years, that could look like nothing. What other aspects of UPS is it? Because that's just one aspect of people who work for UPS. What about warehouse workers and other employees? Is that part of it as well? Well, this is a contract for the workers who are members of the Teamsters Union. So it's preliminary, the drivers.

There are some other workers that could be included in different places. But this is the largest national contract in the country, which I think a lot of people don't realize. So many contracts, like what we're seeing in LA, are really hotel by hotel, and this is a national contract. So there are a lot of things at stake, not just wages. That's what, of course, gets the most attention when people are taking a look at contract negotiations and observing it. But there's pensions, there's benefits, there's safe working environments. All of those were on the table. And like you said, that's why there are timelines on these contracts, right? It's a contract for the next however many years, because things change

and you need to go back to the bargaining table and see if this is still a contract that makes sense for those workers. They're what makes UPS tick and what makes them be able to have such a large profit margin. Yeah, I've talked to Gerald Slinty about this and he said last year,

this would be the year of labor unions and all the rest of it because of so much inflation that is being cooked into all this and that has already hit us in so many different ways. And everybody is getting behind in this. Are there going to be other – UPS is really big. We now have an economy that is heavily done by internet purchases and deliveries and that type of thing. Are there more industries we're going to see this UPS being the biggest one? But are there some others that are down the line that we're going to see that may result in disruption if they can't find an agreement like FedEx or something like that? Well, FedEx isn't union, so.

But here's what it does do when the workers at one company get a certain agreed upon wage and benefits, it should, in fact, elevate the entire industry. So that's something that, you know, is really important to remember as to why we have unique contracts in this country, because it does help keep a middle class. It's not just because of inflation. I mean, certainly there that certainly there's a factor there, but this is something that workers need to come to the table. They're making sure that they have working environments that are safe. We're making sure that we have those standards and we're making sure that they're being paid a fair wage. You should be able to work a full-time job and not live in poverty. That's not a crazy demand in this country.

It's okay to make sure that we're making sure that what makes this country tick, the people who are cleaning your hotel rooms, people that are driving your packages can live a nice life with their family and they can put food on the table and get a good education for their kids and go on vacation once a year. I mean, this is what the American dream is about. And if we continue to allow it to be just a huge profit margin at companies at the expense of the workers that are delivering the goods, that's a giant problem for our country overall.

And of course, we saw in the pandemic and subsequent parts of that, we've seen a lot of billionaires made. But in general, when you look at CEO pay and the multiples of CEO pay to the average salary of the workers, it really has exploded as well in terms of multiples. Probably nowhere is that more evident than in Hollywood, where there's this concentration there. Let's talk a little bit about that and about the issues earlier in the program. I was talking about the concerns of Screenwriters Guild in terms of being replaced by chat GPT. I mean, we're not just talking again about wages. We're talking about them completely being replaced. And so there's issues. The actors are concerned about that as well. But Screenwriters Guild said they won't even talk to us about that, which indicates that they're pretty hardcore in terms of having future scripts being written by ChatGPT or something like that.

Tell us a little bit about what's going on in Hollywood from your perspective. Yeah, I mean, I think just to touch quickly on what you said about COVID. I mean, it also showed us what are the essential workers in this country, right? We were all applauding them, the grocery stores, the nurses, and that's who we need to make sure is able to have good contracts and fair working environments going forward. But Hollywood specifically, they see this AI problem coming their way. And I think what happens is a lot of times when people hear Hollywood's on strike, you think of George Clooney and Julia Roberts, or maybe I'm bleeding myself a little

about who the superstars are. But you think of, you know, these very wealthy making mega millions per movie, but that's not the bulk of Hollywood. And it's not the bulk of the writers for sure. These are a lot of people who are working hard on show to show. And it's not the bulk of the writers for sure. These are a lot of people who are working hard on show to show. And we've seen, you know, there used to be a pretty standard, you had a comedy, it was 22 episodes, or a drama that was, you know, 20 something episodes a season. And now with Netflix and Hulu, I mean, you get seasons that are eight episodes long. Well, that's not as much writing. So there's a decrease in work per series that you're on in a lot of ways. And then what you said, which is AI is coming.

And we haven't even really even seen the beginning of it yet. But there is a fear that they are going to use that instead of people for a lot of this writing. And that would be a shame on the creativity. The other thing that Hollywood is really looking at is these residual checks. Right. I mean, these things are being streamed over and over and over now on people's Hulu's and whatnot whatnot and they're not getting a real paycheck from that i mean there was an actor that was talking the other day and he's not an actor you'd maybe definitely know this isn't a super uber famous he's been on some shows and he got over 50 residual checks and it totaled like 86 dollars wow so so this is the conversation they're having

at the table and now the actors have joined the writers in solidarity because frankly that strengthens their position and the actors know how crucial the writers are to their craft and their work uh so it's good to see the solidarity happening here. But AI is something we're going to be looking at in a lot of different industries, starting to get the attention here. But that's going to be, I mean, we've seen it in grocery stores, right? To get to that place. How many cashiers are there now? Well, not as many, because you've got 20 self checkouts that one person watches. So we need to have a conversation about what are AI replacing and what does that mean for a workforce in America?

Yeah, when you're talking about grocery stores, I think we're going to see that escalate. I just saw that Winn-Dixie and another chain were bought by Aldi's. Now, Aldi's is not all that big in the United States, but they're very big in the UK and in Europe. And they have, of course, Corbin, I forget which one, I get them mixed up, two brothers, one is Piers, the other is Jeremy. One of them went into an Aldi's and they didn't want him to pay with cash. It had to be cashless and they've got other things. They're getting very highly automated where you enter in and you've got biometric ID or something like that, or you don't

get into the store and then it follows you around and charges you automatically. Um, that's the type of thing with Aldi buying domestic grocery store chains. I think we're really going to see that proliferate. And, uh, so that, as you point out, that's going to be another big issue there. But getting back to the Hollywood stuff, it is, and we look at this, as you point out, when you sent this to me, you said there's 1.7 million people outside of California. That's the other thing. You know, people think, oh, you know, George Clooney or whatever, but it's not just the big stars. You see the multimillion stuff. In Hollywood, the film industry, a lot of that is outside of california 1.7 million people who work outside the state 158 billion dollars a year

in wages and so it's a very big industry it's not limited to one town or one state earlier in the show when i was talking about artificial intelligence i pointed out that in new york there's a law that's been introduced saying that if you're going to use AI to replace some of these actors, then you're not going to get the tax breaks that they use to incentivize people doing production into their states. So there's different things like that that are starting to happen. Are we seeing that in other places as well that you're aware of? I don't know that we've seen it official in other places, but I think we will see that be a tactic that some states take. There is certainly a growing conversation happening in state legislatures and in Congress about are we going to be able to wrap ourselves and laws around AI before it's too late, frankly, because this is something we need to catch up.

We're still catching up in some ways on the internet at this point. I mean, a lot of times you see new laws about can you share certain images of someone and the law says it's okay. We sort of know intuitively the ick factor and that you know that's not maybe something that the person gave as a what they'd want to share with the public but the law hasn't caught up with the fact that we have phones that snap a picture and send and text and can you know just hasn't caught up to that so i think we're going to see that be a situation with AI in many different ways, but in this particular conversation as to the jobs. But the actors are very worried about can their likeness be used without their consent

in AI. So this is something that we need to stop acting like is in our future and start having real conversations and discussions and hearings about right now. Yeah, I talked about it about a decade ago. I did a reference earlier in the show. I did a report about a movie called, I think it was titled The Congress, but it was about Robin Wright. And she made this deal with a studio that they could digitize her essentially uh and you know very deeply digitize her entire image her voice everything her persona and then they would own her and it's kind of interesting when you think about that we haven't seen that yet but we're right at the cusp of something like that being done and uh and they could kind of see that coming about a decade ago

when you talk about residuals versus the company's copyrights, we see that the corporations get their copyrights extended and extended and extended. These things have gone longer and longer and longer. It used to be that it was tied to the person's life and then a little bit beyond that for their heirs and that type of stuff. And now, you know, they've extended it quite a bit below beyond that. But this is all something that is really being done to the benefit of the corporations, not so much to other people. And as they own these types of things, own people's images, just like

they have done with copyright music or copyrights of film and that type of thing, we're going to see that to an increasing degree. And I think it's kind of interesting as you're talking about technology, how it is rapidly advancing and people are kind of on their back heel in Hollywood in terms of the writers and the actors. You know, how do we keep from all of this stuff accruing to the corporations? We're not getting our residuals, but they're getting their copyright residuals, if you will, extended into perpetuity. But, you know, you've got streaming, which is out there. You've got, and that's changed things quite a bit. And then you've also got kind of the death of cable and even broadcast.

Linear TV is really collapsing. So the distribution channels are really changing rapidly as well. All of this is in a state of flux. You know, whether you're talking about residuals and copyrights or the way that people are viewing the information, as well then as people, actors and writers being completely replaced by artificial intelligence. How far away are they from reaching an agreement? There's so many different issues here. It doesn't sound like they're really close yet. Yeah, it's so so. It's so complicated. But you might even see more people sort of join the solidarity, different production crews.

We'll see what Broadway does. I mean, they could even grow this. There's radio that is represented by unions but not on the strike right now, like at NPR and places. So we may see it grow. That could force the hand a little more. We may see them start to make some gains at the negotiating table. I do think it's great that a lot of the quote unquote megastars have given funds to the strike fund. A strike fund is absolutely key to if a union is able to stand up and stay on strike because a lot of these people, again, like they're not getting their benefits. They're obviously not making a salary and the strike fund is able to help sustain them and their families through this time. Yeah, that's been one of the practical issues about strikes,

the fact that if it's an extended strike, even if you get some gains that may have been wiped out by the amount of time that you're out. When you look at how we move forward with this, this has been a big agenda for a very long time. And I've been talking about this for a very long time, universal basic income, and the statements being made by a lot of people in the tech industry. But even when Michael Bloomberg was running for president, uh, he made those statements and everybody said, Oh, look, he just call farmers stupid. Well, he didn't really call farmers stupid. He was talking about how farmers were replaced and they went to a factory workers. And he said, went to factory workers. And he said, and the factory workers have their thing, but we can replace the farmers.

We can replace the factory workers. And he said, right now, we're looking at how we're going to replace everybody. When you start talking about solidarity with other groups, he said, we can replace everybody. Our only issue is how do we keep them pacified so they don't come after us with guillotines? That's what he said. And so this has been a process where you look at Bloomberg or you look at Elon Musk. They've talked about massive unemployment. I remember about a decade ago, there was a South Korea survey, and they were talking about how much unemployment would happen with artificial intelligence replacing doctors and lawyers. It was up in 60, 70 percent range for transportation workers that we were talking about earlier. You know, that that's a I don't know if that was a part of the UPS strike, but the issue

of self-driving delivery vehicles or drones or anything like that, that is also something that has been on the horizon. And they've had a target on pretty much every industry, whether it's transportation, whether it's white-collar jobs, blue-collar jobs. They're looking to replace everybody with artificial intelligence and robotics. So I am wondering if this is going to be the start of something that is much bigger. Did the self-driving issues and drone things come into play in the UPS contract as far as you know? I don't know if they were part of the contract

because I wasn't in the negotiation, but it's certainly something that every transportation union from the pilots to TWU to ATU are concerned and working on and having conversations about. There is a concern. They've tried to, Congress, for example, has tried to make trains only have one man, one person in the engineer seat, right? And there's a bill, it's like calling, making sure that there's always a two-man crew. Because there is a safety element to this. It's a concern across the board, right?

I mean, it's only so long until I think they're going to try and tell you, well, let's have robots serve the coffee on the airplanes. Well, let's talk about this. When do the robots think it's a good idea to open the door? Also, they're not a waitress in the air they are a safety um element to your flight as well um but we're going to continue to see this and you know you mentioned it's i think people really place it in blue collar right they talk they think of the factories they think of farmers and that's true but it is a problem like there's a possibility that it's the lawyers and they're having robots write the bulk of the briefs that's right you know doctors

you know if they're gonna if the doctors have become uh basically a lookup table for a pharmaceutical drug which is a lot of them operate you know you come in you got x symptoms you know you could easily have a, uh, AI that's going to do as good, a better job than the doctor is going to do of that. And that was the thing that surprised me when I saw it a decade ago, the fact that for a lot of white collar jobs, they saw that as, and now we're starting to see that with the writing and other things like that. Uh, they saw them as more vulnerable than the blue collar jobs to being replaced. And so it is going to be a major disruption in our society. In addition to what we're seeing with inflation,

that is, I think, the bigger issue, and that is the artificial intelligence thing. And they have been looking at this for the longest time. I remember when Uber was in its early days, and you had Travis Kalalnik was still the CEO. And he said, the reason our cars are expensive is because of that other dude in the car with you. And we're going to make him go away. So they've got people who are, you know, working as a, in a gig job and supplying their own car,

maintaining their own car. Meanwhile, they're working on how they're going to slit that person's throat. But we've seen some really bad results as you're talking about the robot serving coffee on the airplane. We've seen some really bad results as you're talking about the robot serving coffee on the airplane. We've seen some really horrific things already with the self-driving cars. And they just had a big traffic jam I talked about yesterday in San Francisco. The people there hate those driverless taxis. They're creating safety issues around fires and other things and creating massive traffic jams going particular places and just stopping and creating massive traffic jams going particular places and just stopping and none of them will move. And so there's a lot of issues with that

besides replacing everybody and just putting us all on some kind of a government handout welfare check, which people don't want. Right, exactly. It's complicated and we can't keep putting our heads in the sand and ignoring it. It has to be something that we're taking a look at and we have to look at it with an imagination. Like what could be in 10, 20 years? Because there are a lot of safety and danger concerns when it comes to this too because they don't they know how to set it up so that it starts learning but even the scientists building it are not completely clear on what point it starts to teach itself more and what exponentials that happens and we don't even know how it's doing that you know it's like it sounds like a sci-fi movie but it's not it's like at what point do they does the the ai thing the robot or

whatever say oh this is the danger and it's the people and and what it does with that and can we control it i mean i know that sounds like an an insane Hollywood movie, but we're closer to that than I think people really realize. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, we saw that already happen in the last couple of years. You know, we got to, we got to, here's our, here's our problem. And we're not sure the solution, but we got to do it really quickly. We got to do it at warp speed. We don't know if this thing works.

We don't know if it's dangerous, but we got to do it at warp speed. And you wind up having some people who make a tremendous, obscene amount of money and other people who get hurt. And this, I think, is being played out in this. You know, we have all these different nightmare scenarios that people have always talked about, about runaway technology and about, you know, the Terminator type of technology, Skynet, becoming self-aware and coming after us. I just talked today about some new information that shows that it might just go the opposite direction. If it starts, the more content that it puts out on the internet that is synthetic, as it starts to read its own content, within about five generations of synthetic stuff, it's kind of like cannibalism.

It's kind of like the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or mad cow disease. It's feeding on itself and it just becomes incredibly stupid. And instead of becoming incredibly smart, it becomes incredibly stupid and useless. So that was a hopeful bit of information. Maybe this thing isn't going to become super intelligent. Maybe it's going to become super stupid. And in the interim of either two of these scenarios fulfilling themselves, you're going to displace people out of jobs. You're going to create an economic problem and situation where there aren't these middle class jobs to have. So we really need to have the leaders of this country and people pay attention to this and figure out how are we ensuring that we have an economy that's going to keep running. And that's a strong middle class. I mean, that's the backbone of, of the U S and when you've got strong union representation, it helps keep a strong middle class in America. And talk a little bit about the extent of this outside of LA and outside of Hollywood. I mentioned some of the numbers,

1.7 million people, $158 billion industry. How is that? I know when I was living in North Carolina, they had offered a lot of subsidies to film companies to film there. And so they were making a lot of films there. And there were a lot of people who were working in the industry. How is that looking now? How is that distributed? I think there's still a lot of films being made in a lot of different places. Georgia has a great deal, New York, Illinois, Washington State. There's a lot of the industry that's around the United States.

And some, because states very specifically, like you said, in North Carolina, pass maybe different tax credits or other incentives to have the filming come there. And other places because they're just so geographically perfect for so much of what they're making that it's a place that makes sense. We do see a lot go to Canada as well. I think there's a lot of desire for the U.S. to keep that in country. But we do see a lot of filming that happens up there for the same sorts of reasons. So, you know, it's something that's going to affect states outside, like you said, of California. It's a real problem for some states now because of how much they've grown the industry there are taking a big

hit on the economy yeah yeah gonna affect a lot of people uh the the illinois nurses association is involved in um some labor strikes tell us what's going on there it sounds like there is some dispute about the working environment and the safety. And I think we have to remember that a lot of times what the demands are for hours and those sorts of situations arise that these workers need to be sure to have a working environment that is safe for them. And particularly if you're thinking about your nurses, you don't want them to be walking around overtired or in a possible safety issue because that's not good for any of the patients either. I believe they went on a two-day strike, so it's sort of a warning strike. And this is, you know, just kind of showing what the problem could be and what they'd have to deal with if they were on a full strike.

And that's often what we see with hospital workers and whatnot. But yeah, this is not, again, it's not just about the pay. It's more about their working environment. Let me ask you, does it have anything to do with some of the mandates that happened in terms of vaccines and stuff like that? Because I know that was a real sticking point. A lot of people left their employer, left some of the hospitals that were doing that type of thing and went somewhere else. Is that a factor in this, those kind of mandates? I haven't seen it come up in this particular strike as a factor, but, you know, the

medical workers, much like our Army and our Navy and whatnot, have had a lot of vaccine requirements for their entire job. I mean, that sort of comes with entering that industry. That was not simply a COVID mandate. There's a whole host of vaccines that they have to have to be able to work in that particular environment. So that's nothing new for a healthcare worker. Yeah, I was just wondering if maybe it was a new concern for them and that's going to start taking place there. But that was throughout Illinois. Are there other things like that happening in other states that you know of

in terms of the health industry? I haven't heard of a new one in the health industry right now, although stuff pops up. I know the nurses in Buffalo had a strike a couple years ago and successfully met that. But we are seeing possibly UAW and workers in Michigan putting together the union-made cars. They might be on strike soon. There's discussions about that. We obviously have the hotel workers in strike in Los Angeles. And we're seeing a lot of organizing. You know, I mean, that's the other element of

this. It's not just those who have it and are striking, but we're seeing a lot of new organizing happening and people working to see if they can form a union and join a union. And, you know, just for viewers to know, like, that's a process. There's cards that have to be signed. There's lots of paperwork that's submitted. There's votes that happen amongst the workers. So it really has to be that a large majority of the workers want to join a union. And it means that they've met with a particular union. They've talked through that. They understand what sort of the demands that they may want to make on the employer. And it might be that they have already have other places that belong in that industry, belong to a certain union. It may be a fresh new one. So we are seeing

a lot of organizing happening across the country right now too. Yeah. And I think you're going to see the kind of disruption that maybe not as many different factors as you see in the entertainment industry in terms of all the distribution and the manufacturing and you know the involvement of technology but certainly technology and this push for electric cars is going to be very disruptive they're going to be simpler they're not going to require as many people and they're moving the power plants out of the heavily unionized states into the non-unionized states as well at the same time. And I think they're looking at lower volume. I think most of these automotive companies are now looking to be mobility companies renting cars by the ride, getting back to the crews and the driverless cars and stuff like that.

I think that's really their focus, whether they can make it work and what kind of a timeframe they can make it work. That's going to be another issue. But I think that they'll waive the regulations and get this push for them one way or the other. Well, it certainly is an amazing topic and it has so many different aspects to it. Just in Hollywood, it does. But we're going to be seeing this type of disruption. It's a massive time of economic disruption, and it's going to be very challenging for everybody as this rolls out. Thank you so much for talking to us. Again, we're talking to Nicole Brenner-Schmitz about the labor strikes that I think are going to continue to proliferate in this kind of an economic environment. Thank you so much for talking to us.

Thank you for having me. Thank you. All right, folks, we're going to take a quick break and we will be right back. ¶¶ oh Analyzing the Globalist's Next Move And now, The David Knight Show