TRASHFUTURE - Hollyweird Rise Up ft. Nick Adams

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

Nick Adams, writer on such shows as BoJack Horseman, New Girl, Tuca and Bertie (and others!), takes some time off the WGA picket lines to talk to us about writing as a profession, how studios have constantly sought to break up and undermine it, and the insane plan to replace Hollywood Writers with ChatGPT. All information, including information on strike funds, is here: https://www.wgacontract2023.org/strike-hub If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We’re touring the Midlands, the North, and (one city in) Scotland in May! We’ll be in Birmingham on May 14, Leeds on May 15, Manchester on May 16, and Glasgow on May 21. Tickets are available here: https://www.trashfuture.co.uk/events *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows and check out a recording of Milo’s special PINDOS available on YouTube here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRI7uwTPJtg *ROME ALERT* Milo and Phoebe have teamed up with friend of the show Patrick Wyman to finally put their classical education to good use and discuss every episode of season 1 of Rome. You can download the 12 episode series from Bandcamp here (1st episode is free): https://romepodcast.bandcamp.com/album/rome-season-1 Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Thanks, everybody, for coming to the table read. We know, obviously, that without writers to actually work, it's pretty difficult to make shows. But I think we got something really good here. It was given to us, actually, by a guy who had a crack at being a screenwriter earlier and is really developed in another industry and has come through for us today. So I'm going to do stage direction, and then you all know your parts. Okay, let's get going.

So interior, studio executive's office day. We see a screenwriter, Jim, sitting in front of a large desk, facing a studio executive, Mr. Smith. The room is nicely furnished with large windows overlooking the bustling city below. Mr. Smith, I'm hoping we can talk about my compensation for this project. I feel that the initial offer is not commensurate with the work required. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I understand your concern, and I will consult with the necessary department to see if we

can come to a mutually beneficial agreement. Well that's good to hear, but I was hoping for a more immediate solution. This is a high profile project, and I've been putting in long hours to make sure it's a success. I appreciate your dedication and hard work. Just to ensure that we value our employees and want to compensate them fairly. Yeah, I think we can all agree. It's a laugh riot, you know?

Cuss it, print it. That's cinema, that's movies, that's television, you know? What we're not going to read out is the sequence afterwards, where Oscar Isaac comes in and says Palpatine has returned. That was Ben Shapiro, who of course, a guy who has had a crack at being a screenwriter before, using chat GPT to show how screenwriters are no longer necessary to produce the gripping dramas and comedies and other stories that we all know and love. Yeah, and he solved it.

He solved it. I will see you for season six premiere of Jim and Mr. Smith on FX. This does feel like a really weird, but also very telling insight into what he's like, because I'm not sure whether he's trying to own the WGA, the strikers, by sort of saying that no, you could be replaced by AI, but the whole thing is him trying to generate a sequence in which it shows that this is just very bad bureaucratic hope. I don't understand how he thinks he's owning anyone in this. It feels like...

Because what he's trying... It's very undirected. It's not really particularly concentrated. It needs to be rewritten, is what you're saying? It sounds like... Yeah. So, I'm going to stop everyone here. The table read is now at an end, and I want to welcome our guest.

It is, of course, Hollywood, Hollywood power player and screenwriter, Nick Adams, who has written for such shows as New Girl, Bojack Horseman, Tuka and Birdie, to name only a few who is joining us as a member of the WGA who is fighting back against the tyranny of Jim and Mr. Smith, Studio Executive Knights, by Ben Shapiro. A slight correction, Nick. Hollywood power players do not drive Volkswagen's, so... They drive Toyota's, such as the new Toyota Corolla. Once I get that Yaris money, then I'll be a power player.

Yeah, that's right. Nick, it's great to have you here on the show. We are going to be talking all things, all things strike, all things writer's room, and all things... Quite a few. I'm trying to answer the question. Can autocomplete on your phone replace this industry, as well as the cheating on... At school industry, as well as all those other industries it's replacing?

Can we go back quickly to the Ben Shapiro thing? Because we... It's so good. We want to revisit it. Well, absolutely, yeah. Actually, Jim is a comfort character for me. Yeah, I want to make seven seasons of this. This is the new corner gas for me, no.

Because what he's done, I presume, is he's trying to prove that chat GPT can replace Hollywood screenwriters, but instead of getting chat GPT to write applauseable like Hollywood TV script or whatever, he's gotten chat GPT to write the script of the negotiations for the pay of TV writers, which doesn't make no one watch that TV show anyway. Yeah, this is exactly what I was trying to say. It doesn't like, surely he would have been more effective at getting them to just sort of write something that would have been kind of bad, but possible, and there's like loads of examples where you could do that and sort of like make your case, even if it's still

like, shitty. But he's so sort of like ideologically mad about all of this, but he doesn't quite understand like how to drive a very simple point home. It's the joke about how like conservatives never know how to finish a joke, because they get too mad in the middle of telling it, and they don't even know how to finish a prompt for an AI. There's so many like, it's a police interrogation scene, it's a courtroom scene, it's a hospital room scene that we've all seen a thousand times, that you could at least approximate.

They didn't go for one of those things. It's this weird negotiation for what we don't know, like, What we're all missing here is that we keep assuming that Ben Shapiro is going to write some kind of a good realistic or at least understand what makes a screen a screenplay scene. So just like, just another very quick thing, which like wasn't the daily wire was like making or planning to make movies or TV shows, right? It released a couple.

The like Gina Carano one where like Joe Biden smells her hair. So like wouldn't it be called daily wire because they make a show as good as the wire every day? Wouldn't it wouldn't it wouldn't it look more effective to be like, hey, I hear us in films and TV shows we made without like damn union writers, there's proof that we could you know, you don't need them. Like it's very telling that he's not even he doesn't have any faith even in his own projects.

It also gets to the core of like conservatives and kind of the core of the thing that I think has hurt the industry is that instead of just sleazy Hollywood assholes doing it, you have like tech guys trying to do it and you know, conservatives try to do it like they're not cool or smart or funny and they don't have good taste and they don't have anything to say. And so they get really frustrated. It's like a kid who can't open like a child proof case because they don't know how to do it.

You know, and every time they try, you know, it's not something it's not like, you know, being an engineer where they're, you know, just basic rules that you have to follow. You have to have taste. You have to have an ear. You have to have had conversations and arguments and had sex and one night stands and these people haven't done any of these things, so when they try to depict it, they don't know how to do it. Well, it's our all conclusion for this, that Ben Shapiro is too much of a virgin to write

even an AI prompt. He's probably had lots of sex, but he's still a virgin. If that makes any sense, he's had sex, but he's never fucked. So I'm going to, I'm going to set us up for our, our broader conversation. I'm going to do a little bit of scene setting here. Social banks have now failed as a result of mortgage-backed securities losing value, causing nerves among financial power players and depositors across the U.S. economy. A new clutch of technologies threatens to upend and demolish the swath of jobs we once believed

secure and replace them with platform and not only dominated piecework. A Hollywood writer strike looms as the eyes roll that a new bunch of reality TV shows are going to take over the airwaves. The rises on jeans are low, the cuts are boot, and a large social network is teetering in the brink of collapse and irrelevance as its more exclusive cousin siphons off power users with invites. The year is 2008, the year is 2012, just setting up my blue sky. All of this has happened before and will happen again.

Yes. This is a fast cycle. I'm Matthew McConaughey. I'm cutting the can into like little men and standing them on the table. This is, this is a show that will now be written by chatGPT. This was an observation that I've elaborated on by friend of the show, John, leave it. But I think it is apt to share that the long 2010s started in 2008 with a Hollywood writer strike over such things, which we'll get into as not just like DVD residuals or who's

going to make money off of bones, but in fact, streaming was an early war over streaming. It was happening at the time of broad-based economic collapse. It was happening at a time of consolidation in the industry, and 14 years later we are still in the same year having a similar fight. But the terms, the battle lines have changed so much and the power of the entrenched studios has grown so large. But it does seem that the, if nothing else, the obvious righteousness of the cause and popularity of the cause of the worker in this particular arrangement does seem to be a little

more notable. So I just want to ask, Nick, how do you feel about the historical parallels in the broad sense between 08, 23 and 88? It's really amazing, the last strike, the thing that we're still fighting for were a direct result of the fight that we fought then. There was, I mean, we were pretty unified then. I wasn't in, the guild was unified. I wasn't in the union at that point, but I think people were unified then, not as unified

as we are now, but I think we rightly so saw that, you know, the second anybody streamed anything on their computer or their TV, everybody realized that that was going to be the future. And even though the studios hilariously tried to say that this was like just an experiment and we don't know what's going to happen, we knew that that was going to be the fight. And you know, if we hadn't fought the fight then we would be doing it right now. Like, can you imagine a union that was just now trying to get, you know, compensation or residuals at all from streaming television in 2023, which, you know, it seems ridiculous. But I think it's just a sign of how these economic factors and the media consolidation

and the rising of the streamers and, you know, the movement of most of the content to online is just, yeah, it's an extension of a fight that we've already fought. And it's clear that it's this thing that's exploded and it's not going back. And for them to still try to maintain that this is just some lark that, you know, that they're doing for a time and we don't have to pay you the same because the delivery model is slightly different is just ridiculous. But they've always been ridiculous. Netflix is going to go back into DVDs any day now.

They're going to mail you the DVDs again. I'm actually squatting on RKO.com for when they inevitably come back. Well, look, you can go to the ESO station. You can buy a Roy Chubby Brown on tour DVD from the bucket for £3 right now. What are the residuals on that? I wonder not. And so, you know, this is something we'll get into, but there's another little vignette I wanted to share.

You know, we shared Ben Shapiro's script. I wanted to share this vignette from The New Yorker. You'll probably have seen it referenced. Probably a bit smart for us, I'm sure. And it says, last month, The Show the Bear won a WGA award for Best Comedy Series. And Alex O'Keeffe went to the ceremony with a negative bank account and a bow tie that he'd bought on credit. He's applying for jobs at movie theaters to prepare for the potential strike, saying,

A lot of people assume that when you're in a TV writer's room, you sit around a table and you just work together. With The Bear, I learned from these masters that if you were given a shit sandwich, you can dress it up and make it a Michelin star-level dish. They were consistently given shit sandwich after shit sandwich. You recall one of the executive producers apologizing to him saying, I'm so sorry this is your first writer's room experience. It's not usually like this, and it shouldn't be like this, but I don't even know the alternative.

I thought we would be treated more like collaborators on a product, but it's just like an assembly line now. And from everything I've read, that seems from everything from the chopping up and splitting up of all of the work, the physically splitting up the writers, and then being on such financial precarity that you have to rent a bow tie to go to an award for your extremely popular show that you're working on. That one vignette seems to really be evocative of what writers are actually experiencing. It's a common thing here on LA.

There's so many award shows that you can just go somewhere and they'll just like blend you a bow tie for a few hours. No, I mean, not to make light of that situation, but it's just something that has crept in over time. Kind of, I hate that analogy because I don't think it's accurate, but the frog in the boiling water that gradually doesn't know it's boiling. But just going back, going from 22 episodes to 12 or eight or 10, going from 10 months of work to four or five, and then the mini room thing, it used to be that if you had

a job on a show, especially a hit show that you knew, okay, based on the reaction is going to come back and assuming they liked my work, they'll I'll be brought back. But getting on a show like that sort of meant more financial security, but you don't have as many months out of the year to work. For me, I was fortunate I worked on Bojack Horseman for three seasons, but I also was working on a show called People of Earth on TBS. So both shows went for about six months at a time. I would write for a season of People of Earth, and then sometimes I would have a week off

or two weeks off, but then usually I would just go right into Bojack, Bojack would end. I would have some downtime and then I would go back to People of Earth. So you're looking at either having to do that, just like maintain, get lucky enough to maintain two jobs. So he would have had to been on the bear and then start working on something else or just hang around for six months, which even if you're an upper level TV writer, maybe you can pull that off if you don't have a family. But I don't know too many people who can get away with working five months a year, even

if they're making tremendous money when they're doing it. Also you're trying to do that in Los Angeles, which is one of the most expensive cities in the world. And maybe you're one of the people who can do it without living in LA, but then you probably are a New Yorker and it's even more expensive or depending on who you are, slightly less expensive. So it's just this ridiculous thing that on the surface you see some of the numbers, the weekly pay sounds like a lot to the average person and it is, it's good money, but you

have to basically prorate that on four or five months out of the year, unless if they do a mini room, especially if you're a lower level writer. And it's only good money in the first place because you're a union, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's the same thing. Hmm.

It's the same thing people say about train drivers here, where it's like, oh, you drive a train, you make like 80,000 pounds a year or whatever. That's a lot of money. It's like, yeah, it is a lot of money. It's a lot of money because they're union and they want to defend that and keep that and still have it be like a good wage because everyone should get one of those. We're a crab in a bucket country, you know, now everyone should earn what I earn and no more.

That's the... Yeah. I shouldn't earn more. I don't care about that. Other people should earn as little as I do. So, Nick, you said this thing about the mini room earlier and that's something I want to get into about changing the nature of how the job actually works because I want to talk about like, before we talk about like the history of how we got here from the previous

strikes, I wanted to talk about like what it's like for writers now, right? So we have the transformation of the conditions of work. We have the transformation of how you're actually paid and what it looks to me is like a kind of a gig-economification. So let's start with the mini room. Let's go through what it actually is like. Well, like these are all... This is all secondhand.

I've been fortunate that I've never really experienced a mini room, but the traditional model was always you pitch a show, they like the pitch, they buy it, read a pilot, they decide to make more if they like that, if that experience is good. At that point, you hire a writing staff. You hire a room full of people, I mean, and used to be 12, 13, 14 people. And then you start writing the show, you start breaking the season, you start writing the episodes and you go into production, you start making it. And now they can sort of say, well, we really like this idea and we're going to buy it maybe,

but can you do a mini room and break a season or write a few more episodes, basically get the writers together and really quickly do what used to take 10 months to do, which is like break a whole story, write a bunch of episodes, maybe even write all the episodes. And then at the end of that super brief time, everybody's contract is over, they're let go. And then maybe the showrunner and one other person, if they pick up the show, have to go and rewrite scripts and address all the stuff that other writers would be doing. Or sometimes they would, the mini room wraps and they haven't even decided they're going

to go forward with the show. And even if they do, there's no guarantee that the writers who helped break the season would be rehired to actually go into production. So I mean, the gigification metaphor is incredibly apt. It's them wanting to extract as much writing as they can for as quickly as they can and then get those people off their payroll as soon as possible. And I think if you look at, there are some little bits, I think, of just clips of shows I've just seen online or whatever that have always really stuck with me.

The one going around at the moment is that clip of Ted Lasso that just looks like an HR training video. You wonder why that things are more difficult. It's not because people are treating writers worse, everyone's writing much faster and your time to actually do good, well thought out work is being reduced by the need to break an entire season in 20 minutes and then have one guy try and reconcile all the issues later. Well, yeah. I mean, I think there was an article that went around talking about succession, one

of the writers from succession talking about typically they have two to three writers on set and the actors have questions, the actors have a problem, you need someone there who can interact with them who knows the story, who's been in the room from the very inception point of the story. A lot of times, actors will wonder why you're doing something and you have to explain to them like we're setting something up that you don't even know about yet because you haven't read that script, but it's two episodes down the road. So the people that are the most knowledgeable about the whole story process need to be on

set and need to be involved. When I worked on New Girl, there were days where there were probably four or five writers on set just throwing jokes around, just adding more jokes and more jokes and more jokes, but also learning how to interact with actors, learning how to figure out what works and what doesn't work. Being on set is such an integral part of doing the job and it's rare now I think in most cases if you're not shooting in LA for the writer to get to be a part of that. You're just locked in a closet and a broom closet and just called, okay, give me a season

of this. What we're going to do is we're going to take a server containing a large language model and we're just going to put it near the set, keep it out of the eye line and it's going to learn that way. I also get the impression, Nick, my girlfriend works in film and TV and that it's like a bit like Feast or Famine. You get these things that are also huge budgets where they're kind of spending on money sometimes on writers, well, they don't even know what they're doing with them.

I remember she said there was a huge, one of the massive global shows that everyone watches and they'd put out a tender for a UK writer to go and just, who hadn't worked on the show, to just go and sit on the set and just be there, just floating around for a huge amount of money and then they kept offering it to writers at this agency and the writers were like, yeah, but what am I supposed to do? And they're like, I don't know. You just go and be there and it's like a huge amount of money and then you contrast that with most writers who are actually doing the writing and who are getting less and less

money to do more and more work. There's no one else who's even going to understand why they're there than the person who, I worked on a show and it was another writer's first time being on set and she turned to me and she was like, can I just talk to them? And I was like, yes, you can go, they're the actors, just go talk to them, introduce yourself. But she didn't know what the protocol was because she hadn't ever been allowed to be a part of the process. And I mean, the problem is the people who are making these decisions, they have no idea

what goes on in the writer's room. They have no idea what goes on on set. Like it's really good non-writing producers, really good studio executives will tell you, like, yeah, I've seen the process, I know how important it is to have those people involved all the way through. But the people making these decisions have never written anything, they've never operated a camera, they've never stood on a mark, don't know anything about making a movie or making a TV show.

You walk on a set and there are hundreds and hundreds of people and they're all scurrying around and they all have a thing to do and they know what the fuck they're doing and they know how to do it. You talk to them for five minutes and you're like, I didn't even realize that was a job. Like this guy's explained to me what he does and it's blowing my mind. The people making these decisions have never done any of it. They have no idea, you know, so that's the ultimate frustration. I always go back to how, back in the day, and this town has always been about making

money, but back in the day there was a studio executive smoking a cigar and he was looking for a boffo picture and this one's going to have guns and this is a mobster story, right? And the girl's going to have legs for days, you know? He was absolutely an unrepentant capitalist, but he wanted to make a great picture. Sammy, we're going to make a great show. And these guys don't have that. They don't care about that, so they don't understand, yeah, it costs a ton of money if you want to have a trained orangutan.

It costs a shit ton of money if you want to have a shootout and someone jumped from the top of the building to another building. You want that song? You want that Carly Simon song? Well, Carly Simon's going to charge you $85,000 for like two seconds of it. So you have to pay, you know? Or then again, nobody does it better, you know? You know what we've lost?

We've lost Bruckheimer and Simpson. That's who's missing. He's been replaced by tech guys, the genuine insanity that you need to be Don Simpson. Like just a middle-class guy who likes movies and is coked up out of his mind. I understand that guy. I absolutely understand that guy. The like 30-something guy who drinks kombucha and is like mindlessly looking at stock reports. I don't understand that guy.

Like I understand a Hollywood, you know, producer, that makes sense to me. I feel like we're back in 2008 again. Bring back the old tyrants. Yeah. Yeah. Because 2008, I think, was the fulcrum. And not just in the movie or entertainment business, but in every business where people were like, okay, the economy went to shit.

And so then what they did was they put all of the accountants in charge of running all of the big companies. And then you see it's created the same problem in every business where it's people who only care about the bottom line and extracting value to the detriment of what the fuck it is that that company actually does because they don't understand any of the business. They only understand the money. If you want to talk about why like there is no more digital media anymore, it's because private equity bought all of it, fired everyone, covered everything with ads, then just hoped

that a business model would sort of emerge from that. And I almost did. It was Quibi. Like we nearly got like 50 states of fright, you know, at any of those shows. Doghouse renovation. Murderhouse. Murderhouse flip. That's the one.

There was the doghouse renovation one also. I love Quibi. I wish it would. I can't believe a mediocre CEO couldn't run a network. Can't believe it. It's crazy. Yeah. So that's another casualty of O8 is we lost Breckheimer and Simpson and we lost Simpson

way earlier than that, but we lost that type of guy. So when we talk about O8 though, so when we talk about the job, right, we have it physically broken up. We have the writers isolated from everything. Part of what that does is it reduces their power. It reduces their ability to say, I uniquely, I as a person understand how to work with these actors. I understand how to work with the rest of the team.

I'm developing my own skills because that makes them more expensive and harder to fire, right? It also makes them better at making the product. But if you're not trying to make a goddamn picture, then you don't give a shit and you want them as broken up and separated and alienated from each other in the process as possible because you don't care about what they write. You just need words on the page that you can shoot so you can give Ted Lasso a speech to give.

So if you have an endless subscriber turn or a model where you need more subscribers and more subscribers, I do think for them, it just becomes about getting product on the screen as quickly and as efficiently as possible and making sure that product generates the maximum number of eyeballs, the people stick with it until it's done streaming or whatever their metrics are. And there does just need to be some quality control involved in this. And with taste, have to understand that if you want Mad Men, if you want Breaking Bad, if you want the Sopranos, if you want the wire, yeah, those guys need to be locked in

a room for a while and you need to just let them work on it. We talked about the most ridiculous things that Bojack Horseman did. We debated them as if they were, okay, are we going to build a bridge from LA to Hawaii? What are we going to do in the bridge? We talked about it as if it was a kid with cancer on house or something. We took it seriously so that when we got to the point where we were writing it, when we got to the point where it aired, there was a reason for it. It made sense.

It wasn't just something that we tossed off for a site gag. That takes time, man. It takes time and writers have to be involved in the whole entire process. Too many producers now too obsessed with getting product on screen when they used to be obsessed with getting product off a mirror and we need to go back. We need to bring back the Bob Evans level of producer in Hollywood with the phone, by the pool, with the coke habit and the big sunglasses. When you meet him in a pool, yelling and a frenzy.

She doesn't even know what she's yelling. The algorithm can't tell you why a show with the leading man that no one's ever heard of about advertising was going to have America by the balls. An algorithm can't explain the why of that. It just can't. We're never going to be able to understand what I don't understand of the viewers. All of this stuff that's bad but is designed along these lines and is designed to encourage subscribers.

I don't want to name names, but you know these movies on Netflix that you're like, I have literally never heard of this. I've never seen any of these people before. Of course, it's Yaris. Netflix is telling me 8 billion people watch this every second. Are they just fudging the numbers? Well, yes, but also like someone out there is watching this shit and who? I want to know.

It just goes back to our point. If you're going to simultaneously brag about how many people are watching the newest action movie on Netflix, you can't then tell us you can't pay us more. If it's so successful, if this movie that you're saying no one's ever heard of, if it's so successful and this many people around the world have streamed it, seems to me like now's a good time to go ahead and cut the people in who wrote the fucking thing. For us, Spencer Confidential has been a running joke for a very long time because when we did our three-part series on the economics of Netflix, that was the number one movie

that like 4 billion people had watched and no one could say what the fuck it was. It was never talked about anywhere, it was just this nothing, but I want to move on a little bit because we've alluded to what I want to move to, which is that all of these organizations are making so much more money. The profit margins are getting huge. This goes back to what we were talking about earlier, 2008, this point around which everything pivots. This is where we get our era of low interest that makes Netflix possible the way it is.

This constant bidding up of the costs of every single project, but also all the costs except labor. It also is where we get Apple and Amazon getting into the film industry who don't have to make money at all. Famously, Amazon Studios was described as a lost leader for Jeff Bezos to get pussy. It was described by that by an Amazon executive. Also the huge concentration of power among these groups, even by someone like Netflix becoming a monopoly buyer of shows.

There is this enormous expansion in profit margins, an enormous expansion in credit available, and then all the while, they're gigafying all these jobs by looking at old provisions of the old contract, and at the same time, having this money tidal wave of money crash over them. One of the things that's changed now, of course, is now that the economy has had moon gravity turned on instead of zero gravity, is that these companies are all being told by the people who've loaned the money, you would now need to turn a profit unless you're Amazon and Apple who don't and can just basically crush the others.

As we all know, shit rolls downhill. You can see how the same transformations that are happening in 08, consolidation, the slow emergence of the tech players, the economic crisis forcing everyone to start quickly rummaging around under the couch cushions for change. It's happening again, but it's happening from this position where things have moved on. It's happening from a place where through a combination of, again, increasing market power, but also through the fact that people will uncritically repeat, oh, chat GBT can do this, that and the other thing, it's going to automate the following jobs.

The accountants who are in charge of the studios, like Don Simpson would never believe that kind of thing, but the accountants who are in charge of the studios, they'll see that, they'll believe it, they'll make decisions based on it. They're powerful enough that we, either as creators of stuff or as consumers of stuff, have to just live with those consequences. They're scared of chat GBT because they've not done enough cocaine. They need to do more cocaine and they will have the confidence to believe they could beat chat GBT in any arena.

I was just going to say, despite the projections and the stock prices and whatever else they want to try out, this isn't an industry that's generated, that makes $200 billion a year, basically $200 billion last year. What we're asking for, if we get everything that we're asking for would be, I think, less than 2% of that, less than 2% on a budget line for not just one corporation, but all of them. You know what I mean? Just to ensure that if you want to still be in this business, that you have people who

can write the movies and write the TV shows, which are so immediately successful. This is all only happening because Wall Street demands that they get more and more and more successful every year instead of taking care of the people who make the shows. It's not going to stop with the writers. The actors are going to have to fight this fight. The directors are going to have to fight this fight. All the below the line crew, the people that drive the trucks, the people that cook the food, the people that do the hair and the makeup and the wigs and the clothes, they're

all going to fight this fight because this is what they always do, which is try to squeeze the people who actually do the work. I wanted to ask a little, I wanted to ask very quickly a question about actors. One of the things I would pick up on was just even how Wall Street, Private Equity, Venture Capital, how they define success. In this case, being a lack for lack of a better term, the line always has to go up. You've got to keep on pushing stuff out. You've got to keep slapping ads on things.

One of the things that sells a show these days seems to be having a big headline character. I wondered whether the success of these strikes or not success per se, but how much studios engage with these strikes will come down on actors who it seems that studios are more dependent on in order to continue selling at a time of endless content streams and how, from your perspective, I've seen some actors and some producers, of which I was very surprised about, they're being very openly supportive of the striking rices. How are you seeing it from your side in terms of how actors are engaging with everyone on strike right now?

Yeah. The support that I've seen, it's been tremendous with lots of big name people have shown. They've shown up on the picket lines and tweeted their support. I think if you're a working actor, you know how important A, the writing is, and B, how important the writers are on set. I think there are maybe some younger actors, I don't want to name any names, but people who maybe aren't as experienced, who feel like they're in a position to sort of integrate the work or dismiss the work.

I think the real successful working actors, people who have had a career, who know what it's like to have stuff written for them that they can really sink their teeth into, they know that there's nothing for them to do without good work. And it behooves them to support the people who are going to write the words. And also, I think the actors are going to be facing and are facing a similar crunch. Lots of actors have shared their stories about how it's harder and harder to make a living as a working actor as not someone who's not the star of the show, not number one or number two on the call sheet, people that are just sort of the day player rate that people talk

about that they want to continue to give actors instead of a good solid minimum. And again, we can't do it without those people. There's no shows, there's no movies without the people who have the guts to get in front of the camera. But if you're Ted and Ted Lasso, your bank account is always going to be fine. But it's the people who are around the perimeter of those shows who you absolutely need. You absolutely can't make any of these shows without that are facing the same squeeze that we're all facing.

Unless you're the top showrunner, the top rock star showrunner or a top actor, you have to fight and fight and fight to make enough just to support yourself. So I think we sort of have the shape of the situation as it is now. We have this uberified workforce, we have demands for more stable employment and higher minimum pay, more residuals on things like streaming, which were magically considered to be worthless because we're going back to the old terrestrial TV system anytime now. And by the way, just to note, there is a system of TV writing currently operating in the world that works exactly like the L.A. studios want now, looks exactly like that.

It's called Britain. It's all in Britain. You get hired by the day and you're paid less than minimum wage to write for BBC comedy shows. And the BBC comedy shows are so good. It's a demonstration of how well model works. Yeah. Exactly.

The efficiency. One of the things that we wanted was, you know, minimums in comedy variety on streaming and the studios responded with the day rate. That was their response. Yeah. And so now the only people or the vast majority of the people that can work in UK comedy writers' rooms come from, let's say, families named after parts of the country that they owned. Yeah, for sure, and that's why all of the jokes on Have I Got News For You are the way that

they are. So, American listeners, if you want to understand what the American studios and streamers want for American comedy writing, it's us. It's here. It's this situation. It's Have I Got News For You. But could America have made years and years? I don't think so.

But could America have made exclusively shows where we've got a bunch of like underpaid stand-up comedians to sit around a desk with another underpaid stand-up comedian for like half an hour to an hour of topical comedy about the week's events? Those were the best shows, too. They are better than their American counterparts, somehow. Somehow. It's a low bar, but they have cleared it. I want to talk a little bit about 2008, because we've alluded to what was being fought over

in 2008, but I think it is important to discuss, right? So, as I understand it, the last strike in 2008 was around the rise of home movie collecting and wanting to make sure that writers got DVD residuals. But as I've sort of alluded to earlier as well, it also anticipated the rise of streaming because it could see movies being sold, for example, on iTunes. And what you mentioned, Nick, is this is the reason that there is any provision for streaming at all in the current master business agreement, right? It was something at the time that anybody, I think, with a half a brain, could tell was

going to explode, and it has exploded even bigger than the union even realized at the time. I keep saying we, even though I wasn't in the union at the time. And so for them to now basically try to do the same thing, to try to minimize the effect of that and minimize the ability for people to get residuals based on shows that now can be watched ad nauseam. The residual model was built on, hey, they're going to show a rerun of the episode that you wrote, right?

Every year, you would go on hiatus and they would just show reruns of that episode. But they would air it maybe one time, maybe twice. And then down the road, if your show goes into syndication, they'll be, you know, it's airing somewhere. With streaming, you can just watch Ted Lasso over and over and over again if you want. Not that, you know, yeah, like, or Stranger Things, or Stranger Things, or Project Horseman, or whatever. But you know, the studios have this ability to just air something ad nauseam and continue

to generate, generate revenue off of your work ad nauseam. And they want to pay you less in residuals. They're airing it more and using it more, but they want to pay you less. Yeah, do you understand? I feel quite bad about the studio's eternal flame like Ted Lasso repeating TV that just shows all of the episodes of Ted Lasso on a loop. There'll be one for every show in the future. Every show will have its own stream.

You could actually do law and order already. You can have a law and order stream. It's just that. Go to that channel and just watch that in the day, they would syndicate Bojack Horseman in Albania as Bo Bojack Centurman, and then you would get a truck of Florence driven up to your house. Yeah. Not anymore.

We have that in the UK. There's like various channels. There's like one which kind of just like shows come down with me on repeat. And there's another that does like a Colombo type of thing. I'm not sure what it's called, but they just play that all the time. Speaking of come down with me, actually, this is also worth bringing up, which is there's a lot of stories that get told about how OA was also the birth of reality TV, which isn't quite right.

It was around before that. In fact, 88 was sort of the birth of reality TV with cops, America's most wanted. And those are scabbing responses to the 88 writers. Right. Yeah. They went, who could we get to bust labor power reliably and then looked at the cops and we're like, oh, okay. And also, we need to make road walls.

Also most people, yeah, it's also worth noting, right, that the people who are working on reality TV in 2008 did try to organize and the staff of America's next top model were all fired because they had even less power than writers on scripted TV shows where the staff of reality shows, they were all freelancers, all that will employment, no protections, all fired. Yeah. I mean, before I was a member of the WGA, I worked in reality TV, you know, and I remember talking at the time and this was in the early aughts, you know, where people were talking

about like, I don't know how much farther this is going to go. Like this is run its course, right? You know, so you want to marry a millionaire or whatever would come out and people would be like, oh, this is so tasteless. This is beyond the pale. This has to be it. And then there would just be a more ridiculous show, a more ridiculous show. And that was years before the 2008 strike.

So yeah. Yeah. And no one could have predicted married at first sight Australia back in those days. And now, of course, right, because what happened in 08 is that reality TV became a bigger fixture of sort of lots of networks programming. And it's now just going to become, in my view, a bigger fixture of most streaming networks programming. Sure.

Because we're just going to, we're just going to have more of those like shows where they have the opaque wine glasses where they just give a bunch of people desperate for some famed liver failure by getting them drunk and depriving them of sleep. Like like the saw based reality shows every day, every day we get closer to the sorry to bother you. I got the shit kicked out of me. Yeah. And ultimately, we can get the season of Love Island where every contestant is possessed

by a historical ghost. We can get recruitment Hitler and can finally every story horror story that you've heard from a writer, every story that you've heard a writer tell about, you know, their work and their pay and how they can't get enough work to live. Like imagine that with the people that work in reality shows who do not have union representation. They don't they don't have health care. They don't make as much money as even the lowest paid staff writer on a scripted series. So they're going to, you know, which goes back to my earlier point is like, this is

a fight that we're all going to have to fight. And the reality shows are wildly successful. And it's ridiculous to think about those people not being able to organize themselves and demand, you know, minimums and benefits and basic protections that all workers should get. I'm sorry. I'm afraid that Nicholas Shea needs to add another story to his double decker limousine. So you're not going to get your residuals from another 14 people getting alcohol poisoning

this year. Nicholas Shea is a worker. The story editors, they're all workers, baby. Nicholas Shea's got to come on the naked line. Whoever's in charge of Nicholas Shea's boss, let's say, needs another story. Nicholas Shea's ratatouille. Yeah. So I think we've talked around some of the some of the history, some of where this came

from, where the fights are over, what the WGA actually wants and what the stakes are. The one issue that we haven't gotten to yet, what I think is the issue that has been like the ghost at our proverbial feast, right, like the Jack Lipnick being like, I just need that chat GPT sizzle. That's right. It's AI. Because one of the key provisions in the WGA's demands is that we want to make sure that studios do not use AI, technology, large language models to generate new scripts, or to have

writers be basically working for an AI showrunner and largely just tweaking what they write. And of course, what the studios responded with was laughable. I sort of got up from my computer and I paced around my office when I saw what they promised, which is to quote, you've asked for this. You've asked us to promise to protect your jobs from chat GPTification, which would put the final nail in the coffin of being alienated from one another in the process and the skills and then the product and everything. And they've ever run.

It would like. The response was this. It would destroy screenwriting as a profession. Like, yeah. The response was this, an annual meeting to discuss advances in technology. Cool. Perfect. Worth it.

100%. And at that meeting, they're going to be really receptive. I'm sure. An AI. Yeah. You're going to get to, you're going to get, they're going to give you sandwiches at 50% of what they got them for at Spago or whatever. You are, you are going to get so well treated at that meeting.

You're going to get to meet the guy in charge of the company, maybe. What's going to be chaired by Mr. GPT himself? That's right. It's going to be, as, as Donald Trump once said, a perfect meeting. And it's, it's interesting too, because it's, it tells you that it's something that they're thinking, obviously they're thinking about it or working on it or trying or want to carve out space and reserve the right to do that. But it's also one of the many things, which if, if people are curious about this stuff,

I encourage you to look at our proposals and then look at our, the offer, the counteroffer, multiple things that they just rejected, didn't even make a counteroffer. And essentially that's what this is. Like an annual meeting to discuss advancements and technology is nothing. That's them. That's us saying, we don't want you to try to get computers to do our job. And them saying like, it's just ignoring it basically. Yeah.

What, what if we had an annual meeting to talk about like a cool new feature on the F 35 and technically in advancements and technology, the important thing also about the AI clause, I think, just to someone who spends a lot of time thinking about AI and how it works and everything, is that once a piece of training data is in the language model, it's there forever. And like in so many cases, when it's applied to something like knowledge worker, creative worker, communicative worker, whatever you want to call it, the AI's main job is to make it impossible to tell definitively who did something.

Right? And it's like in, in, in cryptocurrency, there would be the tornado cash service, right? Where people would put a certain number of Bitcoin in and get a certain number of Bitcoin out. But where those Bitcoins were created of pieces of one another. Millions and millions of Bitcoin would go in and out, but become completely unrecognizable because they had been recombined more or less at random. And once your...

That was never used for any kind of nefarious purpose. No, not once. But once you have written, say, the studio says, okay, we're going to pay you a hundred dollars, please write a generic romance scene. And they're going to, that's one of a thousand that we're getting, we're going to put it into our language model. And now we can just churn out plausible romance scenes. Even if one of your character names ends up in the scene, you're never going to be able

to say, that's my scene, because it's equally the scene of those, of those thousand other people. And the point of the AI is to make it, is to disconnect you from the product so much that your, that the value of your input can be reduced to whatever the buyer of your work says it's worth, because you no longer know, you no longer have a relationship between yourself and the finished product. It is essentially applying the logic of like the Fordist assembly line, but using that veil of, using the veil of anonymity almost in relation to the finished product.

You know, so this is, well, you are, you are your involvement. It is a totally essential, but it has by the logic of the large language model, been made completely invisible. And it also just belies it, like they just shows a lack of understanding of how art works. Like that you're, someone writes, writes words or a series of words, because they have something very specific that they want to say, new screenwriters that you enjoy, song writers that you enjoy. It's not going to sound generic.

It's not going to sound like anyone else because I'm the only fucking person who's going to combine these series of words. Quentin Tarantino was the only guy that was going to think of a character named Antoine Rockamora and call him Tony Rocky Horror. Like he was the only guy that was going to come up with that. And it's fucking poetry. Every time I hear it, it makes me giggle. A machine's not going to make those cultural references and put that together.

And again, it's people who don't know how to fucking make anything, who don't have taste, who don't have an ear for dialogue and don't understand that. And they just think if we plug in enough words, it'll spit out a good scene. Ultimately, it's, it can't, it can't do anything new. All it can ever do is recombine stuff, but not even recombine stuff in an interesting way like Quentin Tarantino does. It's like, it's only, everything is only ever going to be derivative of other derivative things.

And it's, it's just like, it's so depressing because to me, like, one of the reasons why I like, you know, film, why I like TV, because it lets me like experience new things and empathize with new things. And instead of doing that, we're just going to sort of narrow things down to, we're going to do the same thing again. And at least the old guys, at least the like, you know, Louis Mayer or whatever might have said, okay, I want a gangster picture, right, and have had a very like derivative idea of what that was, but you could smuggle shit by him because he didn't care.

Like, whereas these guys, you know, there's, there's no smuggling involved, you know, there's no sort of like opportunity for craft in there. Back in the seventies, you had to, if you wanted to do this, you had to be like, bring me to monkeys in the typewriters, we're going to clear a whole warehouse. We're going to have that. Bernie Sanders works in Hollywood. You can't really, you can't really imagine that type of guy, sort of like demanding like the board apes come.

Uh, the monkeys and the typewriters are writing 99% of the pictures, but they're getting 1% of the residuals. That cannot be right. It's also a little bit like in, like in, in Renaissance Italy, right? You've got like wealthy art, wealthy like aristocrats commissioning painting after painting of basically the same thing. And then it's up to Bernie Sanders was big in Renaissance Italy, but that it's basically up to the individual artists to say, yes, this may look like it's a painting of the

enunciation, but actually I've subtly included some references to indicate that the current Pope is the devil. Well, it subtly included my day and at least those rich guys had the, the, the self-respect in the taste to realize like, I'm not going to fucking paint. I'm going to hire someone who can really paint. Yeah, exactly. And I'm going to stay out and I'm just, I'll check in or is it done yet? No, no.

Okay. Just let me know when the painting is done. We talk about, about AI though, and it's quite fortuitous, possibly intentional, maybe, that Collider magazine has just moderated a panel with Joe Russo, the co-director of Avengers Endgame and the chief creative officer at Epic Games, a man with an incredible name, Donald Mustard. What's where I got all that money from, from inventing Mustard? Yeah, his father was that Colonel.

Oh, right. Please. My father was Colonel Mustard, call me Donald. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he married into the Coleman family. Hey. Mr. Coleman, it's me, your cousin, Donnie, yeah, Donnie Mustard. Oh, we're changing it to Donnie.

That makes it like a, like a New Jersey mob guy. Donnie Mustard, the FBI has a fucking federal warrant out for the arrest of Donnie Mustard. Don Mustard is like a game show host, and now Don Mustard. I challenge CatGPT to come up with any of these characters that we've made for Donnie Mustard. That's Donnie Mustard's good, Donnie Mustard, like, I can picture that guy, I know how he would react in certain situations, like any actor can come in and sort of give him life, like Donnie went to, he got kicked out of private school and then he had to go, like, yeah,

I got it. I'll tell you what Donnie Mustard wouldn't do, he wouldn't talk to the fucking cops. Donnie, old Donnie Mustard keeps his fucking mouth shut, and he does his time like a man. His nose may be burning, but his mouth is shut. We call him Donnie Mustard, he got his hands stuck in a hot dog machine. Oh, Don Mustard, look who's home, Colonel's home. Oh. Ah, okay, I love our Donald Mustard, I hate this Donald Mustard.

So I've edited and picked different bits of this conversation, so this isn't word for word quotes. This is the moderator says, I want to open the door to a conversation that a lot of people are having in every industry, which is AI. I'm curious to, with both of you, how do you think AI is going to play out in the world of games, movies, and television? So Russo, the director of Avengers Endgame says, or one of the two, so there's a real possibility now for technology to become a really important factor in our lives because

it's being embraced by Gen Z. We're not in a world where your uncle doesn't know how to send emails anymore, we're in a world where entire- My uncle still doesn't know how to send emails. Yeah. No. We're in a world where- There are sentences who don't know how to send emails.

Yeah. We've talked about them a lot. Oh, yeah. We're in a world where the entire generation has facile expertise in it, and they're not afraid of it. And you're saying this about the two videos at once, TikTok generation, like, no, that's not right. Avengers Endgame boring as hell.

I got my little subway surface thing running in cyber. By the way, if we were to talk about AI, right, like the IP-heavy formulaic superhero movies, things like that, this is another example of trying to turn the job into AI without using the tool, right, trying to turn it into that, you know, paint by numbers thing, the branding-driven, let's say, decisions on creative, right, that's trying to make the thing more like an AI. The actual AI is just the final nail in the coffin of this increasing control by marketing and executives.

But I digress. So, potentially, what you could do with it is use it to engineer storytelling and change storytelling. You could have a constantly evolving story, either in a game, movie, or show. You could walk into your house, and this bit is fucking demonic. You could walk into your house and say to the AI on your streaming service, hey, I want a movie starring my photorealistic avatar and Marilyn Monroe's photorealistic avatar. And I want it to be a rom-com because I've had a rough day, and it renders a competent

story with dialogue that mimics your voice. And suddenly, now you have a rom-com starring you that's 90 minutes long, so you can curate your story specifically to yourself. Why would I want to watch a movie starring myself? Yeah, exactly. What happened to, like, escapism, or, like, empathy, or, like, any kind of, like, any of the benefits of film other than just, like, pure solipsism? I mean, the only thing that I'm learning from this is that, like, okay, I don't doubt

that studios have invested very heavily in this, right? I also don't doubt that they're very optimistic about this. I do think that the Russo brothers are not on the phone with the fucking, like, you know, the Fox skunkworks team or whatever that's developing in a secret basement beneath Los Angeles, the super computer that lets you fuck Marilyn Monroe, right? I think this is just pure, like, PR bullshit. The Russo brothers tried to work, don't you think? But it's so close to one of the original TF bits, right, which is the thing that Riley

came up with, which is that the future of movies is a week long, one film that's a week long, and you get to be every one of your favorite characters, except this time you also get to hang out with Marilyn Monroe, I suppose. So, yeah, you get to be in it as well as, as well as watching it, you know, when Homer Simpson fights Darth Vader, you get to be in the background going, oh my God, really exciting. And this would be, is fan fiction, right? And this is something that, like, studios and, like, you know, any number of people

have been very, very hostile to for, like, copyright reasons. So we're just fine with this now, it seems. Once we've devalued all of the writers and all of the actors and all of the crew and all of the tech and stuff, we can just be like, you can sit down at home and be like, okay, write me Avengers Endgame again, but, like, better. And then we'll just do it. No problem. It's the idea.

So, you know, life is solving a problem that doesn't exist. Yeah, exactly. We know how to make movies and TV shows. We've been doing it for a long time. People really enjoy them. The only problem, the only reason you would do this is, is if you were trying to do it even cheaper instead of just paying writers and letting them write, which has made every movie that you like or movies that you don't like.

That's how we've made every television show that you've enjoyed or the ones that you don't enjoy. All the characters you want to, all the characters you want to go cohabitate in a world with, that's just a reference to something that someone already wrote at some point. Right. Please take a picture of the scene. You're really enjoying the rom-com with Marilyn Monroe starring you. You're immersed in the story.

You're romancing Marilyn. My voice stands familiar. Why is that? Marilyn Monroe's singing me happy birthday. All my dreams have come true. Oh, no, there's a smashed cart. Suddenly I'm in an open top car driving past the Dallas Pugnipon story. No, no, I can't exit the movie.

If you want the good, you have to take the bad. If you want the Marilyn Monroe, you have to get shot in the head. Exactly. On the one hand, this all sounds horrific. On the other hand, and I just thought about this now, I can hang out with Ethan Hawke in first reform. So that's pretty cool. Just two guys lamenting and hanging out.

Wordlessly handing him a vape. Yeah. But what we're talking about here is their view of entertainment. Their view of the entertainment industry. If you think about the, let's say, the commercial aspect, the artistic aspect, kind of add a tug of war with one another, what they're talking about is a total scorched earth victory for the commercial aspect. Because not only is this Iruso Brothers power fantasy, where you fantasize that you can

live without any of the workers, no writers, no actors, no set dressers, just executives, and a chatbot that they license to lonely, horny men. That's the fantasy. But also, it's like, you're talking about the eradication of film and television and that kind of art as a method of communication. It becomes just a mirror. It becomes a mirror, or that's like one of those boards that you can put your face in and then you get a picture of yourself like as a muscle man at the beach, right?

It's reducing movies to that, where you don't have the film as a way to communicate with someone like just like any form of art is a way of communicating with someone. It's reducing it not just to a theme park ride, but like more than a theme park ride because with a theme park ride, you can still see the nuts and bolts that someone must have put there. It's purely a virtual theme park ride. It's just a mirror with some sort of ideological set dressing. It's saying, hey, check out this cave.

There are some shadows on the wall. Strap yourself in. It's great. Well, I think that's a good point. And I think with art, with a lot of art, people don't get to see the nuts and bolts. You just see the finished product. You see the movie. You play the video game.

You have no idea how many programmers it took with my son. We finished Breath of the Wild and I was like, let's watch the credits. I want to show you something. And it was just like, yeah, all these people worked on this game. But with the art itself, you don't see the gaffers. You don't see the first AD. You don't see the best boy. So you have no idea what.

And you don't see the writers. You have no idea what those people do. And it's interesting to me that you have these two wildly profitable sectors who are trying to jump on this AI bandwagon video games, big budget tentpole video games. It's only in the last, you know, several years that they've given the sort of prestige and respect of movie and TV, you know, they were profitable for years, but people just thought of them as like, okay, you're shooting zombies or you're in World War Two or whatever. And then you had, you know, BioShock or Red Dead Redemption or The Last of Us where people

started to, oh, this, the writing is pretty good here and the voice acting is really good and the mocap, which is all real people again, they love going after this, you know, AI, but the best video games, the best big budget, you know, computer generated movies, how do they start? They start with somebody in a suit with the little dots on and then they act everything out and then it goes to the animation circus. Yeah. And ultimately what this is promising isn't just alienation from those people, right?

Which like that a lot of the craft of making any commodity really is about tricking you into forgetting that those people are there and that there's just this commodity that exists that you can buy a ticket to a movie, a DVD, a thing you can click on your streaming platform. That's just sort of... For your hand time, Marilyn Monroe, whatever it might be. That's just sort of there and it's there, it has a value and that value comes from kind of nowhere.

It's just inherent to the thing you're buying. And you know, but one of the things about art that always makes it difficult to work with as a commodity is that you can't abstract away from the fact that there is a... Someone is reaching out to you through the medium of a painting, a play, a song, a TV show, a movie, anything. VR hand time, Marilyn Monroe. VR hand time, Marilyn Monroe. Well, in this case, right, this is a computer generated one, so they're not doing that.

But what this... The fantasy, right, of the AI people and what the let's say studio negotiating position seems very keen to shoehorn into our lived reality of consuming like art and mass culture and stuff is the complete nuclear destruction of anything that like empathy or anything like the understanding that there is another person there on the other side of the art is the total victory of the commodity. And that's why it's just a power fantasy where you're imagining yourself as getting to like fuck Marilyn Monroe and then get shot in the head from the grassy knoll, basically.

Right? Cool. Yeah, I mean... Yeah. That's like all the demonic. I mean, you're... Yeah, you're completely... I mean, all I was going to say is like, it kind of feels like they've sort of said it

very... I mean, they probably have said it directly before, but just the idea of that... I don't know. I think there's this element also that a lot of this comes out of this sense of like entitlement as well. Like entitlement that you can, as was like mentioned, like you can ignore all the people and like all the kind of people who get paid very low if nothing at all, who are precaritized that make these cultural products, but are making like these...

Making like shows and music and all these other sort of artistic bits about it on like in really, really tenuous conditions. And to me, it just sort of feels like for a long time, these topes like the studios, but also, you know, your kind of tech companies, Netflix and stuff, have been pushing stuff out primarily just because they can and to kind of get the line working. That's still their aim, like they still just kind of want to keep on maintaining what they view as sort of like successful growth. And they kind of have calculated that like the way in which they can kind of keep the

line working, which is sort of what they need to do to survive is by like getting rid of anything that might kind of obfuscate that or that might sort of like obstruct that. And I wonder whether like what we've reached now is kind of a decision that they've made, which is like instead of even trying to feign the idea that we're trying to create like an artistic product, we're just deciding to scrap that entirely, and we're sort of just going to try and give the consumer like a product that they can like that sort of operates by the whims of their demand with like, you know, the fantasy kind of being that yeah, eventually, like, you know, you won't have any more woke Star Wars because, you know,

you'll get to decide like what the characters do and like, you know, what words they can say and everything. And like that might not happen, but like the attempt to at least try and do that will be one that is ultimately just kind of this big cost cutting exercise. And I don't know, I think about this obviously in the same way that I think about like journalism and other forms of media, where like a similar type of logic kind of like took the industry both in the UK and the US. And I imagine other places as well, like it's done irrevocable harm to like the industry

has done so much harm to like the art and also to like the politics of it all. But like fundamentally, even though people now admit that like, yeah, these types of like ad based technologies have destroyed the industry, you know, it's, it is just kind of the way it is now. And I wonder whether like that sort of game, it doesn't actually matter if like, they're successful at building these impossible products, what matters more is just like getting the line to go up, even if that means just like destroying everything that's left of it. I mean, it's pretty clear that, you know, these big companies, all of whom, you know,

have CEOs that are making tens of millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, like you use the phrase artistic product for them, it's just product. And so if you come to them and say, but the people that write the episodes, the people that write the movies aren't able to live to them, it doesn't matter, it just doesn't matter getting the product out to market, whether it's and whether it's good or bad or otherwise. And I think with regards to AI, they don't care or understand that the connection, the thing that makes people connect with something is that humanity, whether it's something

that you particularly like as an individual or it's not your cup of tea. At some moment in that movie or TV show, there is a human connection. It's not you fucking Marilyn Monroe, someone has told a story that's good enough to suck you in that you're watching some other guy fuck Marilyn Monroe, like that's that's what the medium is supposed to do. Yeah, you're a cuckoo. Allow us to fuck you as we have been for so many decades. I think that's that's a good place as any to call this to an end.

So I want to say, Nick, it's been a delight having you on. Thank you so much for coming and hanging out with us this morning for you. My pleasure. Thanks for having me, guys. And if people want to support the strike, what can they do in the States in New York or LA, you're absolutely welcome to join a picket line, the guild, you know, has a list of places and times that we're out there every morning and every afternoon. There's also, you know, a few entertainment industry strike funds that there's some links

on the WGA's website here locally, DSA LA has a fund called the snack list where you can sign up and donate money to buy striking writers snacks. And also all of the social media stuff, it really helps like just, you know, any sort of show of vocal support for us is great. Great. Do the right thing. And we are spelling right with a W. Also, once you have done that, the only once you've done that, don't forget, there is a Patreon for this show.

It's five bucks a month. You get more episodes per week, you get a bonus episode, you get a variety of snacks, you get writtenology. We've got a Twitch stream, we've got a, oh, we have a tour. We have a tour. We do. We have a tour. We're in Birmingham.

We're in Leeds. We're in Manchester. We're in Glasgow. So if you're in any of those places and you've previously complained that Trash Teacher hasn't come there, you can now either come or stop complaining. Those are your two options. There are still tickets available in all those places, especially Glasgow, which is a massive venue.

So please. Again, we book please. We book please. Please help us cancel Joanna Cherry. You are transphobic if you don't come to the live show. That's right. Trashfuture.co.uk slash events. That's right.

All right. All right. And, you know, our theme song is Here We Go by Jin Sang and also there's a Twitch stream Slop.delivery Mondays and Thursdays 9 to 11. We do a lot of things. You can access much of it. And we'll see you on the bonus episode in but a few short days, a bonus episode that won't have me on it.

The inmates are going to be running the asylum. Yeah, that's right. We got Josh from the worst of all possible worlds. He's in London. He's on the plane right now as we speak. As we speak now. Yeah. Which is Thursday.

Which was last week. Yeah. He might be on the plane again. Back to the... We're doing the thing again. We'll see you on the bonus episode or I won't. You'll see the rest of them. Bye, everybody.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.