 Let's turn to a clip that features Alan Ruck, the actor. He has been around for a long time. We loved him in Ferris Bueller. We saw him most recently in Succession. And he has something to say about the studio, the suits, the heads, technology, capitalism. Let's run this clip. Used to be kings and queens and emperors and now it's captains of industry. And they think that the world and everything on it and in it, everything in the air and in the ocean belongs to them. And they think that human beings, who are not of their socioeconomic class, are just another natural resource mostly to be managed, to be utilized, maybe exploited, but mostly to be managed. Cause they always say stuff like those people, they're asking for too much. Well, we're not, we're not asking for too much. We're asking for what's fair. This isn't about the movie stars. This is about the journeymen actors, the journeymen writers, the people that make the thing go. The wet dream for some big shots is like, just hire one star and have the AI do everything else. You know? Well, we're not gonna allow that. I mean, we're not gonna allow it. I mean, yeah, I mean, if it could happen, it'll happen, right? If it can happen, that's exactly what will happen. But the solution to, I mean, this will not surprise you, Nick, that I think the solution to this is more capitalism. Right. That the problem we have, and I also feel like things go in cycles, right? So you had a deregulation cycle that kind of encouraged these behemoth studios and networks to join and, you know, we have a, you know, a Comcast is a giant cable network and a studio and a TV network and a streaming service. I think it may own parts of the Pentagon as well at this point. I hope not because it is an incompetent conglomerate and should not exist. And it definitely is a silent conglomerate. Okay, right, right. I mean, it should not exist and it will be busted up and capitalism is what's gonna bust these things up and when they're busted. And I don't think, I mean, in the old days it was the federal regulators. You know, Richard Nixon said, I don't like these TV networks. They hate me, so I'm gonna make sure they can't own the TV shows they put on because if they could do that, then I think I'm really, really rich. Now, have he had he just let them do it? They would have gotten really, really rich for like a day and then really, really poor for like a year, which is what's about to happen to all these big companies, which is why they're even now today talking about what pieces of their business they're gonna sell. And when they sell them all, everything in show business will be better for the next 15 years until they can put them all back together again as they do. Could you describe briefly, and we have a clip that we'll show after this, but Rob, what is the experience of anti-capitalism in Hollywood? Because on the one hand, rhetorically a lot of movie stars, a lot of writers, a lot of producers, a lot of studio heads are anti-capitalists even as they are phenomenally successful business people and good at marketing and self-branding and all of that stuff. But what is it like as being somebody who is on the right politically, I think you call yourself a conservative or maybe a conservatarian, libertarian, conservative, whatever, but like you're an outcast. Yeah, you like markets, you like freedom, you like people being able to kind of innovate and things like that. What's the, you know, the felt experience of anti-capitalism for you in Hollywood? Well, I mean, I don't know. It's kind of the same reason that people don't like capitalism in general. It's they don't like the uncertainty of it. That the question you have to ask yourself with capitalism is would I rather go for the uncertainty here, change, disruption, all sorts of things, you know, rational economic acting, or would I rather cling to something that I know and is safe. And if you're at the very top of any organization, you prefer to cling to something that's safe. Capitalism, the way you and I understand it, I think, is dangerous, right? We really had capitalism, we wouldn't have Goldman Sachs or we wouldn't have JPMorgan Chase. We wouldn't have these giant regulatory capture scenarios across the board. So if you're a movie star and you kind of think, well, I mean, I know you have giant ego and you think you're a genius, but there's always a voice inside your head that says, wait a minute, I know that I'm lucky because I almost didn't go to that audition or I didn't really want to be in that project that made me the biggest, whatever it is, right? So you're not really crazy about rational economic chaos, creative destruction. You like the idea of there being some kind of somebody, some people in charge. And you can hear that in the arguments made by Brian Cranston and Alan Rock, the idea that there are these malevolent evil geniuses who have a plan, they're twirling their mustache up there with the League of Supervillains. And if we let them have their plan, they're gonna succeed, right? The truth is that they, and that may have been true in 2007, I think, but those same actors that, by the way, they are pretty much in many cases, the same actors. I mean, the corporate actors have utterly failed. Let's look at one of those actors who has utterly failed and this is Robert Iger, Mr. Iger. I love the false decorum, by the way, when people on strike are like Mr. Iger, you know, et cetera, but let's run the clip of Robert Iger because we've been talking about this from, you know, kind of, okay, the actors and writers are kind of, you know, or I'll say I find them a little bit annoying, but, you know, the studio heads are equally obnoxious and frustrating. And by the way, Bob Iger is who, that is who Cranston and Rock are both pretty much talking directly about. Specifically talking about, yes. So let's, here's Robert Iger, beleaguered chairman of Disney. He's one of the myths of a writer's strike and very likely it would seem to have a actor's strike. How is that gonna impact things and what are your expectations there? Well, I think it's very disturbing to me. You know, we've talked about disruptive forces on this business and all the challenges we're facing and the recovery from COVID, which is ongoing. It's not completely back. This is the worst time in the world to add to that disruption. There's a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic. And they are adding to a set of challenges that this business is already facing that is quite frankly very disruptive. So they're not being realistic? I know they're not. I respect their right and their desire to get as much as they possibly can in compensation for their people. Like, you know, I completely respect that. I've been around long enough to understand that dynamic and to appreciate it. But you also have to be realistic about the business environment and what this business can deliver. It is and has been a great business for all of these people. And it will continue to be even through disruptive times. I wish they had pulled back so we could see that he is standing on little children, you know. A mound of skulls. Yeah, but how, so you know, Iger, Enzac, you had the number. Well, we'll show it in a bit, but how much did Disney lose in 2022? It was, yeah. It was $100 million. $401 million. So he, you know, and he came back to Disney. So he's, you know, he's kind of on the hot seat. But Rob, how do you respond to something like that? Well, look, you know, the irony here is that he is the smartest guy in show business, really. I mean, he's a very smart guy. And his company is just too giant and he started Disney Plus and he should not. He did a lot of dumb things. And he's right, that if you believe that, if you've done this terrible job running these big media companies and you're looking at your, you know, quarterly earnings or your annual earnings, you're looking at the future and the future competition and how much it's gonna cost you to keep feeding your machine for content for $11 a month and you don't have any pricing power. They don't have any pricing power, these people. They're in a business they've never been in before, consumer product business. That's what a subscription service is. They don't make consumer products, they make TV shows, right? They're not making Fritos, they're making TV shows. So they have no, there's no experience in this business and the business is kicking their ass. But if you insist that that's the business you're in, yes, of course it's incredibly meddlesome and troublesome and disruptive and unrealistic for the writers and the actors to ask you to do something else. Because you're like, hey, listen, it's like, you know, we've driven the car into a ditch. Stop, you know, I don't have time to like get you at cheeseburger or whatever it is, right? But the driving it into the ditch was the problem. The problem isn't now that, you know, you guys aren't on our side. They haven't offered any, you know, notice these, they never offer you like shares in the company, you know, they don't do that. They're not really offering to make you a stakeholder in the business. So, you know, he's smart, but there is no solution for these people, even if somehow they, it turns out that the studios strike a deal that they believe they can then sell to the shareholders is like a good deal. There is no future for these companies except to break themselves up and they will. It sounds, you know, while you were talking, reminds me a bit of the airline industry, which goes through these cycles of booms and busts and where smaller airlines buy each other and they become bigger because they're gonna have economies of scale and market share and then they can dictate, you know, they have pricing power and it never quite works out that way. And then occasionally you'll get like years ago united the employees are like, okay, well, you know, we're gonna buy it because that way we'll own the company we're a part of. And they did that. They were like, we don't have to run an airline. We don't want to. And they tried to sell it back, et cetera. So maybe we're going through one of these cycles. Zach, let's talk. You have some slides about just like looking at the big picture of, you know, how's it working out for studios that kind of support a lot of what Rob is talking about here. Yeah, so we mentioned Disney posting a negative $401 million loss in 2020 to Netflix. You'll see here, you know, Netflix, Sony both down profit wise Warner Brothers NBC Universal Paramount posted modest increase their profit margins for 2022. The Writers Guild provided this historical graphic which you see, you know, billions, tens of billions in operating profits for the big companies over the years, although they also concede that 2022 in particular was a rough year for the industry. This just shows the executive pay for all the big studio chiefs. And, you know, in the hundreds, tens to hundreds of millions for some of them, most, many of them did take a pay cut in 2022. So, you know, still living. Still living. Look at that Ari Emanuel only at about 20 million. Yeah. Well, you know, Ari built a business. Ari built a business. Rob, can we go back to that real quick? Yeah. You know, Rob, one of the things that you hear again and again, you know, from, you know, say the Alan Rucks of the world is that it is obscene Ari Emanuel who is part of the leading, you know, he's the brother of Rahm Emanuel. He's a liberal Democrat, if not a progressive Democrat. He has made, you know, in the past five years, he's made $346 million. And Alan Ruck says that is obscene, that is wrong. He doesn't deserve to make that much money. Is Alan Ruck right? No. He's wrong. Ari Emanuel built a business. It's his business. He built it. He's not like, it's a everybody who pays. By the way, it's a business built on fees, right? You know, the business itself was a talent agency. It's got a lot of other pieces of, pieces to it now, but it started as a talent agency. People willingly engaged in a contract with Ari Emanuel because he was a passionate and great talent agent representative and they gave him a portion of their earnings and he worked for them. He built that business. Patrick Whitesouls on the bottom of that. Patrick's another partner at WWE and he did that. It's like, no, of course he deserves it. That's not, I mean, and lumping him in with some of the sort of factotums there is, it doesn't seem fair, I would say. And I say that as somebody who's not represented by Ari at all, but he built a business. He deserves it. He earned that money. I don't, I don't, when the argument becomes about people getting rich and they shouldn't be getting rich, you know that they've lost the thread of the argument. The argument really should be you're not going to pull this business out of a ditch by giving me a pay cut and by removing income streams from me. You're going to still have to live up to the standards of paying me for either my residuals in my image or my residuals in my writing. And you're going to have to figure out another way to pull your company out of the ditch. And the way to do that, as I keep saying over and over again, is just simply make it smaller. Like you find somebody to buy this. If every single one of those companies you had up there broke itself into pieces of exhibiting and studio. Like a content creator and then a content exploiter. It would be like the golden years again. And everyone, the idea, the fear there is that, okay, well, nobody will sell me. There are no, no studio will sell me their content. Right. That was the net big Netflix fear, which is just completely ludicrous. That just, there's just no evidence for that at all. And there's so much counter evidence to it. Netflix's own ratings are that, like and creating a lucrative backend, which is what we're talking about for content is something that's in the, it benefits the whole environment. Everyone does better. Do you think that's, are you optimistic that is a likely outcome here for the future of the industry? Because, I mean, one interesting aspect of this go around with the actors is that SAG-AFTRA has already issued some waivers to some of the smaller independent production companies. Is that kind of how it starts to break apart that really these smaller, maybe more nimble players are gonna be able to move forward while the big ones are kind of stuck in the mud? I think it breaks apart because the shareholders eventually wake up. I mean, the entertainment business is a very great, very, very good place to go and for individuals to get extremely rich. It is not a good place for shareholders to get rich. Shareholders need to learn that lesson about every 15, 20 years, but they do learn it. And there'll be some activist shareholders, some whoever the latest asshole is that's in some giant hedge fund who's gonna lie. Oh yeah, you're speaking of Catholic nuns. Right? Yeah, probably right, right. The nuns who go to Exxon mobile meetings show up. Yeah, right. No, it'll be some hedge fund guy who's gonna make trouble for Sherry Redstone or make trouble for somebody and say, why do you own this stuff? You're failing at it. You're failing at your streaming service. You're failing at your studio. Sell it. Is there any indication that somebody like Reed Hastings at Netflix is kind of getting that message or the leaders at Amazon where there it becomes even more unclear, you know, I've read that over half of American households are Amazon Prime households. That throws off a lot of money. Prime video is one of the ways that you keep people being Prime households. So maybe they don't really care how many people are watching or, you know, and they have to have cash on hand, but. That's a problem. Apple and Amazon don't care, right? Yeah. Yeah, just to put the data on Netflix here, this is the subscriber base for Netflix from 2013 to present where, you know, closing in on 250 million paid subscribers worldwide. So yeah, you do have to think like, even if things they're struggling right now, that's a lot of people, there's gotta be a way to figure out how to turn that around, right? Well, but not if you're spending money the way they spend money on content. But for this slide, the terror on that slide is the first quarter of 2020, of 2022. Because that is the first quarter that the subscriber growth, I think it was definitely first quarter, so maybe I'm looking at the. Yeah, no, you're right. That's the first quarter that subscriber growth didn't flatten, it didn't slow, it went down. Yeah. And the rule was that that will never happen. It'll just slow and plateau, they called it. And then they discovered that the people who gave up Netflix, right, they weren't the people you expect to, the people who got it in December of 2021 because they wanted to watch movies over the holidays, or they got it because they were, you know, in 2020 they were, it was during the pandemic, they were all home, the people who gave up their Netflix membership in the first quarter of 2022 were people who had been subscribers to Netflix for two plus years, which was not supposed to be possible. That the whole model was built on the fact that once you do it, you're not gonna check your credit card bill anymore, you're not even gonna know what that is, you're out the house, whatever it is. But they didn't, that didn't happen, which of course anybody at Procter & Gamble or the Frito Lay Corporation would have said, you know, that's not gonna work, right? That's not how consumers buy shit. But these guys have no experience in that, so they had no idea. So my short answer to your question, Nick, is that no, they should, I mean, if you look at all of the Netflix literature and the stories around Netflix, it's always that hyper-rational kind of place. I know they have like data analytics of the yin and yang. And for employees too, like, you know, hey listen, you were employee number three, but you're no longer fit into the system. So you can like, you self-fire yourself, but you think this is kind of a cult, right? A cult of rational actors. And yet the minute they touch show business, they just turn insane. That was an excerpt of our Reason Live Stream with Rob Long talking about the writer's guilt strike and the SAG-AFTRA strikes. If you wanna watch another excerpt, go here. And if you wanna watch the whole thing, go here. And make sure to come back next Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern time when Reason's live stream will be talking with somebody who's very interesting saying stuff that you definitely wanna hear.