*PREVIEW* Enter the Sixth Form Chambers feat. Mattie Lubchansky

Summary

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Episode Overview

Theme:
This TRASHFUTURE episode, “Enter the Sixth Form Chambers feat. Mattie Lubchansky,” explores the ongoing consolidation frenzy in the media and entertainment industry, focusing on Netflix's possible bid to acquire Warner Brothers. The hosts, joined by guest Mattie Lubchansky, dissect the implications for creativity, labor, and the future of film under an increasingly technocratic, AI-driven, and Wall Street-oriented culture. Their tone is irreverent, satirical, and deeply skeptical about Big Tech's stewardship of creative industries.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Netflix’s Acquisition Ambitions and AI Obsession

• Netflix wants Warner Brothers to boost its AI training
  • “[Netflix] needs huge amounts of IP most likely to continue training the AI that it is alluded to having. So basically by buying Warner Brothers, they can suddenly massively improve the training data set for their IP or AI.” (Media Industry Analyst, 00:00)
• Creative industry frustration with risk-averse studios:
  • “You can make new IP. You can do it. You can make stuff that is popular if you let creative people work, and they just refuse to do it because it doesn't exist at the margins that tech stocks do. So they don't understand.” (Creative Industry Insider, 00:24)
• Sarcastic take on AI as a quick fix:
  • “But if we just keep betting that in a few years we can just have AI do it, then it'll be fine, right?” (Tech and AI Enthusiast, 01:16)

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2. Industry Consolidation and the End of Creative Risk

• Parodying streaming giants’ rationales:
  • “Netflix argues that it faces significant competition, just not from other studios, but from like TikTok, and that they need to do this to compete with TikTok, essentially. And like, I don't know, sleep.” (Media Industry Analyst, 01:38)
• “Their competition is the dishwasher, because you’re unloading the dishes, like that’s their, you know.” (Creative Industry Insider, 01:58)
• What media mega-mergers mean:
  • “It would mean more price hikes, more ads, more cookie cutter content, less creative control for artists, and lower pay for workers all around. And that is obvious. Every single gigantic media consolidation… has largely meant that.” (Media Industry Analyst, 02:03)

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3. The Business of Strip Mining Studios

• Warner Brothers’ recent box office success flies in the face of sale logic:
  • “They’ve actually, weirdly, had kind of a generational run, which ordinarily wouldn’t cause a company to be sold. That’s the kind of company that buys other companies, not the kind of company that basically strip mines itself for parts.” (Media Industry Analyst, 04:14)
• David Zaslav’s private equity mindset:
  • “He’s a private equity guy. He thinks like a private equity guy. That’s what he does. So he’s like, hey, we’re up for sale. Who wants to eat our corpse?” (Media Industry Analyst, 04:34)
• The absurdity of the “always up and to the right” mentality:
  • “You’re not experiencing like hockey stick growth forever. Right. That’s all these people know about or understand.” (Creative Industry Insider, 04:58)

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4. Nostalgia for the “Movie Man” and Rise of Technocrats

• On the lost cultural cachet of Hollywood leadership:
  • “The people that ran these studios used to be evil and cynical and greedy, but they… had an understanding that there was like the cultural cachet of being the movie man. And now… it’s all these tech guys… The product is not the product. The product is the stock.” (Creative Industry Insider, 05:41)
• Comparing potential buyers: The Ellisons vs. Netflix
  • “I would rather have the Ellisons buy it because they have some, you know, microscopic amount of wanting to be the movie… whereas Netflix is just like, we’re going to get rid of theaters, by the way.” (Creative Industry Insider, 06:39)

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5. Satire & Absurd Observations

• Imagining AI-generated blockbusters:
  • “You could have Tai L girl, Tile girl. Tail girl. Tail girl. Yeah. Tail girl. Yeah.” (Media Industry Analyst & Tech and AI Enthusiast riffing, 01:21)
• Lampooning the desperation of billionaire sons:
  • “What 42 year old ever bought a major motion picture studio without like a little help from their parents? I’m just glad he’s being upfront about it.” (Media Industry Analyst, 07:40)

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6. Behind the Scenes of the Paramount–Warner Brothers Bidding

• Personal drama and ghosting:
  • Recap of David Ellison’s repeated attempts to woo Warner Bros’ CEO:
    • “Just tried calling you about the new bid we’ve submitted. I heard you on all your concerns and believe you’ve addressed them in our new proposal. Give me a call back when you can and we can discuss in detail. No response.” (Text message via Media Industry Analyst, 09:15)
    • “I appreciate your underwater today, so I wanted to send you a quick text. No. Despite the noise of the last 24 hours, I have nothing but respect and admiration for you and your company. No response.” (Media Industry Analyst, 09:22)
    • “It would be the honor of a lifetime to be your partner… You will see that my father and I are the exact same people you had dinner with. No response. Oh, boy.” (Media Industry Analyst, 09:29–09:35)
• “Parasocial relationships can strike at any time.” (Tech and AI Enthusiast, 09:39)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The only thing that reversed [media consolidation] was pretty significant and excellent work organization in creative industries.”
  (Media Industry Analyst, 02:24)
• “It’s not a corpse.”
  (Creative Industry Insider, 04:43)
• “Getting Tom Cruise toxoplasmosis, that makes me want to like do movies and makes me less afraid of doing stunts in, which I will die.”
  (Tech and AI Enthusiast & Media Industry Analyst, 06:32–06:39)
• “And under the Ellison’s like, CNN probably becomes a mouthpiece for the fascist administration, but I’m just kind of like, well, it won’t really make that much of a fucking difference, will it?”
  (Creative Industry Insider, 07:19)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:00–01:38] Netflix’s AI goals and the creative industry’s exasperation with corporate risk aversion & IP obsession.
• [01:38–03:30] The competitive streaming landscape and consolidation’s impact on workers and creativity.
• [03:30–05:39] Warner Bros history, Zaslav’s “strip-mining,” and the logic-defying nature of these acquisitions.
• [05:39–06:39] The lost legacy of “the movie man” vs. technocrat culture.
• [07:09–09:29] Paramount’s failed courtship of Warner Bros—cringe texts, “gaslighting,” and billionaire family drama.

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Summary

This episode lampoons the current state of the entertainment industry, where the only logic seems to be financial engineering, debt-fueled mergers, and stock price cultism, rather than creative innovation or even basic stewardship of cultural legacy. The hosts and guest illuminate—not without biting humor and personal anecdotes—the hollowed-out nature of modern media conglomerates, the absurdities of billionaire buyouts, and the bleak future for creative workers if these trends continue unchecked.

If you want to understand why “the product is not the product, the product is the stock” or just enjoy a cathartic roast of Hollywood’s would-be overlords, this episode is for you.

Transcript

[Media Industry Analyst]

Netflix is in this situation where it has a pretty easy time making Stranger Things, but it has a very, very hard time making big blockbusters, which we'll get back to. So it also needs huge amounts of ip most likely to continue training the AI that it is alluded to having. So basically by buying Warner Brothers, they can suddenly massively improve the training data set for their IP or AI. Excuse me. Yeah.

[Creative Industry Insider]

Can I just say something here? Which is the whole thing is so massively to me as a, as a. As a person in the creative fields and a make fiction so massively frustrating to me because they also don't allow anything. They won't even give anything a shot. And let's let look at the. The massive, insane, like, preposterous over the top success of K Pop Demon Hunters. Right? A movie that would be successful IP had they put any effort into it, but they buried its release. And then like after it was the most popular movie on the planet Earth for like three months, they gave it like a very perfunctory theatrical release. But they hadn't even like sold the toy rights. They'd done none of like the IP things. And it's like these companies are just not invested or interested in all in like the make. Like, how do you get new. You can make new ip. You can do it. You can make stuff that is popular if you let creative people work and they just refuse to do it because it doesn't exist at the margins that tech stocks do. So they don't understand.

[Tech and AI Enthusiast]

But if we just keep betting that in a few years we can just have AI do it, then it'll be fine, right?

[Media Industry Analyst]

Yeah. You could have Tai L girl, Tile girl. Tail girl. Tail girl. Yeah. Tail girl. Yeah. Okay, so when we said this was.

[Tech and AI Enthusiast]

The TF right room, we really weren't joking.

[Media Industry Analyst]

Paramount's claim.

[Tech and AI Enthusiast]

We're just throwing ideas around.

[Media Industry Analyst]

Yeah. So Paramount has claimed that Netflix is. They take this with a grain of salt, that Netflix, HBO combined would control 30 to 40% of the global streaming markets. Remember, HBO is owned by Warner Brothers. Netflix argues that it faces significant competition, just not from other studios, but from like TikTok, and that they need to do this to compete with TikTok, essentially. And like, I don't know, sleep.

[Creative Industry Insider]

Yeah. Their competition is the dishwasher, because you're unloading the dishes like that's their, you know.

[Media Industry Analyst]

Yeah. And what's insanely obvious, this of course was already said by Representative Pramila Jayapal, who frequently comments on antitrust matters. It would mean more price hikes more ads, more cookie cutter content, less creative control for artists and lower pay for workers all around. And that is obvious. Every single gigantic media consolidation in the last what? God, I don't know, hundred years has largely meant that the only thing that reversed that trend was pretty significant and excellent work organization in creative industries. So there are a few stories here as far as I'm concerned. Number one, the enormous record breaking debt fueled acquisition boom continues apace at a time when more companies are saying since 2009, which is cool. Number two, Netflix journey to dominance will hurt everybody, especially people working in the sector, especially because it will try to put AI in everything. Slash, put everything in AI. And that will essentially like kill the movie theater as anything but a luxury destination for people who live in prestigious cities. And three, David Ellison's competing Paramount bid is being led by him and his father as Coen brothers characters who are utterly useless. So a little background about Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers discovery, as it now is known, was taken over by David Zaslav in 2022. Zaslav built his empire on shitty reality TV. 90 Day Fiance, Naked and afraid, these kinds of things, but which basically he's been this kind of shitty company for ages. He's been like a sort of dead eyed corporate. Like he started as a corporate lawyer again for ages and he just cynically just took this over and was like, we're going to churn out the crappiest reality TV is pap. No.

[Tech and AI Enthusiast]

No one who's a corporate lawyer could be a cynical man.

[Media Industry Analyst]

Yeah. So as we've alluded to earlier, Warner Brothers has gone through huge numbers of mergers through the years. Time magazine, AT&T A, AT&T. Time Warner most recently. And they tried to make themselves because AT&T was trying to make themselves movie moguls. But like they aren't a movie studio so they weren't able to just like buy Oscars, which was an astonishing weird decision for them to make. And this is part of them being like, just joking, we're going to go back to being a communications company. Only kidding. Got you. And so they own the film studio and a streaming business which are successful. Number of cable channels, including cnn, which are money pits. But it's not shitty in terms of making movies people want to watch. Warner Brothers isn't exactly struggling terms of getting people to watch movies and pay for them. Barbie, Dune, Minecraft, Superman, One battle after another. The Final Destination series, Sinners, weapons, the conjuring, F1. All of that's Warner Brothers. All of that's the last Couple of years. They've actually weirdly had kind of a generational run, which ordinarily wouldn't cause a company to be sold. That's the kind of company that buys other companies, not the kind of company that basically strip mines itself for parts. But Zaslav is. He's a private equity guy. He thinks like a private equity guy. That's what he does. So he's like, hey, we're up for sale. Who want. Who wants to eat our corpse?

[Creative Industry Insider]

It's not even a cor. It's not a corpse.

[Tech and AI Enthusiast]

I love to enter the room and be like, well, I'm cooked. He wants my stuff. And it's just like thriving. 90, like 90 heart rate. Nothing wrong with me. Like, perfect blood pressure.

[Creative Industry Insider]

Yeah.

[Media Industry Analyst]

Just received great news.

[Creative Industry Insider]

Yeah. I found out I'm not a More. I'm not an immortal Dracula style creature. Who wants to. Who wants to eat my corpse? It's like, because you're not experiencing like hockey stick growth forever. Right. That's all these people know about or understand. Which is again, as we sound the. Since 2008, clacks on 45 times an episode here. Like, it's. That's also not how it works. It's not going to work with tech forever that way. And it's for some reason the only way these people understand the world. And it is so, like, I've been at a media company that expects that when I was like working for a nonfiction comics website that had a lot of readers and we could have been sustainable, but they were just like, well, you're not going to be increasing your numbers over time always to make billions a year. So we're not interested in you anymore.

[Media Industry Analyst]

And comics, the comics are making millions.

[Creative Industry Insider]

Nonfiction comics. And like, you know, I. It's that thing where there's this every so often this Michael Shore quote that goes around that he was talking about. He was. It was an interview he gave from the picket line, the last writers strike where it was like this idea that the people that ran these studios used to be evil and cynical and greedy, but they had an understanding that they were like, they, like there was like the cultural cachet of being the movie man. And now that's gone completely. And it's all these tech guys who only understand, like, they come from a world where the product is not the product. The product is the stock. Right. That's all they understand. And they're. And they're not interested in being the movie man. They just see it as another fucking corpse to be bought and sold.

[Media Industry Analyst]

Yeah. Whereas I think David Ellison does desperately want to be like Don Simpson. He wants to be a movie Tom Cruise. That's right.

[Creative Industry Insider]

And Tom Cruise has gotten his fucking movie disease into him, which is fine.

[Tech and AI Enthusiast]

Getting Tom Cruise toxoplasmosis, that makes me want to like do movies and makes me less afraid of doing stunts in.

[Media Industry Analyst]

Which I will die.

[Creative Industry Insider]

Yeah. And like, as a, as a, as a movie person, like I, as a movie person, as a person who likes movies as a cinema, as a real movie cinephile over here, as the sort of Greg Turkington of trash future, I, I don't know, like, I, I, I feel like I would rather have the Ellisons buy it because they have some, you know, microscopic amount of wanting to be the movie of wanting to be, you know, Louis B. Mayer in them like a little bit. Right. Like, whereas Netflix is just like, we're going to get rid of theaters, by the way.

[Media Industry Analyst]

Well, they promised they wouldn't. And whenever a merger deal happens and the purchasing company promises they won't change anything big about the company they're purchasing, they always stick to it forever. Right.

[Creative Industry Insider]

And like, you know, and under the Ellison's like, CNN probably becomes a mouthpiece for the fascist administration, but I'm just kind of like, well, it won't really make that much of a fucking difference, will it? Actually, like, it's like CNN was doing the good work out here.

[Media Industry Analyst]

So David Ellison has made some announcements as to how he wants to run Warner Brothers, which we will get to.

[Tech and AI Enthusiast]

Oh, good.

[Creative Industry Insider]

Okay. Batman's gonna be in Mission Impossible. Think about it.

[Media Industry Analyst]

Pretty good. So, but yeah, I'd say this deal is old movie magic. Paramount, Skydance, basically being saying like this, they were seen initially as well. This is our deal to lose. Like, we're definitely, we think we're in with a chance because we have the administration connections, we have the infinite money of my dad behind us who wants me to have like a special, a special birthday. And you know, when you're 42, you need like a little help, you know. What 42 year old ever bought a major motion picture studio without like a little help from their parents? I'm just glad he's being upfront about it. But it's meant that David Ellison and his father Larry visited David Zaslav at his home three times. Each time making a new higher offer and each time being rebuffed. It seemed like there was nothing they could do to get David Zaslav on board. Partly because David Ellison is like a world historically unappealing person to spend any Time with. And David Zaslav would still work at whatever the new company is like. That's very explicit in the contract. This issue escalated. Paramount says it chased Warner Brothers for months with ever richer bids, personal appeals, private dinners, only to be stonewalled every time a person close to the company said, quote, paramount was being gaslit from start to finish. No matter what answers Paramount provided, Warner kept finding excuses to say it wasn't enough and then just started ghosting us. I now have a number of texts sent by David Ellison to David Zaslav. Just tried calling you about the new bid we've submitted. I heard you on all your concerns and believe you've addressed them in our new proposal. Give me a call back when you can and we can discuss in detail. No response. Dived. David spelled wrong. I appreciate your underwater today, so I wanted to send you a quick text. No. Despite the noise of the last 24 hours, I have nothing but respect and admiration for you and your company. No response. It would be the honor of a lifetime to be your partner and to be the owner of these iconic assets with you. If we have the privilege to work together. You will see that my father and I are the exact same people you had dinner with. No response. Oh, boy.

[Creative Industry Insider]

Sad now.

[Media Industry Analyst]

Yeah.

[Tech and AI Enthusiast]

Parasocial relationships can strike at any time.

[Media Industry Analyst]

Also, it's like Larry Ellison has no official role at Skydance. No official role at Paramount, but it's like, no, no, it will be me and my dad of. Anyway, Ellison followed up one more time saying Paramount had offered a package that covered all the issues Warner had raised, including the need for strong cash value and the speed to close. Because basically Paramount has the Ellison's money behind it and connections to the administration. So they were like, we will not need to wait. We won't need to. Warner Brothers shareholders won't need to wait to get paid. This is when Netflix arrives in the scene.