00:00I'm just going to go right there, the merger.
00:04What are you thinking of Paramount and Warner Brothers?
00:06You know, listen, the thing about all these companies, you never know.
00:10I think the overriding feeling we all had was, for those of us in our 50s who grew up,
00:16HBO and Warner Brothers were the gold standard, so to have those things change is very difficult.
00:20It's emotional, it's a big change.
00:22The thing that I do like about David is he likes storytelling.
00:25And any time a corporation owns our studios and what we all try to do for a living,
00:29you want the head of that person being someone who likes stories, and David does.
00:33I hope they maintain.
00:35It's an incredible executive staff at Warner Brothers and HBO.
00:38I hope all those great people continue to tell the stories, Mike and Pam and Casey and their teams.
00:43But we're in a transitional time, right?
00:45And I think it's incumbent on all of us to make sure we hold on to really what matters,
00:49and that's great storytelling.
00:51What about it affecting the industry in the sense of so many people probably will lose their jobs,
00:56which is, you know, the impact of consolidation.
00:59Yeah, I think, listen, it's a really tough time in the sense that people will lose their jobs.
01:03Nobody wants to see that happen.
01:05Everybody's got something they've got to do with the money they make and all those kind of things.
01:09I'm hoping that there'll be new companies that kind of rise up that are entrepreneurial.
01:12I think the thing about industry is, like, when things consolidate and things get difficult,
01:16it's incumbent on all of us to actually find new ways and new paths.
01:19And I hope there's all kinds of new places.
01:21And you look over the last 50 years, companies like New Line, A24, Miramax,
01:26they came out of the spirit of new entrepreneurial spirits.
01:29And I hope a bunch of people who unfortunately may lose their job band together and create something great together.
01:34You know Ted well.
01:35Were you surprised he backed out?
01:37No, because he's an incredibly smart businessman, right?
01:40And I think as a company, they're really disciplined and really thorough.
01:43We always worked about different scenarios.
01:45And I think internally they looked at what they did.
01:48They went to the place they wanted to go to as a business very smartly right away, which is why
01:51they won.
01:52And I think they looked at it from that standpoint.
01:55And once it got to a place where they thought either they were going to go further than they wanted
01:58or continue to go further,
02:00they had the discipline and the balance sheet to say this is not the right deal for us right now.
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