Dear listeners,
Warner Brothers Discovery is up for sale, and Netflix and Paramount are fighting over the opportunity to buy it. Much of the focus in Washington is on the fate of CNN, but in Los Angeles, the garment-rending is over the future of studio-released films. Ben, Megan and I discuss the long-running forces that are killing movie theaters and the films made for them, and how the fate of Warner Brothers may slow or speed that trend. We also discuss the Trump administration’s apparent intent to interfere on Paramount’s behalf, and whether Netflix’s anticipated argument that its deal should pass antitrust review — that all these movie studios and streaming services aren’t just competing against each other, but also against Google and ByteDance — will carry water.
Next we talk about Ezra Klein’s search for “the good”: a framework that will allow liberals to say — without reference to charts and statistics — that building a community is better than staring at your phone all day or, replacing your spouse and your therapist with an AI chatbot, or, God help us, living in the “goon cave.” (You might not want to click this link to a Harper’s feature that explains what that is.) As Megan notes, the difficulty of building a moral framework without God isn’t just a problem for responding to AI and atomization, but also for Abundance — how do we even figure out what we want an abundance of? Megan and I both push for citizens to more freely pass moral judgment on each other, since a “thick” moral framework can’t and shouldn’t come from the government in a top-down way. But Ben, a libertine Hollywood child, stands up for letting individuals figure out what’s good for them, even if that means ending a marriage with a spouse you still like pretty well.
We also discuss some indications that gay men, specifically, are outrunning negative social trends — maybe the rest of you can learn something from us?
Finally, we discuss a report that almost 40% of undergraduates at Stanford are officially “disabled” — but not really, they just have common conditions like ADHD and anxiety and they’re using those diagnoses to get extra time on tests. Interestingly, this is an area where even Ben seems pretty willing to pass moral judgments — food for thought.
We hope you enjoy the episode. Comments? Complaints? Commendations? Put them in the comments section below.
Best,
Josh
P.S. Megan’s new podcast, Reasonably Optimistic, can be found here.
