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00:00We are deeply grateful for you taking time out.
00:02Happy to be here with all of you.
00:03It has been a heck of a year for FX.
00:07Yeah, really good.
00:0836 is the number, I'm sure,
00:11that's probably circled somewhere.
00:1336 Emmy Awards this past year.
00:15Did I get, is that the number right?
00:1736 Emmys, leading the industry for the first time,
00:23elbowing past a few other brands you might have heard of
00:26to lead the industry for the first time.
00:28That was an enormous accomplishment,
00:31an enormous, enormous long haul for your team,
00:34not just one year, but for many years.
00:38And symbolic in a way, but it must be,
00:41it must, after this year and the reinvention
00:44that we're gonna talk about over the last five years
00:47since FX came under the, excuse me,
00:51under the umbrella of the Walt Disney Company,
00:54a little deal you all might have heard something about.
00:57We're gonna talk about that,
00:58but just the symbolic victory at the end of this year,
01:02having the Emmys and so many shows just really click,
01:04and I wanna put in a plug for the current show
01:07that I'm one episode in,
01:08I'm gonna spend some quality time with it over the weekend,
01:11Say Nothing is the latest entry in your list
01:16of really, really distinctive and compelling dramas.
01:19So just congratulations on a fantastic year.
01:22Thank you so much.
01:23Yeah, look, in some way it was a proof of concept
01:25on a number of different levels.
01:27I would say first for Disney, right?
01:29Because they made a really bold choice
01:31to pivot a century-old company into streaming
01:37as a primary direct-to-consumer business,
01:41and they beefed up in acquiring the Fox assets,
01:45a whole bunch of other general entertainment assets,
01:47and tried to say, we wanna be as excellent
01:50as everyone else in general entertainment,
01:52not just family and sports.
01:55We're gonna invest in curators,
01:59people like Kevin Feige and Kathy Kennedy
02:01and the folks at Pixar, and we joined that.
02:05We think that we can make,
02:07we can compete with smaller units
02:11that do a modest amount of very heavily curated material,
02:15and then they gave us the opportunity
02:18to make content for a global streaming platform
02:20instead of a basic cable network.
02:22And so that enabled a lot of things,
02:24but the question of could you compete
02:26against trillion-dollar companies
02:29or companies that make literally hundreds and hundreds
02:33of television series and movies
02:35from a centralized process was an interesting challenge.
02:41And I'm really proud we were able to meet it,
02:43but also really happy for Disney.
02:46They've been fantastic stewards of our brand.
02:49We probably exist today because they bought us,
02:52because as a basic cable network,
02:54I don't think I would be sitting here,
02:55I don't think we would have been able to make those shows.
02:58So I was glad to be able to say, yeah, this is a good idea.
03:02All the things that you did to reorganize your company,
03:05and you could see in the recent quarterly earnings call
03:09that took a while, but it's really paying off.
03:12I was just gonna say that the reports,
03:14not only was it a very strong quarter,
03:16but the green shoots going forward are very clear.
03:19And the phrase you use, proof of concept,
03:21this really does feel like 2024 was the year
03:25when after all of the disruptions that we all know about,
03:28starting with the acquisition in 2019,
03:30which took over a year to close,
03:34and then the pandemic and the strikes,
03:35we all know the litany and wars and interest rate,
03:37we all know the litany.
03:39It's a good reminder that nothing happens quickly,
03:41but in five years time, as you get to the end of 2024,
03:45proof of concept exactly in that deal.
03:48And so interesting because the acquisition of FX,
03:52Disney had never really played in the waters
03:55of really premium TV, commercial free TV,
03:58or largely commercial free TV.
04:01And as they've discussed, and as you all have discussed,
04:04it was something of a leap for them to get into.
04:07FX brand, some of the content on its face
04:10doesn't seem like it would fit neatly into the Disney world,
04:13but as we know, that brand is pretty expansive
04:17and includes a lot of lanes for content to be produced.
04:26And it seems like that's been borne out
04:28from your experience.
04:30Yeah, I think so, so far.
04:31I look, I think there's a fascinating set of questions
04:36unfolding right now with the sort of scale of the internet
04:41and network effects and sort of the, again,
04:42the scale of these trillion dollar companies,
04:44which is, you know, it is one brand, right?
04:48One singular brand.
04:50Can it be all things to all people?
04:53Or do you need a master brand and then a set of sub brands
04:56that have a greater level of more specific affinity, right?
05:00And Disney sort of right now going the route of both, right?
05:03Disney has profound affinity within family and theme parks
05:08and many other things, animated films
05:11and kids television shows,
05:12but it's also working its way into being a master brand
05:15that has all these other brands, Marvel and Star Wars
05:17and Hulu and FX underneath it.
05:20And there are other companies that have dispensed
05:22with all those sub brands.
05:25What I would say is that I, as an individual
05:29who leads a group of people who need to pay attention
05:32to every frame of every episode of television that we make,
05:38who work very, very hard on every episode,
05:40there's just a limited amount of attention we have.
05:42And so we can only do a certain amount of storytelling.
05:49Otherwise, you don't have that level
05:52of curation and authority, right?
05:54You can be an editor of variety,
05:58but you can't be an editor of all things
06:00for all people at all times.
06:02And so back to the proof of concept,
06:04I think the thing that was really satisfying for me
06:08is the notion that against much, much larger competitors
06:11spending much, much more money
06:13and taking many, many more at bats,
06:15we were able to put that attention and that focus
06:18and that curation of talent,
06:20because really we don't make these shows,
06:22the talent makes the shows,
06:23and prove that that can make an impact
06:26even in this kind of competitive marketplace.
06:28The curation, the approach that your team,
06:31it really is defying a lot of the kind of prevailing winds
06:35of the trends.
06:36I spoke with some of your team the other day
06:38and they were talking about,
06:39we love pilots, old-fashioned pilots.
06:42There's a lot of good there.
06:43So we'll talk a little bit more,
06:45but since we are in a room full of business managers,
06:48and again, we are so grateful for you taking your time
06:50and your candor.
06:52I wanted to talk about a lot of the shorthand
06:56of the transition to streaming,
06:58the major changes that we've seen
07:00in the kind of fundamentals of how Hollywood creatives
07:04and networks and studios make money.
07:07All of that has prompted and catalyzed a conversation
07:11within FX, within your production,
07:13because you do have a pretty robust FX productions unit,
07:17and you've had to make some decisions
07:19and really sort of think about what you are presenting
07:24to the creative community,
07:25because you are competing with companies.
07:28And I think when you say trillion dollar balance sheets,
07:30you're talking about the largest tech companies
07:32like the Amazons and the Facebooks and the Apples,
07:35which we'll talk a little bit about that influence.
07:38But can you talk at a time
07:40when the whole notion of valuation of content,
07:43which is the kind of crux of how you determine
07:47future rights and profit streams,
07:49can you just talk in the big picture of,
07:51as the world moved more toward a cost plus model
07:55that has had a big impact on creatives,
07:57how did you and your brain trust sit and figure out a way
08:01that you could present what you felt
08:02were very fair approaches to talent,
08:06but also preserved that notion of kind of swinging
08:09for the fences, playing for the back end?
08:11I know that's a big question,
08:12but it's a room full of business managers.
08:1421 minutes and 30 seconds left,
08:16I could spend the next 21 minutes
08:18answering that single question.
08:21Look, when I came to FX, this was 20 years ago
08:26and started the studio,
08:28you know, we had a fair amount of authority
08:32over the way we structured our deals
08:35and we really wanted to have an incentive structure
08:38where there was a shared benefit, right?
08:40So there were some very profitable shows,
08:42maybe It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
08:44would be an example that came out of that
08:46where our partners, our creative partners
08:47have really done very well on that show.
08:50But that was predicated on healthy markets.
08:52You had six, seven companies that were all,
08:55you know, of roughly comparable size and scale
08:58and who could all be frenemies and deal with each other.
09:01You know, when you have trillion dollar companies
09:03that could effectively, you know,
09:06afford to spend billions of dollars uneconomically
09:10for a long period of time for some other goal,
09:14or you had a company like Netflix that really came in
09:17and wanted to change the ecosystem
09:20and hope to run away with it,
09:21and even now has 100 million more subscribers
09:24than its nearest competitor globally,
09:26that really distorts the market.
09:28So unfortunately, when they went to a cost-plus model,
09:32we really had no choice.
09:33So the way we approached that is we basically took all,
09:36and it, look, there's been a lot of,
09:38I think, valid criticisms of it in the sense that it's,
09:42you know, it's been, it's,
09:44but we took the entire pool of dollars
09:48that had been paid out over MAGR
09:49across a very wide bucket of programming.
09:53At that time when we built it, it was inside Fox.
09:55We took all that money, and we said,
09:57well, how would we allocate it
09:58through a fixed-fee model, basically, based on,
10:01and, you know, we looked at everything we could look at,
10:04ratings, longevity, awards,
10:06all the things that we thought created valuation.
10:09We just reallocated it across multiple different points.
10:12Of course, that was all before the strike
10:14eliminated packaging, right, which was not this strike,
10:17but the strike before this strike,
10:19or the labor action before this strike.
10:22So it's just very complicated,
10:24and frankly, I don't love where we are
10:27in the sense that I think the healthiest relationship
10:29between creatives and distributors or studios
10:33is one in which, you know,
10:35there's really a shared ownership,
10:38but unfortunately, you can't be in a situation
10:40where you have to sell your content
10:44to trillion-dollar competitors,
10:46or competitors that are trying to take over the whole market,
10:48and they don't have to sell their content to you.
10:50You can't do that, right?
10:51So once the representative community
10:54went down the cost-plus model,
10:56and again, we didn't introduce that model,
10:58I think that there was nowhere for it to end up
11:02at where we are now, and look, I hope ultimately,
11:04you know, it's gonna take a long time
11:06for there to be a stabilization of the business
11:09where there might be four, five, six competitors
11:11who are in it for the long haul.
11:13We can all look at each other and say,
11:14okay, we're gonna be around 20, 30, 40 years,
11:17and maybe we can be a little bit more aggressive
11:19about selling to each other.
11:20Right now, selling is a bit of a one-way street, right?
11:24In other words, you know, Netflix, or sometimes Amazon,
11:28or Hulu are buying, but most of our competitors
11:31are selling, you know, other than to themselves.
11:34They're not buyers.
11:36And have you, in your experience, you know,
11:40a lot of people are talking about the need
11:43to kind of realign everybody's incentives.
11:45Have you found, I mean, obviously, I know, you know,
11:48you and your team are so, such a track record
11:51of incredible artistic integrity and working with people,
11:54but at the same time, as we've discussed, people do,
11:57you know, economic incentive is a driver for a reason.
12:01Have you found that in talking to people very candidly
12:05about, you know, how you are doing things
12:07and how you are looking at that allocation,
12:10that that is a, you know, that is a selling point for FX?
12:13Do you feel like people feel like
12:15there's a transparency there that they can,
12:18that they can appreciate?
12:20I don't think anywhere in the industry right now
12:23there's as much transparency as talent wants
12:26and their representatives want.
12:27In fairness, I just don't think anybody has achieved that.
12:31And I can tell you that we always try to be fair
12:34because fundamentally, we recognize
12:37that we don't make television shows, right?
12:39We need people to make television shows.
12:41But I would say that I'm not even sure
12:43that the industry right now is well organized
12:48to understand how to unlock long-term asset value, right?
12:52In the sense that when you look at the consumption
12:55of television or film, an enormous amount of it
12:58is essentially library, right?
13:01But if you look at what the current investment
13:04is designed to create, it's not long-term library.
13:08Neither is it in the main Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
13:12or, you know, Pinocchio or The Lion King
13:14or something that's gonna last as a movie
13:16for 20, 30, 40, 50 years.
13:19Nor is it 100, 200, 300, 400 episodes of television.
13:22Right, a 15-season show.
13:24Right, I'm not sure the industry even knows
13:27how to really fully recognize that long-term value.
13:29So there's a misalignment in my view.
13:32I mean, it's something I work on every day
13:34to try to create alignment.
13:36But right now, there's a little bit of a misalignment
13:38because when you go to a cost-plus model,
13:40everything starts really expensively, right?
13:42Obviously, just the cost of making television
13:45has radically transformed in the 20 years
13:47I've been doing this.
13:48So you start at a very expensive level
13:51and very, very few shows end up making it
13:54to the point where they really are gonna matriculate
13:56into being long-term assets in library.
13:58And for me, the inability to do that
14:00actually damages a lot of value creation
14:04for the creative community, right?
14:05Because essentially, there's only a limited amount
14:08of value you can get out of a one-off project.
14:12You don't have the economic events
14:14of syndication, of international.
14:16That's right.
14:18For example, when we made Shogun,
14:20I mean, if you're gonna make a show
14:21for a couple hundred million dollars,
14:24the level of global performance you have to create
14:26just to make one more season is so extraordinary
14:29that very, very few shows are ever gonna make it
14:31through that filter.
14:32So it's fantastic from my standpoint
14:34that we were able to recreate Field Japan
14:37and spend the kind of money
14:38and do the kind of detailed work that I would love to do
14:42and never could without a global streaming platform,
14:44but it's gonna be,
14:45and we're working on the second season now,
14:48that's gonna be so rare.
14:49How do we create a system
14:51where it's actually a more normal process
14:54for something to go multiple different seasons?
14:57And I don't just mean two or three.
14:59I mean, we need sitcoms and procedurals
15:01and the kinds of things that people are still
15:03actually watching inside these streaming systems.
15:07I look at the data and I know what people are watching
15:10and they're watching a lot of the output of this industry
15:14back from an era when we had a profit participation model
15:18and we had people incentivized
15:19to keep working on one television show
15:22year after year after year
15:23and making hundreds and hundreds of episodes.
15:26And it's a challenge figuring out how to rebuild that model
15:30inside a new entire ecosystem right now.
15:34But I think the audiences tell us that that's television.
15:38That's something they really want from television.
15:40And I don't think we're very good
15:41at giving it to them right now.
15:42I think you're about to get an amen from this crowd here.
15:45But, and interesting that,
15:52so you talked about a sort of a system and a process
15:55that came together under Fox
15:57prior to the Disney acquisition.
16:00Was that a tough call with Disney business affairs
16:02when you explain like, this is how we work
16:04and this is how we like to negotiate
16:07and deal with our creative partners?
16:08Was that a radical difference
16:10from what they had from their approach?
16:12It was very different.
16:14And look, the whole industry is going through
16:15just wrenching changes right now.
16:17But I would say that in essence,
16:19when all of us from Fox came over
16:22and most, like half our colleagues
16:24inside Disney Entertainment are Disney colleagues,
16:27formerly Disney colleagues,
16:28but it was Peter Rice and Dana Walden and I
16:30and Eric Schreier who came over
16:33and ultimately Peter ended up running that group
16:35and now Dana runs that group.
16:36So, we took solutions from the existing system
16:41but we brought a lot of solutions with us.
16:44But I would say, I mean, is anybody fully satisfied
16:48with the way the system works right now?
16:50I don't know who that person is.
16:53That's probably nobody in this room.
16:54Take a poll here in a minute.
16:56Nobody in this room, but unfortunately,
16:59we're in this period of transition.
17:01When again, I don't think the market
17:03has settled into a stable number of profitable companies.
17:08And on the one hand, when you have companies
17:10that are in the business of making television shows
17:13where that's not their primary business,
17:16it's good on one level
17:17because it brings extra sources of capital in
17:20and recreates work and it creates jobs.
17:22But on the other hand, what I look at is,
17:25okay, if the value as recognized by the markets
17:30is created by incremental subscribers,
17:34not by the profitability of the content
17:38that generates incremental subscribers,
17:40then the value is locked in a value chain.
17:43Just similarly, if the content's designed
17:45to market a service or a device,
17:50so what I miss, what I really miss
17:52is a direct relationship between the actual thing
17:55that was made with us, our studio, the creators,
17:58and the actual value.
17:59But now, everything that our creative people do
18:04is locked inside these giant, giant systems, right?
18:07That's true for music as well as for television.
18:10And you will have those rare Taylor Swifts
18:14who can sort of overcome the long tail of an entire system,
18:18but I think it's more difficult, frankly.
18:21And there's a very, very long tail,
18:22but it's people in the very, very upper middle
18:26and the bottom top, I think,
18:28that we're struggling to sort of unlock the full value
18:32of what they're doing right now.
18:33And I want to, because ultimately,
18:36that's my business, is finding, frankly,
18:38the next generation of really talented creators
18:41and figuring out how to let them do their work
18:44and then figuring out how to pay them and keep them.
18:47Almost all of FX's successes,
18:49all the way back to its beginning,
18:50were from really new creators or new showrunners.
18:54We've never been someone who chased after
18:55and bought talent from our competitors.
18:59We've always developed it internally.
19:00A showrunner, an unproven showrunner in Sean Ryan
19:05for The Shield, a promising young talent
19:08in Ryan Murphy for Nip Tuck, the list goes on.
19:11His first big hit, or Justin Marks,
19:13who did Shogun or Restorer, who made The Bear.
19:16These are all people that are maybe brand names
19:18in our industry now, but they weren't before they did this.
19:21Let me ask you, as we want to make sure
19:24we hit a couple of different topics,
19:25let me ask you about the Shogun was such a success
19:29for you, like you said, Shogun really seemed to me,
19:30from my perspective, showed that FX
19:33could really settle into the Disney system
19:36and really benefit from the different levers
19:40that Disney can push to get content out there.
19:42What was it, and Shogun got such a, as I understand,
19:45a big ride on Disney Plus outside of the U.S.,
19:49what was it like for you to have that kind of direct,
19:52being able to see, I would imagine,
19:53to get a good visibility about how people
19:56in other markets in Europe and Asia and other places
19:59were watching, what their cadence of watching,
20:02was there learnings from being able to see
20:04Shogun travel around the world?
20:06Well, I guess there were learnings
20:08from watching what traveled around the world
20:10before Shogun on the Disney system,
20:11and what you could see is that Marvel and Star Wars
20:15and some animated films, there is a kind of storytelling
20:21that really travels globally, right?
20:23It sort of transcends local on some level.
20:27It's fairly universal, and it seemed obvious to me
20:31that Dana Walden's unit, FX,
20:36needed to figure out how to tap into that,
20:39and so how do you do that?
20:40Obviously, everyone at that time was chasing
20:42after the success of Game of Thrones,
20:44which had done so well for HBO.
20:46For me, anyway, I felt like you have to do
20:50something different to try to achieve the same outcome,
20:53so I thought that this sort of intense realism
20:59of medieval Japan would be a more interesting way
21:03of going at it than another version
21:05of a constructed fantasy world,
21:07not that there's anything wrong with that,
21:08I just felt like the audience had been given a lot of that.
21:12Also, Disney had never really committed
21:14its full sort of top-level synergy marketing
21:17to an adult title, to a general entertainment
21:20or a TVMA title, but they really needed it,
21:24and it was amazing when you see that machine
21:26get in gear, both domestically.
21:28I mean, even Shogun still doesn't get the full level
21:31of support that a G-rated or maybe PG-rated thing
21:35could get. For obvious reasons.
21:36A whole lot of spaces in the parks
21:37that are not gonna promote beheadings in medieval Japan.
21:41Plushy samurai toys.
21:43Exactly, but everything other than the fully family spaces
21:47got on board, and it's an incredible marketing machine.
21:51It's really extraordinary.
21:54So we just basically had to make it,
21:55we had to get it done really early,
21:57serve it up and say, what do you think?
21:59And then, to answer your question,
22:01I mean, watching something cross 20% reach
22:05everywhere on Earth that Disney operates,
22:08which is most countries now, it's not China,
22:12it didn't do 20% share in India,
22:14but in almost every territory it did a 20%,
22:18and that was just an extraordinary thing,
22:19which again, I come from an American basic cable network,
22:23so there would have been no way to even attempt that
22:26before Disney bought us, so it was an exciting thing to try,
22:28and it was equal parts relief and exhilaration
22:33that it worked, because we'd bet the farm on it, yeah.
22:37Yes, absolutely, and I think it was,
22:40I think in a sense of a rising tide
22:43does help lift all boats.
22:44I really think that to be able to show,
22:48I mean, Shogun isn't fully new IP,
22:50but you took, it was not Richard Chamberlain
22:54back in the NBC miniseries,
22:56I have just completely dated myself,
22:58because there are very few people,
23:00but it really was, as you say,
23:03it was sort of a triumph for adult drama content
23:07that was rooted, it was 400, 500 years ago,
23:12but still rooted in real life,
23:15and planet Earth, not with any supernatural powers.
23:22Excuse me, and can you talk about,
23:26because again, we're talking about people
23:28that are in the nitty gritty of deals,
23:29with, you went into Shogun thinking
23:33it would be a standalone piece,
23:35but you left a small door open for the potential.
23:38Can you talk about the challenges and something like that?
23:42It sounds like you built in a slight exit ramp
23:47if you did want to bring it back,
23:50but is that construct, whether it's limited or recurring,
23:55is that a challenge as well
23:57in this kind of the licensing regimen right now?
23:59Yes, it's very difficult,
24:01and we had Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo
24:05and the writers work on a potential idea
24:07for subsequent seasons story.
24:10It came in about six months before the show premiered,
24:14and I was knowing how well the show would have to do
24:16for it to even be a possibility.
24:18I thought, oh, this will never happen,
24:19so I put it in a drawer,
24:20and then I kind of sheepishly took it out
24:22after the show premiered,
24:23and I was like, oh, this is pretty good,
24:25but I would say one thing I bet
24:27a lot of the more experienced people in this room
24:30recognize is every time you're having an amazing year,
24:32and you're really happy about it,
24:34and then there's part of the back of your mind
24:36that's thinking, yeah,
24:37but I'm gonna be retracing this year next year,
24:40and my clients are gonna expect the same performance
24:42next year that they got this year.
24:44You're over your comps.
24:45Exactly, and so it's thrilling when you have something,
24:48but now we gotta do a second season,
24:49and we don't have James Clavell's book,
24:51and so we spend every day working on the intense challenge
24:58of trying to lay out 10 episodes of television
25:02that don't have all the brilliance of Clavell,
25:05so all I will say is what have you done for me lately
25:09doesn't just appertain to business managers.
25:12It also works for programmers,
25:15and you roll up your sleeves,
25:17get back to work, and try to figure out how to do it again.
25:20A high-class problem.
25:21Yeah.
25:24We've talked about some of the agita in the system.
25:27What right now would you say,
25:30especially as FX had, like every other network on the planet
25:35had a couple of rocky years,
25:37but 2024 really seems like has been a banner year for you.
25:40As you go into 2025, whether it's programming,
25:44whether it's developments within Disney,
25:46what gives you hope for 2025?
25:51Well, I'm glad the film business
25:53is gonna be back to a normal cadence.
25:56I wish every participant in the market
25:59were committed to theatrical release as Disney is.
26:03I can tell you as a licensor of films,
26:06for many years, FX was the top basic cable licensor.
26:09We didn't license films that weren't released theatrically,
26:12never, because theatrical release
26:15and the marketing that goes with it
26:16creates a long tail of value,
26:18and we wanted to buy that release
26:20and the value of that release and that marketing,
26:22and I'm glad that there are many companies
26:24that are working on it,
26:25but I still think our theatrical distribution business
26:28is really challenged, right,
26:29and I don't wanna see it erode
26:32because I think there is something extraordinary
26:34created in the relationship between audiences and stars
26:38and audiences and storytellers with that big screen.
26:40Even though I've never worked in that business,
26:41I still think it's a really important part
26:43of the value change,
26:45and what I can say is I think you see the industry
26:48going through a really big reckoning.
26:49I think it overinvested in almost everything, right,
26:54because you had seven market participants
26:57chasing after one pool of subscribers.
27:00Now it's gonna have to figure out
27:04how to have enough scale.
27:05Each of the companies can have enough scale
27:07to have profitability,
27:08and then inside those scaled companies,
27:10they're gonna get more efficient
27:14at figuring out what they need
27:15and what they don't need, right,
27:17so unfortunately, it's gonna be lumpy,
27:19I think, for a little while
27:20because I don't think the industry's really found,
27:23and it's fascinating to me,
27:24having come in with three broadcast networks
27:26and then there were four once Fox
27:28that I think we're probably heading towards
27:31a four or five participant marketplace.
27:35That seems to be where things naturally gravitate,
27:39but just remember that each of those broadcast networks
27:42got very efficient at knowing exactly
27:44what it needed to compete in that marketplace.
27:46Now I think we could be a decade away from a situation
27:49where you not only have rationalized
27:51the number of participants,
27:53they're all profitable,
27:54they've rationalized their slates inside that,
27:56but unfortunately, I think we're gonna be in that mode
27:59for quite some time,
28:01and for me, I guess the challenge has always been,
28:03okay, well, you know, businesses go through cycles
28:05and they change.
28:07At the end of the day, though,
28:08a healthy ecosystem needs,
28:11it needs innovation, right?
28:14Like, if you just,
28:15there's always gonna be a certain amount of our industry
28:17that's just chasing after prior success
28:19and trying to clone it and replicate it, right?
28:22Television being the sincerest form of flattery, right?
28:25Exactly, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery,
28:28but needs innovation, right?
28:30Somebody needs to come along
28:31and decide to make Titanic or Avatar
28:34or go back to Walt Disney and what he did
28:37or, you know, the MC New needs to be.
28:39Or It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
28:41on a shoestring budget that is probably less
28:43than the valet parking fees that will be assessed here.
28:47So what excites me is not being a part of the,
28:50you know, at the top of the apex of the chain.
28:54And what excites me is having a vibrant,
28:56modest-sized business whose job it is to innovate, right?
29:01Because what I get excited about
29:03is I get excited about the next creative generation
29:05or the untapped creative genius or resource
29:08and how do we unlock that person's brilliance?
29:11How do we make something great?
29:13And so what FX is now,
29:15after, you know, a lot of tumult, a lot of change,
29:17is it's a relatively modest-sized brand
29:21inside a very, very large global streaming service.
29:23You know, we're meant to make, you know,
29:25somewhere around 15 shows a year,
29:27which means at any given time,
29:29we'll probably have more like 20
29:31because they don't all recur annually.
29:33That's not a lot of shows compared to a market
29:37that's pulling out 400, 500 shows.
29:40But the question is, can we be nimble enough
29:42and innovative enough creatively?
29:43And that's where we need the talent.
29:46Like, we're not in it to take the algorithm
29:50and basically replicate a whole bunch of successes.
29:55We're in it for the out-of-the-box, extraordinary,
29:59you know, innovation that is the bear.
30:01And I don't know where that,
30:02I never know where that's gonna come from.
30:04It's gonna come out of nowhere.
30:06And it's gonna either be one of your existing clients
30:10or it's gonna be somebody that one of you
30:11is gonna wanna work with for the rest of their lives, right?
30:14And that's the magic of this industry
30:17that never changes from my standpoint.
30:19That's the meritocracy of ideas.
30:21That's absolutely true.
30:22That's absolutely true.
30:23Well, John, we are so grateful to you
30:25for taking the time out to speak with us
30:27and kind of walk us through a lot of these things.
30:29I have a whole long list of other questions for you,
30:32but I think if we just leave with one thing,
30:34curation, curation, curation,
30:37the FX's investment in that brand all those years,
30:40certainly, you know, even predating you,
30:42it's so clear that all of that is paying off right now.
30:46Yeah, it's-
30:47It's in droves.
30:48That has truly put you in a class by yourself.
30:51I think it's tempting to chase the now,
30:52to chase the quarterly results.
30:54We all have to, we do have accountability,
30:56but I think the best of us,
30:59if we're fortunate enough to have some longevity,
31:01also think about the year, the decade,
31:03or even beyond that and try to build long-term value.
31:07And, you know, you gotta be a little bit lucky sometimes too
31:11and that doesn't suck.
31:12Yeah.
31:14I couldn't end it on a better note than that, John.
31:16Thank you so much.