Jon's comment that "they don't believe in institutional knowledge" is spot on even for corporate America. No one is a "lifer" at any one company any more. When things turn bad, the first to have targets on their backs are those who have been there the longest and deemed "too expensive." I once worked for an insurance company that in reaction to a bad couple of years in the 80's decided to offer a sweet early retirement deal for anyone who would take it. They also use to publish who retired on any given month and how long they worked there. The result of their early retirement deal, they "retired" 700+ years of collective experience in one month. They company was never the same after that and eventually went belly-up.
Most of the failures we see in the world today can be directly connected to allowing finance people (aka beancounters) make decisions. Short term profit has become king.
Conan's description of the Simpsons' writers room and the German documentarians watching them, reminds me of that scene in an episode of Spongebob Squarepants, when Squidward asks to be let into the "imagination" box, and all he sees is Spongebob and Patrick just sitting there making noises with their mouths. Compared to what Squidward hears every time he is outside the box. lol
Their comments on how much harder it is today to get into anything are dead on. My niece is training to become a musician and comparing her experiences to the older folks who "taught a masters class or two to pay the rent" are night and day.
The system is set up to get harder, not easier, and that's the stress inflation of late stage capitalism. Every company wants more profit, less cost to themselves. They want 1/3rd of the staff, but 350% profit. It's insane. People aren't given a fair shake and that's by design. My mother was physical therapist for decades, now retired, but she looks at young people trying to get into the program these days, with straight As and still not getting accepted! She wasn't getting all straight As, but she became a great physio over lots of experience. And experience is the best teacher, but they hold people back at the door of academics and bad policy. The system is messed, folks. It's time for a system change. See Zeitgeist films and getting ready for Zeitgeist: Requiem. It's time.
@coolioso808 I agree, in almost every field the difficulty level to get into programs (whether academic or not) has increased. It's super competitive so there is higher admission criteria where they have high expectations
@@shell8118 yep, increased difficulty in late stage capitalism is predictable, but not something we have to live with if we take steps for brave system change. Ever see Zeitgeist films or Culture in Decline series by Peter Joseph? Worth a look if you like truth like that.
no, it’s just that our population now is much larger than 80 years ago and a higher percentage of our larger population has the opportunity to try and train in certain programs.
In music it's mostly a case of supply and demand. There are far too many people learning to play instruments proficiently while the music being made that requires those instruments continually shrinks with so much of modern music being made on computers. Trying to make a living as a working musician is going to be brutal under those conditions.
i don't have any experience in the entertainment industry, but it's similar in other industries too. decision makers who may not even know what x department is doing, but they're making staffing decisions.
You know, a lot of people get a little nervous about the idea of "anarchy" but it doesn't mean no organization, it means no all powerful higher up dictators and bosses. Basic tenant of a worker co-op or a anarchist democracy is "Every worker should have a say in decisions that affect them." So, if a big fancy CEO doesn't see a day of real work on the factory floor, SORRY, they don't get to make decisions. Instead, workers can co-decide what to do next. It's not that hard really. See Mondragon corporation a true worker co-op in Spain.
If "ruthlessly efficient content factories" are bad in entertainment, then let's see Conan or Jon Stewart produce stuff that's better. Then the content factories will shut down because people will think they suck. That's capitalism and that's fine by me.
Samsung is a Korean megacorporation (chaebol). Those are ineficient in many ways, but they operate in a diametrically opposed philosophy than American tech.
It feels like we're headed towards a situation where the new guard of streaming and everything over streamlines things in the sake of efficiency. And then in 15 years we have no more good writers because young ppl cant get into it, animators are worse because they weren't exposed/allowed to take time to study animals, etc. And then we'll just slowly rebuild that knowledge that these ppl foolishly cut out because finance bros are running everything
Welp... at least it isnt building airplanes. Because the MBAs did the same thing there and now we are heading for a reality where the USA may just be out of the airplane industry. Which is just kind of insane.
Producers will be creating everything with AI. There will be a further homogenization of stories, "live" video, and animation, and the masses will either watch or ignore it and film themselves jumping off buildings while chewing on soap sachets. And as long as the money guys make obscene amounts, they WON'T CARE.
@DonoVideoProductions We already see it happening on youtube. And I dont even mean the 100% AI content, I mean there are hundreds of channels with human hosts, generating daily content that appears to be based on the same sets of AI-generated prompts. I guess they are all working together "hacking" the algorhythm by forcing a "trend". Utterly valuless content.
I always appreciate when older generations realize how high the bar has gotten, like Jon saying “oh I wouldn’t be able to get into college now” is just, true, the bar is in the clouds and when older generations just tell us that they jumped over it so what’s wrong with you, it completely discredits what the current generation is legitimately experiencing
Yes they don’t live your experience but they are why you are living yours now. They succeeded so your parents could so you could. Your kids will have it even rougher. If everyone is putting in extra effort and the population keeps growing the bar is of course going to be in the clouds.
It’s strange for me to hear as a STEM student, when I look back at the quality of testing and rigor for analysis in academics before I was born, and am amazed at how much harder it was than what I’ve had to go through. I’m studying in a top level graduate program for my field and I see the sorts of work previous generations were required to do and it scares me how relaxed our standards have become. We certainly have a different set of skills that are focused more on instrumentation and information processing, but when it comes to analysis, the reading of data and seeing through it to deeper meaning, older generations were on another level.
It’s true, I mean even just computers and the internet alone changed SO MUCH. The idea of “oh you can work at the local grocer” is no longer even reality, the store can go online and sort through THOUSANDS of applications and pick whoever they want and dismiss whoever they want for arbitrary reasons. It’s truly wild.
@@CharlieQuartzYes a tech university in my country have made the same type of test for 1st year students for over 40 years now and the results keeps declining. Exams are getting easier because otherwise not enough students pass. Still, competition is much higher in every field today so it's kinda strange how everything has changed. Knowledge today is also alot different from back in the day before the Internet. Today a different type of knowledge is more valuable, but im not sure if people even have that for the most part.
To add to Stewart’s points, I like to think of it as we are now seeing more businesses act on business decisions versus using creative ones for newer content. For example, he explains how people would come up with material for a longer period of time and companies now want shorter periods of time for creative content. Ironically, businesses are failing, in terms of streaming situations, because there’s less creativity involved. It’s all about the business and making everybody into an advertising index, as opposed to actually letting people explore creative options for more unique storytelling. If studio/movie/television/music groups would like to see more success at the financial level, then they need to have more creative types lead the way in terms of producing unique content that will appeal to everybody. We don’t have that now. We just have options to watch the same things that we’ve been seeing for decades now.
I"m a game dev, and we had a similar situation to what Conan mentioned about the German crew filming the writer's room. We were crunching to finish a game as the deadline approached. Reporters were arriving to document the "Final Hours of Quake 3" as the article titled it. Well the reality of that would have been a bunch of people sweating over their computers to fix bugs in time. So before they arrived we were sent out to buy a bunch of nerf guns, so that during the interview a nerf gun war could "spontaneously" erupt! So later the interview started, the nerf war happened, and tada, look how fun game development is. lol
that has a marketing teams stench all over it lol. once at a previous studio we had a big marketing push saying "this game is using this brand new engine" as a way to say that we wouldnt have the performance issues of the previous game. in reality we had just given the engine a new name and fixed performance. the money put into that could have given us the time we needed to make the game better(especially on console) but instead the publisher was insisting we hit that holiday release and we got slammed with negative reviews
It changed from individuals having power to marketing departments having power. Everything has to fit a quota now. Seen it time and time again when big companies acquire smaller companies.
I worked for EA a few times, and they had a process where one producer focused on the schedule, while another producer focused on quality and content. What could possibly go wrong in a system like that? 😂
@@joselopez3678 Lol no self-awareness. You complain about writing quality yet celebrate writers losing work. Best part of your comment, ya can't write characters that on-the-nose dense without being called a hack.
@@joselopez3678this is written very short sighted and lacking basic empathy. What happened in your life to blame your fellow common man rather than rich executives? That's a crabs in a bucket outlook you have.
Two things; One - The irony of this conversation spliced in two between an ad for a television to replace cinema is one of the funnier things I've had the viewing pleasure of witnessing today Two- On a more serious note. It's interesting to see this happen to the film industry, as they had the opportunity to watch the music industry go through it first, and still didn't adapt or do anything about it. It took a tech company to come in and alter the music industry and capitalize on the digitization of it. Obviously there are MANY aspects as to what this has done to both industries, but I think it's fair to say that apple has more money than say a24, so as long as they're making money, they'll be next to impossible to remove. But this has been the eternal debate of art and commerce - and the more we value money over people - the less people will be working and creating (great) things in this industry. I'd be surprised that if within my lifetime all these corporations don't just generate content with ai or whatever becomes the cheapest to get the most revenue and stock value.
I always thought Chappelles Show would not have lasted much longer anyway as a lot of people forget that their writing staff was really small and it was mostly just Dave and Neal. They were so hard up for sketches in season 2 that it was the main reason Charlie pitched his true Hollywood stories as they were both desperate for ideas But imposing limits on creativity based on financial reasons will just lead to quantity of content over quality of content and these companies just want more content
Many people predicted this. The strikes may have increased writers wages, but companies are not willing to pay more for writing. So now, we have less writers. Those writers are making higher wages (when they are working), but there are less of them. Has product quality been affected? That, I don't know, as I barely watch any TV/Netflix
The monopoly of big corporations needs to be broken up. When mega corporations are worth more than 50% of the worlds countries....we have a huge problem!!! No company should be bigger than the government. Period
Well, people often use two very different metrics when comparing corporations and states. GDP for countries and market cap for public corporations. GDP measures (roughly) the wealth created in a single year inside a country. While market cap is the total amount of value that a company is supposed to be worth in a given moment, not the money the corporation has made, which would be closer to net profit. So it's probably not true that those big companies are more valuable than half the countries in the world (I could be wrong though). That being said, I think it's absolutely ridiculous some of those big corporations are now between 1-3 Trillion USD. 10 years ago apple was 10 times smaller than it is now and they were already a gigantic corporation. This is not healthy for an economy.
That really reminds me of Musk interviewing each worker on twitter and asking them what were their most remarkable lines of code of the last month. It's such a baffling measure to determine how good a programmer is, because some of the senior programmers in most important positions barely write code.
This episode is very special. These two sharing their wisdom, for us who come behind ( independently your work) has resulted in a very calming and humble experience.
Listening to this reminds me of 6 days to air for South Park. It’s amazing what they could do in 6 days but if you watch the whiteboard you can see them playing out other episodes as well.
I think this is a bad and a good thing. The Entertainment Industry needs to change, and this push and pull, up and down from the "analog" vs "digital" ethos are a good way to grind things down into something new. A some of the best things from both.
“Just” 5x smarter?? Were you let down because you wanted to say he’s even smarter than that, but you were actually rounding up from a lower point that would make your subjective statement look less impressive? …I thought as much…🫤
This was an interesting foray into how all things in life speed up as we progress. I work in IT application development and if you saw the output of a programmer today, vs’ that of just 10 years ago it’s wild. Another example would be cars. Before we used to drive a car with 200hp and go “WOW, that’s such a fast car”, now we look back as we’re driving in our 500hp grocery getter and thing that old car drove at a snails pace
Yes, everything has to be full bore capitalism. I need my comedy created with full efficiency via Six Sigma methodology and ISO9001 standards. That should make everything funny enough.
Why why why are these put out not only in pieces but OUT OF ORDER...seriously. Please for the love of all that is good, put out these interviews in their entirety, or at the very least, put out the clips IN ORDER so we can actually follow the conversation. What possible reason would you do it this way? Who is benefitting from this? I promise I will still watch your Miller Lite reads. Just let us watch this stuff like a normal person.
Never been in a writers room but I can take an educated guess as it is similar to any creative process involving any group of people - it is a process, it requires discussion and a back and forth between individuals working through the material to create an understanding and a focus - this process is used in AP Literature and Composition high school course allowing students deeper understanding of written work - in a sense it is working backward to what writers do in that it is creating content while students try to understand why.
It's like skating in the Rodney Mullins first invented the ollie vs skaters today who grew up with that always being the case. There are 12 year olds doing what was considered impossible 20 years ago. You can see this pattern in multiple places
Using the athlete analogy, 100m runners have sports medicine, scientific analysis, year round training and coaching and massive track condition improvements and the best time is 1 second faster than 1910. Given the amount of resources elite athletes absorb from our society, it's surprising they're not even better.
Yeah, but now there are 1000x more people who can get close to that time. It's no longer a few individuals who are insanely better than everyone else, its an entire field that are all closer to the top level.
RUclips really, really, REALLY wants you to see them as being like any other streaming service. Google wants them Bezos bucks! Sad, when the billionaires fight.
The normal way of everything in every business has changed. The ways things has successfully worked for decades is thrown out for politically correct, feel good measures, that absolutely fail but they have billions to lose to say it works instead of admitting its horrible. The greatness and uniqueness of the U.S model is gone with this new generation. You no longer have to be good, but look good or have a great web presence and youll be praised for how winderful you are without any merits
On Avid: User Interface Engineering is a hugely important and often neglected craft that is supposed to match the minds and way of working so that software tools can ACTUALLY BE HELPFUL! This is not often. I like Avid too!
Coming from the world of computer programming, the things Jon says about writing apply too. Much of it is just thinking about stuff for a long time with no progress visible from the outside. The upside of the Silicon Valley coming into the writers' room would be being used to this dynamic - you'd have to get it across to them that writers = programmers before they'd cotton on, though, probably. (But the rise in recent years of the "tech bro" phenomenon doesn't bode well)
If that is the way Sillicon Valley is thinking about writers' rooms, it's funny, because their business is software and software bears a good number of similarities to a writer's room.
The absolute biggest shift has been the availability of technologies that are now allowing those that would have been snubbed in the past instant access to an audience. There's always been so much good talent but minimal space, now, as Jon said, there's plenty of real estate.
Counterpoint: Charlie Brooker’s polemic sketch “How to Fall Off a Log” in his ScreenWipe series, where he shows the endemic inefficiencies - compared to a RUclipsr. These are examples from each extreme - a healthy industry must exist in the middle.
I found it hilarious that after talking about the German documentary crew complaining about The Simpsons writers room being inert, they cut to the Samsung OLED commercial.
There was no money for old school writers even in budget of Rings of Power, so half of billion for first season? Special effects look nice, yet many people are complaining about casting, writing and acting. Things that made properly don't cost that much.
Every time Conan tells the german documentary crew at The Simpsons story I have a mental image of Werner Herzog having a long overly dramatic monologue voice over with cuts between the writers just sitting there and those underground shots of root systems growing in fast time, then whenever a writer finally says something inane there's edited in footage of a volcano erupting, shot back to half the root system being destroyed by fire, and then starting to grow again during the long silences.
What John is talking about has been happening for the last 40 years or so and it’s not so much that tech companies are forcing entertainment to do it their way and more so that the entertainment industry itself is bending over backwards into a business model similar to that of product development. It’s disgusting but you can see this kind of thinking ever since the internet started getting privatized in the beginning of the 1990s.
As a veteran in a construction trade, many on unions (much better than non union by far), every time I sit through credits in the movie theater I am amazed that every movie doesn't bankrupt their studio. I suspect there must be about 3/4 of the names that just got their name in there from people they know to get good resume clout. There's no way that having thousands of people work on a single movie is in any way efficient or fiscally responsible.
every name you see in the credits is a union credit. and since you need 3 to get full union status they are carefully controlled and guarded. The union doesn't just hand them out like candy on Halloween. So every name you see will be a contract worker. As technology has changed a few jobs have been made obsolete but the union won't let them go. So a movie COULD be made with a smaller staff, but it is typically made with 145 crew per typical day. Now the crew may change from day to day depending. Not everyone you see in those credits worked every day. All the keys will remain consistent, but the grips and lowers will change from day to day based on availability.
your comment is the embodiment of the dunning kruger effect. you think because youve worked construction and built a house with 5 other guy you know anything about how a movie is made? you think you could operate a movie set better than businesses that have been doing it for literally a century at this point? not to be too rude but you sound delusional and really ignorant
I’ve been thinking about this a bit, since I’ve been watching older movies lately. The credits in a classic film can fit on one or two screens whereas now they take up a third of the runtime. So much bloat.
Streaming is killing cable subscriptions now, and eventually one or more streaming services will team up to bundle their services cheaper...eventually enough will be bundled so that we have a bundled streaming subscription instead. Thanks Netflix 😒
It's already happening, Disney owns Hulu since they bought Fox and all that, so now they bundle them. Amazon has Starz and Showtime content that you can pay extra to access, pretty sure I've seen HBO on there too. Not sure if those are really bundles since they just kinda consolidate where you pay for everything, but the Disney/Hulu thing is probably not the end.
it's like any business, the bottom line, people are expendable and the fewer the better for profit. it is beyond ignorant. it's institutional sanctification of business profits over people's connection with art, culture, purity, and one another
Lol the irony here about tech companies taking content jobs away and then a long commercial about a TV manufacturer that's also in the content business is wild.
I'm really thankful for this video. I remember a time when I was homeless and facing many challenges in life. Then things turned around when I started earning $75,000 every two weeks. My life changed from having nothing to being able to offer something good to the world.
I raised 75k and Rebecca Larryn Arnold is to be thanked. I got my self my dream car 🏎️ just last weekend, My journey with her started after my best friend came back from New York and saw me suffering in dept then told me about her and how to change my life through her. Rebecca L.Arnold is the kind of person one needs in his or her life! I got a home, a good wife, and a beautiful daughter. Note!:: this is not a promotion but me trying to make a point that no matter what happens, always have faith and keep living!!
I could listen to hours and hours of those two. Be it when they’re talking about very important things or making the stupidest jokes, they are always amazing.
Somebody should come up with a cartoon where two 90 year-old billionaires have to team up or save (or wreck) the world and let these two handle the voices.
Jon's comment that "they don't believe in institutional knowledge" is spot on even for corporate America. No one is a "lifer" at any one company any more. When things turn bad, the first to have targets on their backs are those who have been there the longest and deemed "too expensive."
I once worked for an insurance company that in reaction to a bad couple of years in the 80's decided to offer a sweet early retirement deal for anyone who would take it. They also use to publish who retired on any given month and how long they worked there. The result of their early retirement deal, they "retired" 700+ years of collective experience in one month. They company was never the same after that and eventually went belly-up.
Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
Most of the failures we see in the world today can be directly connected to allowing finance people (aka beancounters) make decisions. Short term profit has become king.
@@IanHobday Thanks Jack Welch (sarcasm).
Nothing like Jon and Conan chatting casually and freely. Loved it
Conan's description of the Simpsons' writers room and the German documentarians watching them, reminds me of that scene in an episode of Spongebob Squarepants, when Squidward asks to be let into the "imagination" box, and all he sees is Spongebob and Patrick just sitting there making noises with their mouths. Compared to what Squidward hears every time he is outside the box. lol
I understood that reference
this is definitely HOW IT IS. IT'S IMAGINATION. IT'S WRITING.
💯😂
it also reminds me of the episode of The Simpsons when Homer is teaching a class and sitting there for a minute trying to figure out what to teach.
Their comments on how much harder it is today to get into anything are dead on. My niece is training to become a musician and comparing her experiences to the older folks who "taught a masters class or two to pay the rent" are night and day.
The system is set up to get harder, not easier, and that's the stress inflation of late stage capitalism. Every company wants more profit, less cost to themselves. They want 1/3rd of the staff, but 350% profit. It's insane.
People aren't given a fair shake and that's by design. My mother was physical therapist for decades, now retired, but she looks at young people trying to get into the program these days, with straight As and still not getting accepted! She wasn't getting all straight As, but she became a great physio over lots of experience. And experience is the best teacher, but they hold people back at the door of academics and bad policy.
The system is messed, folks. It's time for a system change. See Zeitgeist films and getting ready for Zeitgeist: Requiem. It's time.
@coolioso808 I agree, in almost every field the difficulty level to get into programs (whether academic or not) has increased. It's super competitive so there is higher admission criteria where they have high expectations
@@shell8118 yep, increased difficulty in late stage capitalism is predictable, but not something we have to live with if we take steps for brave system change. Ever see Zeitgeist films or Culture in Decline series by Peter Joseph? Worth a look if you like truth like that.
no, it’s just that our population now is much larger than 80 years ago and a higher percentage of our larger population has the opportunity to try and train in certain programs.
In music it's mostly a case of supply and demand. There are far too many people learning to play instruments proficiently while the music being made that requires those instruments continually shrinks with so much of modern music being made on computers. Trying to make a living as a working musician is going to be brutal under those conditions.
i don't have any experience in the entertainment industry, but it's similar in other industries too. decision makers who may not even know what x department is doing, but they're making staffing decisions.
You know, a lot of people get a little nervous about the idea of "anarchy" but it doesn't mean no organization, it means no all powerful higher up dictators and bosses.
Basic tenant of a worker co-op or a anarchist democracy is "Every worker should have a say in decisions that affect them." So, if a big fancy CEO doesn't see a day of real work on the factory floor, SORRY, they don't get to make decisions. Instead, workers can co-decide what to do next. It's not that hard really.
See Mondragon corporation a true worker co-op in Spain.
also socialism, giving the worker a say in how things are run? Yes please.
Unions? Yes please.
If "ruthlessly efficient content factories" are bad in entertainment, then let's see Conan or Jon Stewart produce stuff that's better. Then the content factories will shut down because people will think they suck. That's capitalism and that's fine by me.
3:12 shoved a Samsung ad between a critique about tech companies 😂
I got a kick out of the fact that it was so clear by his stilted delivery how much what he was having to say was bullshit 😂
Samsung is not a American company though.
You can critique capitalism while still operating within it. This is America, everyone has a sponsor because everyone needs to live.
Samsung is a Korean megacorporation (chaebol). Those are ineficient in many ways, but they operate in a diametrically opposed philosophy than American tech.
It feels like we're headed towards a situation where the new guard of streaming and everything over streamlines things in the sake of efficiency. And then in 15 years we have no more good writers because young ppl cant get into it, animators are worse because they weren't exposed/allowed to take time to study animals, etc. And then we'll just slowly rebuild that knowledge that these ppl foolishly cut out because finance bros are running everything
Welp... at least it isnt building airplanes. Because the MBAs did the same thing there and now we are heading for a reality where the USA may just be out of the airplane industry. Which is just kind of insane.
The good news (perhaps the only good news) is that nothing lasts forever
Producers will be creating everything with AI. There will be a further homogenization of stories, "live" video, and animation, and the masses will either watch or ignore it and film themselves jumping off buildings while chewing on soap sachets. And as long as the money guys make obscene amounts, they WON'T CARE.
@DonoVideoProductions We already see it happening on youtube. And I dont even mean the 100% AI content, I mean there are hundreds of channels with human hosts, generating daily content that appears to be based on the same sets of AI-generated prompts. I guess they are all working together "hacking" the algorhythm by forcing a "trend". Utterly valuless content.
@@patreekotime4578 I second that assessment.
I like the way John talks to Sona too
So gentlemanly of him to acknowledge the help
She can support him with laughter if jokes don't land too
@@INRamos13 Yes, that's exactly what they meant
I always appreciate when older generations realize how high the bar has gotten, like Jon saying “oh I wouldn’t be able to get into college now” is just, true, the bar is in the clouds and when older generations just tell us that they jumped over it so what’s wrong with you, it completely discredits what the current generation is legitimately experiencing
Yes they don’t live your experience but they are why you are living yours now. They succeeded so your parents could so you could. Your kids will have it even rougher.
If everyone is putting in extra effort and the population keeps growing the bar is of course going to be in the clouds.
It’s strange for me to hear as a STEM student, when I look back at the quality of testing and rigor for analysis in academics before I was born, and am amazed at how much harder it was than what I’ve had to go through. I’m studying in a top level graduate program for my field and I see the sorts of work previous generations were required to do and it scares me how relaxed our standards have become. We certainly have a different set of skills that are focused more on instrumentation and information processing, but when it comes to analysis, the reading of data and seeing through it to deeper meaning, older generations were on another level.
It’s true, I mean even just computers and the internet alone changed SO MUCH. The idea of “oh you can work at the local grocer” is no longer even reality, the store can go online and sort through THOUSANDS of applications and pick whoever they want and dismiss whoever they want for arbitrary reasons.
It’s truly wild.
@@CharlieQuartzYes a tech university in my country have made the same type of test for 1st year students for over 40 years now and the results keeps declining. Exams are getting easier because otherwise not enough students pass.
Still, competition is much higher in every field today so it's kinda strange how everything has changed. Knowledge today is also alot different from back in the day before the Internet. Today a different type of knowledge is more valuable, but im not sure if people even have that for the most part.
Competition is far higher but standards are lower.
To add to Stewart’s points, I like to think of it as we are now seeing more businesses act on business decisions versus using creative ones for newer content. For example, he explains how people would come up with material for a longer period of time and companies now want shorter periods of time for creative content. Ironically, businesses are failing, in terms of streaming situations, because there’s less creativity involved. It’s all about the business and making everybody into an advertising index, as opposed to actually letting people explore creative options for more unique storytelling.
If studio/movie/television/music groups would like to see more success at the financial level, then they need to have more creative types lead the way in terms of producing unique content that will appeal to everybody. We don’t have that now. We just have options to watch the same things that we’ve been seeing for decades now.
“Different sizes and equally ineffectual.”😂😂😂
I"m a game dev, and we had a similar situation to what Conan mentioned about the German crew filming the writer's room.
We were crunching to finish a game as the deadline approached. Reporters were arriving to document the "Final Hours of Quake 3" as the article titled it. Well the reality of that would have been a bunch of people sweating over their computers to fix bugs in time. So before they arrived we were sent out to buy a bunch of nerf guns, so that during the interview a nerf gun war could "spontaneously" erupt! So later the interview started, the nerf war happened, and tada, look how fun game development is. lol
That was a Geoff Keighley production. I always knew he was a fraud, but your story just reinforced it.
@@INRamos13 I really don't know if he had anything to do with it or if it was the studio's idea.
@INRamos13 you're a sad person
that has a marketing teams stench all over it lol. once at a previous studio we had a big marketing push saying "this game is using this brand new engine" as a way to say that we wouldnt have the performance issues of the previous game. in reality we had just given the engine a new name and fixed performance. the money put into that could have given us the time we needed to make the game better(especially on console) but instead the publisher was insisting we hit that holiday release and we got slammed with negative reviews
It changed from individuals having power to marketing departments having power. Everything has to fit a quota now. Seen it time and time again when big companies acquire smaller companies.
It's what is strangling the gaming industry top to bottom right now.
I worked for EA a few times, and they had a process where one producer focused on the schedule, while another producer focused on quality and content. What could possibly go wrong in a system like that? 😂
Locking two people in a room with a puppy. They have water, but no food.
How does that story unfold?
I worked at Jimmy John’s a few times. Nothing has changed because our job is actually necessary. Boohoo the guys who “write” are being down sized.
@@joselopez3678 Lol no self-awareness. You complain about writing quality yet celebrate writers losing work. Best part of your comment, ya can't write characters that on-the-nose dense without being called a hack.
@@joselopez3678this is written very short sighted and lacking basic empathy. What happened in your life to blame your fellow common man rather than rich executives? That's a crabs in a bucket outlook you have.
Two things;
One - The irony of this conversation spliced in two between an ad for a television to replace cinema is one of the funnier things I've had the viewing pleasure of witnessing today
Two- On a more serious note. It's interesting to see this happen to the film industry, as they had the opportunity to watch the music industry go through it first, and still didn't adapt or do anything about it. It took a tech company to come in and alter the music industry and capitalize on the digitization of it. Obviously there are MANY aspects as to what this has done to both industries, but I think it's fair to say that apple has more money than say a24, so as long as they're making money, they'll be next to impossible to remove. But this has been the eternal debate of art and commerce - and the more we value money over people - the less people will be working and creating (great) things in this industry.
I'd be surprised that if within my lifetime all these corporations don't just generate content with ai or whatever becomes the cheapest to get the most revenue and stock value.
I always thought Chappelles Show would not have lasted much longer anyway as a lot of people forget that their writing staff was really small and it was mostly just Dave and Neal. They were so hard up for sketches in season 2 that it was the main reason Charlie pitched his true Hollywood stories as they were both desperate for ideas
But imposing limits on creativity based on financial reasons will just lead to quantity of content over quality of content and these companies just want more content
I have two rules on RUclips. I see Conan and I click. I see Jon Stewart and I click.
That's four rules.
Not unlike Conan and Jon - them both of them are clicking, too. Great episode: More Jon, please👍
@@willis936 you can’t triple stamp a double stamp
Well if you clicked twice that means you just watched a paused video.
Conan's adds are they only ones I DON'T skip.
Many people predicted this. The strikes may have increased writers wages, but companies are not willing to pay more for writing. So now, we have less writers. Those writers are making higher wages (when they are working), but there are less of them. Has product quality been affected? That, I don't know, as I barely watch any TV/Netflix
The monopoly of big corporations needs to be broken up. When mega corporations are worth more than 50% of the worlds countries....we have a huge problem!!! No company should be bigger than the government. Period
Well, people often use two very different metrics when comparing corporations and states. GDP for countries and market cap for public corporations. GDP measures (roughly) the wealth created in a single year inside a country. While market cap is the total amount of value that a company is supposed to be worth in a given moment, not the money the corporation has made, which would be closer to net profit. So it's probably not true that those big companies are more valuable than half the countries in the world (I could be wrong though). That being said, I think it's absolutely ridiculous some of those big corporations are now between 1-3 Trillion USD. 10 years ago apple was 10 times smaller than it is now and they were already a gigantic corporation. This is not healthy for an economy.
The bouncers joke made me laugh so hard 😂
Their description of a writers room is similar to watching researchers in academia write as well. It takes time and it’s messy.
That really reminds me of Musk interviewing each worker on twitter and asking them what were their most remarkable lines of code of the last month. It's such a baffling measure to determine how good a programmer is, because some of the senior programmers in most important positions barely write code.
This episode is very special. These two sharing their wisdom, for us who come behind ( independently your work) has resulted in a very calming and humble experience.
Sona's giggle is so wholesome
When Sona heard "Red and Stimpy" you know in her head just went "BINGO!".
6:45 supporting arguments for my thesis that the computer in "Minority Report" was a statement about film editing technology.
I was wondering how it was going to get a bit dark with Stewart, I'm not disappointed.
Tech leadership isn't interested in creating entertainment, they're here to maximize efficiency while extracting as much money as possible.
Wow. These two really are the human embodiment of Ren & Stimpy.
Yes!
I would pay to see that footage of the Simpsons writing room with Conan. It's gotta be somewhere in some warehouse or somebody's basement.
That director had to have been Werner Herzog
Listening to this reminds me of 6 days to air for South Park. It’s amazing what they could do in 6 days but if you watch the whiteboard you can see them playing out other episodes as well.
I think this is a bad and a good thing. The Entertainment Industry needs to change, and this push and pull, up and down from the "analog" vs "digital" ethos are a good way to grind things down into something new.
A some of the best things from both.
Jon Stewart is just 5x smarter than most of Conan’s guests lol.
“Just” 5x smarter??
Were you let down because you wanted to say he’s even smarter than that, but you were actually rounding up from a lower point that would make your subjective statement look less impressive?
…I thought as much…🫤
@@tonym1810 What is this word vomit?
This was an interesting foray into how all things in life speed up as we progress. I work in IT application development and if you saw the output of a programmer today, vs’ that of just 10 years ago it’s wild. Another example would be cars. Before we used to drive a car with 200hp and go “WOW, that’s such a fast car”, now we look back as we’re driving in our 500hp grocery getter and thing that old car drove at a snails pace
These guys are so great! So cool to hear about Jon's creative process. Cheers from Canada.
Jon just explained why everything out of Hollywood sucks anymore: they axed the writers.
Yes, everything has to be full bore capitalism. I need my comedy created with full efficiency via Six Sigma methodology and ISO9001 standards. That should make everything funny enough.
Every movie now feels like an ad
No, there are writers but only two and they don’t talk to each other.
No, they're still hiring writers. But they're not making sure that they're good before they hire them.
@@INRamos13 Or, ala Barton Fink, they're hiring good writers and forcing them to write schlock.
Now this is actually interesting content from Stewart.
Fleabag is a great example of how technology can support creative, innovative writing
Why why why are these put out not only in pieces but OUT OF ORDER...seriously. Please for the love of all that is good, put out these interviews in their entirety, or at the very least, put out the clips IN ORDER so we can actually follow the conversation. What possible reason would you do it this way? Who is benefitting from this? I promise I will still watch your Miller Lite reads. Just let us watch this stuff like a normal person.
Calm down man😅
I like how they need so many ads to even justify allowing us to watch a free clip of them complaining about this new landscape
They are out of order because Sona is in charge of uploading them.
You sound like me with Colbert’s production staff. I gave up.
Subscribe to the podcast
Big Tech companies also don't get how coding works, so how would they get writing...
Love the comedy and sensitivity of Conan and Jon.
Never been in a writers room but I can take an educated guess as it is similar to any creative process involving any group of people - it is a process, it requires discussion and a back and forth between individuals working through the material to create an understanding and a focus - this process is used in AP Literature and Composition high school course allowing students deeper understanding of written work - in a sense it is working backward to what writers do in that it is creating content while students try to understand why.
It's like skating in the Rodney Mullins first invented the ollie vs skaters today who grew up with that always being the case. There are 12 year olds doing what was considered impossible 20 years ago. You can see this pattern in multiple places
4:49 New Clueless Gamer 🎉
Using the athlete analogy, 100m runners have sports medicine, scientific analysis, year round training and coaching and massive track condition improvements and the best time is 1 second faster than 1910. Given the amount of resources elite athletes absorb from our society, it's surprising they're not even better.
Yeah, but now there are 1000x more people who can get close to that time. It's no longer a few individuals who are insanely better than everyone else, its an entire field that are all closer to the top level.
@@patreekotime4578 I would hope so, since there's at least 1000x the money going into it.
1 second is kind of huge when you're taking about 10 second races. Lol. That's a 10% increase.
Yea… you don’t use seconds to talk about sprinting so the fact you are shows how big of a difference that is.
Someone in Minnesota just emailed our office located in FL that we need to be in office with a category 5 in the water... this is corporatism.
So glad that Jon is back. Funny and interesting clip.
I just love the ads before ,in the middle, and after the skit , seems like the skit interrupted the ads
RUclips really, really, REALLY wants you to see them as being like any other streaming service. Google wants them Bezos bucks! Sad, when the billionaires fight.
What skit?
@@TheDarkSatirist ok , the clip
@@stephenbailey8476 you know that words clip and skit are not synonymous, right?
@@TheDarkSatirist yes , I'm old , other things to worry about besides clip/skit
My favourite thing about this show is how hard Sonia laughs at Conan's jokes
Omg, two legends meeting face to face.❤
The normal way of everything in every business has changed. The ways things has successfully worked for decades is thrown out for politically correct, feel good measures, that absolutely fail but they have billions to lose to say it works instead of admitting its horrible. The greatness and uniqueness of the U.S model is gone with this new generation. You no longer have to be good, but look good or have a great web presence and youll be praised for how winderful you are without any merits
3:45 tell me more about this Samsung Sona Sofa
These two guys are GOATs, that's why they acknowledge the greatness of new generation!
On Avid: User Interface Engineering is a hugely important and often neglected craft that is supposed to match the minds and way of working so that software tools can ACTUALLY BE HELPFUL! This is not often. I like Avid too!
Coming from the world of computer programming, the things Jon says about writing apply too. Much of it is just thinking about stuff for a long time with no progress visible from the outside. The upside of the Silicon Valley coming into the writers' room would be being used to this dynamic - you'd have to get it across to them that writers = programmers before they'd cotton on, though, probably. (But the rise in recent years of the "tech bro" phenomenon doesn't bode well)
If that is the way Sillicon Valley is thinking about writers' rooms, it's funny, because their business is software and software bears a good number of similarities to a writer's room.
Smiling ear to ear in this episode
Absolute icons 🙌
Two of my fave ppl.
Please please post the clip from this episode about Johnny Carson.
The absolute biggest shift has been the availability of technologies that are now allowing those that would have been snubbed in the past instant access to an audience. There's always been so much good talent but minimal space, now, as Jon said, there's plenty of real estate.
Counterpoint: Charlie Brooker’s polemic sketch “How to Fall Off a Log” in his ScreenWipe series, where he shows the endemic inefficiencies - compared to a RUclipsr. These are examples from each extreme - a healthy industry must exist in the middle.
Thank you
I found it hilarious that after talking about the German documentary crew complaining about The Simpsons writers room being inert, they cut to the Samsung OLED commercial.
There was no money for old school writers even in budget of Rings of Power, so half of billion for first season? Special effects look nice, yet many people are complaining about casting, writing and acting. Things that made properly don't cost that much.
Every time Conan tells the german documentary crew at The Simpsons story I have a mental image of Werner Herzog having a long overly dramatic monologue voice over with cuts between the writers just sitting there and those underground shots of root systems growing in fast time, then whenever a writer finally says something inane there's edited in footage of a volcano erupting, shot back to half the root system being destroyed by fire, and then starting to grow again during the long silences.
6:22 what is John referring to here? "...the invention of the (avid?)."
I don't know what he's talking about but it sounds cool.
Louis CK got his body of work (pun intended) right at least straight to consumer!👍
This is seriously why video games have been failing / getting shittier for a decade
I DEMAND THE FULL EPISODEEEEE
we need jon&conan as ren&stimpy XD
I would 100% watch a show about Jon and Conan being bouncers together
They are describing the outsources of most jobs to technology or countries with lower costs.
I hope Conan, if he doesn't, finds out about comedic RUclipsrs and Streamers. I would love to see him do something with Jerma one day.
Where’s the full episode?
So Blaise has a concept of a game.
What John is talking about has been happening for the last 40 years or so and it’s not so much that tech companies are forcing entertainment to do it their way and more so that the entertainment industry itself is bending over backwards into a business model similar to that of product development. It’s disgusting but you can see this kind of thinking ever since the internet started getting privatized in the beginning of the 1990s.
Love you guys
The Samsung ad for being able to watch cinema on your couch instead of a movie theater totally totally contradicts. What this conversation is about.
you know who would have an interesting inside-scoop on this? Bill Lawrence!
Get Normand and Ghillis on the pod!!!!
"Can something happen?!" 😂
Uuuuhm, ... I know, you guys prolly are getting tired of these questions... but could we PLEASE have the entire episode?🙂🙃🙂🙃
As a veteran in a construction trade, many on unions (much better than non union by far), every time I sit through credits in the movie theater I am amazed that every movie doesn't bankrupt their studio. I suspect there must be about 3/4 of the names that just got their name in there from people they know to get good resume clout. There's no way that having thousands of people work on a single movie is in any way efficient or fiscally responsible.
every name you see in the credits is a union credit. and since you need 3 to get full union status they are carefully controlled and guarded. The union doesn't just hand them out like candy on Halloween. So every name you see will be a contract worker. As technology has changed a few jobs have been made obsolete but the union won't let them go. So a movie COULD be made with a smaller staff, but it is typically made with 145 crew per typical day. Now the crew may change from day to day depending. Not everyone you see in those credits worked every day. All the keys will remain consistent, but the grips and lowers will change from day to day based on availability.
your comment is the embodiment of the dunning kruger effect. you think because youve worked construction and built a house with 5 other guy you know anything about how a movie is made? you think you could operate a movie set better than businesses that have been doing it for literally a century at this point? not to be too rude but you sound delusional and really ignorant
I’ve been thinking about this a bit, since I’ve been watching older movies lately. The credits in a classic film can fit on one or two screens whereas now they take up a third of the runtime. So much bloat.
Streaming is killing cable subscriptions now, and eventually one or more streaming services will team up to bundle their services cheaper...eventually enough will be bundled so that we have a bundled streaming subscription instead. Thanks Netflix 😒
It's already happening, Disney owns Hulu since they bought Fox and all that, so now they bundle them. Amazon has Starz and Showtime content that you can pay extra to access, pretty sure I've seen HBO on there too. Not sure if those are really bundles since they just kinda consolidate where you pay for everything, but the Disney/Hulu thing is probably not the end.
Ahh but which one of them is Ren and which is Stimpy? THAT is the question! @10:16
I am a simple man i see jhon and i click.
Hope coco does one of those new vr games comming out next few months. Batman, or Metro or Alien
I just realised they did it! They got Samsung! Eat that Apple!
I'm so happy that this aged like milk for this sellout ❤️
I love Conan, but did they really just include a 2 min ad break in a 10 min video? Cmon man
it's like any business, the bottom line, people are expendable and the fewer the better for profit. it is beyond ignorant. it's institutional sanctification of business profits over people's connection with art, culture, purity, and one another
9:16 I don’t know what flatfooted means but as someone with flat feet I took offence to that.
Lol the irony here about tech companies taking content jobs away and then a long commercial about a TV manufacturer that's also in the content business is wild.
i'm guessing jon stewart is sona's favorute guest in a long time
without writers in the writing room there is no entertainment.
I'm really thankful for this video. I remember a time when I was homeless and facing many challenges in life. Then things turned around when I started earning $75,000 every two weeks. My life changed from having nothing to being able to offer something good to the world.
It's Rebecca Larryn Arnold doings she changed my life. A BROKER- like her is what you need.
I raised 75k and Rebecca Larryn Arnold is to be thanked. I got my self my dream car 🏎️ just last weekend, My journey with her started after my best friend came back from New York and saw me suffering in dept then told me about her and how to change my life through her. Rebecca L.Arnold is the kind of person one needs in his or her life! I got a home, a good wife, and a beautiful daughter. Note!:: this is not a promotion but me trying to make a point that no matter what happens, always have faith and keep living!!
Facebook..
She’s on Facebook..
Rebecca Larryn Arnold.
👆🏼that’s her name
I could listen to hours and hours of those two. Be it when they’re talking about very important things or making the stupidest jokes, they are always amazing.
Somebody should come up with a cartoon where two 90 year-old billionaires have to team up or save (or wreck) the world and let these two handle the voices.
Hi Jon!