Pay demands and employer perspective

The Hollywood absurdity reaches new levels: the Writers Guild of America (WGA) is now facing a strike from its OWN staff union (WGSU) — a union inside a union! In early 2026, the WGA’s ~115 staffers walked out over unfair labor practices, surveillance claims, higher pay demands (from ~$43k min to ~$60k+), and strict NO-AI rules in their workplace... while the WGA itself fights studios for similar AI protections for writers.

Malcolm & Simone break down this hilarious/self-defeating “unions all the way down” situation, why unions (especially public-sector ones) often hurt the workers they claim to protect, how mandatory writer minimums and AI bans create slop and kill competitiveness, why modern writing feels AI-generated anyway (looking at you, recent Wednesday/Star Trek seasons), Stephen Colbert’s comedy decline, and the broader lesson: unions can turn industries unviable (hello, Detroit autos, Pan Am).

We also touch on AI making employees 10–100× more valuable (if they embrace it), why demanding raises without ROI thinking puts you first on the chopping block, and why Hollywood’s output feels disconnected from audience demand or profitability.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are gonna be talking about the ridiculousness of what’s going on in Hollywood right now, which will give us an odd, a chance to talk about many related issues specifically wag the Writer’s Guild of America.

Created a union under itself that is now in a fight with the Writer’s Guild of America that the Writer’s Guild of America is not stepping down from, and the fight is over all of the things that the Writer’s Guild of America is. At the moment fighting the studios for, so for example, the biggest issue that the Writer’s Guild of America will not compromise to with its own union of members is they want it to not be able to use AI to replace him.

That’s the core thing. It’s arguing with the studios about. And so we’re going, because I [00:01:00] first heard about this. And I was like, I have to understand this in so much more detail. Is this normal to have a union inside of a union? Is it normal for them to be fighting a union over the same things that union is fighting externally over?

What are they fighting over? What aren’t the union bosses compromising on? Why does the union inside the union say they’re being trailed by surveillance agents hired by the union?

Simone Collins: what?

Malcolm Collins: Yes.

Simone Collins: Unions with the spies.

Malcolm Collins: It is, it is. Unions all the way down, nothing but unions.

Malcolm Collins: Next I need to have a Union. Of the Union. Of the Union.

Simone Collins: yes. That That’s the secret Union. They just don’t tell you about that

Malcolm Collins: so I wanna talk about this fight. One because it’s comical, but [00:02:00] two, it provides us with two interesting things that we can look into and dig deeper on. One is the problem with unions more broadly.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I personally am not an anti-union person. I am anti-public sector union. I think that’s insane. But I think that unions should be legal.

However, I think that they are very rarely good for anyone. And unfortunately people are just.

Simone Collins: the employees. Let’s be clear.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they’re usually bad for employees. Right. And we’ll get into, and this will be a clear instance of just how little unions actually care about employees. And, and if you’re wondering why I’m so against things like public sector unions, the famous line from the head of like the teacher’s union in in New York was like, we’ll start caring about the best interest of students when students start paying union dues.

Which is true. And Simone found this really great study that was looking at how long school closures around COVID happened and. The number one thing that was correlary wasn’t the amount of outbreak in a region, but the strengths of the teacher’s [00:03:00] union.

Simone Collins: About safety?

Malcolm Collins: it was just about getting teachers time off at extra pay.

But I wanna go into how unions break down, how they make things worse for workers. So that’s one thing that we’re gonna talk about. And then we’re going to go into on, on top of that, we’re gonna go into how AI is changing the workplace environment and how. And why? Basically nobody’s making serious compromises on it.

Even the union that is fighting against AI is unwilling to allow its workers to say, we won’t use ai. It’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Come on. Be, be reasonable here. People.

Simone Collins: I thought you were gonna say that they were going complete Luddite in a way that was going to render them obsolete in the end. But what you’re saying is actually they’re fighting back and they’re saying, no, I actually kind of wanna use ai.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no. They’re being like, oh, well, I mean reasonably you can’t do any, and, and then I wanna talk about how.

Simone Collins: interesting ‘cause I’ve actually, a bunch of the, the, the woke YouTubers I write have been talking about how new iterations of shows feel like they’ve been written by [00:04:00] ai. And I wonder just how much AI writing has actually taken over screenwriting, like the, the latest season of Wednesday apparently to so many people.

They’re like, wait a second. This was definitely written by ai, which I’m curious to see, you know, if that ends up coming out to be true.

Malcolm Collins: Maybe, I mean people have said that about the new Star Trek as well. And the thing is, is that, is that if you are like a standard woke progressive, you’re gonna sound like an ai, right? Like that’s the problem, right? That’s the problem.

Simone Collins: response to this is, does it matter? What’s

Malcolm Collins: Does it matter? Do you notice the difference? They’re already on autopilot.

I mean, and, and you see this as they get older and they get more entrenched in this. I mean, obviously the famous case here is Stephen Colbert where, you know, I was watching him on like strangers with candy recently and he was hilarious. And then you go to the Colbert Report or his

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: the Daily Show and he was hilarious.

And, and then just as time has gone on, he’s gotten less and less funny. And now he’s just basically chat GPT. Try to be a snarky progressive, talking about the news, right? How did he get that bad? How did he become [00:05:00] so deeply unfunny? And I,

Simone Collins: is his writers. It is not like he does all his own stuff.

Malcolm Collins: he did do his own stuff. Remember when there was the, the writers strike, Stephen Colbert was one of the shows that kept going, was out writers. So we know what Stephen Colbert was. He was quite funny. His quality didn’t really drop at all.

Simone Collins: He is bad writers now.

Malcolm Collins: the, the point I’m making is I think that he does a lot more of his own writing than other people do.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: that I didn’t notice a change in his show when he lost all the writers due to the writer’s strike. This was age ago, by the way. Talk about ancient history.

Simone Collins: I know.

Malcolm Collins: and I liked his show enough then that I was able to tell there wasn’t a big drop in quality during the writer’s strike. The other funny thing is the ridiculousness that like Wag has asked for, just if you wanna get an idea of like how insane Wags requests have been.

This is the, the Writer’s Actor’s Guild that has a union picketing it.

Simone Collins: Huh.

Malcolm Collins: They tried to make it so that you would have a, like when we’re talking about urban culture brained writers, right?[00:06:00]

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Tried to make it so that you had a, have a minimum number of writers per show. I think. Go over. It’s like four people, at least four to six people.

And it’s like, that’s how you get slop. Like too many cooks.

Simone Collins: too many cooks. Too many cooks.

Speaker 3: So sweet Dash ‘em. Cool to add the heat and you die. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many, too many, too many cook, too many cooks, too many cook.

Too many. Too many gonna fit in here. This is the worst case of intra I’ve ever seen. You can even hear [00:07:00] the theme music. And the thing is, we have no idea how contagious this strain is.

Speaker 5: Now look.

Speaker 3: Kids. Little love to make it nice and you Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Many.

Simone Collins: .

So bad. It’s so bad. I, I like, just, let’s just add more people. There’s the, the famous research that showed that after a certain group size, the IQ of, of the collective thought process goes down significantly. Like, let’s just make this worse. Just more, more running this by committee ‘cause that produces good outcomes.

Malcolm Collins: So let’s go into the.

Simone Collins: Charles Shakespeare wrote things with a group, of course, as did Dickens.

Malcolm Collins: Yes.[00:08:00]

Simone Collins: yes,

Malcolm Collins: They’re like, you need a group for quality. That’s what they said. So you could get, yeah,

Simone Collins: good writing with just

Malcolm Collins: without the consensus of the masses,

Simone Collins: Huh? Forbid. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Malcolm Collins: you wonder why Hollywood’s not making anything that anyone wants to watch anymore. It’s these guys and you basically cannot make anything high production in Hollywood without their approval.

Simone Collins: Oh, and when, well, it, the, the amazing thing too that you and I have witnessed when documentary film or news film crews come over is the, the stark difference we see when we work with unionized studios versus

Malcolm Collins: Oh, they’re terrible.

Simone Collins: if it’s a unionized production crew. It’s going to suck. It is the most inefficient day. They spend like eight hours to film. Five minutes. They bring all this equipment, they spend all this time making a huge mess in our house and like buying lunch, ordering lunch, getting lunch, taking their lunch break setting up, putting down, having a meeting, and we’re like sitting there and we’re like, can we, can we like live our lives?

Please? Can you, can we maybe

Malcolm Collins: I [00:09:00] hate having unionized crews ever. I mean, I hope they all go outta business. Anyway.

Simone Collins: have to, they’re gonna, they, they, this is unsustainable. I don’t understand this. And I, I don’t know. I’m thinking about outlining an episode at one point in which I put out the argument that, that feudalism actually never went away. That actually for this really long period of time a bunch of people have basically just had patrons, like wealthy people, funding non-productive work. And they just always, there have been sort of these wealthy. People owning different fiefdoms and then the rest of us are just peasants, like leaching off of their money. And then there’s some people who have, you know, local merchant. There’s this merchant class where people just make money off of businesses that do real work. But anyone who is a mid-level manager or who works for a large corporation work cannot be directly to profit is basically living in someone else’s fiefdom. Off of their large s as a patron.[00:10:00]

Malcolm Collins: Okay, that that could work potentially as an episode. We’ll see.

Simone Collins: But I mean, that’s, I think that’s definitely what’s happening in Hollywood because what they’re, what they’re doing is not connected to a return on investment. The money is not being put into them and making more money. It is just, it stops there. It ends, there’s, there’s no more.

Malcolm Collins: So the core issue that stalled negotiations of the Union union’s contract and by the way, this is their very first negotiation. So the union under the union. Just formed. Apparently this is a normal thing to happen within unions, except it bypassed a normal vote that you would have when it formed, I guess, is a sign of good faith.

But their very first negotiation is where things are failing and everything’s falling apart

Simone Collins: okay, so this, this new inner union, the cancer within the cancer. Is new as of when? 2025, like last year. Oh, it just formed.

Malcolm Collins: oh, I think 2025 it formed, and this is their first contract negotiation.

Simone Collins: these, these sub unions form why, when the union isn’t uniony enough what, what, what [00:11:00] is their purpose?

Malcolm Collins: We will get into that. So the contract negotiations broke down over accusations that the writer’s actors Guild had been negotiating in bad faith, including alleged surveillance, retaliation against organizers, and only surface level talks without real progress. And that’s specifically what they mean when they say arguing bad face.

Simone Collins: representing us. I’m gonna protest this. I’m

Malcolm Collins: They,

Simone Collins: my

Malcolm Collins: yes. They also argued that they were breaking labor laws that the union was breaking labor laws and doing unfair labor practices. So there’s,

Simone Collins: Kind of check out actually.

Malcolm Collins: there’s specific demands.

Simone Collins: I could see a teacher deciding to form a union against teachers’ unions because teachers’ unions are so corrupt,

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: up, and like here the teachers are like scraping together pennies to take their kids on a field trip. Meanwhile, the unions are like sitting high and pretty on their mountains of money. Why

Malcolm Collins: If they can force teachers to pay. It’s my understanding in a lot of areas, like you’re not allowed to [00:12:00] even be employed if you don’t give money to the union.

Simone Collins: Okay. Maybe now I’m, I’m kind of, now I’m in favor of sub unions. Let’s, let’s have more unions within union.

Malcolm Collins: More unions, so many unions.

Simone Collins: against the unions. Yes. No, this is good. Okay. Whoa. I’m into this. Tell me more.

Malcolm Collins: All unions must have sub unions. At least sub.

Simone Collins: You have to resist the evil union and the

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: could do that, you have to fight fire with fire.

Malcolm Collins: So they fought for higher pay to, of course, to address the living costs in Southern California. They said then just move to a location outside of Southern California.

Simone Collins: Can I have

Malcolm Collins: They want AI protection. Okay, you can go change.

Simone Collins: emergency. It might be a blowout and I, I don’t want, I don’t want that

Malcolm Collins: you. You do so much for this family. I do not know how you put up with this

Simone Collins: Other people say they put up with S**T, but I actually do a lot of it.

Malcolm Collins: a baby. You got a lot more, Simone. We’re only halfway there. This is number five.

Simone Collins: but

Malcolm Collins: So [00:13:00] we’re not even halfway there.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Not even.

Malcolm Collins: I’m sorry. You’re gonna be so sad when it’s the last baby s**t.

Simone Collins: I am. Well, no, because I’m, by then, if we’ve planned things right, it’s just a couple years until a grandkid, so it’s all good.

Malcolm Collins: Octavian is so fun. He

Simone Collins: he’s gonna be a great dad. He was telling me yesterday about how he was gonna give his kids way more toys than he has, and I’m like, I don’t know if that’s gonna be possible, buddy. We

Many

Malcolm Collins: he said that for real,

Simone Collins: Yeah, for real. He’s like, I’m gonna get my kids so many toys.

Malcolm Collins: he is going over with me on the video game where he found a map in like a war room. And he’s like, I, he’s explaining to all the ais how they’re going to conduct the war, and he’s like, and we need to attack the islands.

Simone Collins: Oh no. Yeah. He was telling me about how America needs to take more territory, and I’m like, no, that. They’re working on it, buddy. And he’s like, yeah I need to make them do it. And I’m like, how are you gonna make them do it? And he is like, [00:14:00] well, I’m gonna give them money. Okay. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: God. All right.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: To continue here. So they wanted, governance and fairness procedures, just clause rules to prevent arbitrary firings plus formal processes for handwriting disputes and to promote accountability and improvement of working conditions. The strike escalated to the point where the union discussed canceling its annual awards show, which is a huge deal in the industry.

It, it is a very big awards. Okay. It’s the main union for writers in Hollywood canceling the awards for writers, the yearly awards. And they’re like, and we’re gonna blame this all on you, the sub union, right? Like, and of course the sub union then became quite upset about this. So let’s, let’s discuss the salary situation here.

The minimum annual salary for staffers is $43,000, which is about the American median salary. So I don’t know. I mean, these are non-profit workers. That’s high. If that’s a minimum salary,

Simone Collins: in la you [00:15:00] know that, that’s rough

Malcolm Collins: well then don’t base it la.

Simone Collins: It doesn’t, doesn’t work like that. But I hear you. I

Malcolm Collins: And so they proposed that they move from 40 thou, 43,000 being the minimum to 59,737 being the minimum. And then a 7.5% increase upon ratification and 5% increases in each of the next two years which to me seems ridiculous.

Simone Collins: I mean it, it comes back to that famous. Minimum wage debate, which really can be extrapolated to any position. If you choose to make your salary higher. You’re putting yourself first on the chopping block when money gets tight. Like, sure. Okay. Like whenever employees ask us for raises that we’re just kind of out of nowhere, like not really merit based or whatever, it’s just like, well, I want a race.

We’re like, okay. If this really matters to you, we will give you a raise. And here’s what’s gonna happen depending on how high your raise is, when we look like we hit [00:16:00] a hard time and we have to figure out how we’re gonna make the company stay afloat, gonna have to eliminate the most expensive things we can.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I always tell somebody that whenever I give them a race, I’m like, you know that this puts you first on the chopping block to be fired, right.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And that’s always how it was like when, when the pandemic hit and we had to furlough employees and then keep some on, we kept on the most number of employees we could. And that meant that if you had a lower salary, you were in, like you were paid throughout the entire pandemic. And if you had a higher salary. You got furloughed because, you know, basically like it’s, can I save if, if I can save two people by eliminating one person, I’m going to eliminate the one person. So yeah, by making yourself, and what happens instead with minimum wage is, well, if I can’t afford a person, I’m going to just figure out how to automate them.

So I’m just not gonna have that job anymore. And that’s already a problem in Hollywood already. People are spending long, long stints [00:17:00] unemployed.

Malcolm Collins: I think that they don’t see it the way employers see it. So when an employee comes to us as, as somebody who’s run large businesses, like one of our businesses pulled in like 70 mil a year at one point. And they came to us and they’d say, Hey, I want more money, or something like that. The calculation in my head is, you know, differentially, when I can trust you as somebody, I could get on the open market versus other employees, are you bringing in value to the company?

And if you are, then I will raise your salary. Was the understanding that what you bring into the company. Change based on things that aren’t your fault, like market conditions, like a pandemic, et cetera. And then that can lead me to say, because you people never, you know, it’s, it’s almost always better to fire someone than lower their pay because they,

Simone Collins: you just, you don’t lower someone’s pay

Malcolm Collins: yeah.

Simone Collins: never happens.

Malcolm Collins: and, and so that’s like, I’m thinking what is your utility to the firm versus how much do you cost? These people are not thinking that about their own salary. They’re thinking, how much does it cost for me to live in la [00:18:00] therefore, that’s what I need to be paid. Not could they hire somebody who’s not in la differentially, less expensively That would be just as enthusiastic about the position.

What do I actually do? What value do I provide? Right? Like, mm.

Simone Collins: Well, and that’s the key thing too. I mean, if you really wanna make yourself. the first that comes to mind when someone needs to fire people or even just make yourself someone that they wanna fire immediately. Say, I need a raise ‘cause I need money. ‘cause life is expensive for me because

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it shows you’re not thinking about the best interest of the other employees at the company.

Simone Collins: have to come with. I, I’ve brought this value. I, I am, I basically just show that you are instrumental in, in the company’s profitability that, you know, they put in $1 and out comes two. And that’s what happens when they pay you. And if you can directly demonstrate that as long as you have a return on investment, you’re good.

Like, and that we’re always that way. 100%. You know, if you output more money than we, we put [00:19:00] in. That doesn’t really happen a lot,

Malcolm Collins: Anyway. And in terms of like, how bad is this organization because you’re like, oh, maybe they’re, they, the pay discrimination is really big. The, the woman running it, Ellen Dutchman earns approximately $682,000 with two other senior officials earning $399,000 in another earning $468,000.

Simone Collins: What

Malcolm Collins: Now, they almost certainly are not worth that much money, but keep in mind, that’s only like.

A bit more than 10 x what the average employee is earning, which isn’t that bad for a large company like this. Keep in mind, just this one sub union branch of this union has 110 members in it, right? And the, the, this, this union is operating, all of the writers, it’s like a for, for basically all Hollywood writers, right?

Like the, the person who’s running it is the face of it is probably going to be famous in some regard and command a decent salary, right? Like, to me, that actually doesn’t seem that abusive. And a [00:20:00] lot of charities you’ll see people pulling in millions of dollars in salary. So for something this high profile I can see that.

I don’t, I don’t really see that as, as, as that particularly bad. Now let’s get.

Simone Collins: I see it as egregious. It for me. I’ve, I’ve always justified in my mind that it makes sense for charities because the CEO typically is the defacto fundraiser, and it implies that they bring in more than they’re being paid.

Malcolm Collins: True. True.

Simone Collins: But

Malcolm Collins: they probably are,

Simone Collins: different. They’re just

Malcolm Collins: but a union is different.

Simone Collins: salaries. Yeah. I mean like with a union, it’s basically, I’m just gonna take a little bit of everything you earn and that’s, that’s way different. So I have a big issue with any union leader’s salary. That money belongs to the union members.

Malcolm Collins: So to continue here how did they get this bargaining and bad faith accusation? Because this is obviously really bad and they’re now going and negotiating with Hollywood people and people are like your own employees. Say you bargain in [00:21:00] bad faith. Like, how are you?

Simone Collins: Ly, there have been, there must have been at least one historical instance of a union leader colluding with the CEO of the company, maybe for kickbacks

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but that’s clearly not happening here. The things that they keep asking Hollywood for are completely ridiculous in going to sink the industry, like which we’ll get into. But, so thi this core accusation was just came from surface bargaining where management shows up to sessions but doesn’t meaningfully engage or intend to reach an agreement on key issues recently during the strike management and allegedly refused further bargaining unless W-G-C-S-U accepted their latest offer by February 27th, 2026, or they’d canceled the Rider’s Guild Awards on March 8th.

Now. What is interesting here is the sub union is basically like the, the, the bigger union is just like, guys, you just need to agree to this stuff. And the sub union is like, no, we will not stop coming to the table until you cave on the two key issues they care about, which are higher salaries and no ai.

[00:22:00] Which it,

Simone Collins: ai, like actual full Luddite, no

Malcolm Collins: yeah.

Simone Collins: ai. Wow.

Malcolm Collins: exact AI requirements. AI cannot be implemented for any purpose, eg. Surveillance, hiring, discipline, or performance evaluation without prior negotiation and agreement with the union. This includes a prohibiting, unilateral use of. All AI tools prohibitions on use, no generative AI tools like GPT in the workplace to replace or devalue staff roles.

Eg. If AI can do it cheaper, don’t allow it assurances that ai,

Simone Collins: ourselves less competitive, please.

Malcolm Collins: yeah, AI will not be, well, they don’t need to compete is why they can argue things like this, right? Like. If they wanna create art for one of their little like union things, right? Like that’s, that’s going out to the writers members. But then again, I actually think it’s probably in their best interest to have blanket bands on AI as a union simply because of what they are fighting for.

It’s very hard to argue [00:23:00] no AI at the major studios if they can’t commit to that themselves. And I can only imagine the blowback if they put something like AI art in something that goes out to Writers Guild members.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Because a lot of these people are like reflexively into ai

training and consent. If AI is introduced after bargaining, staff must receive paved training and have input, which is funny. Oh. And no forced a adoption. So if they don’t wanna use ai, they can’t be forced to use the ai, which a lot of companies are doing. I’ve heard, which is interesting.

Simone Collins: Forcing adoption.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Of ai.

Simone Collins: Obviously, yeah, you can get 10 times out of an employee that uses ai, and that’s the most what a lot of investors who are bullish on AI are saying is that the most valuable employee over the next short term is going to be an employee who very enthusiastically uses ai. And that the hardest thing to get right now isn’t like. Good AI per se, or just a good employee. It’s an [00:24:00] employee who enthusiastically uses ai ‘cause that is worth 10 or even a hundred individuals, right? If you get both a very smart person and a very smart person who uses the best AI unicorn, right? That’s what

Malcolm Collins: Do you think I should apply for normal jobs again? ‘cause I use a lot of ai.

Simone Collins: You, you, you, mean, you are, you, you fit the description very well. I just don’t see how

Malcolm Collins: Anyone’s gonna tolerate working with me.

Simone Collins: No. Why? Why you would. I mean, even if tight on cash and everything, wouldn’t you rather eating like canned beans and not have to

Malcolm Collins: true, but I, I don’t understand. I, I feel like we made a good product here. I just gotta figure out how to get people using it.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And that’s gonna take a lot of persistence and I don’t know, you’re like, oh, it’s been two weeks and it’s not huge. Like yeah, that’s pretty normal actually. Don’t worry about it. We just have to grind. I mean, smartly, of course. But [00:25:00] yeah, it’s, it’s a, it’s an amazing, it’s an amazing chat bot and. We’ll, we’ll figure it out. Anyway,

Malcolm Collins: Okay.

Simone Collins: they’re at this, this loggerheads and the, the sub union. I don’t know, I, how do you think this is gonna conclude?

Malcolm Collins: So to continue here, what I wanted to understand is, given what this sub union wants of them in relation to ai, what did the union want in regards to AI from the studios? Right. Because I wanted to contrast what the sub union is asking them versus what they initially wanted. Okay.

Simone Collins: because presumably the union, you’d guess that they’re allowing some AI adoption, but it can’t be a lot. Right.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So they wanted AI cannot write, rewrite, or generate literary material. Now, this is, these are points that they won in 2023. Okay.

Simone Collins: Oh, okay.

Malcolm Collins: AI generated content cannot be considered source material preventing studios from using it as a basis for human [00:26:00] revisions at lower pay rates. Basically they didn’t want AI to generate the original story.

And then humans come in and, you know, like they did with the Wednesday show or the Star Trek show, they’re obviously doing this, but you know, they’re just having humans who do these write-ups be paid for the AI’s work. Right. If AI is used in any way, writers retain full credit, separate rights, eg ownership elements and compensation as if no AI was involved.

AI cannot undermine writers pay or credits. You know what? I would be using AI for aggressively if I was major studios, and I’m really surprised we haven’t seen this because they’re still making these types of mistakes. Canon conflicts. AI is perfect for searching for Canon conflict.

Simone Collins: to make sure you’re not, Oh, that makes a lot of sense that, yeah, because you’re seeing a lot of Canon conflicts show up in shows these days, especially because no one is willing to make original IP anymore. So they’re just in on like

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, like if you’re making the new Star Wars or the new Star Trek, just dump the scripted AI [00:27:00] and be like, where is every single Canon conflict? Right. Just ask it like five times. And that’s the type of thing that historically you’d have to hire nerds for, and even they might miss something.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Whereas with this, absolutely. I mean, I think a lot of this comes down to all the weird rules about AI use, so you just can’t use it for even really simple checks like this. I mean, they don’t even want it to be used for what, like evaluations and stuff. So I don’t know.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, so they wanted restrictions on AI around writers can choose to use AI tools with studio consent, but studios cannot require it and no train. AI models on writer specific works without permission studios. Well, maybe that’s why the ais that are writing all the movies now are so bad. Studios must disclose and, and materials provided to writers.

If, if such materials include AI generated elements.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: and then, if, remember how I said they had the minimum staff things? [00:28:00] So for pre greenlit development rooms, a minimum staff of six writers, including four production writers, was what they wanted. For post greenlit rooms scaled by episode count, EG one writer per episode up to six.

Then one additional writer for every two episodes beyond that, up to 12.

Simone Collins: Just how what I, I, I mean, I understand that this is just to try to guarantee work for a group of people that’s finding jobs drying up in the industry, but. Don’t they understand that this is going to make it impossible for producers to raise money for more movies and shows. I like who can fund this?

Malcolm Collins: I, I, they literally do not think about where the money comes from or what their value is within the industry. The industry is just an infinite money flow to them, and the amount of money they deserve is the [00:29:00] amount of money they need to live their lifestyles.

Simone Collins: Yeah, well, can, can you blame the management for showing up and just not being willing to talk? I mean, I mean, what are you supposed to say? I mean, I wish management would, I, I wonder if this has, you know, as we discussed, right? Like, if you ask for this, we will have to find a way to just completely get rid of you.

Like, is this being explicitly said, do you think management’s trying to just not say it is, is all of this just not being disclosed that unfair

Malcolm Collins: I think the lefties are like. Literally incapable of, I’m like, your utility is the increase in productivity you bring to the company of seeing the world that way. That is not the way they see reality. And so here I wanna talk about why unions typically end up hurting employees because a lot of people have this myth.[00:30:00]

That unions won a bunch of beneficial things for employees historically speaking. And what we actually see historically speaking is it was periods of enormous wealth within the United States specifically because of the end of World War II and the de-industrialization of Europe that that caused.

And everybody who. We owe debts to and all the in our favor, trade negotiations, we formed that was basically American colonialization that was helping them. If they want to go back to that, we can go back to that. But we need to start getting aggressive, need to get a little ma maga right. But that was not really the unions that won all of those benefits for workers.

And why unions generally suck at winning benefits for workers is you’ve gotta think of the actual incentive structure of a union, right? So with a union. The workers get out there and they elect the people who are quote unquote, the figureheads of the union. Right? [00:31:00] The, like the, the people who are running the union or putting in charge, who’s running a union, right?

Maybe in an instance like this, so how do you lose your position? How do you gain your position? Right. It’s really about signaling to the workers that you are superficially doing whatever it is that they want you to do and not being willing to back down if you’re not at least superficially. You don’t need to actually do what they want you to, but you need to superficially do what they want you to.

Simone Collins: because eventually you can just blame, well, the, you know, the, the evil owners

Malcolm Collins: Right. And I think that this sub union breakdown that we’re seeing right now is a perfect example of this, this happening in real time.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: A new sub union is formed of one branch of the larger union. And so the people who are taking over leadership of this new subsection.

anyway, to continue. You’ve been elected head of this new sub union, right? You’re going to your first contract [00:32:00] negotiation. You have to win something like pay, right? Like people are like, that’s why we formed this sub union. We wanted higher pay.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: We wanted AI protection, right? You go and it turns out that the stuff that your people wanted were unreasonable.

I mean, this is a union, likely they would’ve already been given it. So now you don’t actually need to win them this stuff. You just need to have a big fit over not winning them. This stuff. That’s how you maintain your position, right? You, and that’s what they’re doing right now. Like I, I think they.

Pretty quickly realized that they weren’t gonna win the things that they said they were gonna win. And so then it just became, okay, well then let’s throw a fit over this. Let’s be, be spoilers over this. Let’s have meeting after meeting after meeting over this. We’re doing our job. We won’t be replaced.

We get whatever benefits come from this job, whatever additional money or anything like that. And. And what that means is it is a lot of people when they think of a union, if they think it’s an ability for workers to [00:33:00] collectively resist or push back against management, when that’s not functionally what’s happening, what’s happening is you’re creating a sublay of management, which must performatively combat the productive layer of management.

And. And this, you can see that the sub layer of management is always gonna be antagonistic to the productive layer. In so far, so like right here, what is a union’s job to, to win more of rights for the writers to win more page, win more. Obviously this fight that the sub union is having is going to hurt the goals of the larger union.

Like writers should be furious about this because this sub union has basically lost tens of thousands of writers. They’re negotiating power for the marginal benefit of like a hundred people. Okay. But that’s not, that’s because they’re leftists, they’re not going to see this, you know, they’re, they’re not gonna gr that, that’s functionally is happening.

But the point I’m [00:34:00] making here is they don’t care and they don’t care that they’re throwing the union members of the. The larger union that are paying their salaries under the bus because they don’t care about the goals of that union. They care about the politics that got them elected into a sub union position, even if those politics puts everyone who they serve in a weaker position.

So a great example of this comes from my dad and one of his friends, he told me the story when I was younger was a pilot at an airline called Pan Am.

Simone Collins: Pan Am like the That’s

Malcolm Collins: Well, pan Am if you, if you’ve heard of it, but don’t know what happened to it. It went broke because of its unions. And he remembers a conversation he had with this pilot, and he was very proud of what the unions were doing in the strike. And my dad was like, I. I have run the numbers. It’s going to go bankrupt.

If you guys keep doing this, like why aren’t you pushing back? And the guy’s like, no. Like look at these great pay that they’ve won us. Look at this. [00:35:00] Great. And functionally in the same way that employees can in good times, earn more marginal pay for themselves, but they’re also first on the chopping block.

Entire industries can do that to themselves. Where. And this is what we’re seeing in Hollywood, right? More and more people, more and more projects are happening outside the union ecosystem because the union ecosystem is making themselves uncompetitive.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And you eventually get to that point. We, like, we’ve seen this with writers, like obviously, oh, I want more writers in the room for every story.

Right? Obviously to the writers, they’re gonna want that. They’re not thinking about, it never enters their mind. How is this going to affect how much a user the, the, the consumer of the products that we’re writing is going to want to consume what we’re producing? It’s literally never crosses their mind because it’s not relevant to them.

Right? So,

Simone Collins: this

Malcolm Collins: If they did think through that, they’d be like, [00:36:00] oh, obviously having six writers to 12 writers in any writing room is going to decrease the in product quality, but

it never occurs. Anyway. Any final thoughts, Simone, about unions, recurrent unions, et cetera, et cetera?

Simone Collins: I want to see a movement of sub unions, the church of the sub union that. Just destroys unions, that, that roots out the corruption in unions, because unions, I agree with you, you know, in the, in their original format, really did have a reason to exist. These are people working in factories, in minds with really rough conditions.

You know, they’re, they’re not being subject to basic. Employee protections. You know, this was before osha. This was before all sorts of regulations of protected workers and unions were the proto version of [00:37:00] that. They existed to protect the basic safety of employees and to give them. You know, reasonable controls, especially in a time, and I think unions really rose during one of the, we’re at the second peak of this, but at the first peak of really high levels of immigration. Remember when we looked at immigration peaks and valleys

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: in United States history, and we were like, around the time that unions first rose, we were at a peak and now we’re at another peak. And so unions also existed because it was really. It really easy for companies to just be like, fine, I’ll just hire an immigrant who will do the work without any of the protections.

And so why they first existed. Writers don’t need protections. They don’t need breaks like this. They don’t need, I mean, okay. I actually, I understand why some writers do. And, and there are some, like for example, say you’re filming some reality [00:38:00] TV show on some island. Like there, there was that guy who was filming when, when Tex was born like in, in the triage room I’m talking with. With the, with the camera guy about like the other work he’s done. And he talked about this one time when like, I think he got bit by something poisonous in like in the ocean in Tahiti and stuff. And like it’s kind of good to have a union when you’re in another country working incredibly long hours standing in water being like stung by stingrays, you know, while filming a bunch of entitled bougie, like sluts.

I don’t know what he was filming, I can’t remember what the show was about, but like, yeah, you probably wanna make sure that you don’t get totally screwed over because. A lot of weird dynamics can take place when you have like a small crew of people and like you’re isolated in another country. I get it. But this whole thing of like, well, but for writers, we need protections. Like, oh my God, what will happen if I’m not given, you know, this size of writer team or if I, if I’m forced to use technology to, to be more efficient. just so [00:39:00] overblown. I don’t

Malcolm Collins: I mean,

Simone Collins: level of

Malcolm Collins: functionally what unions do. So typically the way a company works is if they can find somebody to like do a job cheaper and better than the existing employees, they’re going to take that individual, right? And so.

Simone Collins: if they’ve, if they have investors, it’s their fiduciary responsibility.

Malcolm Collins: What a union tries to do is to try to get in the way of that to differentially, get more resources for the employees and what that causes as Simone and I have. Pointed out is the union is the collective bargainer of that employee who asks for a higher salary without understanding that that makes them first on the chopping block.

With unions, it’s asking for a higher salary without understanding that that makes the entire company more likely to go out of business with

Simone Collins: shortsightedness.

Malcolm Collins: jobs that they represent. Well, they, they face functionally a union boss faces functionally, no, no negative repercussions for a company going outta business.

E even if everyone who they said that they were gonna protect.

Simone Collins: [00:40:00] immediately if they don’t represent

Malcolm Collins: they don’t really think about that, like in terms of like how they push for things, et cetera. And so they’re, they’re in instead of employees attempting to increase their value to the company or their differential value, they, they think, okay, how can we get more, and you can get temporary benefits from this.

It just eventually causes those industries, like, everyone’s like, oh, look at all the things Detroit unions won for auto factory workers. And it’s like, and what happened to all of those auto factories? Right? Like. When they differentially were able to get around that system, they did and the system collapsed.

It is ultimately catastrophically bad if a union forms was in your industry. Where this gets really, really nefarious is when unions form in public sector industries where they just have no business being at all because then the industry can’t fail. And you just get it happening to the extent where it just becomes comical and kids aren’t being educated.

Our old recording software company decided to like quadruple prices, so we decided to try a new one. [00:41:00] And unfortunately, we lost the last 10 minutes of Simone video. , So we won’t be doing this again because, on this one, we only lost the last 10 minutes of video where she only said a few things. So it’s not that big a deal.

But on the other one that we recorded today, we lost the entire recording from

Simone,

Malcolm Collins: all right. Well, Avi Simone, and we may do a separate video of people want on the history of like the, the mis history of unions that you’ve heard, where you believe that unions actually ever really helped anyone instead of just set up industries to fail. That that is, that is what unions did, is they teed up the failure and.

Poverty of many parts of the well United States, of, of Europe, of et cetera.

Well, no, it was an optical reason. The idea was just can we fight back against these giant kingpin whatevers? And the answer was, is. They, the, the kingpins were not being as ruthless to you as you thought they were. There was a reason often for what they were doing right, they were trying to maximize the productivity of the industry.

And you just weren’t making yourself that [00:42:00] valuable.

He or she said something about how unions kept us from offshoring jobs.

Malcolm Collins: Right, but those people existed in other regions, so as soon as something unionized in one region, another region would end up replacing it unless there had been an enormous sunk cost capital investment in something that couldn’t be moved. was busy listening to my manga, so it’s okay that you made me Wait, is

Simone Collins: can’t believe you discovered that. you think it’s AI or

Malcolm Collins: it’s a hundred percent AI somehow, and I think there’s even a website that you can probably go to to do this. It will just automatically read in the right language, the manga for you and describe what’s happening,

Simone Collins: you what’s happening? Yeah. That’s what’s so cool about it. I’m so intrigued by this.

Malcolm Collins: because it sometimes gets things wrong, like who’s speaking, which a normal person wouldn’t get wrong, but an AI might get wrong.

Simone Collins: Yeah, the bubbles are sometimes, I guess you have to sort of infer a lot in

Malcolm Collins: like you’d be able to tell by like little marks on the the, the speech bubbles, who they’re in relation to,

Simone Collins: you really,

Malcolm Collins: but the little Mark May not be obvious to an [00:43:00] ai. Now, I know you have the brain of an AI Simone, and so you see these marks and they’re.

Simone Collins: This is very true.

Malcolm Collins: I reached back out to Temple just to get an idea if we should do filming with them.

I appreciate you pushing back.

Simone Collins: We’re gonna talk

So we’ll get to the, we’ll get to the bottom of this.

Malcolm Collins: we’re 30 today with the team. Okay.

Simone Collins: So

Malcolm Collins: temple’s. And Temple’s not this week, right? It’s next Thursday.

Simone Collins: it’s next Thursday. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. And what else? What are we doing for dinner tonight?

Simone Collins: It’s night two of that curry. I was thinking of doing it on toasted Hawaiian buns.

Malcolm Collins: No, that’s always gonna be harder to eat.

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. Sandwiches just fundamentally don’t make sense when you, when you take them away from what they originally were, which was, was gambling food, which was actually portable.

Malcolm Collins: I like sandwiches when they’re made with sandwich meats. The problem is, is the sandwich needs to be more understated, I think [00:44:00] with cheese being the predominant flavor.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And it doesn’t work very well if like curry’s the predominant flavor or something.

Simone Collins: No, it’s true. Or like, yeah. Any sort of sloppy Joe or like, yeah. mean, yeah, sandwiches. Tea sandwiches really are the truest form of the sandwich. That is what the Earl of Sandwich presumably had invented so that he wouldn’t have to leave the card table and stop hemorrhaging money in a stupid, pointless game. the fact that people now associate sandwiches with like hoagies and Philly cheese steaks and subs, like those are not sandwiches. You

Malcolm Collins: I don’t even understand how somebody even eats something like a Philly cheese steak without assembling it.

Simone Collins: falls the Yeah, it’s very, I, I hate sandwiches except for tea sandwiches. ‘cause you can actually eat them everything falling out.

You can take a bite.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And what, what else was I gonna say? In regards to, yeah, IGI I’ll, I’ll just with rice.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Looking forward to dinner tonight. Oh, by the way, the curry that you keep making that you seem to think is mango curry is [00:45:00] definitely a panang curry.

Anyway, I will get started in a second and for our fab, I mean, I’ve got to think about what to do to promote it. Do you have any ideas?

Simone Collins: I, I mean, I think it, it’s more persistence, it’s more time. We’re not doing the wrong stuff in reaching out to influencers who talk and write about these platforms, but we’re gonna have to be persistent. And keep in mind the, the second and third times that I reached out to people each time. inevitably catch one additional person who didn’t respond to the first email or the second email because they were on a break or they had stopped checking that email or whatever it might have been. So I think a lot of this comes down to persistence. And the same goes for ads.

Malcolm Collins: We should reach out to Alex Cruel and see if he wants to test the agents

Simone Collins: That could be fun. Yeah.[00:46:00]

Malcolm Collins: anyway.

Simone Collins: How many people he

Malcolm Collins: I haven’t really been working on the agents for a while because I’ve been working on getting all the other features to be top-notch. ‘cause like that’s our major selling point. But I think we’re about ready to launch agents.

Simone Collins: That’s

Malcolm Collins: I, the main reason I’m afraid of putting them in production is they have this habit of ma disabling turning them off and that people run out of credits.

And so like, and I’ve gotta make sure that they don’t run like infinitely and make us go broke or something. Right. You know? So.

Simone Collins: Oh, like, okay, so they’re not. Ah. They even don’t, you have kind of a hard stop when credits

Malcolm Collins: No, it I, on my computer, the way I turn them off when they go crazy is I just turn off the back end. I cannot do that on production.

Simone Collins: Hmm. You can’t create a hard limit to credit

Malcolm Collins: I can, but stuff like that can do, go off or not trigger correctly or,

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: That’s what’s been happening.

Simone Collins: Well, let’s make sure we get that [00:47:00] down first. ‘cause the downside is non, non-trivial, thanks to

Malcolm Collins: started here.

Simone Collins: on that. Okay. I’m so excited for this one.

Malcolm Collins: People wonder what we’re talking about. We have like an AI chat bot like adventure thing where you can use any of the major models to play AI adventures, be they like companions or not safe for work or whatever. R fab.ai. And we’re gonna be releasing like agentic agents very near future. That is sort of like claw, open claw, but like way more intuitive with way more features.

And that’s smarter than open claw. I don’t want to take time to explain how we are able to make it smarter than open claw, but we are.

Speaker: Okay, so explain this to me. Like I’m trying to sell my AI friends, like, like this one down here. Okay, activity. Get up, get up. What are you trying to do? You’re trying to show them the map on your screen. Yeah, and I’m trying to show, and I’m showing, and I’m trying to show this guy, what are you, and I’m trying to show all of the people here.

Speaker 2: [00:48:00] That’s where they should attack at the enemy base. And where should they attack at? At? At the islands that are not connected to us. Like that one. That one, and that one right there. Why attack the islands? Because they’re enemy islands, the ones that are not connected to us. How do you know they’re enemies?

Because they tried to retreat and they made other islands with their boat. So they, so I decided to text them. All right. Go Octavian. Yeah.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe