I cannot believe it, quite frankly.

How far apart we are on so many things.

How they plead poverty that they're losing money left and right

when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs.

It is disgusting.

Shame on them. They stand on the wrong side of history at this very moment.

The Okay, guys, I am really excited about this episode.

Okay, guys, I am really excited about this episode.

It's an all-star panel of people who I, one, have enjoyed talking to very much in other

context and two have been grounding for me specifically with respect to talking about

the ongoing writer's strike that has now been joined by actors in Hollywood.

You know him, you love him. He's returning to the podcast for the umpteenth time,

Josh Olson, who not only is himself a writer in the film industry, but my favorite podcaster,

Josh, I miss our West Wing thing days.

It was torture, but I do miss it. It's kind of like the way some people miss having been in prison, you know. It's like I want to go out and commit another crime and start over again. I talk about the West Wing thing, like in stimming. I bring it up with these random conversations. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, politics and podcasts and what I like and the understanding of the world and liberals are like this. And it comes up so often as I'm trying to have normal social interactions with people that it's become a little bit of a problem for me. So I have to find my new fix. But in addition to Josh Olson, if you watch Rising this week, then you'll have met Blake Masters, not that Blake Masters. We're talking about Black. Blake Masters is a writer, screenwriter, and television runner. You couldn't get that guy.

You couldn't get the guy. You would just settle for him. Well, I'm not a proto-fascist robot and I'm

a human soul. So, you know, it's a little different. We did both graduate from Stanford with degrees

and econ, but I actually decided to be a human being. We're thankful for it. So, Blake, all right, start us off for people who for some reason might have been living under a rock and not following what's been going on in Hollywood over the last now more than 70 days. Where are we with this rider strike? How do we get here? Well, I think we're in full McBeth, where, you know, we're so deep in the swamp. It's just as painful to go forward as go back.

But we're a long way from the end, mostly because I said on the podcast on your,

on the rising this morning, we've reached a place where what's become very obvious is that the

writers and actors are on one side and the companies on the other side

are actually fought in very different businesses at this point. They have very different

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