This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Cool Zone Media.

Welcome to XAP and here, a podcast about the consolidation of capital into increasingly centralized

forms and how it's ruining your life.

I am your host, Mia Wong.

And with me today to talk about how the consolidation of media monopolies has ruined many, many, many, many, many things for many years is Vicky Austrobyle, friend of the show, author of forthcoming April 14th, 2026, The Extended Universe, How Disney Killed the Movies and took over the world. Vicki, welcome to the show. Thanks. It's so great to be back. Thank you, Mia. I'm excited to talk about something a little less depressing than the things we could be talking about. Slightly less than that. Very mildly less of that thing.

You know, like, this is a story.

Obviously, the story that we're talking about here foremost is Paramount's acquisition of Warner Bros.

Or forthcoming acquisition since Netflix is backed out.

It technically still could fail, but seems very, very unlikely to.

And, you know, you can tell things are going great in the news where this is the fun one.

And the fun one is us before we started recording talking about who we think the sort of Nazi commissar they're going to put in charge of CNN is going to be.

Like, who's their very wise? So, things going very good. Yeah. As you can tell. Oh, my God. You had the most cursed name that I've heard so far. Oh, yeah. Tim Poole, I think, is probably the most cursed. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be the most. It's a dark horse candidate. I don't know, what are the numbers on Pollymarket? Should we look? Who's a friend for? I know. She'll pull it up. I think they've probably, that's probably up now, which I hate. I refuse to check Pollymarket, even if I could know facts ahead of time. I simply will not.

It can't make me.

Oh, God.

But we're not talking about insider trading war crimes.

We're talking about insider trading intellectual property.

So that's pretty good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Woo!

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