Mr President, I have the honor
to present David Zaslav for
Boston University's honorary degree.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> The Warner Brothers Discovery CEO,
David Zaslav, was the commencement speaker at Boston University, and when he
took the stage, as you can see in that video, some people not too happy about it.
And it has a lot to do with the ongoing writer strike,
which has been ongoing for the last three weeks.
Now, we have some more fun clips to get to and
also some photos from the commencement to also show you.
But first, we need to just back up a little bit and
tell you a little bit about how Boston University could not have picked
a worse speaker at this moment, considering the writer strike.
So the writer strike officially started on May 2nd, just two days later,
Boston University announced that Zaslav was their commencement speaker.
Now, Zaslav is getting a lot of pushback because of the writer strike,
because of what his pay is compared to what writers make.
So, for instance, he made almost 250 million in 2021 alone.
A lot of that,
meaning 200 million worth of that 250 million was in the form of stock options,
which is usually how incredibly and fabulously wealthy people get paid.
That's how a lot of executives get paid.
And side note, part of the reason why is because it encourages them to cut costs,
meaning costs associated with labor, to increase profits.
And when you increase profits, the shares of that stock goes up, and
he gets paid more as a result.
So it's an incentive to cut costs, especially when it comes to labor.
Now, most Americans do in fact, support the writer strike, so
the studios might not, but the American people do.
For instance, according to reporting from More Perfect Union, overall,
71% of Americans with an opinion backed the writers in their dispute.
The survey indicated that the dispute has high visibility with the public, with
more than 80% of Americans polled saying they had an opinion on the ongoing strike.
The poll found overwhelming support for the strike that cuts across racial,
gender, age, and even political lines.
Even 63% of Trump voters with an opinion on the strike do
in fact back the writers efforts,
while 37% of those same Trump voters back the studios instead.
And that's, of course, represented by the Alliance of Motion Pictures and
Television Producers.
Okay, so that's a little bit of background.
By the way, guys, don't be surprised that Trump supporters would be in favor of
labor-related efforts.
Lot of them are workers themselves.
We need to stop pretending as if we don't share anything in common.
But that's a side note.
Now, before I get to some of the fun videos and
pictures from the response to Zaslav, what do you think, Cenk?
>> Yeah, so look, your company does well, you get rewarded in stock options, etc,
I don't have that much of a problem with it.
The question is, how did you get there?
And so if you're doing it by just cutting employees when you don't need to,
that's a different question.
And in this case, they're in the middle of a strike, and the workers are asking for
429 million more per year, and that's a small slice of the profits, right?
And in the media industry, there is tremendous profit,
generally speaking, and the industry is counter-offered 86 million.
The reason I'm giving you those numbers is because, remember, and by the way,
I have a different number than you do on Zaslav's salary from the last two years,
and it's probably because of difference in the stock prices, etc.
And so in my source, it's at 286 million over the last two years.
So let's be fair to the guy and say and divide that by two and
say he's averaged over 140 million in those two years.
That's already more than what they're offering the writers.
Just one, one CEO out of the entire industry.
If they just took his salary and gave it to the writers,
they'd already be nearly doubling what they're offering the writers today.
To give you a sense of context for when they say, we golly, gee,
we just don't have the money for it.
>> Okay, just to give you a sense of what kind of person Zaslav is,
I didn't know about this, he apparently just scrapped a movie that was
already completed, totally finished, the Batgirl movie.
He scrapped it for a tax deduction, a write-off.
Did you know that?
>> Yeah, I did know that.
So, look, guys, there's a larger story of why they're doing all this
cost-cutting in the first place, and that's a super interesting story, but
I wanna get to that after we show you what they did to this guy.
And I love what he was talking about when they started booing him, and
I wanna talk about that, too.
So let's go to the videos, then I'll give you the whole story.
>> All right, so there were two instances in which they started booing him very
aggressively, and one of the times had to do with his statements,
he is complaining about how difficult his life was as a lawyer.
Let's watch.
>> You've got to figure out what you're good at, and what you love doing.
I graduated from law school right here at BU, and
I got what I thought was everything I wanted.
I got a job at a big, prestigious firm in New York,
an apartment in New York, and I was making good money.
I was feeling really great.
>> [NOISE] >> He's so out of touch.
That's the thing, he's so out of touch, and he doesn't know it.
He doesn't know it.
Times have changed, and he still thinks that it's Pimp My Ride time.
And what was the other MTV show where they would go to people's houses and
it was like, look at my nice house?
>> Cribs.
That era is gone, okay?
People are freaking struggling.
Those college students, their future is so uncertain and so unstable.
And the homeboy is like, I was a lawyer and I was living the good life.
I had that apartment in New York, shut up.
>> So the whole speech was like that.
And it's funny you said that he was out of time because I-.
>> Out of touch.
>> Out of touch with the times, right?
You're right. He did seem out of
time when they start booing him.
>> You're out of touch, you're out of touch, your time, right?
Yeah.
>> Nobody saw that coming.
So he's out of touch, I thought as I watched the speech,
this is a good speech from 1986, 1994 in that ballpark, right?
This is all the graduation speeches from that era where they would come and they'd
be like, well, I had this spectacular job coming out of the prestigious school.
I came out with this one, right?
And then I decided to turn it down to pursue my passion.
But it turned out I got an even more spectacular job, and
then I got $286 million because I was so spectacular.
And in the middle of it, he was telling a story.
And that's another point where he started getting booed, about how Jack Welch,
where he used to work for the legendary businessman, Jack Welch, who ran GE, etc.
And he's like, Jack calls me in his office and
he tells a story about office politics, okay?
>> I think we have that video, and here is the next one.
Let's watch.
>> And then I'll tell you more.
>> If you wanna be successful, you're gonna have to figure out how to
get along with everyone, and that includes difficult people.
>> [NOISE] >> Some people-
>> [NOISE]
>> Some people will be looking for
a fight.
>> [NOISE]
>> But don't be the one they find it with.
>> [NOISE]
>> Focus on people's good qualities.
>> God, I have to be honest, I mean, and
you can hear the people chanting, pay the writers.
Excellent, okay?
But at the same time, I will say, I feel so much discomfort, cuz it's so cringey.
It's so cringey.
Do you ever watch things that are so
cringey that it makes you kinda sick to your stomach?
>> Totally-. >> That's a good example of that.
>> My son will literally walk out of the room when something like that happens on
a TV show or a movie that we're watching, cuz he can't stand the cringe, okay?
>> Yeah, it's so cringey. >> So here what he was telling,
was that Jack Welch story, and him and this other guy disagreed, and
the other guy was trying to knife him into office politics, and
Jack Welch calls them into his office and he wins the argument.
But Jack Welch has this advice for him afterwards, saying, hey,
there'll always be difficult people, and then people start laughing, right?
But he's gonna finish his story, and the finished story doesn't end well, right?
He says,
now the trick is to not let those people who are looking to pick a fight find you.
Oops, that's exactly what's happening right now.
He went to go give this speech, giving people an opportunity to find him and
make him the face of the strike, right?
But Zaslav is a good face for that.
And the reason is he's the one leading the cost-cutting in the industry.
Now, they're all doing it, they all agree, but he is a spectacular example of it.
As he's putting away a quarter of a billion dollars over the last couple of
years, he is chopping away at cost, employees, etc,
at Discovery Warner Brothers.
Now, if you're wondering why, to answer the question Ana brought up earlier,
it doesn't have to do with their core business.
Their core business is actually very profitable.
So why are they chopping all these people?
Cuz Zaslav made the decision to take on tremendous debt to get this merger done.
And since they're saddled with all that debt, the stock market is forcing them and
they're happily doing it, cutting costs so they can say, it's okay,
it's okay, we'll make even more profit so we can pay back the debt.
But it's a short term strategy because like Elon Musk is seeing with Twitter,
there's only so much you can chop at your employees before you get strikes.
Before you get people tuning out, before you get to a point where you've
done long-term damage to your brand and to your business.
But hey, he's got to make those quarterly earnings every quarter and
that's what his bonus is based on, so he's looking for
a big fat bonus this year too after those cuts.
And if it destroys Warner Brothers Discovery in the long run, who cares?
He won't be there for it.
>> I think that's a good place to end it.
I feel even more sick now.
But, yeah, it's a great point.
And it really does pour cold water on the myth that as long as you do everything
right, as long as you work hard and you're earning the company you're working for
a lot of money, you're gonna be safe, your job is gonna be safe.
But in this case, because of the merger, it didn't matter.
>> No, I know for a fact, people within the company,
in portions of the company that are very, very profitable,
that are getting cut anyway because they got to pay down the debt.
And that's just the stone cold fact of finance.
So the original sin was taking on that debt to do the merger in the first place.
But that's a sin for the shareholders, that's a problem for the company, but
it's not a problem for the executives because the bigger their revenue is,
the bigger their stock price is, and the more they get paid.
So they have an incentive to build these giant untenable companies and
do tremendous damage to them in the short-term
while they reap the profits the executives do.
And then if the company runs into problems later, by the way, almost all the retail
stores you know, Sirius, Kmart, Toys R Us, this happened to all of them.
They suck all the money out and they go, I guess the company's failing now,
and they kill it.