Good morning,

Hope you’re enjoying a great and restful holiday weekend. It’s Jon Kelly, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Puck, and we want to keep it that way. So herewith, some of the most memorable work that you might have missed amid the holiday. And stick around, below the fold, for the backstory on how it came together.

HOLLYWOOD:

Matt Belloni and James Andrew Miller go deep on the future of HBO under Zaz Rule.

SILICON VALLEY:

Teddy Schleifer unveils the courtship behind Bezos and Obama’s shotgun marriage.

WASHINGTON:

Julia Ioffe profiles the courage of a couple Never Trumpers looking for Rupert’s money without Tucker’s stigma.

And…

Peter Hamby incisively reports on the most vexing question plaguing the left: Can Harris win if Biden doesn’t run in ‘24?

WALL STREET:

Dylan Byers and Bill Cohan envisage how the next five years of media M&A will play out.

A decade or so ago, I remember lingering over a long cafeteria lunch on the 14th floor of The New York Times building with my friend and then-colleague Adam Davidson, the economics journalist and podcast pioneer. Adam and I had started working together on a weekly column for The Times Magazine called “It’s the Economy,” a blunt reference to James Carville’s facile yet brilliant political strategy that kneecapped George H.W. Bush back in 1992. 

The whole premise of our concept was that the economy, and ergo the culture, was changing before our eyes in obvious yet often imperceptible ways. Adam and I, who had both grown up in Greenwich Village, often joked that we saw this phenomenon in our own roots. The blocks we played on as kids, long the province of artists and writers, had been remade in the aesthetic fantasies of Goldman bankers. Pastis, Richard Meier’s Perry Street condos, the Marc Jacobsization of Bleecker Street: it wasn’t Bob Dylan’s village any longer.

Over cafeteria sushi and fountain sodas, Adam chastised me lightly for being so folksy and oblivious. The change shouldn’t have caught me off guard. After all, our economy had been fundamentally morphing since the late 70s—some academics pegged the turning point precisely to 1978, in fact—when seismic gyrations in global trade, technology, and the union movement began unmooring us from the firmament we’d been used to for decades. The change had been steady and constant; I had just missed it. 

The boon of the Greenspan years, 9/11, two foreign wars, and the financial crisis had made it hard to see that we were entering an era of unprecedented transformation. For generations, Americans could reasonably plot out the rest of their lives, contextualized by the same institutions, with some accuracy by their early 30s. If you worked hard and played by the rules, as Clinton had fetishized, you could chart a steady path to economic advancement. Now, that was all out the window. The new economy promised volatility and unpredictability; new companies would overtake stalwarts, generational wealth could be made and lost in years; the highs would be higher, there would be troughs: the only constant was change. Like I said, it was a heady lunch.

I trusted Adam back then, but I’d be lying to you if I could honestly say that I saw his vision. Now, I see it everywhere. The customs and companies that many of grew up with are shape-shifting before our eyes: GE is vivisecting into three; CAA is buying UTA; five of the seven most valuable companies in the world are younger than I am; in merely the course of this pandemic, Zoom and Peloton went from can’t-miss bull stocks to head-scratchers that seem like potential catnip for acquirers. Tesla is larger than the entire automobile industry—and Rivian already seems like a worthy competitor. 

When I began my career, there were dozens of publishing companies; now there are five, and you could effectively say the same about movie studios. In the ‘90s, we joked about the endless scroll of cable networks; now they are all owned by a few companies, many of whom seem hungry to fob them off to someone else. We’ve seen this movie in the fashion and aviation industry, where iconic and distinct brands become shingles on a colossus, just as the most venerable brands of our information economy will become “tiles” on Netflix or Disney+ in the next few years. Meanwhile, the Lakers now play in the Crypto.com arena and hedge fund god Ken Griffin could have bought his copy of the Constitution from Sotheby’s for $43 million in Ethereum. 

Now, if anything, it feels like we are so cognizant of this transformative era that our focus has shifted from the present to the future. And as time passes, in fact, I am less convinced that we are living in a singular era and more sure that we are living between two different stages. At the very least, that was the leitmotif this week at Puck. Dylan and Bill brilliantly pondered a series of future hypothetical M&A deals that linger over the media industry. A number of them—such as the possibility of a future state in which NBCUniversal finds itself a bedfellow with ViacomCBS or Warner Bros. Discovery—would have seemed inconceivable only a few years ago. (Similarly, Matt went deep on the future of HBO, perhaps the most precious creative jewel of our culture.)

The media and entertainment industries aren’t alone in this bizarre interregnum period. Our politics is consumed by it. As proof, I’d point you no further than Peter Hamby’s deeply reported piece on the current agony plaguing the left: how to deal with Kamala Harris’s unpopularity amid concerns that Biden won’t run again. 

In many ways, it really does seem like the grand political landscape depends on the whims and vanities of a couple septuagenarian men, neither of whom appear to be in a rush to make a decision. Tina Nguyen has consistently reported on the waiting game taking place on the right, as DeSantis, Haley, and Hawley look for smoke signals out of Mar-a-Lago. But as they wait, I’d turn your attention to Tina’s latest piece, which focuses on a disturbing trend emerging as the hegemons of the right kick the can. (And if you want a more global understanding of how the axis of power continues to shift abroad, please spend some time reading Julia Ioffe’s latest dispatch on Putin’s master plan.)

Living through transformation is exciting, and it’s something that we embrace at Puck as we grow our business around a new economic model that puts creators in the center of the equation. When Adam Davidson and I had that original conversation, we worked at a magazine that was only exploring its digital identity. We’re now living in a time when that wonderful experience of discovery that a magazine once provided has been transferred to digital platforms, like ours, and we’re still only in the early days of the shift. In fact, as I read Matt’s piece about HBO, I was struck by how much the early days of prestige television—that category that sat above the networks and regular cable—presaged what we’re experiencing now in digital media. 

We’re seeing it firsthand at Puck—and all from the vantage of our office in Greenwich Village, marrying the heritage of our creative past with the tools of modern finance and technology for an exceedingly exciting future.

Thanks for your support. Have a wonderful weekend.

Jon

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