The $100bn media battle that could change everything

This is a Global Player Original Podcast.

Do you support the Paramount bit for Warner Brothers? I don't know enough about it. Uh you you spoke about Netflix last night saying you have concerns about uh then. I know I know the companies very well, I know what they're doing, but I have to see. I have to see what percentage of market they are. We have to see the Netflix percentage of market, Paramount, the percentage of market. I mean, none of them are particularly great friends am I.

You know, I just I wanna I wanna do what's right. It's uh it's so very important to do what's right. Would that uh impact your decision? It Paramount is. I I don't know. I haven't I've never spoken to him. He's really trying to Uh work on Gaza. of the year. The proposed sale of Warner Brothers, a Hollywood Titan studio, potentially to Netflix. Potentially too paramount, and of course, Trump finds himself, wants to put himself at the centre of it.

And Donald Trump says none of the people involved are great friends of mine, well up to a point. Your son in law is involved and you're good friends with the Ellison family, also critical players. Are we now in a situation in America where business success is entirely dependent on your relationship with the leader of the country? Welcome to the news agent.

The news agents. It's John. It's Lewis. And you really can't overestimate just how important and significant these changes are. Yes, it's a business deal and that's not normally the newsagent's wheelhouse. But because of the political ramifications of what might unfold, What happened last Friday was that Netflix announced that it had agreed an eighty two point seven billion dollar takeover.

of Warner Brothers Studios. And Warner Brothers Studios is not just the filmmaking, it's also CNN, it's also HBO. It's got a lot of kind of real estate that goes with it. It's one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world. And the idea that a streamer Netflix should be taking over one of the bear moths of the film industry kind of made everyone gasp. Since then Paramount has come in

Going directly to shareholders with a hundred and eight billion dollar offer. So in other words, a hostile takeover that the board of Warner Brothers didn't particularly want. The CEO of Paramount is a guy called David Ellison. He is the son of Larry Ellison, a huge backer of Donald Trump, co-founder of Oracle, second richest man in the world. And you can see the might of the Ellison family. So when Donald Trump protests he doesn't really know that many people involved. Oh

And the private equity firm that's run by Jared Kushner is also backing the Paramount deal. So when Donald Trump's son in law of course. Yeah, Donald Trump's son in law. So when Donald Trump says, I don't really know any of the people that involved that well

Uh up to a point. And this is what makes this such a captivating story on a personal political level. You can see so many of the kind of power centers of politics of media, of finance, all sort of coming together in a kind of succession type battle. over this company. And it does ring it's a bit sort of glib to say, but it does so ring of that series and on those sorts of of power battles.

It matters obviously because of those political di dimensions. It matters because it's part of the future of entertainment. We can talk a little bit about why Netflix and Paramount both want this company'cause that is sort of really interesting in in itself. But you know, I think what really sort of matters, particularly for our purposes with this, is that what's at stake with this, it seems to me, is it's not just about the future of of Warner Brothers. But if it were to be bought by Netflix,

It is about the power and it is political power, the power of a mega, mega company to sort of basically drive the attention economy that we're all live in. It would be so powerful. You know, Warner Brothers sits at the heart of the Hollywood Entertainment complex which so determines so much of our entertainment habits and s of what we consume and what we watch and how we think about ourselves, right? How the West thinks about itself.

On a kind of year-by-year basis. Netflix, on the other hand, is the world's biggest broadcaster, basically, the world's biggest distributor of. film of television. So you combine them and you don't just get a normal big media company, although it would be huge. You basically create the single biggest narrative Institutional.

That's basically what's at stake here. You know, twentieth century is partly defined by oil and sort of resources. Twenty first century is being defined by you know what we put in front of our eyeballs, on our phones, on our streamers the entire time. So this would be a truly massive, massive deal. It would concentrate cultural and entertainment power in the US. It would have huge union power over sort of actors, over the future of entertainment and all that sort of stuff.

The regulators have never seen anything like it before, and that is why you have already got political opposition, the form of, for example, Elizabeth Warren, the sort of you know left wing democratic senator, calling it an anti-monopoly nightmare and Democrats calling on Trump to block the deal.

So will Trump block the deal? Well, Trump is simultaneously saying, Well, I don't know much about it, I'm gonna keep this at arm's length. Safe in the knowledge of the That actually he can do that and still get the outcome he wants. to the Federal Communications Commission. That is chaired by a guy called uh Brendan Carr, who was a Trump appointee. And you'll remember we discussed him when he threatened ABC that unless they took the Jimmy Kimmel show off the air.

following the murder of Charlie Kirk, that realistically he was going to kind of take away their broadcasting licence. And sure enough Disney Folded, which owns A B C And there was such a protest that actually Kimmel was reinstated. So we know that Brendan Carr will do Trump's bidding and the other place it goes to is antitrust officials at the Department of Justice.

And we know how independent the Department of Justice is under Trump and under Pam Bondi as the Attorney General. It will also do Trump's bidding. So The bid that Donald Trump wants to succeed is likely to be the one That will succeed in all of this. Yeah, and that that is extraordinary itself. And like to go back to your initial question, John, what is amazing then about how contingent all of this is?'Cause we are talking about like

Mega deals, right? We're talking either an$80 billion deal from Netflix, we're talking a potentially$100 billion deal plus. from Paramount. So whichever way the shareholders choose to turn, right, you know, their quids in you know, this is a serious piece of of real estate. Yeah, Warner Brothers shares have risen substantially since all of this. Indeed so. And so it's gonna be one of the biggest, you know, potential takeover deals, certainly of the of the second

Trump presidency. And yet as we can hear You know, if you had this company you would basically if if Netflix took it over, then they would basically control half Of the American streaming market. So you've got, you know, the co-chair of the House Monopoly, Busters Caucus, Premier Jaypal, saying it would mean more price hikes.

ads, cookie cutter content, less creative control for artists, lower pay for workers. The media industry is already controlled by too few corporations with too much power to censor free speech.

the government must step in. So we're talking big as we're saying, like big picture stuff here, big deals, big principles. And yet So much of it basically at this point seems to come down to the contingency of Donald Trump's thinking on it, which can be as contingent and as minor as one interview conducted on CBS's sixty minutes program with

Marjorie Taylor Green, right? A programme uh that is but ultimately sort of owned by Paramount and this is what Trump has said about it. He said he went on last night basically complaining about an interview that Marjorie Taylor Greene, who of course was a close ally of his and has since turned against him. Trump has said about it on Truth Social. My real problem with this show wasn't the low IQ traitor.

It was that the new ownership of Sixty Minutes Paramount would allow a show like this to air. They're no better, he says, than the old ownership who paid me millions of dollars of fake reporting about your favourite president. Me? Since they bought it, sixty minutes has actually gotten worse, indicating that his displeasure

At this one interview with Marjorie Taylor Green could be enough to sour the well over this entire deal. And obviously we always talk about how unique Donald Trump is, but no American president. Would ever talk openly in those sorts of ways or indeed I suspect think in those sorts of ways of blocking a deal because of one poxy little interview on one stupid programme. kind of what is the key element of this. And you know, rightly the business deal is Paramount.

And we spoke as well about, you know, corruption and the relationship to the president being important. And you were sort of saying, Look, it's not the first time that we've had that in the United States of America.

I think the thing that is different, not only is the scale of it with Donald Trump so different It's that Donald Trump wants to control content. Yeah. He wants he wants to know the sort of movies that are being made. He loves Sylvester Stallone, who was honoured at the Kennedy Centre at the weekend. He loves those sort of action movies. He wants America looking great in movies.

He doesn't want self doubt of movies about slavery and misery. He wants it to be a you know, a projection of his vision of what America looks like. Well CBS under pressure from him, right in the New Owners. Installed a new anti woke. Head of news, someone who is very much in some ways in Trump's image, or certainly historically has been to in Trump's liking, Barry Vice. And again, that's another example, right, of American media companies.

Twisting themselves around the Trump content machine about what he wants us to see. And that brings us to the other piece, which I just mentioned at the top, which is that at present Warner Brothers owns CNN. CNN! Cable News Channel in America and around the world, which has been Of a slightly more liberal bent. I would I describe it as a left wing alternative to Fox? No, it's nothing like as far out there.

as Fox. It's questioning. It gives Trump a hard rap, but it was also questioning of Biden and some of the things serious news organisations. It's a serious news organisation. When I moved to America people said you know, said Oh well, you know, the B B C and CNN were quite alike. And I don't think they meant that in a pejorative sense. No. I think that what has happened is that in this deal, it seems that Larry Ellison, this is according to the Wall Street Journal.

that Larry Ellison, co owner of Oracle and whose son is the CEO of Paramount, had talks with Trump at the White House talking about, well, you know, we can We'll tame CNN if we take control of it. We'll neuter it. It will be less objectionable to you. And you can see That actually Donald Trump calculates how will this not only maybe make my family richer if Jarakushn is involved, but how will I gain political leverage?

Over my enemies, and this might be a way of doing it. And indeed, David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount, was asked about this. On C N B C a couple of real quick things before we wrap up. I mean CNN, uh w uh I assume you would combine the news gathering operation with CBS's if in fact you did own that asset? Yeah, so look we've been really clear since about the last time we were here what we want to do with news, which is we want to build a scaled news service.

That is basically fundamentally in the trust business, that is in the truth business, and that speaks to the 70% of Americans that are in the middle. And we believe that by doing so, that is for us kind of doing well while doing good. And we believe in that business model and we believe it's essential. And uh do you uh do you think the president embraces the idea of you being the owner of CNN, given his criticism obviously for that network in the past?

Uh b by the way, we've had great conversations with the President about this, but I think what but I but I don't want to speak for him in any way, shape, or form. So the clear implication there of what David Ellison said was that he doesn't think that CNN is in the middle, that it does represent the so called seventy percent of Americans who are sort of neither left nor right. So, you know, CNN is clearly in the crosshairs of this particular business deal and that might be an added attraction.

For Donald Trump to get behind the paramount bid. Indeed. And you know, we should say this is in the context of a few things happening over the last few years, right? One is like bigger and bigger agglomerations and buyouts of of media companies in the US. You know, we saw Disney buying

Fox, we've seen Paramount itself basically end up in a sort of new company, sort of company called Paramount uh Skydance and we've seen obviously big tech as well. Not just streamers, but big tech, whether it's Apple or Amazon or whatever, you know, start to completely transform

the entertainment world, which of course has big links increasingly with the political world, and we saw that fusion, right, at the Trump inauguration itself. You know, in the m most extraordinary way, the kind of Attention oligarchy as it's been called, this fusion of Trump, who is politics, tech, and entertainment, and all of the various kind of

Being the tech billionaires. The tech billionaires, the entertainment billionaires, and they're increasingly one and the same, right? And this is a peculiarly twenty first century development. And I think that's what makes all of this or one of the reasons all of this makes this so interesting. I mean just actually just sort of fusing away or breaking away slightly from the political angle for a moment.

Like actually even just considering why Netflix wants to buy Bourner Brothers is fascinating, right? Because it itself and obviously like we've got to step back and think like Netflix, I mean, it is an extraordinary sort of twenty first century success story, right? It's not so f long ago. This is a company that was literally like sending out DVDs in the mail, right? In the post.

And here it is now, on the verge potentially, of buying one of the oldest, most illustrious you know, Hollywood Titans in the form of of Warner Brothers and being one of the

basically a global television programme. I mean look what happened with a global television station. Look at Stranger Things which has just come out. You know, I think got sixty million, sixty five million people watching it in the first five days alone. It's something that we've never seen before. It is truly like a global broadcast television channel.

And Yet at the same time, one of the reasons, by all accounts, it is so keen to sort of move more directly into this slightly more twentieth century kind of like sort of production house. is because it's so worried that it itself might go the way of some of these obsolete technologies and old companies. Because Gen Z in particular are streaming less. They don't have as many subscriptions as sort of millennials and Gen X and those who came be before them. They are

much more attuned to YouTube and to TikTok and social media attention spans are less. So they're so keen to get the sort of like intellectual property that you get with Warner Brothers, which includes a sort of backp catalogue of kind of lots of different films and Harry Potter franchise and all this o other stuff as well. But also they want to kind of

agglomerate and to try and kind of get as much scale as possible because they themselves, by all accounts, are worried that although they seem cutting edge right now, in a not too distant future, they might not be. Well if you think about Netflix Netflix is the only streamer and That is a streamer only, if you see what I mean. So, you know, Apple T V has obviously got Apple computers and you could look at, you know, Amazon Prime and they have got

you know, all the Amazon online shopping. I do think it is absolutely fascinating that you've you know, I mean we could go on and on about this. You know, look the ban on kids in Australia having yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n are tiny compared to the power of these tech titans that also control media and have the ear of the President of the United States.

So the European Union now being bullied, as we talked about yesterday, by Elon Musk. over the fines that have been opposed and how dare the European Union think it can impose fines on the EU. And so you've got these companies like Netflix and others that are so powerful now. And there aren't that many of them that they can dictate what sovereign governments

can do and can't do. And that is the power that has accumulated and that Donald Trump is at the nexus of. Indeed so. And not just that um Governments, particularly European governments, find themselves feeling impotent in the wake of this. But also if we think about kind of national media markets, including our own, which is not an insubstantial media market, right? I mean, what hope is I mean what's what's so striking about this is that kind of

You know, national broadcasters increasingly seem almost like local television stations, right? Like that that's the kind of new media world into which we've entered as well, right? In the world of the global television channels, which have Such enormous media and information and attentional and political power. Like

Even, you know, the BBC, even kind of, you know, big national broadcasters, sort of legacy broadcasters, they're nowhere in this conversation. There's no way that BBC could hope to compete with ev something like Stranger Things or whatever it happens to be to have that kind of sort of sheer cultural and economic power, which will pr only get greater as a result of this deal and the more consolidation and agglomeration there is.

So that's also the you know, the the effect on legacy local, national media markets is considerable. And, you know, There has been a lot of um talk over the years. I mean yeah, you just goes back to even after the Second World War with the sort of invasion of Hollywood a and so on. There's a lot of kind of worrying and soul searching about whether kind of national culture, particularly like British national culture

could survive in the wake of that, not least because we speak English and we're so absorbent of American cultural stuff. And, you know, that didn't prove to be the case. British national culture was and is alive and well. We maintain, you know, our own very thriving film industry, television industry and so on.

But you've got to think, in terms of kind of its independence in the way that we've known it, can it survive? And we've never seen anything quite like this before in terms of the consolidation and the power and the economic power of these companies.

Just one footnote I would add to this, that is that we've talked a lot over the past year. about Elon Musk, because he's such a combustible character, because he's so c eccentric at times, because he's so loud and vociferous, that we find ourselves irresistibly drawn to him. Larry Ellison The co owner of Oracle, the second richest man in the world, the man who is also gonna have a big stake in the new TikTok.

that launches in America when it's eventually spun off apparently. The guy who now wants to be involved in the deal to buy uh Warner Brothers, whose son is the CEO of Paramount. This guy is building so you've got Oracle, which he still holds a substantial personal share in. is a mighty powerful player in the United States, kind of almost like the Hearst family back in the day.

And these are the new power players in America. It's a new Gilded Age. Well talking about streamers and appropriately enough.

We've actually been talking or I've been talking to one of the screenwriters, the screenwriter, for one of their newest films that's just gone on Netflix, it's proven very popular and it's all about the American nuclear arsenal and what would happen if The worst happened and a nuclear missile headed to the United States. We'll be back just after this. Mm-hmm. UK under rank. Here in Edinburgh. Marks, my American week is next. Reporting from the heart of your life. Listen on us.

app or the new LBC app. Leading Britain's conversation. The news agents. Well we're joined now by Noah Oppenheim. He's a television producer, was the president of NBC News, but most humanely for this. wrote the screenplay for House of Dynamite. No, thanks so much for joining us. Are you sick of talking about nuclear war yet? I love talking about nuclear war. You s you sadist. My kids are sick of me talking about it. They've banned it at the dinner table. I bet they are. Just in case. Um

People haven't seen it yet. Just could you just give a an outline of the show and indeed what made you want to write the show? Sure. So uh the film tells the story of what would happen if a missile was ever launched at the United States of America and it depicts the A nuclear missile. Presumably it's presumed to be an ability. And indeed who sent it in the film is not specific. Correct. It's sort of a it's a strike that no one claims credit for and it comes out of the blue.

and we watch as the various institutions within the United States government try to respond to the attack, try to figure out who's responsible and what to do about it. And so you watch as

You know, the people who work at the White House, the people who work in our strategic command, the young soldiers who work in our missile defense system try to stop the missile and try to figure out how to respond to it. And as I say, you you got a journalistic background. So was this a sort of journalistic itch that you'd had for a long time or something that you'd been interested in, the kind of sort of

mechanics of the American nuclear stays. Yeah, so uh Catherine Bigla, who directed the film, who who who won the Oscar for Hurtlocker and made Zero Dark Thirty, she called and me and said she wanted to tell this story, the story of what might happen if a missile were ever launched at the US.

I had long been interested in it. As you mentioned, I used to run NBC News, was there when North Korea was revealed to be a nuclear power. Uh had always loved the genre of nuclear war movies, whether it's Doctor Strangelove or Failsafe or War Games. Um and so we we did approach it journalistically by

calling the people that she and I both knew who worked in national security and asking them to walk us through the steps that would unfold if this happened in real life. And that's how we built the story. It was by talking to people who'd held the real jobs you see depicted in the film. and ha hearing from them how how these systems work. I kind of think that the pandemic has sort of slightly colored the way these sorts of kind of

Apocalypse kind of movies or or books or or cultural things kind of like or at least for me how they've how you sort of interpret them. Yeah. It's like the pandemic.

It was these sorts of things are so easy before to sort of go, Oh well that's never actually gonna happen, right? But then like when you actually have a sort of quasar I mean it wasn't an apocalypse but it was like you know. It felt like it might be. It felt like it might be, right. So it does sort of Color the or interpretation or color the way you sort of look at these things.

will never happen right up until the moment where one does. And I remember in the early days of the pandemic, you know, running a news organization and hearing, oh, there's this new virus in China and they're they're locking down a city And I was dismissive because I'd say, Oh, I've been in news for for so long and I've heard

And then before you know where you are, you're working on news shows which say quarantine announce. Exactly. Exactly. And it said so, you know, unfortunately, you know, the events that are depicted in a house of dynamite are events that

could kick into motion at any moment, right? All it takes is one domino. It takes one launch to set this whole machine And sort of and from your conversations with, you know, the people working in the American security states who who work on this, who think about this. what was your impression of how likely they thought an event like this might be? I mean how much

Do they stay up at night? Most of the people that I spoke to who work in the nuclear threat field, right? Think tank people, analysts, um government officials. they think it's nothing short of miraculous that it hasn't happened yet. I mean if you really if you look at the last eighty years of of the nuclear age, the number of near misses that we've had is pretty staggering. I mean people don't

dig too deeply into it, but there have been occasions where we've one person has been all that's determined whether the world kept on spinning. I mean there was a famous incident of the most famous in the early eighties with Soviet officer named Stanislav Petrov who just his own his decision, the Soviet

thought that there were there with had been American missile launch. He was on duty that night. It was a war game, wasn't it? But this was an incident where he saw on his screen five incoming missiles and decided not to call up the chain of command because he was just like I I'm I can't believe that this is actually real. And because he didn't call up

disaster was averted. I mean the Cuban Missile Crisis is the most obviously salient example of how close we've come to the brink. But yeah, people who live in this world, I think, realize that the threat is much greater than most people

wanna contemplate. And it's one of the reasons why we made the movie is because it used to be during the Cold War, movies like this existed with some regularity and people talked about this and it was a regular topic in American presidential campaigns. I don't know You know, I presumably it was a topic here, like who do you want with their finger on the button? Nobody talks about it anymore, even though the thread is just as great, if not great.

But although that's sort of changed, hasn't it, to some extent in the last few years. Ukraine has brought it back to the forefront, yes. But prior to Ukraine and then prior to you know some of the saber rattling we've seen from the White House about you know resuming nuclear testing. Um it had not been in the headlines very much before that. Did it therefore have a kind of

Journal I mean, sorry it's film, it's entertainment, right? But did you have a sort of journalistic intent in the sense that you wanted something to change as a result from it? Catherine, um

who again the filmmaker, you know, she's made very clear she made it to try to reignite this conversation. Um because, you know and As again coming from the world of journalism, at least in the United States, that landscape is so polarized that it's very hard to convene any kind of conversation that crosses over ideological lines.

But if you want to reach people at all ends of the ideological spectrum, sometimes entertainment is is the more effective means of shining a spotlight on a topic because No matter what your politics are, you might sit down and watch this film. Whereas depending on your politics, you're only consuming certain news sources. I mean presumably the culture war, even in the US, hasn't got quite so bad yet that there is a genuine sort of binary on whether we'd like to be vaporized or not.

Not well right, no, but in terms of what are the what are the platforms where people from all ends of the spectrum actually convene. Uh there are not very many of those left, but Hopefully we can all agree Armageddon is best avoided. Yeah, I mean who knows? I mean let's check in with Tucker Carlson and see what he thinks about it at the moment. I mean something that you sort of arose, I think, from your

research in it, which which which was surprising, is the idea that no president since Reagan has taken part in one of the nuclear drills that they sort of do periodically. That seems extraordinary. It is extraordinary. Um, they offer a number of reasons. They they'll say that they don't participate because they don't know they don't want it to leak what their decision might be in that situation. I find that to be a somewhat odd ex reason for not doing it, but

I think you know, you scratch a little deeper and it's just something that most of them don't really want to contemplate. Well they can't trust the top American sort of brass not to leak what they would do whether they'd press the button or not.

That's the the the explanation is is that it wouldn't be just the top brass that when you add in aides and deputies, you're you know, you're talking fifty, sixty people who might be aware of what the what the president decided in the exercise and so they're concerned about an adversary ever

knowing what their decision making process might look like. I don't know if you know about the sort of British version of that, but we have a sort of version of that which is not so much on nuclear drills, but we do this this weird thing that people have become quite obsessed with where um when a Prime Minister becomes the Prime Minister

they're shown in by the cabinet secretary's sort of top civil service official and told, you know, Congratulations, Prime Minister, you know And then like apparently they have to write

A letter of last resort. I love yeah. Have you heard about this? Yeah, I thought uh yeah, like when you basic they basically apparently have to say in the event that you know Britain has been completely destroyed, you know, what you the nuclear sub should do. Correct. Which I mean and with and that never is revealed. Though very rare. Prime Minister have occasionally said, sort of hinted what they would do, but the Prime Minister sort of

Leaves. But it's a sort of very sort of British small scale version of kind of some letter that's put in some vault somewhere and sort of put away and then eventually put into a shredder. Right. Well it's a fascinating

dilemma, you know, obviously Do you nuke or do you not nuke Well the fact I mean t going back to your earlier question, why are we all still here? Well presumably it's because of this idea of mutually assured destruction that nobody will use it because we assume the other guy will use it. And, you know, if a British Prime Minister were to say, Well, my letter of last resort is is if the UK is new

absolutely don't respond because why bother killing another, you know, couple of billion people? But if that ever were to get out, then obviously the whole I mean I always think that there have been very few like genuine sort of watersheds in human history, but surely one of the most profound

was the basic what happened in Los Alamos in the nineteen forties. At from that moment onwards, you know, never before I mean as Luddy and as horrendous as we had been to each other, you know, throughout the entire sum of human history. Yeah.

We had never had the ability, although it may have felt like it occasionally to actually destroy every single other person. Yeah. But that did change the nature of humanity, didn't it? It did. Well it's been observed by far smarter people than me that that was a moment in which our technological ability surpassed our humanity, that we now have sort of godlike powers, that we can now destroy the entire planet. Um but obviously our

fundamental, you know, our emotional capacity, our lizard brains haven't really evolved much beyond the caveman days and and now we just have much more powerful clubs in our hands. And going back to your point about um the

number of near misses and actually how much opacity there is around this stuff because it this is so opaque, right? I also find it extraordinary the extent to which, you know, obviously this technology has now been around for for eighty years. The extent to which nuclear armed states still have the ability to control

information about it and what happens and when and where is actually quite extraordinary, particularly when we compare it and I I'm sort of really fascinated by this comparison at the moment. You know, when you compare if if we assume that nuclear age

Plus the AI age, are you know two game-changing technologies that sort of tr potentially transform what it means to be human. The sort of asymmetry between state power in those two things is profound, right? Because states have basically zealously guarded They're

control and abilities around nuclear and nuclear power and so on. But they have not with AI. That's just a private well no no no yeah but that's basically private companies are pursuing that and actually states don't really have a clue what they're doing. Correct. And it's a sort of fascinating comparison. It is, and one could argue that AI could prove, you know, who knows, more lethal than than than nuclear weapons in some regard. We'll see. I mean I'll try to be honest with you.

Hopefully never. Um but it is true to say, I mean t in terms of sort of that zealotry about guarding information, it's true to say the Pentagon have not been entirely pleased. It's funny, they circulated one memo in which they objected to one plot point in the film, which is the idea that our current ground based missile defense system, as we say in the film, is only fifty percent roughly effective.

and they circulated a memo internally to say Don't worry, this is not true, our system is actually one hundred percent effective. Anytime anyone tells you they're a hundred percent effective, I think it's safe to be skeptical. In this particular case Also, how do they know? Well, they've tested I mean the funny thing about that pushback is first of all, it's not b an argument between them and us as filmmakers. It's an argument between them and the entire community of

of nuclear uh experts and missile defense experts. And the great news is is that it's all public record. We have this ground based intercept system. It's been tested 20 times since 1999. The success rate is 58%. It's all out there, easily to look up. They uh asserted this hundred percent effective rate based on the just the last several tests.

So it's the equivalent of saying, Well, I've missed you know I missed seven penalty kicks in a row, but I made the last two, therefore I'm a hundred percent effective. So it was an odd argument for them to make but I was just I think we were all were just thrilled that they were engaging at all because it's sort of the point of making a movie like this is to get the

We didn't engage with the current Pentagon the peop the folks who currently work there, but we engaged with dozens of people who were former Pentagon officials and former you know, three, four star generals who who work in the nuclear field. So we we had done plenty of research. We just did not ask for official cooperation because that

ties you up in a a number of different ways. I mean one of the ways in which the film is uh now inaccurate is that you have a character who's the Secretary of Defence working for the Department of Defence, but of course that position no longer exists, right? Because what you have instead, which which again sort of would add a different sort of twist

So the whole thing is you have a secretary of war and a department of war. Yes. It's hard to keep track of the nomenclature changes sometimes. But yes. Do you think that having that I've sort of talked to so many people di in the sort of defence world, American defence world and then, you know, thinking about this? Did you find that chilling?

Having a Department of War and a Secretary of War in the US now as an American? I I think that there are many things to be chilled by in terms of what's going on in our politics, not just in the United States but around the world. You know, the labeling of the department

certainly is a a piece of that, but I I think that the the conduct of it is is certainly it's part of a whole trend which we've seen, right? I mean'cause obviously we're talking about nuclear and it's being a defensive yeah uh defensive uh deterrent, right? But I mean obviously the whole kind of footing of the US

military under Trump over the last year and under Pete Heggsith has become much more aggressive. I think it's first time even that Heggsith has talked about, you know, having more you know, that soldiers are too feminized, you need more sort of masculine soldiers, you're talking about warriors, all this sort of stuff. The way that America is talking about it

its military and what it does with its military, we've seen that in Venezuela at the moment is changing, isn't it? It's becoming somewhat different.

It is changing and then but you've also I mean that's you know, they're trying to change it. You've also started to see pushback I think from the other party. There's there's always a a push and pull in these in these things and, you know, the opposition in the United States is starting to get more active and effective uh in terms of pushing back against the U.S. I mean obviously the sort of extraordinary situation of

The American military being deployed I mean this is obviously about a foreign threat, but American military being deployed to its own its own cities. We have National Guard on the streets of Washington and other places right now. But again, you know There was just a recent round of elections in which the results would suggest a softening of support for those parties.

Which is something that's unclear what he means by that. Yes. Right. So it's like do you are you is he is he saying he wants to test the delivery mechanisms or the warheads themselves? And you know, like I think is the case with many of those announcements It remains to be seen what the actual follow through looks like.

Just um one other thing, I mean just you know, with your sort of former NBC hat on and journalistic hat on, um because I know I'm sure you'll have thought about this a lot. I mean you you were around Yeah, I NBC during the first sort of Trump a administration and obviously He's a different beast now. This this administration's quite different. His relationship with the media's a bit different.

Just wonder I mean, we've obviously had this experience recently where um Trump has threatened to sue the BBC and so on. He's obviously done that to various American media companies. Just a bit of advice. How do you think the BBC should handle that? I had the I I had the pleasure of actually working with um with your Uh and so I I I don't I don't feel particularly comfortable offering advice. I mean the BBC has been around for

much longer than I have. Um longer than any of us in Yeah. It's a it's a challenging moment I think for media. Uh I think the Trump administration's posture is one of those challenges. I think the fracturing of the economic model is another one. You know, social media I think has done as much to undermine people's trust in legacy media institutions as anything. Do you think media companies have been too Cowardly, for want of a better word. By particularly by comparison with

Trump won where there was a more robust response perhaps. Yeah, I mean I was I mean listen, I the nature of the conflict during the first Trump administration was different. I mean I was in that chair during the first Trump administration. There was friction. There was occasionally hostility, but it had never it had not crossed that line into sort formal legal action. Um and so it's

I I make it a point not to cast judgment on those I know how hard those jobs are and how hard those decisions are. Um I think it's rarely as simple as it seems from the outside. Obviously I'm somebody who believes very strongly in the importance of a independent and free press and

would like to see uh people continuing to to do that important critical work. And I think there are people doing it. I mean, whether or not a huge company that's part of a big technology conglomerate is best positioned to do that kind of work in this age, there are a lot more Challenges and considerations that they have to take into account than just their news divisions, which I think makes it hard.

The news agents. Right before we go, we thought we'd just bring you this. Whether Europe would be civilizationally erased. as a result of the immigration policies, cultural policies adopted by European governments. That seems to be what the Trump administration thought. We thought this was a jaw dropping

document articulating many of the extraordinary themes which have been picked up by the Trump administration this year didn't receive that much attention in the rest of the media. Perhaps to our surprise, we thought were we reading too much into it? Turns out perhaps we weren't. Here's Donald Trump talking p too politico overnight.

Shockwaves throughout Europe. The strategy says a key pillar of American foreign policy should be, quote, cultivating resistance to Europe's current trajectory within European nations. How much should European leaders prepare for your administration to to push to reshape the continent's politics. Well Europe is a different place. What do you mean by the way? And if it keeps going the way it's going, Europe will not be

In my opinion, uh many of those countries will not be viable countries any longer. Their immigration policy is a disaster. What they're doing with immigration is a disaster. But most European uh nations uh they're they're decaying. They're decaying. You can imagine some leaders in Europe are a little freaked out by uh what what uh your posture is and uh your people. Look, there are people I like, I get along with them. You s you know that.

But they can't let this happen. And it gets to a point where you can't really correct it. There'll be a point and it's very close to that point. And what will that mean? It will mean that they're no longer going to be strong nations. Does that mean they w they won't be allies? Or they'll be uh well it depends, you know, it depends. They'll change their ideology obviously because the people coming in have a totally different ideology. And so it goes on.

The immigration policies, how nations will cease to be viable in the future, and so it went on and on, indeed. It's sometimes uh we speculate about whether given that there are such sort of powerful people aro around Trump, some of whom with very clear, cohesive views of the world, perhaps more than the president, we speculate that some of this stuff might come from them rather than him.

Clear not, or at the very least those views have sat deeply with the president and you can hear him there talking again in these terms which would have once been confined to the fringe. Basically what he's saying is is because Europe has let in too many foreigners, in particular usually they mean Muslims, that Europe is losing itself, that those countries will no longer be European countries by the end of this process, and that therefore they are not reliable allies for America or any.

Anyway, I did sort of sit and wonder. Oh, that's good for Politico to get that interview. I wonder how Politico managed to get an interview with Donald Trump like that. Um well Politico had just named Donald Trump on Tuesday. the most influential figure shaping European politics. I wonder whether that might have helped I think he's one of the sexiest figures in European politics in global politics.

to the president in a special news agent's sixty minute interview. Not that sixty minutes, Don. Sorry, no, we're doing nothing to do with her, don't worry. Dear Caroline Levitt, Louis Goodall and I would like we'll see you tomorrow. Bye bye. Bye bye. This has been a Global Player Original Production.