Acquired
02:37:18 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:37:18] S0: Yes. So on season nine, the cast effectively did secure what they had set out to do. It wasn't, like, the highest number that they originally asked for, but it did get them the amount of money where they don't need to work again. Yes. Because all of them are extremely typecast now. It's like the worst thing as an actor to be on a number one show in an extreme role like any of these roles And not have back end. And not have made your entire rest of your life's income from that show. Because it's just hard to get other parts. So at 600 k an episode, that's $14,400,000 for each of Julia, Michael, and Jason in that season. Good. Like, yeah. Not what it would be if you had back end, but, like, you could live your... The rest of your life on that when you may have cut off your ability to make big money from acting ever again in the future. So with Jerry now at $1,000,000 an episode, each of them at 600,000, that means that the cost per episode of talent is 2,800,000, which now means that the cost of each episode is, I don't know, $3,500,000. But NBC is absolutely happy to pay this because [02:38:34] S1: As we talked about this. [02:38:35] S0: Giant advertising profits. Yeah. So $7,080,000,000 in in production costs for the season. Okay. We're gonna make 200,000,000 directly from ad sales, let alone all the other secondary benefits that come from it. [02:38:47] S1: Yep. And we should note here too that Jerry's $1,000,000 per episode salary made him the highest paid TV actor in history at that point here in season nine.
02:38:47 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[02:38:47] S1: Yep. And we should note here too that Jerry's $1,000,000 per episode salary made him the highest paid TV actor in history at that point here in season nine. [02:39:00] S0: Yep. Without back end. Yep. Just from the per episode fees. [02:39:03] S1: Just from the per episode fees. So all of this leads here at the end of 1997 to Jack Welch inviting Jerry Seinfeld to brunch to discuss a hypothetical tenth season. Jack Welch. [02:39:24] S0: The CEO of the conglomerate General Electric, which is at the time thought to be the best run company in America, in the world. [02:39:32] S1: Yep. And I think the most valuable company by market cap in the world at this point in time. Yes. It is worth Jack Welch's time to take this extremely seriously and invite Jerry Seinfeld to brunch. [02:39:43] S0: And talk about a potential season ten. Yes. But listeners, before we tell that story, now is a great time to tell you about one of our favorite companies, WorkOS. You have heard us talk about this all season. Once you find product market fit, the fastest way to grow is upmarket, and enterprises won't buy your product until you have gotten enterprise requirements like single sign on, SCIM, that's SCIM, permissions, audit logs. WorkOS gives you all
02:39:43 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:39:43] S0: And talk about a potential season ten. Yes. But listeners, before we tell that story, now is a great time to tell you about one of our favorite companies, WorkOS. You have heard us talk about this all season. Once you find product market fit, the fastest way to grow is upmarket, and enterprises won't buy your product until you have gotten enterprise requirements like single sign on, SCIM, that's SCIM, permissions, audit logs. WorkOS gives you all [02:40:11] S1: of those as drop in APIs. But the twist now is that it's not just your customer's employees who need to get into your app anymore. It's their agents, which brings me to Kramer. In the classic season eight episode, The Bizarro Jerry, Kramer wanders into an office and just starts working there without ever being fired. When he... Kramer finally does get fired, quote, unquote, for sloppy work, he says, I don't even really work here. [02:40:43] S0: This listeners is the situation for most agents today. People just hand out shared API keys to an agent or borrow human login credentials with full permissions, but obviously with very little accountability. It's really not that different from Kramer managing to get an employee badge.
02:40:43 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:40:43] S0: This listeners is the situation for most agents today. People just hand out shared API keys to an agent or borrow human login credentials with full permissions, but obviously with very little accountability. It's really not that different from Kramer managing to get an employee badge. [02:40:59] S1: Yes. So Work OS built the right infrastructure for this, a sign up form for agents. It's called auth. M d, and it's an open protocol. You publish one plain text file to your domain. Auth dot m d tells any agent how to register, what your service offers, and what it's allowed to do. An agent reads it, signs up on the user's behalf, and walks away with its own access token scoped exactly to what it needs and nothing more. [02:41:27] S0: A real world example is Neon, the database company that Databricks bought for a billion dollars. More than 80% of their databases are created by agents, not people. An agent reads neon.com/auth.md, spins up a database scoped to that project, and a human claims it later with one link. [02:41:45] S1: Nice and clean and much more secure. [02:41:49] S0: Auth used to mean proving you are you. Now it means proving your agent is allowed to do this specific thing as you right now with limits. That's how you get in the door with enterprises now, and it's why OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Perplexity, and hundreds of other AI startups build on WorkOS. You can learn more at workos.com/auth-md, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.
02:41:49 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:41:49] S0: Auth used to mean proving you are you. Now it means proving your agent is allowed to do this specific thing as you right now with limits. That's how you get in the door with enterprises now, and it's why OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Perplexity, and hundreds of other AI startups build on WorkOS. You can learn more at workos.com/auth-md, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. [02:42:13] S1: Alright. So Jack Welch invites Jerry to brunch at the end of nineteen ninety seven. They set it up in the then CEO of NBC, Bob Wright's apartment in New York City on the 38th Floor of the Trump Tower. In attendance from the NBC GE side are Jack Welch and Bob Wright, the NBC CEO. Helping prepare for the meeting were Warren Littlefield, president of entertainment, and Don Olemire, who is NBC's head of LA operations, which is the, you know, location of the operations of the show of Seinfeld since it's filming in LA, which I still can never get over that Seinfeld was filmed in LA. But [02:42:57] S0: Even some of the exterior shots of the apartment are recreations of New York buildings in LA.
02:42:57 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:42:57] S0: Even some of the exterior shots of the apartment are recreations of New York buildings in LA. [02:43:06] S1: I know. I know. I don't like to think about it because it feels wrong. Right. So that's the GE NBC side. And then Jerry is obviously there, and George Shapiro and Howard West, the talent managers, agents are are there too. They settle down to brunch, and the NBC GE team brings out slides, like presentation slides. Jack Welch starts giving the presentation to Jerry Seinfeld over brunch, making a presentation arguing that the show has not yet reached its peak. It can go higher. It can get bigger. You can do more. Jerry, we have the data. The audience wants you back. It's not over. You haven't reached the top. Wow. Jack concludes his pitch to Jerry with this line. You know, Jerry, I go all over the world. Everybody who talks to me, they only wanna know one thing. Is Jerry Seinfeld coming back for another season? [02:44:17] S0: And that line about it hasn't peaked, that is one of the things that is going through Jerry's mind, in addition to, like, exhaustion and having really not started his life because he's just been doing this for ten years. [02:44:29] S1: Yeah. He's 43 years old at this point in time. Right. [02:44:32] S0: There is the concern that the show will keep going past its peak, and he doesn't wanna see it. So the only way to go out on top is to go out before you reach your peak because you're not gonna time it perfectly.