Transcript: Ellison’s Paramount Goes to the Dentist
Buying Warner Bros. is like a wisdom tooth pull — painful, costly & unnecessary
This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for the Ankler.
When I was 18-years-old, I went to the dentist and he told me what he was taught in dental school to tell every 18-year-old who came to see him.
“You need to get your wisdom teeth out,” he said. And he filled out a little form for me to bring to the oral surgeon which was a paper diagram of the inside of my mouth, with four red circles around the upper and lower wisdom teeth. I left the office, went home, and was calling the oral surgeon to make the appointment when my father gave me the single best piece of advice I’ve ever gotten.
“Hang up the phone,” he said. “Don’t do it. The whole wisdom tooth thing is a scam. They just love getting you all gassed up and then going at you with the pliers. My advice is, toss that paper out and forget all about it.”
“But he’s a dentist,” I said. “A trained medical professional. Don’t you think I should listen to him?”
My unimpressed father shrugged. “Go ahead and have them yank those teeth out of your head if you want,” he said. “But it’s going to be painful and bloody and you’re going to be miserable for a few weeks at least. My advice is, don’t do it.”
He looked at my skeptical expression and instantly read my thoughts.
“And it isn’t about the expense, okay? Unlike your ridiculous highway robbery college tuition, getting your wisdom teeth out is covered by my insurance.”
He told me that when he was 18, a dentist had told him the very same thing. And he ignored it completely. If his wisdom teeth started to hurt, he told himself, then he’d have them extracted. But as long as they were just sitting there in his head, tucked away and keeping quiet, he saw no reason to dig them out. That was, he told me, 30 years ago. So far, so good.
“But go ahead, if it makes you feel better. Just don’t come crying to me when you have to spend two weeks eating Jell-O.”
I stood with the phone in my hand, paralyzed.
“Good morning, Dr. Kendall’s office,” came the sound from the receiver. “Hello? Hello?”
I hung up the phone and forgot all about it. I would follow my father’s advice and let sleeping wisdom teeth lie. The year was 1984, and the only thing I regret is that I didn’t follow more of my father’s advice. He had a lot of wisdom along with his wisdom teeth. He knew that people cause a lot of pain for themselves when they try to fix things that aren’t broken.
Years later I met a guy who teaches scuba diving — he’s a serious diver, a former Navy Seal, and he told me that the hardest thing to teach people is that if something, for some reason, goes a little bit wrong on a deep dive, your natural impulse to shoot to the surface is probably a bad one. Panic is always the wrong move. That’s how you get a lung embolism. The solution, he said, is rarely up there. It’s probably just a problem with the hose. Fix it where you are first.
I’ll bet that guy had his wisdom teeth, too. He wasn’t looking for more trouble.
But it’s a terrible human need, we all know this, to try to solve a problem with a bigger problem.
For instance — and I’m just picking this example out of the air — suppose you’ve just purchased Paramount Studios, and are now faced with making the collection of assets and broken divisions and rickety business lines into a sleek and efficient modern entertainment business. You need a streaming platform, I guess, and a movie and TV studio and maybe a broadcast network — I mean, you don’t need any of those things, but if you’ve just spent a lot of billions buying them, you want to get in there and fix stuff.