HBO—your cable friend who just wants to stay up all night with you, trading swear words and showing you boobs—is apparently as cool about you sharing your HBO Go password as it is about everything else. “It’s not that we’re unmindful of it, it just has no impact on the business,” HBO CEO Richard Plepler says in this video interview for Buzzfeed, in which Plepler doesn’t even wear a necktie. Neckties, after all, are for uptight squares who care about things like subscribers sharing passwords with their friends who aren’t, and Plepler is pretty whatever about that. In fact, he sees it as a smart marketing move that just creates more and more HBO viewers. “We’re in the business of creating addicts,” Plepler said, echoing all the cool drug dealers you know.
Of course, as cool as HBO is, everyone still agrees that it would be a lot cooler if HBO Go were also sold separately from cable packages—something Plepler is “always thinking about,” so don’t even trip. “It’s all about arithmetic, dude, it’s all about the math,” Plepler said in regard to whether that thinking will ever lead to actually unbundling HBO Go, and to his philosophy for L-I-V-I-N. In the meantime, just keep passing that HBO Go around. Your buddy Plep (he’s cool with you calling him Plep) has got you.