After Party with Emily Jashinsky - CBS Challenges, Media Click Myths, w/ Max Tani, PLUS Crockett’s Gift to Opponents, Scott Adams Smear

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

Emily Jashinsky is joined by Max Tani, Media Editor at Semafor & Co-Host of the Mixed Signals podcast, to discuss CBS Evening News’ struggling attempt to relaunch, the myth of media chasing clicks, and Nikki Glaser’s choice to skip some jokes at the Golden Globes. Emily also analyzes legacy media coverage of Scott Adams’ death, as well as a look at a viral clip of Texas Senate candidate Jasmine Crockett calling Texas racist. Emily contrasts it with James Talarico’s messaging. She rounds out the show with a warning about Wegmans use of facial recognition technology and issues a plea to folks on the left and right to consider the bigger picture about the surveillance state. ZBiotics: Visit https://zbiotics.com/AFTERPARTY for 15% off. Stash Financial: Don't Let your money sit around. Go to https://get.stash.com/EMILY to see how you can receive $25 towards your first stock purchase. CrowdHealth: This Open Enrollment, stop overpaying for health insurance—discover CrowdHealth, the affordable alternative that puts you in control; join today at https://JoinCrowdHealth.com with code AFTERPARTY. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Good evening, everyone. I'm Tony DeKofal. Just kidding. Welcome to After Party. It's a show, of course, when you just can't get enough of these awful news cycles. You come and join us here live at 10 p.m. We're afterwards on the podcast feed, the YouTube feed. Make sure to give us a subscribe. We appreciate it. It helps us a ton. And thanks to everybody who has subscribed up over 100,000 subscribers since we launched. So we appreciate it so much. Max Tanny of Semaphore is going to be joining us in just one moment. We have a lot of media stories to get to today because I made a little joke about Tony DeCopold at the top of the show. We have ratings coming in from DeCopold's first week on the job. Nikki Glazer is talking a little bit about the editorial process behind the scenes of the Golden Globes, which of course aired on CBS. But Glazer's decision when it came to Trump, I think is actually a very interesting story, not just about media, but about business, more generally. We have an addition to these stories. We're going to get to some reaction to James Talerico, his appearance on the New York Times podcast with Ezra Klein talking more and more about Christianity. You know that I have thoughts on this. Plenty of thoughts on this,

of course. And I'm going to get to the media coverage of Scott Adams in addition to new comments from Jasmine Crockett that are pinging around the internet about Texas just being categorically racist. So a lot to get to, a lot to get to on today's show. I'm glad that we're going to have Max Tanny of Semaphore joining us in just one moment to get into some of the details about what's happening at CBS. But first, this year I am, you've heard me say this, focusing on those small changes that make a huge difference. And for me, it's kind of planning ahead so that I can truly just be in the moment. Just let myself cook. And that's especially true when enjoying a few drinks with friends or after a long week of shows and deadlines or even right now.

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We're joined now by Max Taney, who is media editor over at Semaphore and Kos of the Super interesting podcast. Mix singles. Max, thanks for signals. Mixed singles would be a different podcast. Listen, yeah, absolutely. That sounds like our spin-off. That's going to be like our after-party. Yeah, you should. Your breaking points. I mean, you had Ryan Lizza on for the last episode. That's right. It was kind of a... We did. It was kind of a mixed singles. Yeah, yes, exactly. Yeah, both the mixed signals and mixed singles situation. Yes, but we've got to have you on the show. We're overdue. Somebody from your team was like, reached out to me. I was like, yes, we got to do it. Anyway, I'm happy to be here. Thanks for me. No, anytime. It's a really, really newsy podcast. So if people

are interested in the business of media, they should absolutely check it out. And on that note, I want to talk about the ratings that have come in from Tony DeCopold's first week at the helm of CVS evening news. Because boy, they're bad, actually worse than I expected. They've put a lot of effort and you probably can tell us all about this, Max, into marketing to Coppel, not just as the face of CBS evening news, but really is the face of this reformed, relaunched, CBS News brand period. And I can put F1 up on the screen. This is a variety report on viewership as the numbers have come in. This is brutal stuff.

So we're looking at 23% decline year over year in the demo and overall for CBS News under Tony DeCopal, and that's the first week that aired obviously last week. And another thing I think to pay attention to is that, interestingly, ratings are down across the board for the competitors, but only 9% at ABC and NBC. So CBS's double-digit decline compared even with its competitors after putting all of this effort into marketing to Coppel and hyping up his first week on this evening news job. There was no shortage of news to cover last week either, Max. It wasn't a slow news week.

So what did you make of that? Yeah, I think there's a few. things going on and they're all converging to make the ratings not particularly great. Tony got a little bump on his first day. There's definitely some interest in his new show. They were kind of touting that. But clearly there was a steep drop off immediately afterwards. I think there's a confluence of factors. I think one is, as you mentioned, there's an overall decline in broadcast television as people gravitate towards things like the show and, you know, various other podcasts. They just have a million amazingly fine-tuned, you know, algorithmically speaking options that

people could find out there in YouTube and, you know, and in the podcast world or just like scrolling on TikTok or whatever it might be. So that's the first thing. That's contributing to the overall sector-wide kind of decline. But obviously that doesn't, that you, as you correctly mentioned, this decline hasn't impacted ABC, which is still well, well ahead of CBS evening news. And it hasn't affected NBC News, the evening news broadcasts as well, both of which lead CBS by a healthy margin. My read on this is a fewfold. One, there's also always been a huge decline when there is a new host in the anchor chair.

And CBS, more than the other networks, has really turned over. David Muir might not be a person who a lot of people would recognize walking down the street, the host of ABC ABC's News, World News Tonight. But he is somebody who has a really loyal base of viewers who've been with him for years. And he's been in that anchor chair for years and years now at this point, the longest running evening news anchor. And CBS has just churned through them. They've had Nora O'Donnell. In the last year and a half alone, they've had Nora O'Donnell, they had John Dickerson,

Now they have Tony. John was co-hosting it, and they had kind of revamped the formula. TV viewers like consistency. And that's not something that CBS is doing. There's one more reason before I kind of stop ranting here. And I think there is a, I think that there, clearly there was a segment of viewers who are watching the evening news who, I think, it's fair to say, obviously share left-of-center beliefs or are on the left in some sort of manner. and I think that they've, I think they've departed. The challenge for CBS is how do you compete for, how do you win over viewers kind of on the other side when there's other options? There's plenty of other options out there for people to get like, you know, on Fox or in various other outlets.

So I think that that is a, I think that's going to be their challenge kind of going forward, but it's a real uphill battle. That's my take. No, that's actually I was just going to ask because I think it's really difficult to do both of these things at the same time to be kind of digital first and also going for the traditional evening news demographic, which is the folks, as you mentioned, who like consistency, like a sort of stoic, neutral, quote, neutral anchor in the chair. And they're kind of trying to have it both ways, which is odd.

There was a New York Times leak. It was an email from Barry Weiss in a pretty splashy profile yesterday that aired right ahead, or that ran right ahead of Dick O'Bell's big Trump interview that said Barry was instructing CBS staff to make a viral moment out of every evening news broadcast and to drive the news. But the viral moment part of that is interesting. I'm curious to somebody who follows the business so closely, what you make of them kind of trying to use every bit of the news buffalo with two very

disparate audiences. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, they're using it. Right, it's using the whole cow. I think that it's a, I think that makes sense. I think it makes sense in theory, right? Like, of course, everybody would want that. You want a viral moment from this interview, maybe, or maybe.

But there is, that's not, you can't kind of create them out of thin air like that, right? That's not exactly how this kind of thing works, especially when you're doing a five day a week show, an hour-long broadcast that has to go on the air. That's a lot of work, like a tremendous amount of work, to put together all of those different packages, coordinate dozens of people across different states. I think it makes it very difficult to to strive to also have something that you know is going to necessarily resonate and pop online.

Also, it's just not really what the evening news traditionally has done. The evening news is a straightforward, generally roundup of the biggest stories from across the world, A block, B block, C block with lighthearted story kind of mixed in there somewhere. necessarily designed to go viral in the way that, you know, if I'm planning for an interview for my podcast, you know, we can think about the questions for days that might kind of pop. I think that it's, I think it would be fine, even if Barry was like maybe one of these a week

or something, but one a, one per broadcast, I think is a pretty tall order. That being said, I don't think it's the wrong thing to strive for. And clearly, to Tony's credit, he's been getting a lot of, you know, for better or worse, he's been getting a lot of attention online and definitely a lot more people are paying attention to what he's saying on the CBS evening news. With respect to John Dickerson, who was my former boss a long time ago, I was an intern for him. His style was really not geared towards necessarily having things that we're going to pop online and get people's attention and spark kind of controversy.

And I don't really think he did that too often in his time in the evening news chair. Tony, I'm seeing clips from his stuff every day now. So I don't know. Maybe that part's working. Well, I was going to say, actually, is that intentional? I mean, the moment where he was crying about not getting to grow up in Miami, and they did that bit with him in Grand Central Station. And then he's been doing these kind of dramatic sign-offs where he's looking back and almost like, you just don't see that often in this format, or maybe I'm wrong,

but where you do this dramatic reflection on what the news was and what it means. and it's brief, but it's, I wonder if some of this, even if it's like for better or worse, all news is good news, what do you make of that? Yeah, I mean, I do, you know, when I was watching what you said about this the other day, which is this is, and this is kind of related, I think that it's good, I think it's a good thing to aspire to trying to change things up because there is, people are not going to stop watching the evening news. That's just what's happening. As people stop watching linear television, they are the pool of people who grew up watching the evening.

evening news every night and that's a habit that they have, they are tremendously old. If you look at the numbers for this for this show, you know, even when they're getting around 4 million viewers a night, some of that is, some of that's slipping below 4 million. And the amount of people who are in what's called the demo, right, age 25 to 54, that's like the prime demographic for people who advertisers want to reach because they make a lot of money and they could be making money for a long time and have money to spend for a while. those, the share of the viewership that is 20 in the demo was like half a million people. So that means that the vast majority of viewers are over 54.

And my guess is that they're significantly older than that as well. So, you know, this isn't, this is an old audience. And I think it makes a lot of sense to try, if you want to build, you know, kind of a life raft, jump in the lifeboat to the future. You do have to play on digital media. And I think that Tony has done a pretty good job in his first week and a half in creating moments that people wanted to pay attention to, you know, sometimes unintentionally. But I think sometimes intentionally. But that's what's so interesting is it doesn't translate into people who are turning on the show in their living rooms.

But what they need it to translate to is, and by the way, to her credit, what Barry brings into CBS News is having built kind of the opposite of, what we were just talking about, which is this model, really from the age of mass media, where you have the advertisers chasing the demo with disposable income. What Barry did was say, we don't actually, we're not selling ads at common sense, which then became the free press, and now they are in the newsletters as they've joined with CBS. But it's this weird confluence of new media that was supported by subscribers and intentionally was not relying on advertisers as it popped during the COVID era and now bringing it into an advert. I mean, I looked on YouTube.

Last I checked, the Trump interview with DeCopal on the CBS YouTube page had like 50,000 views in over 20 hours. So it's just how they're making money. And I'm curious what your take is on that. Where do they think? I mean, are they really transitioning into a business where their revenue is all digital? Are they, I don't know. I mean, are they clinging to those, you know, pharma ads and politician ads?

I think that you have asked the question that TV news executives have been asking for the last 10 years since they realized, oh, holy shit, this whole internet thing is going to, not only is just going to be like this thing we kind of have on the side and we have a website, but like actually this is going to be the thing that everybody is engaging with. And that's going to be a problem for us. I don't think that any of these networks, any of the corporate media companies really solved that. Exactly. I think the Fox is, the companies that have gotten closest are Fox. Yeah, Fox. which saw this coming. And I think to a certain degree, NBC News,

which has been trying different things from a corporate restructuring perspective, they spun off all of their cable news assets, MSNBC, even though MSNBC makes a tremendous amount of money every year, they know that that business is kind of going into the tubes and they're trying to, they're trying to kind of recreate, they're trying to try something new and create these kind of digital businesses. I think that CBS, I think that ABC, the traditional networks, I think CNN is suffering from this to a certain degree too.

They are just not, they know that the business model that they've existed on, which is in the cable, for the cable networks, it's the carriage fees, what we all paid for cable. And supplemented by these advertisements that could reach a tremendous amount of people. I think Barry had a lot of success with the free press building a super kind of, you know, a well-known but niche media brand and targeted at a very specific audience. And she did a great job, executed it, sold that. I think that we live in a fragmented media world now where it's just incredibly hard to run these big, broad news organizations like CBS, NBC, ABC, that don't have kind of a clear idea exactly of who, their audience is going to be. Going broad is just really hard, I think. What do you think? Do you think that that's right?

No, I think it's right. I think it's hard to do both of those things at the same time. And it's especially hard. This is where I agree with you on the NBC point. When you have all of the overhead that traditional media had, I mean, Colbert is running into this problem, too. He doesn't have disastrous ratings from the standpoint of late night comedy right now, but he has crazy amounts of staff.

I mean, the reports about how many people work on that show, the reports about how much money is spent on that show. you can't get two million people for your evening news broadcast and still have all the overhead of the evening news broadcast in 1997. And I feel like that adjustment right now, you'll know this better than I do, but that adjustment with all of these cuts and layoffs where you're seeing across media is tough. I mean, totally. And the thing is, is that to a certain degree, and I don't, this is not, I found as I've been a reporter, media editor, podcast, somebody who's talked about this that I've found myself becoming

starting to repeat the lines of, you know, the people who are doing the job cutting, which is like, I don't ever want to necessarily, that makes me feel a little bit, I'm not that person, and so that makes me feel kind of a little bit strange about the whole situation. But I, but the reality is this.

You create and show every night, right, here from your apartment, from your studio, you can do it on the road, which you were doing yesterday, and do it with the minimal staff and it looks pretty good and you find like a good amount of people who watch it. These broadcast news companies that are also doing an hour of visual programming on the news

have hundreds, dozens and hundreds of staff. The reality is you can set up a webcam, get some decent lighting, be informed on the subjects, and reach, you know, obviously not as many people, but reach a decent number of people this way for a lot less, a lot less money. And so I think that that is right. Another challenge, they have this big overhead because they have to put these broadcasts together. They can't be as nimble and as fast as these types of things and they have to spend a lot more money doing it. It's a huge challenge and I don't think it's really solvable. Speaking of which, before we move off of this large conversation about Tony DiCopo,

which we've now gone for 20 minutes on, I don't regret a second of it, Max. I have to ask if you have any idea what's going on with the graphics that Prem Thacker of Zateo posted about Whiskey Fridays with Tony DeCopal. So it looks like, according to an image that Prem got his hands on, CBS quote, seems to be preparing a new segment called Whiskey Fridays with Tony DeCopal. Persorces. Some staff were only first made aware of it as they encountered CBS testing set designs of a faux stocked bar in the newsroom featuring a large sponsor banner for Jack Daniels. We have another graphic as well, but it turned out. Jack Daniels, it's looking like from a journalist who covers booze, what a job.

This isn't officially, like, Jack Daniels is pushing back and saying they had nothing to do with it. And so it looks like behind the scenes, CBS was doing these mockups, hoping that sponsorship from Jack Daniels or someone else would come in. And it's all for a segment with DeCopal where they're trying to, I guess, be, they've put him a lot. This is a little thing, but without jackets on, like just his shirt and his tie and they're trying to make him look more buttoned down. At the same time, they're alluding to Cronkite. it's very muddled Max. Like the brand doesn't make a ton of sense right now. I, you know, this is something that's been tried a number of times in broadcast television news.

A few years ago, I don't know if you'll recall, nobody remembers this. But CNN redid their morning show. They moved Don Lemon to the morning. He was doing it doing the show with Caitlin Collins, right? And they made a big deal of like, we're taking him out of the suit and tie. We're going to have him, Chris Licked, the president at the time. It's like, we're going to have him wear like a turrets. turtleneck and a blazer, and it's going to be, like, more casual and more like your friends

you're having breakfast with or whatever. And, you know, I think that ultimately at the end of the day, what we've seen from the world of podcasting, and from like those successful, a continuing successful television broadcasts that are out there, I don't think anybody cares what you're wearing or what you look like. It's a signal you're sending to the viewers. And I just, I also, I did find the lack of the coat, the big tie. I don't know if he's wearing the undershirt. Like, I, I did find it It looked a little strange, but you know what? Tony's a good-looking guy. I'll give it to him.

I don't mind. I think it's okay. There's some other stuff that I've been like, Tony, kind of what are you doing? But I've enjoyed, I actually, I find the stunts I thought have been, I thought have been interesting and like, why not? They're the lowest rated network-eat-neutral. Try something out.

I don't know. Yeah, right. You can't get that much worse. It can, but, you know, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one. As far as Whiskey Fridays goes, though, who knows? Who knows what's happening there? Yeah, I'd love to know, actually. It's right now in production limbo, like the Seacott segment.

We have no idea if it's ever going to air. I will say they said the New York Post reported that a CBS spokesperson said they were indeed doing mockups for something potentially that they might do. This is not imminently happening. Yes, but it is in the Cot segment limbo. If we're going to, I mean, if that's what we're going to see from DeGobo, my honest to God advice is that it shouldn't be purely. an aesthetic shtick. It should be, he should actually drink a bunch. Like, what late night comedy host did that? Like, Seth Meyer does that every once in a while. And then honestly, people will trust him more if you get his take, like a genuine, authentic take on what he thinks

about, like, Lindsay Graham or something. I mean, but that's the problem with trying to do both things at once, with trying to be Walter Cronkite and Whiskey Tony. He's tough, tough to pull off. That's true. That's true. I agree with that. All right. Let's move on. to a story I was really curious to get your take on. This is Nikki Glazer talking about what she cut from the Golden Globes, which of course did air on CBS. There is another CBS tie-in to this story. All things lead to CBS, obviously. But she said she cut Trump jokes, even cut one of the jokes that Steve Martin sent in about Donald Trump because, quote, I'm going to put the article up on the screen. It's not funny. I was going to come in at some point and say, I'm hearing from the bar that we're

out of ice and, you know, we don't really need ice. And actually, I hate ice. And it just felt, oh, even that's just being too trivial. That's what it felt like. This isn't even that anymore. It's hard to strike the right tone. She was telling this to Howard Stern. She went on to say that she threw away a droke. Steve Martin sent in about the renaming of the Kennedy Center.

And Glazer said, Martin agreed with scrapping the droke, saying it didn't fit the tone of the show. It was like, you just don't say that guy's name right now. I just want to give it space. That is genuinely interesting. and you've reported stories about kind of the vibe shift, if you can call it that, happening on both the business and editorial side. And it seems like in a way, it's not as though Glazer was doing that to kowtow to Trump or be in any way compliant with Trump, please him.

She's just doing it for, I think, a pretty defensible, like that's a defensible anti-Trump argument, but it's different from what we were seeing in 2017. Yeah, I think that there is clearly there was a little bit of stuff that you saw at the Golden Globes that, you know, had, and you see this every year at the award shows, particularly, yeah, the Hollywood award shows, not necessarily like music, but you see it at the Oscars and at the Golden Globes. There are these, there's allusions to things that are going on, explicitly or implicitly, to things that are kind of going on, you know, with regards to Trump and in the case of the Oscars last year, you know, with Gaza and we're there. I think that it Well first of all Having read the stuff I think you could just lose it

Because the jokes aren't that good That's my general take I'm like this is weak stuff anyway It's not the best material Did you see Conan? Did you see Conan in Oxford The clip was going by the last couple weeks He said people get too angry

When they joke about Trump And it makes it like lose the comedy Like it's less funny When it's just kind of serious You're so angry that it's hard to be Totally lighthearted I do think in general, too, there's, I think we're just at the stage where 10 years in, I think you've got a 10 plus years in to the Trump experience from campaign through, you know, various terms in office. I think there is a, I think that there is a, the easy material that you could get is long gone.

So to get, you know, good stuff that you, to be done about Trump on the air, I think is, I think is a little bit difficult. But yeah, I mean, as you mentioned, I have done some reporting on kind of the cultural, some of the different approaches in Hollywood and in the kind of broader cultural space towards how to think about Trump and kind of talk about Trump and engage with Trump in these spaces. I do think just over the last few years in general, and I think this is slightly different than what Nikki Glazer, you know, is talking about. there was a there there has been this broad shift where you've seen trump engage with celebrities a lot more in public particularly athletes i think that they're during trump's first term there just weren't that many opportunity there weren't that many times when trump was uh you know mixing up with celebrities with the exception of conier coming to the white house nowadays you really you see trump at nfl games you see trump uh going to the rider cup on long island uh you see him at the u s open. He's just engaging a lot more with the world of celebrity and with culture. You saw it with him influencing Paramount

to make a new rush hour movie. So there is this kind of interesting way in which it does feel like there is this level to which there's some slight levels of places where there's more acceptance for Trump among celebrity culture. But obviously the room of the golden globes, I don't still I think is probably

not super friendly to Donald Trump. Right, but that's also kind of to your point interesting because it serves, this is like the middle of the Venn diagram between business leaders who want to stop alienating Trump voters and Trump himself. And then kind of people on the left who are sick of Trump, exasperated with Trump and hope to just move on from it. And the middle of the Venn diagram is just don't talk about Trump. Yeah, that's right. Right, exactly.

You throw out your material later when you're on Howard Stern and it's like more of a, you know, it's like you can still talk about it. It's still a broad platform. I agree. I do think in general there is that feeling. There's a large portion of people on the left who are so incredibly tired of, you know, of Trump and just generally don't want to think about him and would prefer not to be reminded. Right. And people on the right who feel, you know, who would be offended by, you know, some, you know,

kind of silly, 50% funny joke that Nikki Glazer had. I think it made, I think it kind of made sense. And also, like, look, the reality is, is, If you're the host, I think, especially for her, it's the best gig, you know, she has ever had, I think. And so I think that the stakes for her for making a Trump joke, it's like, it's got to be good, I think. You got to be really nailed. It's got to be universally nailed to get asked back, particularly when Paramount and CBS are the broadcasters of that show now. I mean, she even turned down Steve Martin.

So that was quite a move for Nicky. That's true. She didn't say what the joke was. I wanted to know. I was curious. Same. because if it was a banger, that would be... Maybe that's why she didn't say it

because it was a really good joke. The Trump Kennedy Center, that feels also like... I actually just... I mean, listen, and I don't know. I think people can laugh. That doesn't... The stakes of that are pretty low. I think that people could have enjoyed that one.

I personally would love to hear it next year maybe for Mickey, although it won't be as relevant. Okay, now stick around. I have more questions actually on this topic, but with a different... hook. So we'll be back in just one moment. Listeners, though, you don't need to overhaul your life to start investing. Just automate it. With Stash, your new year money goals can quietly run in the background while you focus on everything else. Sounds pretty nice. Stash isn't just another

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Go to get.stash.com slash Emily to see how you can receive $25 towards your first stock purchase and to view important disclosures. That's get.com. Emily, get.stash.com slash Emily. Paid non-client endorsement, not representative of all clients, and not a guarantee investment advisory services offered by Stash Investments LLC, an SEC registered investment advisor. Investing involves risk offer is subject to terms and conditions. We are back now with Max Taney, who's the media editor over at Semaphore, and he's the co-host

of Semaphore's Mixed Signals podcast. Max, I want to talk about James Talley. because you made a really interesting point. Tala Rico, who is running in the primary against Jasmine Crockett in the Texas Senate race, obviously the Democratic primary for John Cornyn's current seat, has gotten a lot of attention for a very fascinating race where you kind of have populist substance in a norms packaging

with Tala RICO. And I would argue, you don't have to comment on this, but like kind of centrist. I love that. I love that. That's amazing. That's amazing scripture. But Crockett, on the other hand, is super interesting. And that's why I think this is the most interesting race in the country this midterm season.

Crockett is populist packaging, but with pretty normie-dem substance inside of it. And so it's fascinating to see this play out. He went on Ezra Klein's podcast. And you had a really interesting response. Let's first roll the clip. This is S3. What is, to you, the rage economy? I just mentioned the billionaires who own the algorithms and the news networks.

they have created for-profit platforms that with these predatory algorithms that divide us on an hourly daily basis dividing us by party, by race, by gender, by religion, and they elevate the most extreme voices very strategically to provoke our outrage, to provoke our anger, because that leads to more clicks, which leads to more money for that.

them because anger sells, hate cells, fear cells, these billionaires and their platforms are engineering our emotions so they can profit off of our pain. They are selling us conflict right into our bloodstream and they're calling it connection. I loved your response. You said one lingering consequence of the BuzzFeed era is the fact that people still think clicks have enough value for news businesses that they drive editorial decisions. No one clicks on things. No one clicks on things anymore. That's kind of the whole problem for digital media. Tell us more about that, Max. Yeah, you know, I, this is something that I have heard, and you hear this, this isn't a partisan thing. You hear this from people on the right, you hear this from people on the left, that there is this

idea that media organizations, particularly those online are all, you know, chasing clicks, and that's the end all be all anything to kind of get the click. And once you're there, it doesn't really matter anymore. And there was a time when that was kind of true. During the mid-2010s, when Facebook was at kind of its peak of its peak of its power and it wanted people to stay engaged and stay on its platform or keep coming back to Facebook. It was sharing, you know, it was filling your feed full of articles, basically. Upwardly. Yes, up there were all of these publications that were designed mostly on the left, but really across any. Yeah, like Elite Daily.

Yes, exactly. These are corners of my brain are being triggered. Yes, exactly. I remember these very well. But BuzzFeed was obviously the biggest kind of of these where they were just social engineering. They were amazing at figuring out ways to get people to click on articles with things called

like the curiosity gap, where they would get you to pay attention to something, get curious about something enough that you might take the proactive step and click, and they would make money on essentially display ads on the site, what you see at the top, what you see in the middle, and whatnot. And that business really collapsed when Facebook decided to stop putting news in people's feeds as much. You see it a little bit now, but now most people's feeds are back to being kind of stuff from the friends. Yeah, that was over the last, that was in 2022,

In 2022 is when people really saw a huge shift and drop off. It had been tailing off for a while, but there was a huge deliberate change by Facebook in 2022 to stop sending referral traffic. And that really changed the business models of a lot of these publications. It was also around this time that Google had begun starting to experiment with its AI summaries,

which was the other way that people clicked on things. Now, obviously, see when you Google search, there's that box at the top, which summarizes information for you from articles that they've gleaned from the web. This really changed the business models of these places. It no longer was a great business model for a company like mine, the places I work, semaphore, to have a media organization that is built around just scale, like pure. I can get 500,000 people to click on this article, and that means that 500,000 people will see this display ad and we'll sell that. That business just doesn't exist anymore. People are

getting their information through the algorithmic feeds and they're staying on these algorithmic feeds. They're staying in places like YouTube. They're staying in places like TikTok. And so it's, it is shifted the business models of existing, continuing to exist media organizations, the ones that have survived towards audience and a focus on cultivating their audience. I don't think James Talley Rico is totally wrong that the platforms, are incentivized to gin up controversy. But I think that it's changed the incentives for media organizations. Controversy is not the number one thing for scale.

It's not the number one thing that you are chasing now. What you really want is people, readers, a connection with an audience that you can say, these are my people, they really are engaged and like the stuff that I do. And I can monetize that audience either through subscriptions directly or, you know, like the ads on this show, right? Like people trust you when you read those ads. Your audience is here for you. And you, they assume.

I fucking love masa chips. Yes, exactly. I swear to God. Yes. No, that stuff is good. No, this stuff is good for sure. But people trust you for this, people trust you kind of for, because you've cultivated, you know, an audience that is here for the thoughtful interviews and kind of other things

like that. That outrage isn't necessarily the number one. You're not necessarily have to chase that. because advertisers want your connection with your audience. So that's why I think Talariko was a little bit off or a little bit dated in his assessment. Yeah, see, this is, I'm glad that you push back a bit because at the same time, obviously there's still some editorial influence over what the algorithms are going to favor. And what the algorithms favor is, I just think it's strong opinion.

And I think that's why this clip kind of went viral because it doesn't have to be just hate and anger, which he name checks there, it can also be things that you strongly agree with, or like a condemnation or a full endorsement, because for whatever reason, that triggers, this is the brainstem race, that triggers us to engage with content. So on some level, I mean, is it because a lot of news models now prize, I mean, it was happening for a while, but especially now in the subsect era, prize newsletters where you don't have an algorithm even delivering a newsletter to you, even though what you put out on social media, it's probably used in the newsletter. In some way, this is kind of what we're talking about with

CBS. The algorithm does like headlines that get people to engage, whether it's on Facebook or whatever, acts. But that's just so different. I mean, it's just, these things are, I don't know, what do you, what do you make a little I'm stumbling into? I know, I think you're, I think you're on to something. I think that there are two. I, I, when I looked at, what Tala Rico, and there are some people who disagreed with me online, and I don't think that they're necessarily wrong. I think that it is true that the algorithms in places like, in places like Instagram reels, in places like you, in places like TikTok, in particular, are really, really good at figuring out the kind of stuff that you are interested in. They're, I mean,

they're amazing at it. And the reason, and some of the things that flourish in those spaces are confrontational videos, crazy moments, you know, the kind of things that transfix us, you know, for better or for worse. I think that that, I do think that their model is, their model is, the tech companies models are, you know, keeping you on the platform for as long as possible so they can monetize and they'll do that in whatever way they can. And part of that is they read and they say, if you like outrage, if you like right-wing outrage, let's feed you, you know, some crazy, you know, crazy you know, I don't know, woke gone too far kind of content type of thing. If you are a left-wing person who wants to be outraged, they'll show you, you know, ICE of violent videos all day, you know,

whatever. Like that is, there's certainly plenty of truth to that. I just think that for media companies, you know, for people who are in the business of news, that is not always the incentive now as much as like, I'll give an example. My first job, my first full-time job, over 10 years ago was I was working at Business Insider. I was a politics reporter and I had to get my goal, the goal that was set for me was I had to get one million page views every month. That's a lot of page views. That's a shit.

Yes, yeah. One million pages a month. And that's what everybody, everybody had to get by. And Business Insider was very good at that Facebook model. They were. Yes, that was exactly. And that was their business. And part of that was like, okay, this is going to piss some people off.

We'll get this headline, you know, whatever Trump said. and that kind of stuff would, that met the goals that we needed because we were trying to reach this huge scale for advertisers. Now, you know, at the company that I work for, it's aimed at it's, we have our own audience and our, in our audience basically is looking for thoughtful information. You know, obviously they want new information that they didn't have other places, but the audience doesn't care about the most. our audience doesn't care about the most outraged, you know, outrageous moment that's kind of happened in X, Y, Z place. They want to understand how it focuses in the world and how it's changing things in business and in politics. And so our model is because Facebook and these big platforms moved away from sending traffic, online traffic, to news organizations like ours, we're like, okay, the response from the places that I've worked are, okay, we are going to focus on the people who, are interested in consuming our content and creating the content we want to create.

And I think that that's actually been a good, that has been kind of good. And so that's why we have newsletters and people who, you know, want to subscribe directly to us are finding us directly and we are just, you know, giving it to them in their inbox and whatnot. I, it's sad because we can't reach as many people as I reached in that era necessarily. I'm not reaching, I'm not getting one million page views a month, far from it. but I am more satisfied that I don't have to have the most controversial view or take or, oh my God, somebody said something crazy, so I'll get you to trick you into clicking.

I think that world is kind of hopefully, I think, falling is hopefully kind of going away with some nuance, obviously. Yeah, no, that's very interesting. I wanted to get, before you leave, your take on this, I saw Freddie Sayers, my old boss at Unheard, pointing to this moment from a Chris Rufo interview with the fact. founder of I'm 1776, which I think it's not pejorative to say as a far right type publication, who said, today, X is essentially a big attempt to get Musk the repost. There was an opportunity to build a natural elite, rewarding depth, philosophy, high cultural analysis, and so forth.

Instead, the platform rewarded mocking and memes. So just wanted to get your take, Max, on that interesting line from somebody on the right. kind of disappointed by the way, Musk is using the algorithm as I think anybody would expect basically an oligarchic tech baron to use it, not even out of step with his competitors, really. But how have you seen Musk's X shape or influence conservative media? That's a really interesting question. And I do think that we don't know all of the effects at this point of all the changes that Elon has made to the platform beyond the

obvious, right? Which is he doesn't want links anymore on there to anything he wants images. They want their torqued really heavily towards images and video. They want to be a competitor to TikTok. They want the feed to be a competitor essentially to TikTok, which is why you see a lot more videos

on there and you see kind of algorithms tweaks towards torqued towards sensationalism. My view on this stuff is that they are changing, they are making changes to X on a regular basis in a way that is much more perceptible than the changes that you see at TikTok and at Instagram. Instagram and TikTok make these changes slowly over time in ways that are kind of difficult to perceive. And then one day you're just like, huh, when did my Instagram just

become all videos from other people who I don't follow and now the message thing moved around? I didn't, when did that happen? with Elon. Elon has is regularly tweaking. Elon and the people who work at X are regularly tweaking the algorithm in ways that are that are that are perceptible to people right. Like in the lead up to the 20-24 election, there was a lot of content that was that was focused on really sensational political topics. And at times that's ebbed and flowed. It's a very, it's very confusing. The only constant, of course, obviously is to to your boss, to your boss's whole point

is the fact that Elon's Elon has torched his own engagement towards his own posts and posts that he likes write dunks and visual memes. I don't know. I'm still a power user though. I'm on there every day. It doesn't change anything for me. I know. I know. I mean, this has been listen, as somebody on the right, it's been a frustration that I've had with the Elon

cheerleading for a long time, which is that his algorithm is as bad for people's mental health and for like the broader discourse as bad if not worse than other algorithms. And so of course that's going to trickle into conservative media in a way that's particularly constructive. And I don't know that I have like some big, I haven't sensed that conservative media has been obsessed with an Elon retweet, except for maybe the first couple of months that he took over X. But other than that, it doesn't seem to me like there's an intentional effort to just gun for the retweet. But maybe I'm missing something. I don't know.

Have you seen that? It's a good question. I haven't really, I'm not, I haven't seen those changes as much. The perceptible changes that I have seen is there, I find that the algorithm is really response, is much more responsive than it used to be towards whatever you like and engage with on a day-to-day basis. You know, when I am viewing, if I decide I'm interested for one moment in, I'm trying to think of what the last thing was that shocked me.

I think like, you know, I don't know. I clicked on a Sydney sweetie thing once. And I was like, okay, now my feed is all. The algorithm knows I'm a 33-year-old man, you know, and now I'm seeing an unbelievable amount of Sydney Sweetie stuff. Did you see the Fuentes study? Because that happened for me with Fuentes. When Fuentes was like front, center in the discourse,

I was stopping and watching a lot more videos. I get a lot of Fuentes stuff too. Yeah. And I don't know if you've used. saw, I forget the firm that did it, but they went and did a research paper and looked into, they essentially sourced a lot of the virality to what appeared to be bots with Fuentes, and that just shows whether or not it's true. It just, I mean, I think it's an example of how there's the potential for bots to try to follow the algorithm as closely as possible and

tweak people's feeds that way. Totally. And I mean, I do think in general my other main complaint about Elon's Twitter is there just are there are just so many people who have successfully figured out ways to game the algorithm in ways that were much more difficult before you just see a lot more stuff on there that's I'm interested in the NBA I watch a lot of professional basketball and I am seeing just garbage

you know on a day-to-day basis I've seen rumors from people that I don't want to see I'm just like is this real I don't really know and you know and that's like some of that is okay but I do think in general, you know, the guardrails are really often, the algorithm is really torched towards. It's like, you know, you mentioned to somebody at a party, like, yeah, I'm interested in this thing. And they're just like, oh, yeah, now I'll talk to you about it for 20 minutes or something. This is the basketball guy. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, this guy loves basketball. Yeah,

that's kind of where it's. He has no other interests. Yeah, exactly. I'm like, I kind of do. But that did happen with me with Flentes a while back, you know, especially maybe a month or two ago and all that you know, Candice, Tucker, Flinty, all of that stuff was happening. I was, I was, I was locked in. Yeah, it was like every time I opened, I was watching Twentas. Yes. I actually think that might be an interesting story back. So if you were like, with the basketball commentary, it's just an easier, less, I don't know, less complicated, less divisive way to see what's happening in politics. Like, it's kind of an interesting explanation as to what's happened to, like, journalism. if it's happening basketball stories.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, Max Taney is, of course, media editor over at Semaphore and the co-host of the Mixed Signals podcast. Thank you so much for joining us, Max. Thanks for having me. It was really fun. Of course.

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there with me I wanted to do one of those fun media anatomies where we anatomize a media story and in this case it's going to be about Scott Adams take a look at this. Here's the New York Times tweet of its own obituary about the death of Scott Adams. Breaking news, Scott Adams, whose comic strip Dilbert was a sensation until he made racist comments on his podcast has died at 68. Until he made racist comments on his podcast has died at 68. personally. I wasn't somebody who was a regular listener to Scott Adams for no reason other than I just had never tried his podcast out. I know many people in my life who have absolutely loved Scott Adams and have gleaned so much from the years over Scott Adams. Scott Adams obviously meant a lot to very many people. And one of them was actually Coleman Hughes over at the free press,

who wrote a really interesting piece looking at coverage from the New York Times, but also more broadly, the headline here is Scott Adams made me a better thinker. And Coleman's description or Coleman's explanation for why Scott Adams helped his thought process is basically that Adams was steel manning. Trump's, or let's just say comments that Trump made, like build the wall, for example, that the media would freak out about. but had a strategy behind them, a marketing genius behind them, and meant something different to Trump voters, even Trump curious voters than they did to kind of your average, your average media critic or your average journalist. So, Coleman wrote, unsurprisingly, given that he was a political analyst who actually understood the appeal of Trump, Adams was a harsh critic of legacy media and the feeling.

was mutual. His obituaries have inevitably been filled with some of his most inflammatory takes, in particular his advice that white people, quote, get the hell away from black people. Coleman says out of context, and Coleman is black, of course, it sounded quite racist. But in context, Adams was arguing that people should avoid living and working in environments where they will be prejudged as, quote, oppressors. As Adams clarified, when I asked him, Coleman, says about this comment in a podcast two years ago, quote, it wouldn't make sense ever, in my opinion, to discriminate against any individual for race or religion or gender or any of that. And yet, the New York Times just report on its own obituary via this tweet is that Scott Adams

was a sensation until he made racist comments on his podcast. this is, I don't even think, factually correct from the perspective of the New York Times that would defend it. It seems to me that in the Trump era, of course, Scott Adams, who was known for Dilbert, actually became even more popular as people regularly saw the human side of him, and as he dabbled in a very interesting brand

of political analysis, that was also, by the way, down. I always found that to be one of the most interesting things about Scott Adams, which, you know, I said I wasn't, you know, someone who was listening to Scott Adams regularly, but whenever I caught a Scott Adams clip, that was one of the things that always struck me about it, is that the dissonance between, you know, the level of production and the quality of the content was befuddling to, I imagine, people in legacy media, although they probably just dismissed the quality of the content. But to me, I always thought that contrast was really interesting because it

showed where the media was going and that Adams was talking like into a webcam and making this really high level political analysis that wildly, wildly overperforms a James Carvel on CNN. Right? Like, yes, Adams was favorable to Trump. Obviously, Adams was favorable to Trump. but at the same time, he was providing a pretty valuable bit of analysis and perspective. When these cable networks, the dinosaur networks, weren't platforming to borrow their own word, people with a perspective that could actually reflect and represent the perspective that a lot of people were bringing with them into the voting booths, frankly. And that's why people were turning to Scott Adams. And I think it's why people are turning away increasingly from the corporate press.

It's because there's such a difference between what they're told. We've all had this experience. And it happened to a lot of people during COVID in particular. We've all had this experience of being told that something that just happened is, you know, you fill in the adjective, horrible, awful, racist, bigoted. And then you go and look at what it is. you watch it in full and in context, and you can't believe the difference between the coverage and the reality. And there are a lot of reasons why this happens. I mean, sometimes people are

outright lying, but a lot of the explanation for it is that Scott Adams, for example, is just declass A to somebody who's writing an obituary at the New York Times. This Trump era of Scott Adams is just de class A. To take him seriously, as Coleman Hughes did, to take him seriously. would be embarrassing. Take him seriously maybe as an influence, right? But don't take him seriously as an intellect or an analyst because nobody they know listens to Scott Adams and takes him seriously or feels heard represented

by the analysis of Scott Adams. Even though Scott Adams is kind of putting on a silver platter what people were asking for throughout the 2016 election, the first Trump administration, and honestly, ever since, it's putting it on a silver platter. Here is the explanation of what's happening. And it's from Scott Adams was Ariadite, from somebody who was known to figures in the media.

And yet, even Scott Adams couldn't make these genuinely interesting and insightful pieces of analysis about Donald Trump without being totally, totally. ignored or in other cases just smeared by the press. And I say the word parisocial, not in a pejorative sense, but I think Scott Adams, because he had such a low production, and again, I don't say that in a pejorative sense either at all, but because he was just kind of talking into a webcam,

I think people felt so intimately connected to Scott Adams. It was also, like I was saying, that he seemed to give a voice so a lot of average Americans who weren't finding their perspective represented on those very high production, glossy TV shows on cable news and in the pages of places like the New York Times. But they felt like also Adams was just kind of in their daily routine, as part of their routine. And that's so important. And on top of that, you have those two things, right? You have this kind of simple production, every man, simple production.

and this total, this content that makes people who are being ignored feel heard, and that confluence of things I think really, really, really gave Scott Adams his power. So it's certainly unfortunate, certainly unfortunate, that, you know, and this is how the New York Times, I'll put this up on the screen. This is how the New York Times justifies the point it made in that tweet. earlier. I'll put that up. Adams, whose comic strip Dilbert was a sensation to I mean racist comments on his podcast. This is how they would justify it. They would say, the blowback came swiftly, many major newspapers, including the Post, Boston Globe, L.A.

Times, New York Times, dropped Dilbert, so did the USA Today Network, which at the time had more than 200 newspapers. Let me go back and get the year here. Yep. 2023, February, 2023, so almost exactly two years ago. Soon after, Andrews McMeel Universal, which was by then syndicating Dilbert to about 1,400 newspapers cut its ties to Mr. Adams. So did the business imprint of Penguin Random House, one of the world's largest publishers, which dropped plans to release his semi-humorous advice book, Refram Your Brain. Mr. Adams self-published it later that year. Mr. Adams defended himself on a subsequent podcast saying that he was not a racist and that

had been using hyperbole when he called blacks, quote, a hate group. And he acknowledged those comments had damaged his career, quote, most of my income will be gone by next week. He said, my reputation for the rest of my life is destroyed. You can't come back from this. Am I right? And I would just like to say, as we are now, looking at the obituaries covering the death of Scott Adams, his quote proved to be prescient, that his reputation for the rest of his life was destroyed, but in the pages of places like the New York Times and in the coverage, like his elite reputation was destroyed for the rest of his life. But of course, he remained this powerful, warm figure for many people on the right who

understood the full context of the point he, rather inelegantly, obviously, from his own admission, made in that broadcast or in that podcast and that video. So it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a and almost a chilling thing to read him having said at the time. Of course, there are many, many ways the New York Times could have chosen to summarize the life of Scott Adams and to summarize its own obituary instead of framing it primarily, primarily as a political question and pretty heavily implying that he was disgraced for, quote, racist comments. They put that not in quotes. They put that in their own words, racist comments. And so, yes, it's sort of true in a sense, but also with selection bias to frame his obituary that way, proves his point correct,

that this is a man who had decades of work behind him years of podcasting and talking to his audience. And just this one moment was used in his obituaries to define him in illy publications. So just just wanted to touch on that quickly. I also wanted to touch on this clip that the Republican National Committee, the R&C, is circulating of Jasmine Crockett recently. It has to be a recent clip of Jasmine Crockett because, of course, in it she references the, in the same address, which we believe us to a church. She references the assassination of Charlie Kirk. But in this clip, in particular, Jasmine Crockett, who is running against someone we mentioned earlier in the show, James Tolariko in the primary for John Cornyn's Senate seat in Texas.

Let's go ahead to just take a look at the clip because she described Texas in a way that may be a little problematic. Now, some people get a little funny when you start talking about race, but this is real. There was a Trump appointed justice. I testified because I had already sued this big of Texas because Texas is racist. Yeah. Texas is racist. Imagine Jasmine Crockett winning the primary and being confronted constantly with a clip of her saying,

quote, Texas is racist as she tries to win the votes of people in Texas. In Texas. Now, she will probably explain that and say she met the current government of Texas, Republicans in Texas. And, of course, every state is, quote, racist in the sense that racism will, will unfortunately always be with us. Our goal as a species is to minimize it to the level that we possibly can. And that is a noble goal and it is a goal that we should keep with us every step of the way. But if that's what Jasmine Crockett means that there's still racism in Texas, I think pretty much everyone will agree with her. But to define Texas just as categorically racist

is a moment in Jasmine Crockett's primary that I have to imagine Talarico, James Talarico, we talked about earlier in the show, sometimes we'll refer to as Timu Richie Cunningham, will be using and saying, listen, and you know Bernie Sanders and AOC have done this effectively as well. You say, listen, I think the American people are fundamentally good. I think the people of Texas are great. In fact, we played that clip of Tala RICO earlier in the show

talking to Ezra Klein, where he was discussing how it's the billionaires. Clearly, politically, what he's doing there is scapegoating the billionaires. He's saying the billionaires who run these algorithms are exploiting us by fomenting outrage, which some truth to that, of course, some truth to that. But you can see politically how the move for Democrats is to scapegoat someone other than the voters. It's actually fairly clever to say, no, it's just those awful billion. billionaires who want to bring out the worst in us, but we're actually good people politically, a much stronger move than just saying Texas is racist as you try to win the votes of people in

Texas. So I'm going to be continuing to cover this race really closely. I've said this before. I think it is the single most interesting race in the country in 2026 because it pits to very, it's like this weird cross categorization here. You have Crocket who sounds like a populist, but in substance is a centrist, and you have Tala Rico, who sounds like a, let's say he sounds more like a centrist, right?

Like he doesn't have the populist. He's not trying to throw off norms in the way that he talks about politics. So Crockett is anti-norms in style, but pro norms and substance, and Tala RICO is, is pro norms and style and anti norms and substance, right? He wants to take on the billionaires and the millionaires,

and he has a slightly more populist economic outlook. So Crockett has that part in, she's just given with that quote, she's just given Tala RICO something of a political gift. And so I'll certainly be watching closely to see how Tala RICO handles it, also, of course, watching closely to see how Talariko handles questions about faith. Because, man, I just saw this was quite a, this is quite a moment in his interview with Ezra Klein, who was asking him about his faith. We've covered it a bit on this show in the past. How he gets held up as almost like an evangelical whisperer.

Let me put this up on the screen. This is from, my friend Nathan Brand, who's a Republican consultant, he says, the New York Times, Esther Klein, brings on a, quote, Christian voice today, Democrat James, quote, God is non-binary Tala Rico. That is, by the way, something that, that is an argument that Tala Rico, who, I believe, went to seminary and holds himself up as a kind of authority on Christianity, gets asked these questions nonstop, is really held up as somebody who can represent a left-wing, Christian. That is something that he said. And Nate points out his views fall way outside of widely held Christian orthodoxy and points to a few examples. This is true. He basically says

Buddhism and Hinduism reveal the same truths as Christianity. And I've verified that. I read the part of the transcript where he was talking about that. He says, you know, religions of love point to the same truth. The Bible never mentions abortion and it goes on and on and on. So one of the many reasons, this is a very interesting race, because this is a primary where the general election, one of those many primaries where the general election could be really affected. And the Republican, I think, probably comes into it with something of an advantage. Of course, in a red state, disadvantage.

Trump's not on the top of the ticket. But you then have Democrats who have come from this direction, trying to out woke. Outwoke is not the right word. It's not the right word because none of it makes sense anymore, right? Like, none of it works anymore. There is no, quote, woke. But trying to, on the one hand,

Tali Rico is trying to make himself, he's trying to kind of soften the edges of cultural progressivism and frame it as something that can be appealing and defended. by Christians. And then you have Jasmine Crockett, who's just like, screw it, norms are dead. I'm going to start talking about my colleagues' bodies and calling all the voters in the state that I'm running racist. So I'm telling you, this is the most interesting race in the entire country. You can expect to see more coverage of it for us. From us. Before we go, I wanted to mention something very interesting going on with the Wegman's grocery store chain. Have you seen this? We can put the article up on the

screen. Here's just the headline, as you can see it. Wegmans declines to confirm use of facial recognition technology at Alexandria store. This has been a real story for Wegmans over the last, I think, week or so. I'm looking at a Fox News headline right now. Popular grocery store chain uses biometric surveillance on shoppers raising privacy concerns. So the headline you just saw was local news, here in the DC area saying Wegmans wasn't confirming whether it was using it at that store. But this is actually something that's happening in New York City. Someone walked into their local Wegmans and it said biometric identifier information collected at this location on a sign posted to the door.

And here's what we hear from Wegmans. They confirmed that it was collecting those readings to Fox Digital that, quote, the safety of our customers and employees is a top priority. like many retailers, we use cameras to help identify individuals who pose a risk to our people, customers, or operation in a small fraction of our stores that exhibit an elevated risk, we have deployed cameras equipped with facial recognition technology. They said they retain those images for, quote, as long as necessary for security purposes, before getting rid of them and for security reasons.

They don't disclose the exact retention period, but say it quotes, aligns with industry standards, aligns with industry standards. We don't know how many Wegmans are using this biometric surveillance when you go to the grocery store, when you go to the grocery store. So they say also that this could include facial recognition, eye scans, and voice prints, according to the sign that was posted at the New York City Wegmans. And this is going to sound like a crazy connection, but I actually think it fits into this broader conversation that people are having about ICE right now. We covered on the show not long ago how in the UK labor leaders like Kier Starrmer have pitched digital ID as a way to deal with

the strains that mass immigration has placed on society in the UK, meaning that as it's harder to track who's in the country and is there lawfully. or is criminal, whatever that is, if you have digital ID, boy, it makes it so easy for the government to just keep track and crack down on any non-citizens taking advantage of welcoming UK society. Why I say that is there's a super interesting back and forth between Joe Rogan and Rand Paul over ICE, and they seem to be a kind of disagreement, some tension, as Randolpho was talking about protesters who seem to be militarized, and Rogan was comparing ICE to the Gestapo. Rogan, who supported Trump, by the way, and was pretty in favor of Trump's immigration crackdown,

although has spoken out a couple of times against deportations of non-criminals and what they've seen, or what those deportations have looked like just in the last year. But this is a really important point that I think gets lost in the big conversation here. which is when you have a Democratic Party that supports for years and defends a Biden administration policy that in a matter of a few years brought in at minimum 8 million, the population of multiple states combined, 8 million new people, most of whom were non-citizens either waiting asylum hearings, hiding out in sanctuary cities, and alike. When that happens in a short, period of time, of course, the next democratically elected president of the United States is likely

to have a mandate to find people who are non-citizens, whether or not they've committed a crime beyond immigration, public support for deportation of people who aren't just the violent criminals, has been fairly steady. It declined a bit, and it probably will decline even further now. I mean, support for the Abolish ICE movement is reaching 50% levels, according to polling in the last couple of days. All that is to say, this happened during Trump's First administration as well. It's why the Biden administration let so many people into the country. They felt that public opinion was a permission slip to go peddle to the medal on a very, very progressive, borderline open borders policy. And so when that happened, how seriously,

I don't think the Trump administration, DHS under Christie Noem or ICE have been perfect by any means. But how do people seriously propose keeping American citizens safe and in a just set of circumstances in their own towns and communities when because of that 8 million number, that's a low estimate, there are literally hundreds of criminals, actual criminals. I mean, Bill Malugian posted a list. We talked about it on Monday's episode of convicted criminals in Minnesota that DHS has, identifying these operations. Convicted criminals, violent criminals. There are violent convicted criminals, not even people who have just been charged and it's debatable whether they did the thing. Also people, by the way, who are non-citizens who have drug offenses, who have weapons offenses, who have committed robbery. There are around the country right now thousands and thousands of migrants in communities, non-citizens, who have.

who should be deported because they're a threat. They've put the American citizen in an unjust circumstance. And so everybody in the country, apart from the far, far, far, far left, they don't want their own child to be a Lake and Riley, right? So what that has created is an actual need for ICE to grow in size and scope, which people who are concerned about civil liberties, that in and of itself, not good, not good. But you obviously need more people when you have a massive influx.

You talk about 8 million people at minimum, which amounts to a significant, a not insignificant chunk of that population, whether you think it's higher or lower than native-born citizens, and that's in dispute. But whether you think that, you still have statistically thousands of people around the country who are endangering American citizens,

who pay taxes and have a right to be protected by their government. So this is the circumstance. And obviously, nobody wants that to be allowed to continue. Nobody wants that to linger slowly into the future. And nobody wants the only other option to be a pathway to citizenship or to allow people to hang out in sanctuary cities like Minneapolis where they don't cooperate with ice. So the connection here is,

that mass immigration policies, in the same way that mass immigration policies have become, in some sense, a pretext, unfortunately, for example, I don't support armed agents of the state walking around in masks. I think that's bad. It's happening because we have millions of migrants around the country, and thousands of whom are non-citizens, I'm sorry, thousands of whom are non-citizen convicted criminals who I think we all agree, we will prevent what happened to Lake and Riley by deporting those people or putting those people in prison. And so that was a response. And it's a political response. There's no question about it. It's a response that Republicans have supported. And you can understand why ICE agents would feel unsafe right now. We've seen

plenty of examples of ICE agents being targeted. And whether you think that's right or wrong, we've seen it happening. So, this is the response. And again, I would never argue that it's been perfect. I have plenty of civil liberties concerns when it comes to ICE. But it's the big picture question to me is you need to, in cities like New York, where you have problems with Legmans clearly has problems with theft, and there have been in recent years, when you have that happening, what does that do? It creates a support, a built-in support structure politically for people to violate civil liberties and to do this, like, you pit, it's security theater, safety theater, right? Like, it makes them feel like they'll be able to track potential criminals more easily and lose less money to theft. And so is it justified by the threat of theft?

Absolutely not. Would the threat of theft actually be minimized if laws were truly enforced in a sane, fair, just way if the rule of law were upheld across the board? And of course, I would include white-collar criminals in that, too. You bet your ass. But the point, what I'm saying here is when you have lapses in the basic functions of government, like controlling the border and controlling even petty crime, it will become licensed like it was in the UK. And like it has been with, you know, ice agents roaming the country with guns and masks.

It becomes license for, it creates a support structure, right? Like the public wants to. feel safe. Many members of the public want to feel safe more than they care about this encroachment on their civil liberties here and there. Not everyone, but some people do. So it creates this political support structure for it, and it motivates politicians and corporations to do it. So that is a little bit of a plea to people on the left and also some people on the right to consider what's the kind of big picture here about the surveillance state and what's at work. work, actually, again, like in the big picture macro sense.

But I just couldn't let that go without talking about it because I keep seeing it coming up. And it's such a visceral example of your local grocery store doing biometric surveillance on people who are coming in to pick up a gallon of milk or their food for the family for the week. And they have to submit to biometric surveillance to do it because obviously New York City has failed to perform. some of the basic functions of a government. And nobody wants, well, at least I shouldn't say nobody, but people who care about civil liberties don't want any police force, whether it's ICE or a local police department, to be compared to act in any way that could get them compared to the Gestapo

and to be petty tyrants or real tyrants. Nobody who cares about civil liberties wants that. But people who care about civil liberties should also want the government to perform the basic functions. Not the excessive functions, but the basic functions of the job well. All right, on that note, please help us out. Subscribe on the YouTube channel, subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Make sure to email me, Emily at devilmycare atmedia.com.

If you want to submit questions for a happy hour that drops on Fridays at 5 p.m. On your podcast feeds only, I record it around Thursday at 5 p.m. So for this week, get your questions in. Soon, if you want me to take a look at them, you can also follow us on After Party Emily and send me a question on Instagram there. We'll take a look at them. Got lots and lots of great guests coming up. So make sure to be with us live on Mondays and Wednesdays 10 p.m. on YouTube. See you soon, everyone.

Thank you, everyone.