Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 4/25/22: Ukraine War, French Election, Elon's Deal, Mask Mandates, Amazon Workers, Disney vs DeSantis, Obama Legacy, CNN+ Collapse, & More!

Episode Date: April 25, 2022

Krystal and Saagar break down the Ukraine-US meetings, French election results, Musk's deal with Twitter, Biden administration's fight for the travel mask mandate, Amazon workers rallying in NYC, DeSantis vs Disney, Obama's campaign against online speech, the collapse of CNN+, and more! For all of the information in the show' check your email with the full show for the newsletter!!!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Sara Fischer: https://www.axios.com/authors/sarahttps://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-media-trends Jordan Chariton: https://statuscoup.com/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Many wonderful, interesting stories to cover. Of course, we're going to talk about CNN+. We have Sarah Fisher on. And, not to give it away, but we do have a little bit of a surprise for you.

Something that we've purchased on behalf of the entire Breaking Points community, so stay tuned for that. We also have election results in France that are actually really interesting to unpack. On the one hand, Macron wins re-election, so it's sort of status quo, and by a much more sizable margin than what had initially been predicted by the polls. However, Le Pen did better than the far right has ever done before, so we'll dig into all of that. Also, looking like Elon Musk is in fact going to take over Twitter. Amazing. Yes.

I mean, well, so this is, you know, reports as of this morning, but we'll break it all down. Yeah, we'll break it all down for you. We also have now a movement from the CDC and the DOJ en masse. They are going to appeal that ruling. Sagar was right. I was wrong. But they did it, of course, in the worst possible way.

So we'll give you all of those details. We also have, starting this morning, workers on Staten Island at another Amazon facility are going to be voting on a union election. Bernie Sanders and AOC were at that location yesterday for a big rally. So we have those details for you as well. And very excited to announce yet another Breaking Points partner, Jordan Sheridan and Status Quo. They're going to be providing us with exclusive on-the-ground footage. He was there. And by the way, Jordan was there from the beginning with regards to the Amazon union election, one of the only reporters and news outlets that actually

took the chance seriously that they could actually prevail there. He was there on the ground at the rally yesterday and sent us some exclusive footage that we're going to take a look at in the show. So very excited about that. Yeah, we've been relying on Jordan for years. One of the things that we've heard from you and that we want to make sure that we're spending your hard-earned money correctly on is having an on-the-ground presence at some of the places that are completely undercovered and that you care about. So Jordan will be doing this for us, you know, basically on a continual basis, not just on Amazon, but on whatever story strikes everybody's across the country. So there we go. All the administrative stuff out of the way. We've got actually more,

even more for you tomorrow. We can't overwhelm everybody. We have to parse this out. But I do want to say about Jordan, I'm really excited about the whole ecosystem that we're building out here and all the partners and relationships that we have. And I hope you guys seem to have really enjoyed the content. I know Maximilian Alvarez put his first piece up over this weekend. People seem to really love Max being such a thoughtful person. Jordan adds another whole dimension. Yes. Because for the first time now,

we'll have capability to have actual on-the-ground reporting, exclusive footage. So that's something we've been looking for and we're really excited to add into the mix to make this a more complete and holistic experience for you all. The extended universe is expanding. Soon we'll have our own shoot-offs. Okay, let's start with Ukraine. So Ukraine, I know it seems like it never ends, but there's some bigger news that came out this morning.

Let's put this up there on the screen, which is Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken both visited Kiev this morning, and they came out with this very significant statement. So, the Secretary of Defense in particular making some big news where he says specifically that he wants to see, and the United States policy, is that they want to see the Russian military weakened. Here's a direct quote. We want to see Russia weakened to the degree. It cannot do the kinds of things it has done in Ukraine. It has already lost a lot of military capability and a lot of troops, and we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability. So that is military speak for we want to continue to see the Russians suffer as much as they possibly can in Ukraine. Now, look, obviously, I agree with

the sentiment. However, whenever it comes to official statement of U.S. policy, it cuts against what we have been speaking about, Crystal, which is that the United States is not currently offering any sort of hope or even really want of a peace process. Obviously, we have to support Ukraine. If Ukraine doesn't want peace, then that's what it is. But in terms of what we should want, we should want an end to the conflict. And the U.S. is now pretty much explicitly declaring this as a proxy through which they want to see as official statement of U.S. policy by the Biden administration to, quote unquote, weaken the Russian military. What does that mean? Well, it means, as we have seen what accompanied their visit, hundreds of millions of more dollars that are being sent to the Ukrainians in terms of military aid. That's right. It means that. It also means making Russia a permanent

pariah state, you know, keeping these incredibly onerous sanctions on that, of course, are wildly indiscriminate, not just targeting Putin and his Kremlin leadership and his oligarchic buddies, but the entire population. And so what the official policy of the United States government, which has been clear for a little while, but this makes it even more official, is basically we are going to make Russia a pariah. We're going to try to bleed them dry. And what Biden had said originally that Putin cannot remain in power and what aides had been leaking and saying privately that basically the only end game is to push him out of power. That is now becoming very close to official U.S. government policy.

And the impact of our actions, look, it's not all about us, but, you know, we're kind of a big player in all of this and have significant influence over the direction of this conflict. We have never been further away from any sort of negotiated settlement and to these hostilities. And that means for civilians in Ukraine, it means continued decimation, destruction, and death. And that's what's so sad about this whole situation. 100%. And you look at it in the context of the war, it looks like Putin is also responding very much in kind. Let's put this up there on the screen. Michael Kaufman, the military analyst who we really respect, he put up that map that those who are watching can see in terms of where the front line in the battle is. But the real end result that you can say from Michael is that he says that this is very likely the decisive period of the war beyond what happened in the first three weeks.

And that the Russian military here is basically exhausting what remains of its offensive potential. I want to emphasize this. They're exhausting their offensive potential in the context of how they're selling the war to the Russian population. Absent a full-scale mobilization, absent bringing in troops from other parts of the country in a full-blown war footing, akin to basically what the Ukrainians are, they're calling it like a special action at home, not war. Although apparently sometimes the Russian anchors slip up and they're like, it's a war. In the heat of the debate, they call it a war, yeah. Yeah, in the heat of battle, everybody acknowledges it's a war. But within what they have, what Kaufman and others are pointing to is that there is very likely the last of the offensive capability, which, look, I mean, we should not underestimate.

Yes, they've made a joke of themselves on the world stage, but that doesn't mean that they're not going to be able to put up a fierce fight. And increasing Western intelligence assessments, you take that of what you will, you know, in terms of what they assess, in terms of what Putin is thinking. Let's put this up there on the screen. They say, and this is from the Financial Times, which first broke the news, so this is from British intelligence, Vladimir Putin abandons hopes of Ukraine deal and shifts to a land grab strategy. This would make sense given the complete basic breakdown

of talks over the last couple of weeks. The Turkey talks basically went nowhere. Escalation on the ground has continued. You saw the strategic withdrawal from the city of Kiev, and now you basically see a full-scale war for the eastern part of the country and of control. That Putin is now looking at this as a pure land grab in order to try and grab as much land as he possibly can, which is going to ensure an intense amount of death and, unfortunately, an intense amount of fighting on the parts of the Russians. Because if this is the last of their offensive capability,

you can be sure that they are going to be grabbing as much as they possibly can before we even try to reach a negotiated settlement. And in terms of the parts of the Ukrainians, they've put up a fierce and, you know, a fierce, fierce resistance. But we did see, you know, one of the major cities there in Ukraine already fall, and who knows how much longer they can hold out in that part of the country, which is already at, in a civil war for the last eight years. Yeah. Kaufman, really, he's very clear. He doesn't want to hazard a guess as to what happens in eastern Ukraine and which side is ultimately going to get the upper hand. And by the way, to your point about, you know, will there be a broader military mobilization from Russia where they actually are telling their population it's a

war and preparing for that? There's a very ominous sign this morning that, you know, I'm not going to hazard a guess as to what exactly is going on there, but there are reports of explosions at a gas facility inside the Russian borders. So, you know, they could spin that as this was a Ukrainian attack. Perhaps it actually was a Ukrainian attack and say, this is a direct attack on our soil. Now it's time we have to fully mobilize and fully go to war. Again, don't know that that's the direction it's going in. I'm just saying those are the reports that are out there this morning, and it's a very ominous development. With regards to Putin and this report that he was kind of interested in a deal was going back and forth and now has sort of decided that, no, we're just going to go for this land grab strategy. I mean, part of what he has always wanted as a key priority here is not just the eastern region, but also this land bridge to Crimea.

So that seems to be the direction that they are ultimately moving in. And the fact that the deal is effectively off the table now, I mean, that's just an extremely sad state of affairs. And I think it's an indictment of U.S. policy and U.S. actions with regard to Ukraine. They said there was hope for a deal. This is one of the sources who were speaking to the Financial Times. Putin was going back and forth. He needs to find a way to come out of this as a winner. And then you contrast that to Ron Klain saying, no, we have no interest in giving Putin any sort of an off, face-saving off ramp. And the administration's increasingly clear posture

that their official policy is basically, you know, Cold War with Russia to the end. And it is a, it presages a new and very sad and dangerous, frankly, world order that we're moving into. Yeah. And, you know, whenever you have a situation where one side needs a safe face, who knows what that looks like? Like you said, maybe there's some attack that they've staged. Maybe it's even a Ukrainian attack. The longer the hostilities go on, the longer that this type of situation and the worst case scenario can unfold. Who knows how Putin views the U.S. policy saying we want to see Russia weakened. I can guarantee you they're going to be playing that all over their TV all day long. This is exactly what they want. They

want to humiliate us. They want to destroy us, which is definitely going to consolidate their population. In terms of U.S. policy, we shipped hundreds of millions more dollars in military aid over just the last week. You know, several different appropriations of weapons that are heading over there. So, look, this is entering a new phase. Unfortunately, one we basically predicted from the beginning, which is we're very likely to see a massive stalemate. You know, World War I, people thought the same thing. They're like, well, we've lost enough people now,

so now we've got to come out of this thing on top. We have to go and grab this land. You know, Alsace-Lorraine was really worth two million people who died over that soil. Pretty much everybody agrees not, but the same traps of war, the same leaders, and the same hubris. We are sadly in the same situation as we found out then and in almost every war since. Now it's all a game of attrition and we'll see how it works out, but it's sad. That's where we are this morning. All right, let's update you on the election results out of France because I find this really fascinating. Oh, yeah.

Based on your response, you all are pretty intrigued by it as well. So this was the second and final round of the French presidential runoffs, and it pitted Emmanuel Macron, who, of course, is the incumbent, against Marine Le Pen, who is a far-right president. She and her father have been running for president for quite some time now. So there was a lot of nervousness among establishment types because the polls were really quite tight there for a while. And there was a big question of who Melenchon, who was the third-place sort of lefty candidate, kind of like France's Bernie Sanders, to make a very casual comparison here, who was the third place sort of lefty candidate, kind of like France's Bernie Sanders to, you know, make a very casual comparison here, who would his voters go ahead and support? Or would they show up to vote at all? Because there were protests in the street among students in particular

saying, basically, we don't want either of these candidates. We hate both of these people. A sentiment that I think us here in America can very much understand with regards to the type of choices we have been offered in our presidential politics as well. So we have official results. Let's go ahead and put this first element up on the screen from the Wall Street Journal. Emmanuel Macron has, in fact, won a second term in the presidential election. You know, they go on to say he's now under pressure to unite millions of French who cast ballots for his rivals in the election's first round of voting, because it's very important to note that when you combine the vote for the far left and far right candidates, more than 50% of the vote went against the sort of establishment neoliberal direction of France. So that's the

first part. Let's put this next tear sheet up on the screen from Le Monde. They talk here about, you've got the official results, 57.4% for Macron, 42.6% for Le Pen, so not particularly close in the end. But they talk about here how large the numbers of abstentions actually were. The abstention rate was on course for about 28%. That means people who just said, neither, right? I don't want either of these people. I'm staying home. I'm casting a blank ballot. I'm not picking either one of these candidates.

28%. That would be the highest in any presidential election second round runoff since 1969. So clearly voters not in love with these choices. And by the way, perhaps part of the reason why is because they report high on Macron's to-do list once he's, you know, back in office is pension reform, raising the French retirement age. So cutting back on social benefits. This has been, there have been, you know, his tenure has been already wracked with protests. They had the yellow vest movement against gas tax increases. He's been, in terms of economics, you know, just standard neoliberal and very dissonant from some of the social welfare traditions in France. Let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen that just has the margin, 58-42. So again, not that close. And you can see, go ahead and put the next tweet up on the screen. You can see as we got closer to election day that the area where it was sort of like the tightest there on the screen, April 10th, that was right during the first round of voting. been gaining and gaining and gaining. So his message of basically like, listen, you may not

like me all that much, but we got to be a bulwark against the right seems to have worked. I know also that there were a lot of attacks from him on Le Pen over her ties to Russia, you know, as the Ukraine conflict continues to unfold. So that's what the lay of the land looks like there. It's pretty fascinating. In terms of Macron, I mean, he was an incredibly unpopular politician, but that's actually kind of par for the course. Now, unfortunately, some U.S. people are trying to read into this, one of them being the White House Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, put up this tweet. He says, quote, an interesting observation, just FYI, President Macron appears to have secured a double-digit victory over Le Pen at a time when his approval rating is 36%.

Now, that's incredibly low IQ and dumb for a variety of reasons. Number one, last time I checked, we live in an electoral college, not a direct democracy in terms of national popular vote, and I think Biden would have to have a 52 to a 54% margin just to win the electoral college. So that's number one. Number two, we don't have a runoff system, a la what we had previously. So that might actually cut across. But third, you really want to celebrate the fact that the guy won. And, you know, look, on the one hand, Macron, it was a blowout. On the other, I mean, he comes into a much weaker position. His party does not look well poised when the upcoming parliamentary elections. France is obviously, you know, ensconced in turmoil. So you really want to celebrate a win on that. And just acknowledging how unpopular you are

looks completely ridiculous. Now, in terms of the election itself, what you were talking about with the crossover vote, let's put this up there. 42% of first round Melanchthon voters actually backed Macron in the election. Now, 42% could be looked at as a lot, or it could be looked at as really not that much, given the fact that Melenchon actually said nobody should vote for Marine Le Pen. So a high level of abstention. And this was the lowest rate of turnout. So you had 42% for Melenchon voters backing Macron and 17% backing Le Pen. So many more went with Macron, but you can see quite a number just said, nah. Yeah, blank. None of the above. I think that's what's really nuts. And

like I said, in terms of his National Assembly, what he looks poised to win, who knows in terms of how this works out, but the polls there seem more accurate. Let's put this up there, which is 66% say they do not want him to obtain a majority of seats in the National Assembly, which would all but spell doom for that pension reform and all of that. Now, in terms of deeper, in terms of the election, in the context of Le Pen, there's a lot going on here. Let's put with Daniel, who we had on the show. I actually kind of disagree with his point here.

He says, important note of caution, it's the highest that the far right has gotten. In 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen got 18%. Five years ago, Le Pen got 34. This time, Le Pen gets 41 to 43. Now, I guess you could say that it is an accomplishment in order to get to 41 to 43, but in the context of any other politics, getting beat by 56, 43, that's terrible. I mean, that's a complete blowout. So really the story to me is one we said from the beginning. The story is that the center left and the center right in France are dead. There is a weird neolib constituency in Macron, but he still created his own party. He's got elements of the right. He's got elements of the left. He's got elements

of the center. He destroyed the center left. Le Pen also just remains really just a complete non-starter figure for a large portion of the French population. They're willing to begrudgingly vote for him. And in terms of the right, the Gaullist center-right party, which ruled France for, I don't even know, for decades, dead, gone. That's the story to me, which is that you see these two independent candidates, which are now assembling new coalitions and how that shakes out in the history of France. This is, we're going to look back on this period and say this was a big, big moment in their history as to how a new coalition and a new center is evolving. It's really fascinating. And it is, there's a lot of temptations to make analogies

with American politics. And I think some of them are apt. Certainly, we can see it in, you know, our reflection, our own politics of having these two choices that, you know, there's a lot of people who aren't terribly excited about having, you know, the message of basically like, look, you may not love me, but you got to be super scared of this person over here. So you got to suck it up and suck it up and vote for Macron in this case. Right. And ultimately, that won the day. So similar to Biden versus Trump, that message was compelling enough for Macron not just to win, but win here by a comfortable margin. the fact that his political strategy looks sort of like what Biden's political strategy looks like

right now, which is basically to piss off your own base. So Macron, since he's come into office, has on cultural issues in particular, decidedly moved to the right, thinking like this will be a bulwark against Le Pen and against other right candidates. But instead, what he did is just pissed off everybody on the left so that you ended up having this, you know, large abstention among the left wing that, you know, would want to stand against the right. And so it ended up making the election closer than it might have been had he not gone down that path. And then I also think that you see, you know, this hollow neoliberalism that everyone hates. I shouldn't say everyone, but many people really hate. That's basically rejected by the population that leads Macron to

have 36 percent approval rating. Very similar, again, to Joe Biden. But that message of, yeah, but the alternative is worse is enough for people to sort of, you know, suck it up and deal with a lot of things that they ultimately don't like. The story below the presidential level at the National Assembly, also super fascinating because at the presidential level, you're right, the center-right and the center-left parties that dominated French politics for decades are like, they got decimated. They weren't even a factor in this president in either of the presidential runoffs. Now, at the National Assembly level, it is a little bit of a different picture. But you see Mélenchon, the left in France, quite emboldened right now, too.

Because even though they didn't make the runoff, he didn't make the runoff, he came a lot closer than he was ultimately being predicted. And because you have this large sentiment in favor of sort of a bulwark against Macron and some of the economic policies that he wants to pursue, they're really hoping to make some big gains at the National Assembly level. So I do think it's really interesting. I think it's very telling that clearly Ron Klain is taking, you know, Biden chief of staff, Ron Klain is taking something from this, basically saying like, look, we don't have to do any better. We don't have to deliver on material politics for people or, you know, stop pissing people off or actually govern well. You all can really not be too into Joe Biden and think he's doing a terrible job. And we still think we got a decent shot to win the election because Trump is that much worse. That's a very, very depressing state of politics that, frankly, we've been living in for quite

some time now. We've been living in this for a while. You know, in terms of what plagues the West, that looks to be basically the same story. Germany, France, the UK, and here. It's not like Boris Johnson is super popular either. No, he's not. What a sad state of affairs that we live in, huh? It really actually is. I mean,

when you think of it, it really is an indictment of the whole neoliberal project over the past 40 years that, you know, we're, I don't know if you guys saw this news item, Bernie Sanders is still thinking of maybe I should run for president and God bless him. I mean, I certainly support like the program and the agenda and what he has meant to the movement. But the fact that you have no standard bearer that can follow up, that you have no bench, that you would seriously look around and be like, I guess I got to do it again, is also in that, you know, on the neoliberal side, the best they think they can do is Joe Biden. I mean, Kamala Harris, completely disaster. So it is kind of an indictment of the whole project that we've been engaged in for a number of decades. And look over on, I mean, after Trump, like, who is it, right? It's like a clown car of a bunch of people who want to try and fill his shoes. So, you know, it's an ever

present story, unfortunately. In a spot of potential good news, depending on how you feel about it, let's go ahead and move on here. Elon Musk. So there is breaking news this morning. This is what we had last night cut. Let's put it up there on the screen. Twitter is reexamining Elon Musk's bid, and it may be more receptive to the deal. Now, since that time, we actually have some breaking news that came out this morning that a deal could be signed as soon as today. Now, what they say is that Twitter is very likely to accept Musk's $43 billion offer. Now, this came after Elon actually secured funding officially per an SEC filing. Let's put that up there on the screen. Now, what they said is that he secured the $46.5 billion

in funding. He was meeting with activists and bigger investors all over the weekend. Reports, Crystal, that over the last couple of hours that they had been on the phone in the wee hours of the day, that they were negotiating the fine points of the deal. In terms of what the deal actually looks like, we still don't 100% know. The reason that this is significant is that the big question mark around Musk was, does he actually have the dollars? And that question was, of course, solved whenever he put forward the SEC filing, officially saying that he had the money. And then you point to the fact that a deal could come as soon as today with serious negotiations that are happening. The original poison pill appears to have been tossed out the window. I think what this comes from is that they were very skeptical, and I think rightfully so, given his past actions on Tesla.

They were like, we don't think that he has the money. So when he came forward with that letter saying, look, here's $46,500. I've got the cash. Let's go. Then I think they were forced from a fiduciary responsibility in order to actively consider the deal. And given that their stock is not doing all that well, and this is a significant premium upon their stock, they have really no choice without facing a massive amount of lawsuits. That's the analysis that we basically gave everyone at the top. We're like, look, I mean, from a shareholder perspective, you can't not do right by the shareholders by giving them a 20% premium. And this would make it so that Musk outright

owning the company, keeping it private, and then being able to enforce whatever content policy he wants without the whims of the public markets. It really is. I mean, it's going to be extraordinary if it actually goes through. Well, the one potential legal avenue that they had to argue that we could reject this deal that, yes, it's at a premium, but it may not be in the best interest of the shareholders because ultimately he has values that are separate and apart from just the financial performance of the company. So that was one thing that people had floated of basically how they can get out of this bind of their legal requirement to act in the best interest of the shareholders. I think you're correct, though, that, you know, that just became sort of

untenable once the money was on the table and it was this significant of a premium over where the stock price has been. I just, you know, at a macro level, I think we should always keep in mind with this story what a dim state of affairs it is that our sort of public square and speech is subject to the whims of a small handful of elite overclass, like whatever their whims are, good, bad, and different, whether you happen to agree with this one or that one or the other one, that's not a good place for us to be in, that we have to like hope that this particular billionaire and what they feel like doing today is going to be ultimately good for the functioning of our democracy. I think that's a sad state of affairs.

With regards to Musk himself, you know, I mean, I am hopeful that his content moderation policies will be more in line with the healthy functioning of a democracy, less censorious, less in that direction, especially the direction Twitter has moved in since Jack stepped down as CEO, which has been very troubling. So, you know, am I hopeful that this particular billionaire might be a little bit better on those things? Yes. There may be some other decisions that we ultimately don't like. I personally am not a fan of the idea of adding the edit button,

something that he has purportedly been interested in. The edit button is a terrible idea. It is a terrible idea. Everybody has gone viral. Okay, anybody who is in the game, this business, has gone viral and has misspelled something, perhaps done something wrong. Guess what? You know what the best thing to do is? And this is my policy.

If I tweet something which is wrong or I did incorrect, anytime I delete a tweet, I delete it and then I screenshot it and I say, this is why I deleted it. Because if you just reply and be like, hey, I got this wrong, the fake news or the fake part of it could still go viral. Right. And with an edit button, it would make it so that we could potentially have a tweet that goes viral for 100,000 and somebody edits it and you look at it and you think that the edited version is why it went. Or if somebody gets dunked on. Look, this is very. Or like what if you retweet something. Yeah.

And then it gets edited. Oh, right. And then it gets edited to say something that you don't agree with, that you don't want to endorse if your retweets equal endorsements? So I'm not a fan of the edit button. I also just like the humanizing aspect of seeing all of our fuck-ups and misspellings and autocorrects and all that stuff. So that part of it I'm very opposed to, but I would say that's a smaller issue than the speech issues because Twitter, why this matters so much and why we followed it so closely and why there's been such a panic and freak out among a large set of sort of elite journalists in particular is because Twitter really is disproportionately powerful in terms of impacting elite discourse. It is not, by far, it is not the most widely used social media platform. But when you're talking about journalists and opinion makers, this is where they go to say their piece. This is where they go oftentimes to like, which maybe they should

do a lot less, but to gather information about how people are feeling about different things. So that's why it matters so much to the functioning of our democracy. It's funny too, in terms of what you're saying, you know, Snapchat's earnings and reports came out. They have 115 million more daily active users than Twitter. Really? Yeah. Ask yourself, does Snapchat punch at the same level of cultural relevance as Twitter? No. And actually it fits really with our show as well. People ask me all the time, they're like, how come you guys aren't more active on Twitter? I'm like, dude, I don't care about Twitter. The majority of the people who watch our show and consume our content do so on

YouTube to a limited extent on Instagram, and then to a far more limited extent on TikTok, where we have those channels. That's it. That's where the vast majority of people actually are. As in, I care about reaching the maximum amount of people, people not necessarily being amongst elite cachet because that's a much smaller audience. And for this show, we talk about populous things and about things that are affecting real people's lives. Majority of real people are not on Twitter.

Many people don't even have a Twitter account. The only time that we really engage on Twitter is either A, in order to make an announcement just because it's sufficient, or B, in order to penetrate elite discourse. When I talk about media and stuff like that, I'm doing it very pointedly at the specific media elites who I know shadow follow me or follow me because I'm sub-tweeting them. Whereas here on the show, I don't care about any of those people. I know they're going to watch anyway, and it's fine. Free country.

What I want to do is reach the majority of the people, and that's what we do here. So in terms of the usages of social media platforms, it's just important to note Twitter is important for elites. And the reason why that matters is because elites run your life, my life, and all of ours. So the content policies on that platform have an outsized impact. At the same time, it doesn't matter for a lot of people because they're content policies on that platform have an outsized impact. At the same time, it doesn't matter for a lot of people because they're not even on the platform in the first place. I would just say, I really hope that it works out from a content perspective. Musk's strategy saying, I don't care about the economics at all, really, in my opinion,

is the only way to run Twitter. Twitter's not a very good business. It's probably a couple billion dollar a year profit based upon advertising, but it's long-term prospects of adding daily active users and changing the product. The core product is what it is. There's not a lot of innovation really to be had. And I think that's fine. But the problem is that doesn't work with the stocks, right? You could have a situation where your product could grow by 20% or something like that, but your stock still goes down because it's, oh, Wall Street expected 25%. So keeping it private, in my opinion, probably the best move. Possibly. I mean, I personally would like to see like total government takeover. You know, I mean, because honestly, at least you have some

democratic accountability. I mean, what I'm really interested in with all these platforms is I think the more neutral they can be, the better. And I mean that both from a content moderation standpoint, you know, you have a set of rules. They should be as hands-off as possible. And then they have to be religiously applied consistently. And there isn't a single platform out there that meets that standard right now. And then the other piece, which is less relevant for Twitter but still relevant, is what content is being served to people. And, the other piece, which is less relevant for Twitter, but still relevant, is what content is being served to people and, you know, seeing and having transparency of how those algorithms ultimately work, because that shapes what you see and how people communicate,

how they even, how their brains work. That shapes all of that so incredibly. And so the fact that on YouTube, for example, we have no insight, that it's just a total black box, zero insight into how they're picking content to serve and what that recommendation algorithm looks like, I think that's really damaging as well. So, you know, on Twitter, they moved to this system where, you know,

they used to just show you whatever came up in your feed next. And now you have to choose actively. You have to choose that option because the default is we're going to pick for you what we think you'd be into. And the facts of the matter is they're actually pretty good at that.

Oftentimes, I find that feed that they curated for me to be very useful. But it also makes the platform less neutral and makes it so that they have more control over what things are getting seen, what things are going viral, what things you feel like are most central and most important. And ultimately, I think that's a direction that is a problem for democracy. Yeah. On at least one thing in Musk's cap, he is saying he wants to make the algorithm transparent. And I think that would be great. That would be great.

I mean, I want to see that on – I would love to see that on every platform because then at least you have the information. And it would be better if we had sort of democratic accountability and had these things run more like public utilities because I do think that they are critical infrastructure in terms of the function of our society. But at the very least, just like with the Stock Act, if you have that transparency, then people can do the reporting, they can expose what's really going on, and then you can have some sort of a populist democratic backlash to demand things be moved in a different direction, to demand, for example, that you don't have CNN and Fox News and MSNBC propped up to the extent that they very clearly are by YouTube. It's an interesting conversation

around tech, too. I was talking with a friend of mine, Sriram Krishnan. He's a venture capitalist. He actually used to work at Twitter for Jack Dorsey. And one of the, he put out a video where he put a recommendation on, which is that if we could control our own algorithm, more what I mean is you could opt as a user into the default recommendation algorithm.

Give me the stuff that's going to make me engage the most. But now that's the default because of advertising. But if you move away to a different business model or if you just give that up altogether, let's say that we wanted to choose the consecutive timeline. You and I work in news. I don't care about the recommendation algorithm. I want to know what's happening right now so I could opt into that. You could also opt into like an entertainment algorithm. You could opt into different ones that the company could select and give you different options over your user experience. I think that would be a lot more empowering for the user. And it moves more in a

direction of like the tech should work for us, not we should work for the tech. Well, the other big central problem that was written about in the book Stolen Focus is the advertising-driven model. Yes, right. Because that makes the whole incentive. Not to how do we satisfy you and make you have a good, pleasant, edifying experience. How do we keep you here, keep you clicking, keep you agitated, right? That's the whole ecosystem because it is driven by ad dollars. The more time you're there, the more emotions, like good, bad, or indifferent that you're having about the content that you're serving, the better it is for sort of the capitalist advertising system. And so, which is, again, why we thought really carefully about our business model

to move it away from depending on ad dollars and towards depending on membership fees, because that just gives you a different set of incentives than if you're just wanting people to click and be mad or be disgusted or be fearful. So I think that super advertising-driven model is another really pernicious problem at the core of all of these social media platforms. If we were just straight YouTubers, our only goal would be to put out videos with as much clickbait or whatever as possible

and just keep time on platform and the retention rate as high as possible. Sometimes you do a clip that's only three minutes. You know why? Because it's only three minutes worth of stuff to say. Dragging it out for a long period is not good for the user and it's not good for us. It's worse content, but that's what the incentives actually look like. So, you know, just gives you a good behind the scenes into what that would look like with an alternative funding model. With a direct

subscription, we can give you the best product that we want to give you. That's the difference. And I think the distance between what YouTube promotes and what actual human beings would choose for themselves was really demonstrated by when we asked our premium subscribers, what do you want us to talk about?

Yeah, right. And it was wildly different than what, you know, the YouTube sort of algorithm would push to people and would ultimately reward. So for me, I think that says it all about the distance between what these platforms are actually serving you and creating

and incentivizing versus what people would actually enjoy and find to be useful in their lives. Okay, let's go ahead and move on. Crystal, I don't want to take too much of a victory lap. Unfortunately for myself and for the entire world, I was right. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. The Justice Department will be appealing the travel mask mandate after the CDC says masks will still be needed on public transportation. They just won't give this one up, Crystal. They are demanding. They did it in the dumbest possible way, too.

Yeah, they really did, which is they were like, well, we need to appeal the mask mandate because we need to preserve the ability of the CDC to make all public health decisions. Here's the thing with the CDC. They have never been a organization that makes law. Their job is to issue a public health advisory, not to set national policy. So, for example, we've talked about this. CDC says that you should cook all your meat to 160 degrees internal temperature. How many people out there like rare steaks? Every time you do, you are doing it in violation of CDC guidance. We take their

advisory. Sometimes we abide by it. Maybe if you're at a sketchy burger place. The other times, you're like, hey, I have confidence in my ability, and I'm going to make free choices for myself. So they can issue an advisory, but they are saying that the CDC's basic authority was trumped over, and thus the Justice Department is acting on that behalf. Well, the part that irritated me was how the administration was clearly all over the place. Right. I was about to get to that. Yeah. We can go to D3 because I think this is like so ridiculous. So at one, Jen Psaki was like, we would advise all Americans to wear masks on airplanes. Then at two, Joe Biden himself said wearing a mask is up to individuals. And then at three, the HHS secretary was like, we're likely going to appeal the federal ruling striking down the mask mandate. And they did it in this weird way too, where they were like, we're likely going to appeal the federal ruling striking down the mask mandate. And they

did it in this weird way, too, where they were like, we're not going to decide. We're going to leave it up to the CDC what they want to do. And then ultimately, so if you genuinely feel like either, you know, this is really important for public health, okay, then you appeal the ruling. Or if you feel like this is an infringement on, you know, the federal government's ability to promulgate rules based on their authority granted to them by Congress, then in that case, too, you would appeal. So it was sort of weird that they were like, DOJ defer to CDC and we just want hands off, which I think reflected the fact that inside the administration, there were a lot of, there was a fierce debate over what exactly to do here

because politically, you still have a majority that supports the public transit mask rule, but the people who are most animated about it are the people who are opposed to it. Also, I can tell you, I flew over the weekend. I would say 80% people on the plane is not wearing masks. Maybe 90, actually, even in the airports. On the plane itself, it was like, yeah, about 20% of the people were wearing masks. So that's just my experience over the weekend. And that was literally the day of the mask mandate getting struck down. Small, obviously, sample group. I think this is revenge of the bureaucrats. I think that the bureaucrats inside the CDC and Fauci and them specifically could not take the idea that the mask mandate

was struck down and that they don't get to decide that. You saw a little bit of a preview and Fauci and them specifically, could not take the idea that the mask mandate was struck down and that they don't get to decide that. You saw a little bit of a preview from Fauci himself in one of his first and probably only appearances on CNN+. Let's take a look. Great content. Both surprised and disappointed because those types of things really are the purview of the CDC. This is a public health issue. And for a court to come in, and if you look at the rationale for that, it really is not particularly firm.

And we are concerned about that, about courts getting involved in things that are unequivocally public health decisions. I mean, this is a CDC issue. It should not have been a court issue. Ah, CDC issue. So this is, I think this is ludicrous. It's not a CDC issue. It's up to the president. The president can take the advisory of the CDC and the policy.

And in that vein, it actually is a court issue because executive action is under the purview of the federal judiciary. Well, that's what I was going to say is, you know, you do hear a lot from the right about like unelected judges and making law and whatever. And it is a, that's our whole system of checking balances is, you know, there can be tension between trying to figure out what is the purview and authority of the executive branch, the legislative branch versus the judiciary. And so, you know, I don't just like dismiss out of hand, oh, it's ridiculous that the CDC would think that they have some authority granted to them by Congress. So I don't think that that's the big problem here. To me, though, the issue is, the sort of meta issue, is that, you know, you have this whole direction in politics of basically value-free, we're just going to outsource our thinking and outsource our principles to the bureaucrats. We're going to let the Pete Buttigiegs of the world with their

spreadsheets crunch the numbers. And we don't have to do any real thinking for ourselves. We don't have to do any real governing for ourselves. We don't have to weigh competing values and competing priorities. We're just going to let the number crunchers ultimately decide. And that's exactly what they did here. I respect it more if the White House just directly came out and said, no, we think, number one, we weigh the risks as more important than the benefit of being able to not wear a mask at this point. And here's the data that backs that up and why we value that over being able to, you know, choose whether or not you wear a mask. And here's what we think about our authority and why we want to preserve the ability to, next time there's a pandemic, require people to wear masks in public places. I would respect it a lot more if they actually owned it and gave their own reasoning around saying, like, we don't know, we'll just let Fauci and the CDC ultimately decide.

On the science, I don't think they can do that. Because, look, the only way it would really be efficacious is this. Everybody strap an N95 to their face the entire time that you're on the plane. That's not the policy. You're already using this cloth mask that you get to pull down whenever you're drinking and eating.

Right, magically when you're having your pretzels on the plane, suddenly COVID doesn't matter anymore. Mask policy on planes has been fake mostly forever and also especially since Omicron. So like I said, if you are afraid and if you find yourself immunocompromised, or if you're fat, obese, you don't want to get vaccinated, whatever,

strap an N95, don't take that sucker off one time. Although I do love this. When you're over at TSA, and you have to give them your ID, they're like, pull your mask down. Every single time one of these things happens, you're creating a vector through which it could spread, only showing you even more that it is theater. It is absolutely indefensible whenever it comes to the science of it.

I think that's fair. And that's why I find it ridiculous from the first place. So we either have an absolutist policy, like China. Guess what? We don't live in China. Or we have to let people leave it up to themselves. Funny part I was telling you on the phone. On the planes now, they have to say, okay, everybody, masks are optional.

Please respect the decision of your neighbors. Telling the Karens, don't freak out. Previously, it was the people before who were extremely annoying and didn't want to wear masks that are the problem. Now we have the opposite issue. Yeah, I'm sure we'll see tons of cringe content

around that. Everybody, put your headphones in and leave your neighbors alone. I don't understand you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess the one reason that I could see the appeal as being justified is preserving that ability to be able to institute public health regulations in the next pandemic. Because I agree with you on the science.

Like at this point with how contagious Omicron is, with the wide availability of vaccines and therapeutics, and the fact that it is, you know, cloth mask or whatever, anything goes, and you can basically take it off for as long as you sort of sip and nurse at your drink, it really is more theater than actual science at this point. Complete BS. All right, guys, some good news. Okay, as I previewed before, we have election number two at another Amazon facility on Staten Island. That voting begins this morning. My understanding is it will complete this week. So we may know by the end of the week whether the new Amazon labor union will go two for two. I do think this is, you know, I don't think we should take this for granted whatsoever.

It's a very different facility. As Chris Smalls told me and has said publicly, it's a sorting facility. You have a lot more part-timers, so the concerns are different. That's a much more difficult workforce ultimately to organize. Also, because this may not even be their main bread and butter, they may have two other jobs, but another job, something else that is their sort of main source of income. So there are a lot of challenges here, not to mention, of course, Amazon's over-the-top union busting, which reportedly they ramped up considerably after the stunning victory at JFK8, the Staten Island warehouse. So big news from yesterday is now the left politicians are fully engaged in the fight now that they have seen that this is a live issue and that Chris Smalls and Derek Palmer and all the rest of the folks at Amazon Labor Union are, in fact, capable of winning.

Let's put this up on the screen. We had Bernie and AOC. They're on the ground in Staten Island. Still not in her district, interestingly, Sagar. Sorry, I couldn't resist. But listen, let me just say this, because obviously, you know, I got into a back and forth with AOC, who was sort of trying to, you know, take a little bit of credit for the initial win when she had not only not been involved, but she'd actively stood these workers up and she pushed back of like, this isn't even

in my district. This is all I wanted. Look, I'm glad to see her show up and engage in the fight now. And we have to provide some accountability to these politicians. And this is not coming from me. This is from Chris Smalls. Typically, the only consequence would be on the other side. If she did show up and then it ended up in some sort of, like, embarrassing defeat, that would be the consequence she'd be worried about. You know, does this damage my credibility and my strength and my brand, all of those things. So if you push back when they don't show up, you have to have some consequences and some costs on the other side for failing to back workers and stand up and support them in the first place. So I am very glad to see that she has joined this

fight. And, you know, they said, ultimately, Derek Palmer had a great quote here. He says, starting this movement in the beginning, we did not have the support that we do now. And now that we won,

I'm just glad that everyone's finally waking up and realizing the power that we have. We've woken the country up and I want us to continue on this journey, Sagar. Yeah, and luckily,

thanks to our new partnership with Jordan Sheridan, we have some exclusive footage of an interview with Derek Palmer. Let's take a listen. You know, after the win, you know, it to our new partnership with Jordan Sheridan, we have some exclusive footage of an interview with Derek Palmer. Let's take a listen. You know, after the win, you know, it's been a historical win. You know, a lot of workers are now motivated. You know, they've come to me congratulating me, texts, email, calls, you know.

So I think the tide is definitely shifting after that win. You know, the labor movement, you know, was kind of asleep, and now it's definitely awakened for sure. And now we're getting that support from the community as well. And workers actually want to get involved with organizing now, which is the goal. So I only see it spreading like wildfire throughout the United States. I wanted to ask you, because Bernie had mentioned when he spoke that before he spoke, you guys privately met and he was surprised he didn't know the full extent of the union busting. Do you know, do you think a lot of the politicians kind of like maybe know some bad things are going on, but don't know like how bad in terms of the threats, retaliation?

Yeah, you know, they hear, you know, they hear the stories, but, you know, it's nothing like being on the grounds, talking to workers, you know, so they can really get the full scope of what's going on here. And obviously there was some criticism of AOC kind of flaked on you during the campaign. What does it say to you that she showed up? Because obviously a lot of people are saying, oh, she's trying to ride their coattails. But I think it's helpful to actually winning to have her out here. Yeah, I mean, you know, AOC gets a lot of scrutiny, but, you know, it was all the politicians, let's be real, who didn't show up. But, you know, now that they're here, you know, they're motivated.

And, you know, ultimately, AOC was best for workers, as well as Bernie Sanders. So their support here means a lot. And moving forward, you know, they're all in. You know, we had a nice conversation back there at the Hilton, and, you know, they want to support 110%. Hey, I'm with Charles. You're a supporter of Amazon Labor Union. You know, I've covered this for about a year. I've never seen so much press and support here. Can you kind of talk about what got you involved with supporting the workers here and what did you think of Bernie and AOC speaking? I think this speech was right on time. For me, I am a rep with a union called the UAE, United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America. I'm based in Virginia, so we came all

the way up here on Thursday of this past week to help support. So we've been doing phone banking, we've been out in the parking lot talking to workers and all that. And right now, for me, I'm actually helping organize city workers down there. So the struggle is around us across the board. So we recognize that a victory for Amazon is a victory for the labor movement as a whole. Same with Starbucks and all these other places. Andy Jassy, who's Amazon's CEO, don't fool it, Bezos is still driving the bus. But Andy Jassy was on CNBC after the victory here.

He said, a place like Amazon empowers employees. If they see something they could do better for customers or for themselves, they could just go meet in a room, decide how to change it, and change it. Guys, you didn't have to do this. All you had to do was go meet in a room and change it yourself. No, I mean, that's ridiculous. It's bullshit, frankly. I mean, we had a number of meetings with Felipe,

with assistant managers to try to get things changed. I mean, this whole thing started, right, with Chris's walkout. Before he led the walkout, he was trying to meet with managers every day. He was in the HR office every day trying to just get them to make changes about COVID or just tell people that COVID was being spread around. And they wouldn't do it. So, I mean, these CEOs and bosses, like, they can go on the news and spread all the lies they want, but the workers know the truth.

Yeah. I mean, that idea that, oh, you could have just talked to us. That was so weird. We would have totally listened and addressed your come on. That's so silly and ultimately ridiculous. Great footage from Jordan, by the way. And if you guys missed the beginning of the show when we announced this, so Jordan status quo, new breaking points partner. He's going to be giving us more exclusive footage from his trips on the road. He also does great investigative journalism. Very excited about being able to add

that piece to the ecosystem here. And you can see how valuable it ultimately is to actually hear from the workers who made this victory possible and how they feel ultimately about all of this. There's been a lot of debate over maybe it wasn't a bad thing ultimately that the politicians didn't show up the first time around because they were able to kind of sneak under the radar, was able to not be a partisan thing. But we also have to respect the fact the workers themselves see this as very helpful and very energizing. Look, it's up to them.

They get to decide what they think is helpful and what is not helpful. I do think personally it was a benefit to them in the first one. This one is going to be different. We'll see how it goes. I think voting starts right now, right? Yes, that's right. Voting starts right now. It's literally happening right now. We'll find out. It's 9.01 when we're filming this,

so you guys can get a little peek behind the scenes. So we will see how it plays out. In terms of the tech side of this, Crystal, this is really nuts. Let's put this up there on the screen, which is that the largest subreddit for Amazon workers has banned the word union and it has 43,500 members who decided to censor union related posts for, according to them, due to an influx of spam and outright malicious posts. Very interesting, isn't it? That censorship is always yielded based upon protecting the community whenever it's the word union. Well, and so some members of that community, because they have it on basically like auto-censorship, so if they just see the word union, then a bot takes it down automatically.

So some of the members have started using onion instead of union to get around it. So they're not going to be stopped. But, yeah, this is really significant because obviously, listen, when you're working for Amazon in those warehouses, I mean, you can ask Chris or any of these folks, you are, it really is relentless, the pace. So you have very little time to talk to your co-workers. You know, you've got bosses and supervisors and multi-thousand dollar a day paid union consultants listening, listening over your shoulder to every word that you're ultimately saying. So online spaces like this are really important for organizing and building solidarity. So for them to decide, oh, this is too controversial,

we have to take it down, it really is very unfortunate. And I thought there was a good quote in this article from Vice, too, speaking to one of the pro-union Amazon workers who said, listen, when you ban the discussion of unions at a place with no unions, you are anti-union because you're preserving the anti-union status quo. And I thought that was a really good way to put it here, ultimately. And by the way, don't forget, we saw something very similar when Verizon workers, who now, by the way, have been successful. Some retail Verizon workers have been successful in ultimately unionizing. But we saw the same thing with a significant Verizon worker forum where they also said, ah, we can't talk about this ultimately anymore.

So this is a disturbing trend that we're seeing in a number of spaces as the worker momentum gains speed. Yeah, I just think when you put it together and you really think about how exactly this works out, I've warned so long that content moderation policy will always be used by the establishment in order to push back against dissidents. Every time. I remember during the fact-checking era, everyone was like, oh, we need fact-checks on Trump tweets. I was like, okay, just wait until AOC runs against Chuck Schumer or something in a debate. And then she tweets something about Medicare for all and somebody at Twitter or, you know, previously before Elon Musk possibly owned it, that they go ahead and slap a fact

check on it. That literally happened with the Washington Post, just so you're aware. So do you want them to set fact checking policy for the entire nation? I don't. So whenever it comes to this content moderation, as long as it's within the first bounds of the First Amendment, I think it's ludicrous to try and crack down because it will always be used in this type of environment. People really need to be wary of it. It always comes for the people who are dissidents. Yes, that is exactly right. There's also some big news with the Starbucks unionization drive, which has just been picking up steam by the day. It really is pretty incredible. That's what Stephen Greenhouse's tweet here up on the screen. So, baristas at a Starbucks in

Leesburg, Virginia, voted overwhelmingly 23 to 1 to unionize, according to the NLRB's count. This means that despite Starbucks' fierce anti-union efforts, the union's overall record increases to 29 wins versus 3 losses. So, they did suffer one very close defeat down in Florida. It was 14 to 13. Other than that, the Starbucks Workers United movement has been just racking up victories one after another after another. Since the very early days, there were a couple of early losses. And since then, they seem to have just picked up tremendous speed in spite of the fact they brought back Howard Schultz.

And, you know, they're clearly upping the ante in terms of their union busting, firing workers. That's the other big piece that happened here is the NLRB has now gone to court to demand that some of the fired workers be reinstated immediately. Yeah. Because they're, you know, they're saying this was done illegally. They're continuing to look into a number of these firings, which seem to be direct retaliation for union organizing. But it's pretty extraordinary. And, you know, a number of these victories to Sager have been unanimous.

Like this one is 23 to 1, so it's very close to unanimous. But a number of these have been 100% of the voting workers said, yes, we want a union, in spite of everything they've been subjected to, which I think is just extraordinary. And also speaks to how a lot of these union-busting tactics right now in this climate are just not working and completely backfiring. It's pretty interesting to me because what I see is that Starbucks is kind of the perfect ground. I hate to say it, but on Amazon, like you were saying, with a high turnover workforce, which is already company policy, and then you have short-term contract workers, it's going to be difficult, right? Especially in order to keep it sustained. But Starbucks, from what I can tell, based on what you told me, they have longer-term employment. They don't have as much turnover in terms of the workforce. More educated, more sympathetic toward union, and could make it so that the company's values, which always sold itself as progressive,

backfire because their workforce is disproportionately more likely to be receptive to that message. It seems like it could be and is taking force as a national-wide movement. I mean, any food service is going to have high turnover, including Starbucks. But what you see, I think with the Starbucks workers, is a disproportionate number of Bernie bros and Bernie gals. There was an article early on, I think by the New York Times, that interviewed a number of the early organizers. And quite a few of them said, I volunteered for the Sanders campaign. And that changed how they were thinking about this.

I mean, it just was like raised awareness around what they could do and how they could push back. And of course, Bernie throughout his career has been a strong supporter, standing with labor. On that note, we do have a little bit of footage of Bernie at the rally for Amazon. I have to say, I don't know if you guys saw, there were some pictures. I posted one of them to my Instagram, shameless plug, Crystal Emball over on Instagram. Check it out. But these incredible photos of Chris Smalls with Bernie Sanders, which really were, you know, pretty extraordinary to see. And you'll see the sort of like warmth between the two of them at the rally. Let's take a look at a little bit of that. But I'm so proud to be standing here with my brothers and sisters and my comrades and the community that's here to support. Without further ado, though, I want to bring up Senator Sanders from Vermont, who came here to stand in solidarity with these

Amazon workers today. Thank you, Senator. And Bernie seemed to be very well received there, but you just love to see that across the generations, across race, religion, all of it. I mean, that's a labor movement at its best, and that's what solidarity really means at its best. So listen, these politicians were late showing up, but better late than never. They showed up, yeah, and I think that's what matters. We'll see how it turns out on the vote. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, there's a big political fight down in Florida, pitting conservatives spearheaded by Governor Ron DeSantis against liberals and the Walt Disney Corporation.

Honestly, it is the sort of brain-rotting culture war mess that we typically stay away from here. But it is worth digging into because I actually think it kind of says everything about the sorry, principle-free, reactionary, pointless nature of a lot of our politics. It's a fake fight with fake stakes simultaneously about everything and nothing at all. And it has scrambled brains across the political spectrum. This fight has got free market bro Ben Shapiro simping for big government. I am the most free market person on the right. I'm an extraordinarily pro-free market person. I don't believe that generally the government should crack down on the right. I'm an extraordinarily pro-free market person. I don't believe that

generally the government should crack down on the operations of businesses. I think more freedom for businesses are good. I think that lower taxes for business are good for the economy of Florida, for the economy of the United States more broadly. However, corporations have to stand up for their own free market bona fides, and they have to not become tools of the people who wish to destroy freedom in this country on behalf of leftist groupthink. If you decide to just become a woke corporation that does the bidding of your democratic taskmasters, don't be surprised when you get clocked with a legislative two by four.

F around and find out. F. to get clocked with a legislative two-by-four. F around and find out. So basically, yay corporate power, unless corporations happen to do something I don't personally like, in which case, yay government power. Sounds like a really solid and principled ideology you got there. It's also got liberals who have railed against the notion that corporations should be given civil rights, suddenly sounding like Mitt Romney declaring that corporations are people too, my friend. Here's The Intercept exploring whether Disney's First Amendment rights to free speech have been violated. Here's TNR gloating about how progressive tolerance is

now a profitable posture embraced by companies as a market strategy. They're right in that assessment, by the way. But they never quite get around in the piece to saying that even when the free market happens to line up with liberal ideology, corporate personhood and control over government still really bad. Okay, so let me give you the outlines of what is happening here. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis obviously wants to run for president, and his strategy to endear himself with a conservative base is to pass a whole bunch of culture war legislation intended first and foremost to own the libs. In response to Black Lives Matter protests, he passed laws restricting the right to protest, which got rather awkward when protests against the Cuban government broke out, violating the new laws that DeSantis had just passed.

After restricting speech with those anti-protest laws, he then supposedly took a stand for free speech by passing tech legislation, the impact of which likely negligible, but send all the right signals that he is against censorship, at least when it's applied to ideas that he happens to support. Proving how limited his commitment to free speech is ultimately, though, he then passed an extremely broad law in line with the latest conservative moral panic over critical race theory. That law has led to dozens of math textbooks being banned for controversial ideas like encouraging kids to disagree respectfully. Apparently, not wanting kids to be jerks is now part of woke ideology. But the latest culture

war brushfire is over a law that has been dubbed the don't say gay law by its critics. The portion of the law which has gotten the most attention bans teaching of sexuality and gender in grades K-3. For older grades, such learning must be, quote, age appropriate. Of course, sex ed is already banned through fifth grade in Florida, so this seems basically to be nothing more than meaningless culture war posturing once again. On the other hand, the law does open up avenues for parents to sue school districts if they feel that the law is being violated. Because the language of the law is extremely vague, this has sparked fears that activist parents backed by conservative legal infrastructure could target school districts for infractions as trivial as

potentially a child mentioning their same-sex parents in a classroom discussion or perhaps a teacher having a picture of their same-sex partner on their desk. Now, I honestly don't know if that's realistic fear or not, but nobody else does either. But what is absolutely clear here is that the main intent of the law is to serve as an anti-gay virtue signal bill, framed as a parental control bill, passed for one reason alone, and that's to further Ron DeSantis' political ambitions. DeSantis can signal that he's tough on gay and trans people to his base while painting it in inoffensive terms of parental control to the majority. It's vagueness allowing him to portray it however he wants, depending on

the audience. Now, the language is so mushy as to both be meaningless and all-encompassing. And as such, it is absolutely fair for gay and trans people to feel attacked by the law, because it seems increasingly clear that the GOP hasn't so much embraced gay people as full human beings as beat a temporary culture war retreat, given that support for gay marriage and basic rights for gay people has gained overwhelming mainstream acceptance. So instead of being upfront about their desire to roll back gains like Obergefell, they're reaching for coded language about sexual deviance and about grooming, attempting to return to a prior generation's framing of non-hetero people as perverts and pedophiles. The Libs of TikTok account, this was, they were into this,

this is kind of their stock and trade, showing some random teacher talking about their pronouns and then accuse them of grooming children. It's a clever sleight of hand, frankly. You're not opposing gay rights or trans rights per se. Instead, you're opposing things everyone hates, things like pedophilia and targeting invulnerable children. Of course, if Republican Party elites really hated such things, then they probably wouldn't have been cool with Roy Moore as their nominee in Alabama. With conservatives firmly in control of the Supreme Court and positioned to hold a trifecta of federal government control come 2024, it is absolutely reasonable to see this as a trial balloon for further attacks on previously established rights. All right, so that's the law. In response to that law, Disney, Florida's most iconic business, denounced the law

and crucially paused all political contributions to Florida politicians who were typically showered with Mickey Mouse cash. Now, that move came after Disney's own employees protested and staged a walkout over Disney's initial lack of response to the bill. Let me pause for a moment and just remind everybody, especially my friends on the left, that Disney is actually bad. If you were on the left, Walt Disney Corporation is not and will never be an ally in any fight. Their products have been made in inhumane sweatshops. Take a look at this. Their American workers have been routinely used and abused. A 2018 report found that 11% were paid so poorly they were actually homeless.

Two-thirds were food insecure and a majority worried about facing eviction. Disney is taking this stance in this fight because they think it's going to help their bottom line, aligning them with the values of the affluent PMC. It's that simple. It's a vague gesture towards progressive principles intended to bolster market position with the tolerant majority. In response, DeSantis and the Republicans decided they were going to do something to show how tough they were about standing up to Disney's fake progressivism. So, they passed a bill revoking Disney's special tax district, something called Reedy Creek. Now, this sounds like it's bad and like it's going to really hurt Disney, but the reality is actually quite different.

A local reporter dug deeply into the likely consequences, and basically, the primary benefit Disney gains from the Reedy Creek district is the ability to govern themselves. This makes it easier for them to launch new infrastructure projects and build new hotels and the like. But it actually comes with a higher tax bill for Disney. They tax themselves to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and use it to then pay for essential services, things like police and fire and sewer. Essentially, Disney has accepted higher taxes for the ability to flexibly self-govern. Without the Special Tax District, that tax burden that was previously shouldered by Disney is now instead going to be passed to local county residents, not to mention responsibility for the debts that Reedy Creek has accrued. So, the likely overall impact of ending the Reedy Creek Special Tax District

is to cut Disney's taxes and to raise taxes on ordinary Floridians. In other words, the GOP's attack on Disney is fake. It won't really hurt Disney, but it feels like it'll hurt Disney, and in the culture war, the show, that's all that ultimately matters. So let me just try to sum up here this brain-melting series of events. You got a fake ally in Disney making a fake stand over a likely meaningless law with fake consequences devised by a culture warrior who is really just using this whole fake fight to fuel his own political ambitions. Meanwhile, the plutocrat class can just look on and laugh as the heated battlegrounds of politics are increasingly focused on these theatrical

displays of divisive cultural signaling instead of a material politics that could actually rebalance the scales and provide basic dignity to American families. In the macro, nothing is better for Disney and Apple and Google and all the rest than the public being consumed by these culture war brush fires while the status quo poverty and despair and plutocracy continues unabated. If the GOP or anyone else is really interested in humbling the Disney executives, they use the power of the government to make it easier for Disney's long mistreated employees to unionize and have a say in the day-to-day running of their workplace. That's why, without a doubt, the most important political fight in the country is the one that's being fought that we just talked about by workers at Starbucks and Amazon and elsewhere. It's the correct battle with the correct divide. And it's not going to confuse people into thinking that Ben Shapiro is against corporate power or Disney is a progressive ally or that we should fight to defend the sanctity of corporate civil rights. Everything about this drove me a little bit nuts.

Yeah, I mean, it should. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, Barack Obama is at a crossroads. He and Michelle have milked their post-presidential fame for $100 million or so that it's worth. His terrible podcast, not getting picked up by Spotify. His Netflix show, by all accounts, a complete joke and a failure.

He is fading from the spotlight, something that an egomaniac like him simply cannot handle. At the same time, he can't do what he actually does best, which is involve himself in politics. Both because he literally cannot run for office again, and second, because if he steps up too much in culture wars like he did when he was a politician, it would be bad for business. The sad truth is that Obama, he's just a run-of-the-mill celebrity now.

So he's fishing around for what an elder statesman like himself can latch onto. Something like political, but not too political. Something that makes seems like he's still singing the tune of change, but doesn't actually challenge the status quo. And over the weekend, we got our glimpse into Obama 4.0, possibly the most dangerous iteration yet. Obama recently appeared at a Stanford University for a speech to decry the crisis of disinformation on the internet.

He blamed the internet and the drop in shared facts amongst the US population for our current social strife. And he ended his speech with a thunderous new call for regulation of speech online. Now, he didn't say anything specific, but Obama is completing the final stage of the COPE tour since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, which served as a rebuke of his entire legacy. What you see here is that on the day that Trump won the election, it was not an accident. The immediate thing that was blamed was quote-unquote fake news. It was not conceivable to the American elite that 65 million people could have goaded for the guy from The Freaking Apprentice. They simply must have been duped. The answer was not possible that Hillary Clinton is one of the worst possible people to ever run for office. The answer could

not be that millions felt betrayed by Barack Obama himself as the country frayed under his leadership. The answer could not be that the neoliberal dream and the cultural left politics pushed institutionally by Obama had ripped the country apart and made it borderline ungovernable, made it susceptible to vote for a Donald Trump as a true screw you to the system in the first place. All those answers would indict not only Obama's presidency, but the oligarchic elite that Obama promised to challenge and became a part of instead. It is not an accident that the very first thing that he did after leaving office was to go to Richard Branson's private island to hang out with billionaires.

Now you might think I'm editorializing, but Obama himself has all but admitted to this. In a New York Times story previewing his call to censor speech online, his advisor said, quote, looking back at his administration's approach, Mr. Obama has said he would not pinpoint any one action or piece of legislation that he might have handled differently. So there it is. Nothing to do with his handling of the housing crisis. Nothing to do with the Trans-Pacific Partnership. nothing to do with illegal immigration. No, Obama cannot fail. He can only be failed. Obama's assault on free speech is thinly veiled. Ironically, it is the exact same logic for which Elon Musk is trying to buy Twitter. Companies need to have a North Star other than making money, he says. Elon agrees. That's why he wants free speech online. But Obama and his ilk? No, they want the opposite. When Obama and

the media tell you that they want to protect democracy, what they really mean is they want to protect their power. Democracy is legitimate when they get elected and they win. It's illegitimate and flawed when they lose. Got it? It's that simple. It's the ability of people to freely talk online. Consider the far-reaching consequences also of Obama's pronouncement. Obama claims in his speech that algorithms are responsible for the death of trust in American society, that those are what should be regulated. And, you know, there is something to that. But also consider this. Under the presidency of Barack Obama, a fifth of Republicans in America

believed that he was a secret Muslim born in Kenya. And guess what? That wasn't algorithmically spread. In fact, the birther conspiracy was entirely fed by email forwarding. Now look, obviously that theory is fake, but under Obama's framework, should the government be able to regulate what people are emailing each other? The obvious answer to me seems no, and it highlights what I'm trying to get at. The crisis of trust in America is not the fault of technology. Technology only exacerbates and makes obvious the wounds that already exist within existing body politic. The job of people like Obama is to try and restore that trust by making their lives better. And when they don't, people fall prey to all sorts of crazy stuff. It's not the fault of the theories. It is the fault of the leaders

who betrayed their trust given to them by the American public and have been doing so for decades. Obama's turn on tech is ironic also, given that his administration, more than anyone, allied itself with Silicon Valley. His former staffers are all over the C-suite executive rooms of some of the top tech companies in America. He famously played buddy-buddy with Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin and Larry Page while he was in office. His current turn against tech is the same as the entire liberal elites project. They cannot stomach the idea that they do not control what people think, so they must blame somebody else, and then seize the current means of information distribution to ensure they are not embarrassed or challenged as when Donald Trump won the election in 2016. You would think Barack Obama, of all people, would understand this. Think back

to the ancient times of 2007 during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary. Hillary Clinton was the Democratic elite and she was poised to win. A skinny Kenyan senator named Barack Obama wanted to challenge her. He did not have the power, but he did have his voice, and he took to the internet. He hired a former Facebook founder to run his website, and for the first time in modern American politics, raised hundreds of millions of dollars online. He got his message out to eventually win the presidency of the United States. Barack Obama would not be president without the internet. For that matter, almost nobody who is prominent today who challenges existing power would also do so. But he is the power now, so he is turning his back on the ability of a future Barack Obama to get elected.

The crisis of American society today is one of a defunct leadership class like Obama that refuses to acknowledge its own failures and then rigs the rules to make sure that nobody can supplant them. When the revolution comes, it will not be because people read a Facebook post or watched a silly YouTube video. It will be because maybe they are someone my age who watched their beautiful country throw itself into two wars, give up its manufacturing capacity, which made it great in the first place, let itself get mired in ridiculous culture war fights, while the edifice holding all of us up crumbles without any attention from the leadership class. My message to them is the only way to avoid a bigger confrontation is to allow free speech

on the internet, to allow a new generation and a dissonant class a chance at speaking to the people, seizing the reins of power, and correcting the follies of those who came before us. Now, I'm not naive. I know they're not going to do it. So Cyber's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now is the great Sarah Fisher of Axios. Sarah, welcome to the show. We really appreciate you joining us now is the great sarah fisher of axios sarah welcome to the show we really appreciate you joining us hey thanks for having me you love this show thank you very much thank you appreciate your reporting you were one of the best sarah you're one of the first to really give us some insight into the downfall of cnn plus let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen you first had the instance that they were uh inside the chaotic collapse. You first had the reporting that they were suspending marketing operations,

and then you were one of the first to the story in terms of talking about the demise. Sarah, I've always respected you as just a great analyst of inside media companies and what's happening here. What exactly happened with the death of this product that they poured $300 million into? Yeah, it's a great question. So about two years ago, CNN executives thought, we really need to get ahead of the linear TV decline. Let's launch a bigger foray into streaming. Now, you have to remember, CNN has experimented with streaming for a really long time.

They started CNN Pipeline in the 2000s. They had CNN Go, which is an app that still exists, but it really just allows you to stream the live cable network through authenticating your cable login. They had Great Big Story, which ended up shutting down a few years ago. And so they never really nailed a smart streaming direct-to-consumer app. And so executives said, we're going to do it. In 2021, they started to make a lot of moves towards that. At this point, they hired Alex McCallum of ProductWiz from the New York Times. They acquired an app called Canopy, which sort of supported news aggregation apps,

and they were ready to build. But the one thing they may not have seen coming was that their parent's parent company, AT&T, was being straddled with so much debt from its media acquisitions that it was looking to spin off WarnerMedia, which is CNN's parent. And in May, we found out that the decision was made to spin it off and merge it with Discovery, which is run by David Zasloff. The challenge here became Discovery's streaming bet was to build one giant general entertainment app by combining HBO Max and Discovery Plus. But they didn't really have in their long-term vision standalone smaller subscription apps. And that's because they've tried that before. Discovery had launched Golf TV. They had a Food Network app that were all subscriptions, and they were tough to build. And so when it came time for the merger to close, you had a bunch of different things that made Discovery very wary about introducing CNN+.

First, in February, CNN's longtime leader, Jeff Zucker, had to resign in a shocking resignation. And that really put Discovery executives on edge. You know, he was the person that would be leading this charge. He's no longer going to be there. And then leading up to the merger, AT&T was very conservative. They didn't want to talk to Discovery because they were afraid of regulatory scrutiny. And so Discovery didn't have great visibility into what was happening at CNN+. And by the time they did in April,

when that merger closed, what they saw was CNN had poured hundreds of millions of dollars into an app that they worried would not become profitable within the four-year timeline that CNN had sketched out. And instead of waiting to make the decision whether or not they were going to support this effort or not, discovery execs thought that what would be safest would be just to pull the plug early and that way they could save heartache down the line. And so it's an unfortunate thing, hundreds of jobs are likely going to be lost. A lot of hundreds of millions of dollars were already spent and wasted. But I guess the silver lining here is that Discovery took quick and decisive action as opposed to dragging this thing on a few more months. Yeah, I mean, you sort of have to respect the fact that they, you know, looked at the writing on the wall and the early numbers, which were reported by you and others, which were very poor, you know, fewer than 10,000 people watching in a day, which is, you know, really pathetic, especially when you have that level of spend on marketing. But why did CNN

push forward with this and decide to keep the launch date where it was to start with when, you know, it wasn't a secret. We talked about it here. I know you reported on it as well, that Discovery preferred to go in this direction, that it was likely that the CNN plus streaming service would be bundled inside of a larger streaming offering. So why did they push forward anyway, knowing that this was very much a possibility? Well, I think you have to look at the number. We reported that there were 150,000 people that decided to pay within those two and a half weeks. I don't think CNN executives saw that as a huge failure.

I think the challenge is, like any type of subscription streaming, you have to inject a lot of capital up front before you can get the payoff later. And that includes marketing. And so it wasn't necessarily that they thought this thing was going to be so awful. Although you're right, some of the daily viewership numbers were low. I think it was just that the amount of money they would need to continue to spend to get the numbers to go up would be exorbitant. And that's what Discovery was afraid of. Remember, they're running what is a legacy profitable cable business. It's a different model than something like Netflix or even like an Uber, where you can afford to inject a lot of capital upfront for some sort of payoff later. And so I think that's the reason why there is a discrepancy.

CNN wanted to move forward. One, I think there was a little bit of, you know, sort of emotional decision-making there, right? They wanted to stake a claim in CNN's digital future before the merger. But I also think, too, is that they thought that this was probably successful in a way Discovery just did not. Right. I mean, Sarah, what does the broader cable industry look at this, and what's their takeaway? I mean, this is something which is a big problem for them, and I talk about it all the time, which is that their main value add on linear is live TV, which they're not allowed to put on streaming. And a lot of their content on streaming, I mean, I'll say editorially, you don't have to say it, I don't think it's very good. So what exactly are they trying to do to plan for their future?

Because I'm not a genius. You know, anybody can look at the upcoming negotiation for live TV, streaming, and linear and say they're in a real problem in terms of what their future is going to look like. So everyone's obviously going about streaming as their future, but they're doing different strategies. So one strategy is that direct-to-consumer subscription model. And some cable networks have been absolutely brilliant about spinning that forward, most notably HBO. HBO was a premium cable network that they've been able to spin into a smart direct-to-consumer subscription. The other option is free and

ad-supported. And I think it's notable that Netflix said this past earnings that they're going to experiment with an ad supported tier. And that's just because if you take a look at consumer spend, consumers have said consistently over the past few years, even throughout the pandemic, they're only willing to spend around $40 a month on subscription streaming services. Other than that, it's going to have to be free ad supported. And so I think what's going to be the future for CNN, Discovery is actually probably going to double down on CNN's free ad supported app. You have to remember, CNN's core digital app is one of the most widely consumed news apps in the world. It's one of the most widely trafficked. So they'd actually be wise to put some video on there, sell some premium video ads against it.

I think for other major cable networks, it really depends on sports or not. If you're really invested in live sports, this is a tough one. I think ESPN has done a pretty good job. You put some rights on streaming, some on linear, and you kind of have to do a balancing act. But if you don't have sports at this point, pretty much the biggest strategy is get as much of your content as you can on streaming, whether it's through an ad-supported streaming venture or subscription. And even if it's not the most profitable part of your business right now, what you will have done is you will have planted the seeds, have consumer familiarity, have advertiser relationships, so that one day when that cable bundle sort of does collapse, you're at least ready to take on the future. Yeah, I think that's well said. I mean, one of the things that irritated me, I saw some hot takes that were like, oh, you know, subscription-based streaming news just doesn't work.

And I think we're here to tell you that that's not the case. Thank you. But, you know, it is noteworthy that, look, CNN, Fox and MSNBC all have their own streaming efforts. CNN Plus was the highest spend and the splashiest rollout. And so it got a lot of attention that the numbers weren't, you know, very impressive. And, of course, it collapsed almost instantly. But the MSNBC streaming service and the Fox News streaming service also don't seem to be exactly doing gangbusters. So what do you think it is about their formulas that just doesn't seem to have much consumer appeal?

I don't know the answer to that because I don't know the numbers. Like Fox has never revealed any people subscribe to Fox Nation. I don't know how many people are viewing MSNBC's Peacock portal. But what I will tell you is you bring up a good point, which is we sort of have this barbell phenomenon. On one end, you have massive scale and really general interest services. And on the other, you have niche. And I would put breaking points in niche. Niche is doing excellent right now. If you can cater to a very highly engaged audience, they're going to spend a lot of time with you.

They're willing to give spend a lot of time with you. They're willing to give you a lot of money and they're going to be very engaged because they like the very specific thing that you're providing for them. The problem is when you try to hit the middle, if you're not super broad and scaled or you're not super niche, you're going to have an issue. Now, when it comes to entertainment or leisure, it's pretty understandable where that barbell lies. There are going to be very, very, very niche entertainment subscription services that do well. My favorite example is Crunchyroll, which is bought by Sony, theater to anime fans. Great example of a niche service that does well. The problem with news is niche is really hard to

figure out. You either lean into personality programming, which you guys aren't necessarily political personality programming. You don't have necessarily a personality programming, which you guys aren't necessarily political personality programming. You don't have necessarily a political take, but you do have very strong personalities. I mean, your brands are ones that I've been following since the Hill and people know you as two distinct people. And so that was why I would put you in niche. In the news sector, if you're not B2B, you know, catering to someone's professional news, if you're not sort of personality programming like you guys are, then you have to be massive and broad. And the challenge with CNN is they actually should have and could have been massive and broad. But the way that the

subscription streaming service was rolled out, I don't think they had the broadest appeal possible. You could blame that on marketing. You can blame that on competition. I don't know what it was, but it didn't go as broad as it probably would have needed to have gone. I think that's really well said. Very interesting analysis. Yep. Sarah. Sarah, thank you so much. Thank you for the great reporting that we have relied on here on this show many, many times. Appreciate it very much. We rely on you a lot. Everybody go subscribe to Sarah's newsletter. We'll have a link down there in the description. I read it all the time. So thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you. I was just going to say, I feel the same way. Like when I have a question about how real people are thinking about things, I call you Sager. So I appreciate it.

Well, the appreciation goes both ways. Appreciate it very much. Take care, Sarah. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. I just think that this is an important time to highlight. We just had that conversation with Sarah, which is, look, we're trying to build out something new. It's true what she said. Original show, it really was just you and me. But now we've got Jordan Sheridan as somebody who's on the ground. That's a real big foray for us, on the ground, actual reporting. Now we've got Maximilian Alvarez, who'll also be doing some traveling. He's breaking down labor phenomenon for us.

Matt Stoller, I mean, I can't even tell you guys. I can't tell you everything. But we're getting some real notice in Washington, and we're going to be having a real effect. The ability of our audience in order to make comments on the FTC and the DOJ to blow out the record is crazy. The fact that we had that level of impact. Marshall's interviews and Kyle's clubs, like all of this stuff is going and building something that all of you enable.

So I just want to thank you all very much. Yes. And if you can help us, we really appreciate it because every day when we look at that balance sheet, we're like, okay, how can we add even more value to the people who pay? We also did make a small investment on behalf of the Breaking Points community.

Due to interests from all of you, I had pointed out on Twitter, you may recall, that at the launch of CNN+, which they hailed as the most historic moment in CNN history since the launch of the network Ted Turner back in whenever.

So in honor of that historic occasion, they actually sold a limited number of NFTs capturing those first historic moments, Sagar. So tell the people what you have done. I am happy to announce that on behalf of Breaking Points Incorporated, we have made an investment that all of you own. It's not just us.

Breaking Points Inc. is the technical owner. It's the benefit of the whole community. But it's the benefit of the entire community. Let's put this up there on the screen. We are now a proud owner of the CNN Plus NFT. I wanted to make sure that we, all of us, were proud owners of one of the most embarrassing failures in the history of CNN.

It is historic. They were right. Yeah, they were historic. As you can see, we are number 148 out of 250. The best part, Crystal, is that they were still marketing and selling it on their NFT site even after the thing had completely failed. And guys, they hadn't even sold

all of them yet. There were still like 83 left in order to be purchased. I want to meet the 140 or so people that purchased these in honest to God good faith. They might be like us, though. Yeah, they might probably be like us. They might be like us. We're like, this is hilarious.

This is really fun. In terms of its cringe. But look, now we own it. They can never take it away. They can never hide their failure. So for the rest of all time, perhaps we'll roll it out every once in a while, the fact that we are the owners of this. Thank you for this non-fungible token.

As they say, it's ingrained in the blockchain. Forever, forever your failures. We are now a part of it at the community. You can really just feel us all coming together and making sure that we can remind them of their failure for all time. Can I just address, there was a criticism of like, how can you celebrate this failure? I'm glad you did this. Nobody wishes ill for like the, you know, low-level producers and the crew. I feel terrible for them. Yeah, absolutely. Listen, no one wishes

them ill. I think about CNN the way I think about any industry which is damaging to the country or the world or the climate, which is, listen, the workers should be protected. They deserve a just transition. But ultimately, if your commitment is to the workers, not to the industry, then you can view this dispassionately and say, CNN and CNN Plus are bad for the country. So yes, I cheer for them to fail. And I do that unapologetically. Also, spare me your crocodile tears. You people don't care. If our show had failed upon launch, they would have loved it. They would have laughed their asses off.

You were talking about this. If Daily Wire goes down tomorrow, they would love it. If Joe Rogan... They definitely would be like, oh, the poor workers of Daily Wire. It's like, screw you. Yeah, and CNN is also an ideological project. So, you know, I mean, it's, again, I definitely am not, like, cheering for the workers

to struggle and fail. And they got a decent, like, CNN seems to be treating them decently well in terms of, you know, what their future is going to look like going forward. But do I cheer for the collapse of an industry that is bad for the country? Yes, I do. Yeah, I do cheer for it. I don't want to see people who are unemployed. I have no, in terms of the workers, the multi-millionaires, Chris Wallace and Casey Hunt and all them, who got fat stacks in order to go over there. You know, that's on you. Casey, you had a show on MSNBC. You gave it up for your fake little gig over at CNN+.

Chris, you were host of the most popular Sunday show, and you gave it up because you thought that your show interviewing Dolly Parton was going to be so great. I dissent. I love Dolly Parton. I know you love Dolly, but look, nobody needs to pay for that. Okay, she can come on,

and we can all watch it for free. Okay? But do you think that they're going to give Chris Wallace the Cuomo slot now? The 9 p.m. hour? No, I don't think so. That slot needs opinion. He doesn't do opinion.

I don't see it gets possible. But don't you think, because the new bosses seem to be leaning more into, we don't want to do opinion as much anymore. We want to do more hard news. It's possible. It could fit into that. He's a big personality, right?

I mean, I think as we learned with CNN+, he doesn't actually have a big. Yeah, he doesn't have a big following, but he has a big elite name. Yeah, I guess I could see it. Probably would be the best. They wouldn't have to spend any more money, right, in order to go and hire somebody since they have somebody here on the bench. So I guess that would make sense. Casey, obviously, will also probably fit into that. But I think it's incredibly embarrassing for them in order to fail on such a national scale and so publicly.

They should have stuck where they were and they would have been absolutely fine. Like I said, have feeling for the actual workers who are affected by this and are not some multimillionaires. For them, I have no sympathy whatsoever. Like I said, have feeling for the actual workers who are affected by this and not some multimillionaires. For them, I have no sympathy whatsoever. Yeah, I cheer the death of the industry, not for the workers themselves. I believe in all of them fighting dignity, and hopefully maybe we're big enough one day we can hire them. But in terms of the talent and the ideological project, no, I have no sympathy whatsoever. Also, in terms of the NFT, I thought it was only fair that given that they bought those dynamically inserted ads which ended up on our podcast, that we show

the love, we funnel back a bit of the $50. So, I think we're even, CNN. Yeah, there you go. There you go. I'm sure those ads really paid off. Really good return on investment there, guys. A lot of brainiacs over there. Thank you for buying those ads and for funding

our ability in order to keep building this and in order to take you down. So we're very happy about it. And thank you all for watching. We really appreciate it. Love you guys. See you back here tomorrow. This is an iHeart Podcast.