The Chris Cuomo Project - Ousting Mike Johnson: Controversy or Nontroversy?

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

Chris Cuomo navigates another series of potential news controversies to distinguish between substantial stories and nontroversies, including a possible ousting of House Speaker Mike Johnson initiated by Marjorie Taylor Greene, the fluctuating stock price of Donald Trump’s Trump Media, a Boeing whistleblower warning about more airplane safety issues, and Marques Brownlee’s review of the Humane AI Pin. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday: https://linktr.ee/cuomoproject Join Chris Ad-Free On Substack: http://thechriscuomoproject.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Controversy, non-traversy. What is there going on in this miasma, this big cloud of media that we love to kind of dip in and out of, that I believe is real, as a matter of fact, or simply fugazy? ["The Big Bang"] ["The Big Bang"]

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PrizePix, man, if you like DFS, this is the way to go. America's number one fantasy sports app. Three million members, why? Easy, exciting, plenty of action, makes watching the sports, makes watching the players more fun. You just pick more or less on two or more player stats, and if you're any good, winnings roll in.

And now, you can win up to 100 times your money on prize picks with as little as four correct picks. You can turn 100 into 10,000. You can turn 10 bucks into a thousand. Basketball, hockey, college, you know, all the different entries today on PrizePicks, America's number one fantasy sports app. You ready to get started with PrizePicks?

Download the app today, use code CCP, you'll get a first deposit match up to 100 bucks. Again, download the app today, use the code CCP, you'll get a first deposit match up to 100 bucks. Again, download the app today, use the code CCP, you get a first deposit match up to 100 bucks. Prize picks. Pick more, pick less. It's that easy. I'm Chris Cuomo. Welcome to the Chris Cuomo Project where Greg Ott and I, my fearless, peerless producer, anderless. And farther to be soon soon. Peerless. Go through big headlines and I either lift them up

or knock them down. So let's get after it. This is from, actually Chris, you're about to go out of town. I don't know if you want to put this in the podcast, but we're recording this ahead of time because you're going on a trip very soon. Do you want to tell the audience where you're going? Are you trying to guilt me?

No, I'm not, no, going on a trip very soon. Do you want to tell the audience where you're going? Are you trying to guilt me? No, I'm not. No, I think it's very fun. It is my son Mario's senior year spring break. So I'm taking him down to a place he loves in the Bahamas. And you're the chaperone? No, I'm the father. Well, you said you're going with them. You're going to be, that's an act of chaperoning, isn't it?

Like you'll be- No, because a chaperone would mean that I'm going with a group of kids that I'm overseeing. What, you're just going with Mario? I'm going with Mario and another family who has a son that he's friends with. Okay, so I thought this was like a school, a group of a bunch of kids going.

This is just like a two family trip. Again, no. It is not a group trip. That's what I said, that's what I thought it was. And I said, no, it's not that. Yes. Anyway, I don't know. I mean, you see what I'm dealing with?

I thought I'd start things off on a light note. I guess I already drove this thing into a ditch. Are you going to jet ski? I have a jet ski. Oh, cool. Thanks. I am not a particular fan of jet skis. I'm much more of a boat person. Mario loves the jet ski, does tricks on the jet ski,

loves to do it. Will we jet ski in the Bahamas? I doubt it. I think that it's gonna be, even though he's a big shot now and a big dude, I think he and his buddy are gonna be into the water slides and into going out and meeting other people down there and I will do as little as possible.

Are you, will we see you in the water slide? Will a picture come out in the post of Chris Cuomo going down the- I was talking to my buddy I'm going down with and I kind of said it to him like, well, you know, you're not going on it. And he was like, well, yeah, I love the water slides. You're not going to go?

And I am less comfortable sharing slides with that many wet people. But I'm probably wind up going a little bit myself. Yeah, just that brown streak that goes right down the center. I'm trying to avoid that. Well, here's something you can't avoid, the news. This is a headline from this week, Washington Post, momentum builds to oust Johnson

from House speakership. The article goes on, how Speaker Mike Johnson's job is in serious jeopardy as too far right lawmakers are threatening to oust him after the embattled Republican leader proposed a complex plan intended to fund key foreign allies during wartime. And so Marjorie Taylor Greene,

another guy are trying to get him. As soon as you say Marjorie Taylor Greene, this thing is dead. Okay. Dead as in controversy, non-traversy? What do you say? Non-traversy. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not,

I yes, I know the mechanism that if you get a call in a second, you can start a process. The Republicans are not going to go through the McCarthy disaster again. The motion to vacate. Yeah, and it was a disaster for them. Mike Johnson has gotten the tip of the hat from former President Trump.

That goes a long way, especially with MTG. I'm sure that Trump either directly or indirectly told her to shut up. And that's why we haven't heard about it as much since the meeting with Trump. And I think this is the media playing with headlines. They love to point to potential instability in one of the parties and I don't think it's going to happen. Nontroversy next! Hold on. Thomas Massie of Kentucky Republican stood and called on Johnson to resign after announcing he had signed on to Marjorie Taylor Greene's plan to oppose him. Yeah, it's not enough.

You think this is all just the media talking about it because it's very easy to gin out? No, and I think it's fringe. Look, this is the problem. This is what's motivating the game. Fringe thinking, fringe minority elements getting amplified and magnified in relevance and attention and they are as a result are co-opting the dialogue but not necessarily the dynamic. I don't think Johnson's gonna go down the McCarthy Road. This is from CNBC. Today the day we're recording. Trump media shares rise after days of declines. From

the other day Trump media stock price plummets Monday as company files to issue millions of shares. This is about this Trump Media company that owns Truth Social, and now they're saying they're also going to try to get into media at large and start putting on hosting shows that have been canceled in other places. I'm wondering if you think this gambit from Trump is a controversy and non-traversy in the context of A, selling shares through this like sort of shell, it's not a shell company, it was called a SPAC,

that's the way it came to be acquired, or maybe you can speak to that, but then this idea of like, he's just using it to raise money for his campaign. He got a pre-existing public shell as the operative entity, the holding company for the media business. And that's something that's done.

It's an expedited process. You wind up playing a premium, but you can do that. He's got to be careful though. Right now it's a non-traversy, but it can create controversy if he winds up seeing to be a front running a stock, which it's interesting that CNBC is reporting on it when they've been accused

of front running stocks in the past. So he's got to be careful about what he does. And as with most things, he is not careful and that's why he gets in trouble. Can you elaborate a little more on what you think he's doing with this company? Right now, I don't think he knows what he's doing. If he gets people in there who can actually run a business

and build a business, that's one thing. He's never been good at that. Again, it is an illusion that he is good at running businesses. He has never run a successful business except his brand as a personal person who gets paid to have his name on things, okay? He doesn't grow hotel businesses.

He doesn't grow golf course, club. He does not do those things. Other people do them. And it's not, well things. Other people do them. And it's not, well, it's always someone else. No, they're managers, they're operators, and then they're marketers. He's a marketer. He's a salesman.

Okay? Now, if he keeps juicing his own stock and saying, oh, we're going to go big, we're going to do this, we're going to do that. And people buy because of him, that's, he's got to be careful about what the solicitation is. If they're just buying it to show support for him, that's fine. Not a great investment, but it's okay.

Maybe not. What about, I don't think it's a controversy necessarily. I'm kind of answering this question about the post-du, but like, what about this as a meme stock? Like people treating it like game stock, essentially just it kind of being a fun thing to invest in. Like, do you see that being problematic for the, for somebody who wants to essentially support the guy,

but they ended up buying a stock that loses them a lot of money. Like, is that a controversy, non-traversy, something worth discussing? I mean, right now, no. You know, I don't want to feed any perception of it before we know what it is. Right now, people are largely buying the shares

of that company to show support for Donald Trump. That's what they're doing. There is no real business to be investing in. There's nothing to look at except for truth social, which is getting destroyed with losses. So you're already well over the book value of the company, and that's okay. That happens with losses. So you're already well over the book value of the company and that's okay that happens with companies it's just not a great investment.

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When we made the switch to Cozy Earth, I noticed the difference. I did not know that fabric or textiles could really be temperature sensitive, meaning if it's cold, they keep you warm. If it's warm, they can kind of cool you off. I did not know that. I know it now because I have Cozy Earth, okay? So this Mother's Day, why don't you treat the mamas in your life to the luxury they deserve with Cozy Earth bedding and sleepwear and prioritize her self-care and sleep health?

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ccp that's drinkag1.com ccp check it out this is from NBC News on April 16th. Whistleblower says Boeing should stop production of 787 Dreamliner due to safety issue. A Boeing engineer turned whistleblower who contends the aerospace giants 787 Dreamliner is unsafe to fly due to assembly flaws doubled down on his claims on Tuesday,

saying the plane could fall apart and quote, drop to the ground mid flight unless the alleged safety problems are addressed. I guess my controversy, non-troversy question is like, Boeing as a company, like how they are, there was a merger many years ago in which it was alleged that like this one company kind of pushed up the engineers for a bunch of pencil pushers

and the company is like obviously reaping what it sowed, you know, based on what those reports say. How do you take Boeing's basic, the way this iconic American company is now like literally, you know, falling apart? Are they falling apart? Well, that door. Well, that's one part on one aircraft. Yeah, but that's falling apart, so I'm not wrong. Well, you said the company's falling apart.

Don't you really mean this one part on this one plane needs to be reassessed? Couldn't you point to that example as like, oh yes, I see what he meant with that. Yeah, I just think it's very unfair. Oh. And here we expose the game, we don't play it. I don't think Boeing is falling apart.

I think that they will be getting government contracts well after your child is here and has decided how to live her life and has children of her own. And I think that safety is balanced with profits way too often. And there are people who literally study the chances of this going wrong and how many lives

and how much money versus the money to fix it. And that is fucked up. It's also how business works. Yeah, kind of in like automobile manufacturing, like they do the recall. It's like they'll calculate, hey, how much more money will it cost to send all these back home versus like, same thing.

Although, you know, unless it's like the Pinto gas tank, the catastrophic nature of problems with airplanes is a very different proposition than things that are on the ground. So you would think that it would air on the side of caution, which they tell us they do. That is why they don't have anywhere near the accidents that you do on the ground, that it's relatively safe,

given the relative assessment of how many flights you have and the number of accidents and miscues, but there's always room for improvement and there's always a chance that they are cutting corners the wrong ways, and that's what this Boeing case of this door raises as a concern. Well, this is not the door case. So he's talking about the 787 and he says, quote, when asked if he'd put his

family on one of those planes, he said, right now I would not. The 737 Max 9, that's the one where the doors are falling off or the door fell off. This is a completely different model. It's a model that's prevalent in the airline industry. So I guess I'm saying is the controversy, the fact that there's rots possibly inside of Boeing it's not just a one model flew through the cracks. It's that yeah, I got it They look they have a problem. They got to fix it. I don't see this as a controversy meaning. It's the end of Boeing They are very important to the American economy and to the US government for good or bad or right or wrong.

So they need to fix it and people should stay on them and it should be reported on and they should be held to account. Finally, this is kind of an odd one. We haven't really gone down this route before. Do you know who Marques Brownlee is? Who? Marques Brownlee. No.

He's a very famous YouTube tech reviewer. He's been doing it since he was a child. He's very prominent these days. Okay. And he just reviewed a product known as the Humane AI Pin. Have you seen the AI Pin? No. It looks like a little match book

that you put on your shirt, like a broach. And it kind of runs like a chat GPT things or like a Siri thing. So you just wear this all day. It's got a camera, it's got a microphone and you just go, hey, it's got a, so it's like, hey, what's on the desk in front of me? And it thinks and it goes, ah, there's a keyboard,

ah, there's a mouse. Like it just gives you like Siri style answers basically. It's supposed to be more complex than that. But he just put up this video calling it the worst product I've ever reviewed. And it's causing a bit of a firestorm in the online tech space because people are upset that he is not essentially deferring to

the manufacturer's opinion that this is a cutting edge product, this is really nice. He's basically calling it like it is and saying, this is a piece of shit. Shouldn't he have always done that? And is he now getting a comeuppance from having been an industry lackey all along where he was just getting paid to support popular products

and now he's taking a stand against what's popular? On the contrary, he's actually been known for being pretty honest in his reviews. So then why is this one coming after him? Because some Twitter guy, his name is Daniel Vasalo, he's got like, I don't know, a couple hundred thousand Twitter followers. I find it distasteful, almost unethical to say this

when you have 18 million subscribers. Hard to explain why, but with great reach comes great responsibility, potentially killing someone else's nascent project reeks of carelessness. First, do no harm. So that's his- First of all, it is not do no harm. Look, this guy may have a couple of hundred thousand followers. I don't know how many he bought. I don't know how many actually pay attention to him, but that doesn't make him an expert or a

need-to-know person on any level, okay? Vassallo. I don't give a shit what he says. I don't know who he is. I don't know who any of these people are, but I will tell you this. Many people know who MKVHD is. But I'm saying if he has great reach, then is there a responsibility comes with it? I don't know, depends on why people follow him. I don't know anything about the guy, but there are plenty of people with huge reach

who people don't go to for responsible information. They go for entertainment, they go for something to be intriguing, they go to get something first. They just like his take, you know It could be a combination and if he doesn't like something then that's his responsibility is to say it if his review Practice were to do no harm then what uses he as a critic if he's not going to say anything that gives you actual Access into it then what is he doing?

It's this this other guy trying to bite into his action and getting people like us to talk about him to make him more relevant? Fuck that. Do no harm is the standard for a doctor. Okay? Not for some guy who reviews stuff on social media. This Vassallo guy continues, he says, MKBHD is not the market. He significantly influences the market. If a single person can affect the stock price of a company, we usually restrict what they can say or when.

MK should be cognizant of the unconstrained power he has for now. I'm bringing this all up because I don't think you give a shit about AI pins on your shirt. None. I think it speaks to more like, this is a guy who's a sensibly journalist because he's giving presumably unbiased reviews of products.

And someone is accusing a journalist, accusing him of like, it's not really a bias, it's saying you're too influential and you could tank this product. And I find that to be like, well, too bad. Like, he's just doing his job, which is- He's just trying to bite into the guy's action. That's what's happening, okay?

This Vassallo guy, Massallo guy, whatever his name is, he is trying to glom off of this situation to get some relevancy. And if the other guy is smart, he will give him no oxygen. We have seen this at a very high form from Megyn Kelly. Megyn Kelly exists to attack people, to draw people's outrage. And that's how she builds.

She's like a screed machine. There is a currency in social media where you just attack and people come to you. It's like splashing your hand in the water and a shark comes, you know? There's certain people who are activated by this kind of energy. And if the guy has an opinion and he doesn't like the know? There's certain people who are activated by this kind of energy. And if the guy has an opinion

and he doesn't like the review, that's one thing. But to try to make it like this guy is abusive and wrong and he shouldn't have it, what he's really saying is, yeah, give it to me. I want that attention. I want that reach and power. Earn it. Well, you're about to go to the Bahamas.

Don't splash your hand in the water like that because you might attract a shark. You gotta be careful. Yeah, there's sharks everywhere. But I am, because I'm splashing with this hand, but I got the one inch death punch ready with this hand. You think you would punch a shark and it would die? You think you would kill a shark?

Do you know how big a shark is? Watch my eyes. That's what does it. You, you, I'm, you think if you were to, first of all, what about like the friction underwater? We'll try. None, right through it. Look at my hands, look at my fingers.

Look at the angle. Ta, ta, ta. Okay, so we're not gonna see photos of Chris Cuomo going on a slide in the Bahamas. We're gonna see you beating the shit out of a shark underwater. What would you do if a shark came at you? It's, my time is up.

Big shout out, man. This guy, he's got a victim. Go Big shout out man. He's got a victim written all over. No, I mean look what am I gonna do? Reason with it? Yeah. I'm telling you I couldn't make that work. I don't think you could make it work. I'm telling you one each. You're a strong guy. I don't think you're gonna kill a shark. Wow. Aluminium. Solid steel. The bumper on my car isn't as thick as this. Controversy or non-traversy, half of it is in the fun of chewing on these situations and trying to figure out, are they getting over on us or is it our turn to get over on them? Thank you very much for being with us on The Chris Cuomo Project.

Thank you for subscribing and following. If you want it ad free, go to Substack and you'll get to see my long COVID reporting and my own personal journey there as well. I'll see you at NewsNation, 8P and 11P every weekday night for now. Let's get after it. after.