The Philip DeFranco Show - PDS 4.29 Jeff Wittek David Dobrik "Money Milking" Scandal, The Most Hated Man In Australia, & More

Starting point is 00:00:00 Ghent is a veteran of the fire department in Lancaster County, serving much of that time here at McDonald Green Volunteer Fire Department. A few days ago, he took to Facebook and posted, quote, Dear police, stop responding to these black neighborhoods. They will eventually kill each other and the fake news won't have a story. I guess it was racially insensitive. I didn't mean it. I did not mean it that way. How would you mean it then, Ken? Unpack it for us. Explain where the misunderstanding lies.

Starting point is 00:00:29 Jesus. Everyone's so big and bad on Facebook and then local news pulls up and they're like, well, well, well, what actually happened? So the nuance being missed here. Anyway, hey, welcome back to the Philip DeFranco Show. It is Thursday, April 29th, 2021. Hit that like button.

Starting point is 00:00:43 Definitely subscribe, a brand new subscriber for the month of April. At the end of the month, we 29th, 2021. Hit that like button. Definitely subscribe, a brand new subscriber for the month of April. At the end of the month, we're almost right there. So almost your last shot is gonna win at random $5,000. Also, friendly reminder, you only got four days left to snag some of the awesome at shopdefranco.com and then it goes bye-bye forever. Yeah, with that said, let's just jump into it.

Starting point is 00:00:59 The first thing that we're gonna talk about today, it's easily one of the most requested stories and it allows me to kind of share news, provide an update, but also maybe a clarification. So I've gotten a lot of requests to do an update on the Jeff Wittek, David Dobrik story. Jeff Wittek of course has his whole docuseries about how he got injured.

Starting point is 00:01:13 Spoiler alert, David Dobrik accidentally swung him into a metal excavator, just maiming his face. You know, in the last time we covered it, we talked about the revelation, how it's amazing that Dobrik didn't end up in jail because I mean, this just oozes of criminal negligence. Since our last coverage, when it came out with another episode,

Starting point is 00:01:28 some saying, why didn't you cover that? And it's because there's not really any sort of legal or business angle to it. This is no shade towards those channels because they are in high demand, but this is not a primarily drama-based channel. If there's a business element to it, if there's a legal element to it,

Starting point is 00:01:44 if there's a precedent setting element to it, we're going to cover it. But if it's just about like Jeff's feelings towards a friend and feeling betrayed and going through all these emotions, that's not something that I'm going to cover on this show. That said, an interesting business element to this story has come out. We have seen a number of different reactions.

Starting point is 00:02:00 And it touched on this interesting element to the story, which is I've seen some people criticizing Jeff Wittek for milking this situation. There's even a viral TikTok about it. Oh my God, he is milking this. Oh yeah, you're saying he's milking this? There's episodes to this, like what? Dude, if someone interviews you,

Starting point is 00:02:15 you're telling me you can't get some views off of that? You can get some views, but three episodes? Since then, we've seen outlets like Tubefilter putting out articles saying, "'Jeff Wittek's Patreon account gets 37,000 supporters "'in 10 days with docuseries rollout. That's at least 2.2 million in annual revenue. They say at least because on the Patreon,

Starting point is 00:02:30 they have subscriptions of $5, $10, $20 plus. With the reality being that in all likelihood, if all those people stay subscribed, then the number is probably much larger than 2.2 million. And ultimately with this aspect of the story, what I would say is to those saying that Jeff Wittek is milking this situation, that he's taking advantage of it

Starting point is 00:02:48 and profiteering off the situation, fine. If anyone should be able to, it's him. Yes, I understand that Jeff Wittek is an adult who made a choice, but I still very much see him as the victim of this toxic situation. And if anyone should be able to benefit and grow from it, I think it should be him. I mean, it's part of the reason why I didn't run

Starting point is 00:03:07 with leaked videos when it was kind of a known thing that he didn't want the stuff out there. And then you throw in YouTube age gating and cracking down on his content, so he's not able to share his story to as many people. And yeah, the Patreon just makes sense. But hey, this is the Philip DeFranco Show. You don't have to agree with me.

Starting point is 00:03:21 That's the story, my opinion. And then I'd love to know what you think, whether you agree or disagree with me. And then let's talk about our douche bag of the day. A man who has been called by local media, the most hated man in Australia, 42 year old Richard Poussey. And Richard, if you don't know,

Starting point is 00:03:36 he was reportedly pulled over for speeding down a highway in his Porsche last April. And as four Victoria police officers prepared his arrest, the driver of a semi-trailer swerved out of its lane and struck all of them. Though Richard reportedly avoided getting injured because he had been urinating beside roadside bushes at the time.

Starting point is 00:03:50 But it's what he did after the accident that has so many people hating him. He remained at the scene of the accident for several minutes to film the officers who had been hit. All four officers were killed, though experts believe the one who was pinned under the semi-trailer was likely alive as Poussey began filming.

Starting point is 00:04:06 For around three minutes, he walked around the crash. He zoomed in on injuries. He mocked the officers on video. His commentary included profanity and remarks like, "'He's smashed. Justice. "'Absolutely amazing and beautiful.'" When a bystander came to aid the officers and asked Richard to help, he replied,

Starting point is 00:04:22 "'They're dead,' and continued filming. "'He reportedly made no attempts to assist them, "'then left the scene and asked Richard to help. He replied, they're dead and continued filming. He reportedly made no attempts to assist them, then left the scene and drove home. With police ultimately finding that footage after his arrest and learned that he had shared it with other people. Ultimately what we ended up seeing was Poussey later pleading guilty to outraging public decency,

Starting point is 00:04:36 along with a drug possession and speeding offense. With him ultimately being sentenced to 10 months in prison and $1,000 fine and had his driver's license suspended for two years, which is stand out for a few reasons. One, because it's actually the first time the outraging public decency charge has been prosecuted in the state since 1963. With the sentencing judge saying that his conduct

Starting point is 00:04:54 was heartless, cruel, and disgraceful. Though, he noted that Poussey had a personality disorder, which might explain some of his behavior. And two, a lot of people think that this punishment is actually very small. Especially because he's already spent nearly 300 days behind bars when the sentence was ordered. Though, actually, according to the New York Times, he is likely to remain in custody for unrelated matters. But still, families of the slain officers and much of the general public were furious over the sentencing,

Starting point is 00:05:15 with many on social media calling it too lenient. Chief of the Victoria Police Association Wayne Gatt even saying, He is a worthless individual that lacks any human trait. Each and every one of us will face our mortality one day. When his day comes, I hope that he faces the same coldness and the same callousness with which he provided my members when they faced theirs.

Starting point is 00:05:39 But you also have others agreeing with and pointing to a piece by Rebecca Kavanaugh, a court reporter for the Herald Sun, which explained the sentencing and noted that being a downright despicable scumbag devoid of any redeeming features, unfortunately isn't an offense. Though of note here, as far as the biggest sentence,

Starting point is 00:05:54 you had the driver of the truck reportedly had actually been impaired by drugs and he was sleep deprived when his vehicle hit the officers. He ended up actually being sentenced to 22 years in prison after pleading guilty to four counts of culpable driving, causing death, three charges of drug trafficking, and one count of possessing illicit drugs.

Starting point is 00:06:09 But ultimately with this story, I do want to know your thoughts regarding the sentencing of Richard Poussey. Where do you land on it? Do you think the sentence was right or no, it wasn't enough? Or do you think that he should not have been charged? Any and all thoughts and the reasons you have them, I'd love to know.

Starting point is 00:06:23 But from that, let's take a second to pay some bills and thank the fantastic sponsor of today's show, Keeps. You know, two out of three guys will experience some form of male pattern baldness by the time that they're 35. And everyone's got that someone in their life, right? That brother, uncle, or friend dealing with hair loss. And if you don't wanna go down that road,

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Starting point is 00:07:05 It is that easy. So if you're ready to take action and prevent hair loss, go to keeps.com slash franco, or just click that link in the description down below to receive 50% off your first order. Then for our daily, which celebrity are people angry at today news? We had Miley Cyrus facing some backlash.

Starting point is 00:07:19 And this in part because it was announced over the last weekend that Elon Musk would be hosting Saturday Night Live on May 8th with Miley as the musical guest. You know, Elon Musk can be a polarizing figure. Or some see and love him as the billionaire genius behind Tesla and SpaceX. But on the other hand, you have people saying,

Starting point is 00:07:35 no, he's just kind of this egomaniacal billionaire. I mean, he denied the severity of the coronavirus pandemic early on. He spread misinformation on the topic. He prematurely opened Tesla factories amid lockdown. He called that Thailand diver that was helping, you know, those kids trapped in a cave, a pedophile. Among other things, right? Some people just going, why are you giving a random billionaire access to hosting SNL, right? And this is just a quick scrub through Twitter. There's

Starting point is 00:07:58 many issues. And even on a casual scrub, you can find some cast members kind of giving subtle criticisms. People like Aidy Bryant, who shared a tweet from Bernie Sanders on Instagram about how the 50 wealthiest Americans own more wealth in the bottom half of the country. As well as Bowen Yang responding to Elon's kind of weird tweet saying that he was gonna find out just how live SNL really is. With Bowen writing, what the fuck does this even mean?

Starting point is 00:08:18 But then with this, we saw kind of the outrage and anger get retargeted towards Miley Cyrus. And this is part there because she engaged with Elon on Twitter, kind of talking about this wrecking ball parody, people who don't like Elon Musk, seeing this as kind of Miley Cyrus co-signing him as a person with tweets like, Miley, please, you don't have to pretend to like him.

Starting point is 00:08:34 Miley, don't associate. And it's been really interesting to watch because I mean, this is probably the most backlash that SNL has got for a host since probably Trump. But what also comes with that is that this is probably the most that someone has talked about an upcoming SNL host in a long time. It really wouldn't surprise me if this was probably

Starting point is 00:08:49 the most viewed episode of SNL this season with people kind of just tuning in to see what the hell this is even gonna be. And hey, I guess we're gonna see in a little over a week. Then what's the weirdest way I could introduce this story? Got it. You know how some people say you cannot put a dollar amount on a human life, but we know that not to be true for two reasons.

Starting point is 00:09:07 One, if you've ever listened to enough true crime docu-series or dramas, you can pay people apparently a very minimal amount of money to kill other people, so you can put the dollar amount there. Or two, you can put a dollar amount on it based off of how much money you make other people. That including Facebook, who just reported their quarterly earnings.

Starting point is 00:09:26 And we learned that for every person on Facebook, you are worth $9, unless you live in North America, in which case you are worth $48 a year. I should have clarified that. You're not some cheap $48 bitch, you're a $48 a year bitch, which is just an ungodly amount of money for Facebook, considering that across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp,

Starting point is 00:09:48 Facebook says that they have 3.5 billion active monthly users. It's not surprising to learn that their sales jumped 48% from 2020 to $26 billion, and of that, 97% were made up from ads. The profit as a company also doubled to $9.5 billion. But funny enough, Facebook looks like child's play when you compare them to Google

Starting point is 00:10:09 who brought in $55 billion in sales, right? More than double Facebook's. Google's profit more than doubling at $18 billion. And notably here, YouTube was a massive winner for Google with their sales jumping 49% to $6 billion. Just for comparison sake, YouTube's quarterly sales alone is 85% of Netflix's quarterly total. So yeah, also because I introduced this story

Starting point is 00:10:32 in such a weird, depressing way, I feel like I should end on a happy note or actually maybe happy is not the right word. Maybe helpful. I could not put a dollar amount on your life right now. Every single day we make choices that kind of show the world how much we value ourselves, what we do with our time, the people we keep around us, and probably a third thing as well.

Starting point is 00:10:51 This is why my videos have jump cuts because not everything comes to me in the moment. You know, the love that we have in our life that we allow ourselves to receive, that is one of the biggest indicators of how much we value ourselves. If you're not surrounding yourself with people that lift you up, that's you subconsciously telling yourself, I'm not worth that much. Was that helpful? I don't know. Anyway, moving on. Then we should definitely mention

Starting point is 00:11:10 that the US Food and Drug Administration announced this morning that it has begun the process of trying to ban menthol cigarettes as well as flavored cigars. With the agency's acting commissioner, Janet Woodcock, saying, with these actions, the FDA will help significantly reduce youth initiation, increase the chances of smoking cessation

Starting point is 00:11:25 among current smokers, and address health disparities experienced by communities of color, low income populations, and LGBTQ plus individuals, all of whom are far more likely to use these tobacco products. Which, according to the data, is true. It shows that the mint flavored cigarettes are overwhelmingly used by young people and minorities,

Starting point is 00:11:41 with research showing that 85% of black smokers use menthols compared to less than a third of white smokers. And connected to that black men have the highest lung cancer death rate in the country. Which is why you have people like Carol McGruder of the African-American Tobacco Control Leadership Council asking, the science is there, the data is there. So why are these products still on the market?

Starting point is 00:11:58 And really, I mean, the answer there is because of a 2009 law. Because even though that law allowed the FDA to establish authority over tobacco products, meaning that it could ban flavored cigarettes, thanks to industry lobbyists, menthol was the one big exception. So instead, the law simply called for more research

Starting point is 00:12:12 on menthols before anything could be done. You know, for years, anti-smoking advocates and medical groups have continued to pressure the FDA to take action against menthol cigarettes. In fact, back in 2013, they even filed a petition urging the agency to ban the flavor, but the FDA never responded. So because of that, last year, two anti urging the agency to ban the flavor, but the FDA never responded. So because of that, last year,

Starting point is 00:12:26 two anti-smoking groups sued the FDA alleging that regulators had quote, "'Unreasonably delayed responding to the petition.'" The agency then had until today to respond, and yeah, they essentially did it last chance they could. But still, do not expect this ban to actually happen overnight. For one, multiple FDA officials have attempted

Starting point is 00:12:41 to move forward with a ban on menthol cigarettes several times since 2009. But each time they have faced steep pushback from Big Tobacco, Congress, and even competing political interests in both the Obama and Trump administrations. Right now, we're also seeing the American Civil Liberties Union pushing back,

Starting point is 00:12:55 saying that it's concerned that this ban could foster an underground market that could disproportionately harm people of color due to over-policing. With the ACLU invoking both the names of Eric Garner, who of course was killed by a police officer after allegedly selling cigarettes outside of a convenience store, as well as George Floyd,

Starting point is 00:13:09 who was murdered by a police officer after trying to pay for a pack of cigarettes with counterfeit money. And then two, let's say the ban goes through. It would likely face a stack of legal challenges, making it unlikely to be implemented for years. And I mean, for Big Tobacco, this is a big, meaningful fight.

Starting point is 00:13:23 Menthol sales make up more than a third of cigarette sales in the country. So a question I want to ask, and if you'll let me know if you're a smoker, you're a non-smoker, what are your thoughts on the possibility here? Do you love to see it? Do you hate to see it?

Starting point is 00:13:34 Where do you land and why? Then we should definitely talk about updates around the killing of Ahmaud Arbery. And it's been a while since we talked about it. So if you don't remember, Arbery was the 25 year old black man who was shot to death while jogging through a South Georgia neighborhood in February of last year.

Starting point is 00:13:46 His death being one of many that fueled nationwide protests about racial justice. You know, with this killing, you had three men charged, 35 year old Travis McMichael, his father, 65 year old Gregory McMichael, and 51 year old William Bryan. And throughout this whole situation, the McMichaels have maintained that they thought

Starting point is 00:14:01 that Arbery was a burglary suspect and they pursued him. Claiming that Travis McMichael was acting in self-defense when he shot Arbery to death. Meanwhile, Brian's attorney has argued that he committed no crime at all. He was kind of just there. In addition to those three also facing separate state charges, including for murder,

Starting point is 00:14:15 the three Georgia men have now been indicted on federal hate crime charges. With them each charged with one count of interference with rights and one count of attempted kidnapping. Travis and Gregory McMichael also charged with one count of using, carrying, and brandishing a firearm, with Travis in particular being accused of shooting Arbery. Right, and according to the Justice Department,

Starting point is 00:14:31 the McMichaels allegedly armed themselves with firearms, got into a truck, and chased Arbery through the public streets of the neighborhood while yelling at him, using their truck to cut his route off, and threatening him with firearms. With Brian then allegedly joining their chase, cutting off Arbery's route with his truck. The indictment saying that all three tried to unlawfully

Starting point is 00:14:46 seize and confine Arbery by chasing after him in their trucks in an attempt to restrain him, restrict his free movement, corral and detain him against his will and prevent his escape. And ultimately with this story, I mean, that video is like seared into my mind. My personal feelings, my opinion on this. I hope these three get prosecuted

Starting point is 00:15:03 to the fullest extent of the law. It's disgusting. A man was murdered. Once the video was released, obviously I can't show it here, but once the video was released, I felt like it completely undercut any sort of argument that they were operating within what they thought was the law. But for now, we will have to wait and see what happens next. And ultimately with this story and honestly anything that stood out to you today, I'd love to know your thoughts in those comments down below because that is the end of today's show. As always, thank you for watching, liking, subscribing, all the good stuff.

Starting point is 00:15:30 If you're looking for more to watch, I got you covered right here with some more news or my latest podcast. But with that said, of course, as always, my name's Philip DeFranco. You've just been filled in. I love yo faces and I'll see you next time.

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The Philip DeFranco Show - PDS 4.29 Jeff Wittek David Dobrik "Money Milking" Scandal, The Most Hated Man In Australia, & More

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