The Philip DeFranco Show - PDS 7.28 PewDiePie Backlash Grows After Mocking Deaf TikToker, Jon Stewart Unloads on Cruel Cowards, & More

Starting point is 00:00:00 Sup, you beautiful bastards. Welcome back to the Philip DeFranco Show. I got a fantastic and jam-packed Thursday show for you today. So buckle up, hit that like button, and let's just jump into it. Y'all, first up, we have easily the most requested story of the day, and that is the controversy and backlash around YouTube creator PewDiePie. So this all starts earlier this week when he posts a video titled, My Dog Cringes at TikToks,

Starting point is 00:00:19 where he and his dog, Maya, react to TikToks that he describes as cringey. One of the videos that he included was by a creator named Scarlet May, who we also put in the thumbnail, and who also happens to be a massive, massive TikToker who is deaf and often posts story time videos where she speaks and signs at the same time. And in the specific video that PewDiePie reacted to, she's wearing long nails while telling a story about ordering at a drive-thru. And this is PewDiePie's now deleted reaction to it. Well, I was at a drive-thru and it has like the people where they stand outside and they take your order before you go and collect the window. So I pull up and I roll my window down

Starting point is 00:00:46 and this lady when I- No, I'm not listening to this. Look, she has your crazy nails, my aunt. So anyway, what I did was I went outside and then I peed and then I pooped a little bit as well and it was crazy. Sorry, are my nails distracting you guys? As that moment gets clipped,

Starting point is 00:01:01 it's shared on other social media, absolutely blows up, especially over on Twitter. With a ton of people outraged at this and saying things like, PewDiePie mocked a young deaf woman's voice and long nails while using his dog's paws to mock her using sign language. We have to stop giving insipid jackasses large platforms to bully people. As well as, as a partial deaf person whose hearing is completely gone in my left ear, PewDiePie's actions were fucking disgusting. I found it so offensive. Mocking a deaf person like that, I feel so bad for her. Also you had others having different issues with the clip saying things like, PewDiePie isn't ableist. He just wanted to mock a black woman for millions of viewers for having long fingernails and speaking in her natural dialect.

Starting point is 00:01:34 It's only racism. But also at the same time PewDiePie had many supporters, a lot of people defending him. But their arguments having range, but essentially coming down to saying that he wasn't making fun of her for being deaf or black, but simply because he thought that her nails were distracting. Saying things like, I don't even watch his shit, but y'all will find anything to take out of context and get mad over it. And PewDiePie is under fire for making fun of a girl's nails and literally nothing else? And saying that Twitter has really set the bar low for cancellation. And while on social media there has been no shortage of reactions, of course, the big question is, well, what about the two people at the center of this story?

Starting point is 00:02:00 Or like I mentioned, the clip involving Scarlet Mae has since been removed from PewDiePie's video. And both of them have now issued a response to the situation. You had Scarlet posting a TikTok saying, So how do I feel? I feel like it was very weird and very unnecessary, but at the same time, I wasn't surprised I'm used to it. Been a big issue in the deaf community. I've been trying to like normalize and put it out that using nails while signing is normal, like it's okay. But then a big creator comes on here and puts us like a million steps back.

Starting point is 00:02:37 So it's very frustrating. Maybe he didn't know I was doing sign language. Maybe he just didn't like my long nails. That's okay. A lot of people don't like them. That's fine, they're not for you. Scarlett then also adding in that video that while she tries to give him the benefit of the doubt she says based on the way that he mocked her voice and used his dog's paws to mimic signing she thinks that he did know but still also adding in the caption of the

Starting point is 00:02:54 video we all make mistakes hopefully he learns from this for his part pewdiepie pinned a comment to his video saying hey just to clear a few things up i edited out the clip with the girl that has the long nails had no clue she was deaf but kind of dumb in me to not realize. Still, watching through the clip, I only poked fun of her long nails. Also saying the voice I did for my dog is the same voice I've given her for years. In closing with, and making my dog's paws move was poking at people always dancing or doing some move on TikTok, which is an ongoing theme in the whole video. Anyway, honest mistake, my bad. With Scarlett also having been removed from the thumbnail of the video as well. But ultimately, that is where the story is now. It'll be interesting to see if anything else happens,

Starting point is 00:03:26 or if it's done now. Or does anyone else sound off? Do the two people at the core of this story add anything else, or is it over? But while we wait to see what happens, I do want to pass the question off to you. What are your thoughts here? Like, looking at the reactions we featured in this video, like, do you land in a certain camp? Yes? No? Why? Why not? Any and all thoughts, I'd love to hear from you. And then, let's talk about this wild news about a murder that has resulted in a $7 billion judgment. So specifically, a Texas jury has now found Charter Spectrum liable for $7 billion in punitive damages for the murder

Starting point is 00:03:53 of 83-year-old Betty Thomas. And that is on top of the around $340 million in compensatory damages that the company has already been ordered to pay. And so the question you probably have at this point is, okay, well, how are they liable? What did they do? And as it turns out, have at this point is, okay, well, how are they liable? What did they do? And as it turns out, the jury found that Spectrum had,

Starting point is 00:04:07 quote, systemic failures when it hired 43-year-old Roy Holden Jr. as a field technician. And it was Holden who serviced Thomas's home in December of 2019 before returning the next day in his Spectrum van to murder Thomas with a Spectrum-provided knife, with him then stealing her credit cards and going on a spending spree.

Starting point is 00:04:21 And while Holden is obviously the murderer, the jury found that all of this could have been prevented if the company had properly vetted him. As it turns out, when the company bought Time Warner Cable, it got rid of an employee screening process that would have shown that Holden had a long history of lying. Past employers who weren't contacted when he was hired

Starting point is 00:04:34 showed that Holden harassed fellow employees, was a forger, and falsified documents. And reportedly in the weeks and days leading up to the murder, Holden had complained to managers that he had no money and no place to stay due to an ongoing divorce. With it reportedly going as far as Holden breaking down crying in a meeting and saying he wasn't okay.

Starting point is 00:04:49 Holden then began scamming elderly female Spectrum customers, stealing their credit cards or checks. But what really did Spectrum in was their attempt to cover up how liable they were. Where the jury found the company guilty of forgery after it falsified documents to try and get Thomas's family into forced arbitration to solve this problem, which if they had succeeded, the company would have saved a ton of money as it would have just been on the hook for the amount of her last phone bill. And according to the Thomas family's lawyer, Charter Spectrum had too many chances to prevent this tragedy and the company showed a complete disregard for the safety of its customers. Worse, the trial reveals how vulnerable Charter Spectrum customers remain today at the hands of a company that appears not to care about public safety. Now, if this whole story freaks you out about the cable guy coming to your home, I just want to say,

Starting point is 00:05:27 get that out of your head. This is just one case compared to thousands of cable guys, but what should maybe freak you out is that the company revealed that there has actually been more than 2,500 thefts by Spectrum employees against customers over the past few years that have refused to investigate or report to police. Yeah, that's cool. But from that, I want to thank today's sponsor, Pinfinity, the first and only augmented reality pin company. Go see the pins come alive in AR at pins.ar slash DeFranco. Pinfinity creates high quality, hard enamel, collectible pins that come alive

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Starting point is 00:06:48 this is the Defense Department's method for disposing trash. Because when you're out in the middle of the desert, there's no garbage truck that just magically picks everything up and whisks it away, and instead they ended up using burn pits. Which, if you don't know, is a practice mostly stopped in the mid-2010s, but before that, the military would take all the waste from bases in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, like plastics, rubber, chemical mixtures, and medical waste, then dig a huge pit outside, dump it all in there, and douse it in jet fuel and set it on fire, with the toxic fumes from these burn pits unsurprisingly being linked to health problems like respiratory ailments and rare cancers in around 3.5 million veterans from recent wars,

Starting point is 00:07:19 according to the DOD's own estimates. With one service member describing what it's like. As soon as I arrived in country, there in Ballard, I noticed a stench. For me, it just smelled like I was living next to a landfill. Just that stench of just burning rubber or something just as nasty. But for years, because fuck our government, the VA had resisted calls to recognize the effects of burn pit exposure depriving veterans of disability pay and medical reimbursement. That is until last year, because it awarded presumptive benefit status to post-9-11 veterans so they don't actually have to prove their illness was caused by time overseas. Though,

Starting point is 00:07:52 big asterisk, that only applied to those who got asthma, rhinitis, and sinusitis. And it had to happen within 10 years of their service. And with all this, if you didn't know, one of the people that's been the most outspoken advocate for this cause as well as pushing for Congress to help first responders affected by 9-11 is Jon Stewart.. Back in March we saw him slamming lawmakers for delaying any meaningful action. They're all gonna say the same thing. We wanna do it, we wanna support the veterans, but we wanna do it the right way, we wanna be responsible. You know what would've been nice? If they had been responsible 20 years ago and hadn't spent trillions of dollars on overseas adventures, if they had been responsible and hadn't spent billions of dollars for defense contractors to poison our own troops,

Starting point is 00:08:37 if they had been responsible and understood that 20 years of war was gonna create an overflow and an influx of sick veterans paying the consequences of those war. They had their chance to be responsible and they blew it. And awesomely, last month, it looked like Congress finally listened because the Senate actually did a thing. They passed a historic bipartisan bill to widely expand healthcare resources and benefits

Starting point is 00:09:04 to veterans exposed to burn pits, adding 23 conditions to the list of what the VA covers, including hypertension and absolutely massive calling for investments in VA healthcare facilities, claims processing in the VA workforce, while also strengthening federal research on toxic exposure. And all of this also being very personal for President Biden, who believes that burn pits may have caused the brain cancer that killed his son Beau in Iraq in 2015. And so if something passes the Senate, you're like, oh, this is done, this is a done deal. Right, the bill goes over to the House

Starting point is 00:09:28 for a procedural vote on minor technical corrections and then returns to the Senate where it was expected to be finally confirmed, but that's when Senate Republicans did a surprise back flip, decided to throw the whole thing into limbo because you have 25 GOP senators who previously voted for the bill

Starting point is 00:09:40 now revoking their support, effectively blocking it from moving forward, as well as Democratic leader Chuck Schumer switching his vote to a no even though he does support the bill now revoking their support, effectively blocking it from moving forward, as well as Democratic leader Chuck Schumer switching his vote to a no even though he does support the bill, though that is a strategic move just to make sure that another vote is allowed in the future, which left the bill with just 55 yes votes

Starting point is 00:09:54 and only a few votes shy of the 60 needed to pass. And so as far as why the fuck are they doing this, you have Texas Republican John Cornyn blaming Schumer for not allowing two amendment votes that he says that they agreed on, and adding that Republicans want to eliminate some mandatory spending in the bill, and then they expect it to pass. But right now, it's not clear when the vote might be rescheduled, since the Senate is taking a month-long recess at the end of the next week. Which is why,

Starting point is 00:10:13 among many, you have Democrats slamming the reversal with Veterans Affairs Committee Chair John Tester, calling it an 11th hour act of cowardice, and saying that more veterans will die because of this, as well as you had Jon Stewart just clearly fed up with all the bullshit. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes.

Starting point is 00:10:46 Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. It's the exact same bill. They changed one sentence in the House. The sentence in the House they changed was about using rural medical practices for the VA, which apparently triggered a constitutional crisis. Their constituents are dying. If this is America first, America is fucked. But ultimately, that is where we are right now. We're going to have to wait to see what

Starting point is 00:11:17 happens. But I want to know your thoughts. And of course, I want to know everyone's thoughts. But specifically, if you are a military service member or you have one in your family or you're friends with one, what are your thoughts here? Because I feel like there's such a disconnect between what people say and, like, what we fucking do. We call members of the military heroes. We thank them for their service, but we just fucking throw them into the streets. And every year, we just throw more money at the military, but only the part that kills other people, and we're like, fuck our own people when they're done. U.S. military spending last year was $801 billion dollars and we can't

Starting point is 00:11:45 take care of our vets? Especially when the thing that was funded for 801 billion dollars is the reason they have the problem in the first place? These motherfuckers in Congress salute with one hand and give the bird with the other. I don't even believe in the place, but fuck all those motherfuckers straight to hell. And then in absolutely massive news, we need to talk about Meta, which of course is a company that has never done anything wrong and is almost universally loved by everyone. And in no way related, this segment is brought to you by Mark Zuckerberg, who is definitely a human and not a lizard person. Kidding aside, he's obviously not a lizard person. He's a robot. But, really, Mark and his company in the news for not the best of reasons.

Starting point is 00:12:19 First of all, his company reported a 1% decline, bringing in only, oh so sad, $28.82 billion this quarter compared to $29.07 billion a year earlier. Well, of course, that seems like a small decline and still a massive fuckton of money, something to consider. One, in addition to slipping revenues, Meta's profits also fell from 36% a year prior to $6.69 billion. Two, Meta's stock has lost half of its value since the beginning of the year. Three, the company is also reportedly forecasting a bleak third quarter for revenue, predicting between $26 and $28.5 billion, which falls a good deal below the around $30 billion analysts had been expecting.

Starting point is 00:12:52 And four, in an earnings call yesterday, Zuckerberg told investors that the company will need to tighten its belt by slowing hiring and cutting costs, saying that many teams will shrink so we can shift energy to other areas inside the company, and adding, this is a period that demands more intensity. I expect us to get more done with fewer resources.

Starting point is 00:13:07 And telling investors, we seem to have entered an economic downturn that will have a broad impact on the digital advertising business. It's always hard to predict how deep or how long these cycles will be, but I'd say the situation is worse than it was a quarter ago.

Starting point is 00:13:17 Right into real human person Zuckerberg's point here, this comes as the US economy shrunk for the second quarter in a row, falling at a 0.9% annual rate and prompting fears that we're headed into a recession. And the decline in digital advertising driven by marketers pulling back on spending due to the economic uncertainty has also hurt other big tech companies like Google and Twitter, which both also posted revenue declines this quarter. But when I say that, I don't want you to think that all problems are created equal. Meta,

Starting point is 00:13:39 Facebook, whatever the fuck you want to call it, they've had a very hard time over the last year or so. And a lot of it's been focused on the platform having to remodeling a lot of its structure in response to new barriers, which include privacy changes made by Apple that limited Meta's ability to collect data on mobile users and made ads much less effective, as well as at the same time having to deal with intense competition from other competitors like TikTok. Which I will say, all of that brings us to the second half of this story, why everyone's pissed. Right, just last week, Zuck & Co announced massive changes to the Facebook app that make it more like TikTok. They've also been heavily promoting Reels, its version of TikTok, like short-form videos to Instagram users, as well as investing in artificial intelligence to boost

Starting point is 00:14:12 content from accounts that users don't already follow on their feeds. And while Zuck claimed yesterday that Meta saw positive trajectory and engagement trends in Reels and the AI investments last quarter, the company has also struggled to monetize Reels, which isn't as lucrative as Instagram Stories and the main newsfeed and beyond that as all these Changes are happening. There's been massive public anger mounting with many not receiving these changes positively There's been a ton of backlash Including from some of the most high profile and influential people on the site like Kylie Jenner who shared a post saying make Instagram Instagram again Stop trying to be tick-tock

Starting point is 00:14:40 I just want to see cute photos of my friends sincerely everyone and say what you will about Kylie Jenner A lot of people are focusing on what she said here in part yes because she's such a massive create on the platform But also because she's the same girl who tweeted that she didn't like snapchat anymore in 2018 It caused snapchat stock to tank by over a billion dollars whether it be because of the Kylie Jenner post or just everything at large Instagram itself responded the platforms leader basically saying we hear you we understand you we love you, but We're not just gonna listen to what you want, fuckhead. Money over bitches, rule one at Meta. Also, even more regarding money, there have been questions about Meta's investments.

Starting point is 00:15:11 Ray Zuckerberg has been spending a ton, a just fucking giant amount of money on his vision for the Metaverse. While he claims this is a long-term investment that will cost a lot now, but pay off, I mean, some investors are concerned that it won't pay off. And even in that space, they're constantly seeing issues. Like, literally the same day they put out this dismal quarterly report, the Federal Trade Commission filed an antitrust lawsuit against the platform to block it from buying the virtual reality game developer within. With the FTC arguing that Meta was acting monopolistically and accusing the company of trying to buy its way to the top.

Starting point is 00:15:37 And claiming that the acquisition was illegal and would allow the company to get one step closer to its ultimate goal of owning the entire Metaverse, which sounds like the plot of a fucking fantasy novel, but you've been alive for the past 10 years. We pretty much do. And while, of course, yes, this is just one deal, experts say that this is an indicator that it will be difficult for Meta to pursue future deals,

Starting point is 00:15:54 which could seriously undermine its bet that the metaverse will be the next frontier of technology. So I know this has been an absolutely massive story, and of course, I'd love your thoughts on any aspect, but the thing that really stands out to me is that social media media is not really a social thing anymore it's all about like consuming and performing and while I felt like that has been the case for a while now I think this kind of just further cements it and it shows it shows like of course this is what happened when every company year over year has to show exponential impossible growth both for like the number of people on the platform and how long they're there and like how much money is being made of fucking course they're

Starting point is 00:16:24 gonna do this they don't give a shit about you and your friends. They only care to the point that you will leave their platform for another one. We've always just been the customer and the product, not people to them. And it's kind of shitty because the natural evolution of the internet is making it less fun. But ultimately, that is where that story and today's show ends. Thanks for subscribing and being a part of these daily dives in the news, being a part of that conversation down below. Also, if you want more news, I got it covered here and here. But as always, my name's Philip DeFranco. You've just been filled in.

Starting point is 00:16:50 I love yo faces and I'll see you tomorrow. Fuck no. Monday. Nailed it. First try.

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The Philip DeFranco Show - PDS 7.28 PewDiePie Backlash Grows After Mocking Deaf TikToker, Jon Stewart Unloads on Cruel Cowards, & More

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