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Hope for the best, expect the worst Some drink champagne Some die at first the way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best Expect the worst,
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hope for the best.
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Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, February 26th 7th, 2026. I'm John Pod Horiz, the editor of Commentary, here to apologize for yesterday's unbelievable blunder in which I told the world that the author of how to Win Friends and Influence People was the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, as opposed to the sort of snake oil salesman Dale Carnegie. And that was really stupid and it kind of totally ruined the point I was trying to make about how Americans have tended to worship at the altar of, of the latest hip industrialist. And that wasn't who Dale Carnegie was and that was really embarrassing. So you can stop emailing me about how stupid I was because I realized that I was stupid. You know who was not stupid are my co panelists here today, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe. Hi John.
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C
I'm some dots stupid.
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Neither. Neither is senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi Seth.
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D
Hi John.
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Very not stupid. And of course, Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi Eliana.
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B
Hi John.
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Actually quite brilliant. Not only not stupid, but quite, quite brilliant. And here's something that happened yesterday. Netflix pulled out of its bid to buy Warner Brothers Discovery and clearing the way, assuming that it passes regulatory muster, clearing the way for Paramount Skydance to buy Warner Brothers Discovery. Now, why is this of interest to listeners of the Commentary magazine podcast? Unless you are stockholders in any of these companies, it probably isn't. But for this salient fact, which is that this means that it is that the Paramount Skydance bid for Warner Brothers Discovery was for the entirety of the company. The Netflix bid was for part of the company and the idea was that the other part of the company that includes CNN and a couple of other assets would be spun out as Comcast has spun out MSNBC and other news channels into a company called Versant, which now owns msnbc, no longer part of the cable monolith Comcast, that this was going to happen with cnn. It would end up as a kind of standalone in a different company and everything. And oh glory wonders of being out of the, you know, know, corporate umbrella. Now the worst fears of CNN's remaining staff have been realized. They are going to come under the Paramount Skydance umbrella, which of course owns CBS and as we know, who is now running CBS News. But our very old friend and Commentary magazine roastee Barry Weiss, to say that the news in Hudson Square, where CNN is now located, Hudson Yards, where CNN is now located here in New York. The news that they are going to be under Barry's aegis is akin to being told that you are about to face the apocalypse. Would be, would be an understatement.
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B
Can we just do some live reading of the reported, please? Reactions, please. The, the, the Oliver Darcy status newsletter captured some of the reactions because of course the first thing the, the rats on the ship do is run to tell Oliver Darcy how they feel anonymously. So he reports. Inside cnn, alarm bells went off as staffers began to panic over the suddenly very real prospect they could be working for Barry Weiss before the end of the year. He says his phone lit up with messages from anxious employees fretting about the future. Here's the quotes. We are doomed. We are effed. Everybody is reeling about the obvious things. The panic at CNN right now is off the charts. One insider told Status of the larger mood that had arrested the network. And I think the icing on the cake is that Anderson Cooper, who just announced that he would not be renewing his contract with 60 Minutes and focusing on his CNN Nightly show reportedly because he didn't like the direction of cbs, will now end up also probably working for Barry Weiss when she takes over cnn.
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D
I just want to say I have a theory. You know how, you know how in the correspondence dinner Obama made that joke about Trump and how obviously he wasn't really running for president and it was all, you know, just PR trick for his hotels and you know, whatever. And he made a lot of fun of them. And they cut to that picture of Trump sitting in the audience looking unhappy. And then Trump ran for president and won and everybody blamed Obama's speechwriters for provoking him. Clearly something, I don't know what was said at the roast of Barry Weiss and whatever it was has lit a fire under Barry. And so whatever our role in that as a commentary, as an institution, you know, don't, don't blame us. That's my theory.
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B
There's possibly a larger story here probably about the Ellison's ambitions which they, they
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A
came back again to make clear. The owner of Paramount Skydance is David Ellison. David Ellison is the son of Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison owns Oracle. He is the second richest man in the world. David Ellison, a successful film producer who made whose biggest movie was Top Gun Maverick, which is the second or third most successful American movie of this decade and, and makes popcorn movies as opposed to his sister Megan, who was making arthouse movies and was like a big deal in the 2010s until her father said, you're losing me too much money. That's enough of that with you and your company. Annapurna. And turned his favorite toward his more financially successful son David, and back this bid not only to buy Paramount, but now to use Paramount, which is a tenth the size of Warner Brothers Discovery. It is literally. It makes a tenth of the money that Warner Brothers Discovery has made and is taking over Warner Brothers Discovery. Like the little fish is eating the big fish. Just to explain who we're talking about here.
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B
Thank you. Yeah, that's important context. So they're obviously signaling they could have done the same thing and said, we're not interested in the news, the money losing, or, you know, the dying. CNN is not money losing, but the dying news properties. But they're not doing that. They're deciding, signaling real interest in them. And the Netflix deal was closed and Warner Brothers Discovery has to pay a breakup fee. You know, that was like. And Paramount came back again saying they're going to pay $111 billion, offering a superior deal for this. So the Ellisons are signaling real ambitions to be media moguls, but also news moguls, and to. To bring. To reshape the news landscape in a more centrist direction. And I think a comparison to Rupert Murdoch, although they're not playing overseas, really is not crazy. But. But David Ellison's 43 years old. He's a really young guy and I think should be taken seriously with regard to what he's demonstrating his ambitions with regard to news are and the risks he's willing to take and the people he's been willing to invest in. And by the way, the first acquisition was of the Free Press.
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A
By the way, Rupert Murdoch, when he entered into the American market as a proprietor by buying the San Antonio newspaper, he was 43 years old. So just to make your point for you, he came from elsewhere and started buying up dying properties in a dying industry. Afternoon newspapers.
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B
With the help of his father. Right.
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A
Well, I mean, his father's company. Yeah. I mean, although, yeah, he had already taken the company and used it the way he had the Ellison ambition with cnn. I was just looking at the ratings. So you're saying, oh, my God, we're screwed. You're quoting all these people saying, we're screwed. It's terrible. You know, Trump friendly, blah, blah, blah.
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B
They're screwed because they're. They're talking about their ideological project. Nothing beyond that.
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A
Right. So here I just want to share with you the size of the discrepancy between the FOX audience and the CNN audience In January of 2026, Nielsen has a new way of measuring cable audience to television audiences. They call it the Big Data plus panel. And supposedly these numbers are now getting vastly more accurate than they used to be. So according to in January, Fox News had 2.046 million total viewers in primetime with this is kind of amazing, a basic 200,000 viewers in the adults 25 to 54 demo, meaning that their entire audience, like basically 80% or 90% of their audience is older than 55. Just to make that clear, because if they have 2 million viewers but only 197,000 of them are in the 25 to 54 demo, that's 10% of, of the audience that seems to be younger, younger than 55, but nonetheless that, that's the number. Okay, and they grew by 11% compared to December 2025. Now let's go to CNN. During primetime in January, CNN had 660,000 total viewers and 135,000 in the 25 to 54 demographics. So CNN has almost has like Fox has three and a half times the size of CNN's total audience. And though it percentage wise does better with younger viewers than older viewers, we, we cite this demographic on younger viewers not only because it sort of like suggests where things might be heading or whose audience might die off sooner than somebody else's audience, but because classically in television advertising, classically not now, but classically in television advertising, you have wanted to buy ads to talk to 25 to 54 year olds. Weird reasons. They're more likely to switch brands. And you know, they're, they're, they, they, they buy more consumer goods for, you know, disposable consumer goods, whatever. Of course, if you've been watching television for the last two years, you will, you will have seen that that is not who advertises on television anymore at all. I would say that something like 50% of the ads now on, particularly on news programming, are health care ads. They're drug ads. They are ads for incredibly specific drugs. Like, they're so specific that they're called something you've never heard of. And in the ad they say this is to cure my pathological blz. And so they don't even explain what pathological BLZ is because if you don't have it, you're never, you're not going to buy the drug anyway. They don't need to waste their 60 seconds explaining to you what this drug is. So it's a very specific, expensive drug that gets advertising and you have somebody walking around on a golf course and you know, and then the bathing and then they're having a drink with their friends and, and all of that. That's what television advertising is. Now advertising has already moved into understanding that people who watch these screens, these big screens and cable and broadcast are old. And so they are advertising old people things to the old people. The larger point I'm trying to make is that Fox has been the number one news network for 24 years now without letup. But the size of its audience relative to CNN's is growing and CNN's is shrinking. All of these networks, including Ms. Now, are profitable because of things called carriage fees, where cable companies are obliged to pay essentially to rent space, to put these networks on their, on their cable systems and they pay per subscriber. And so these are kind of cash cows. Like I think CNN and MSNBC both make a profit of a couple hundred million dollars a year because of carriage fees. But those are going to die because cable is dying just like broadcast is dying. That's why Eliana said these businesses are creaking into basically obsolescence or ruination. But with all of that said, CNN is a dead fish floating at the top of a fish tank. Except for these historical carriage fees, it has no cultural footprint. Nobody knows who anybody is on cnn. Nobody cares. They don't make news. The only clips that go viral are clips of their one conservative spokesman, right? The one conservative on the network, Scott Jennings, who gets into, you know, gets into fights three times a week with people on this show at 10 o' clock at night. So if you're going into this business and you're looking for a market and you think, okay, where, where do I go to get myself a market? You go toward Fox. You go there, they're got a lot of, they got a lot of viewers and you know, you don't know if they like how much they like it or they don't like it. Maybe you supply them with something else that they might want to watch. That's what happens in competitive situations. If sitcoms are successful on NBC, you make a sitcom on abc, you don't make a non sitcom. Like if you, if conservative programming is working on Fox, try it on cnn, who knows? They haven't done that. They haven't had to do that because they've been shielded from the consequences of their market failures by these carriage fees. But if you're playing the long game, you got to start seizing the audience of others. And so the play for Barry to go in or for Ellison to go in and say, how do I make this work? Isn't to double down on the shrinking audience that is a third of the size of the most successful network. That's not how you do it in capitalism. And they're all crying and screaming and yelling because they have Oliver Darcy on speed dial. And he's willing to, you know, sort of like crap all over Scott Jennings. The only thing that gets CNN any attention, as he does in his newsletter last night, says, you know, the egregious Trump spokesman Scott Jennings or whatever.
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B
But it's just like they're already starting to pander to Trump. You know, they. They turned away from the Jeff Zucker resistance that was doing so great in 2016. And he said that basically characterized Scott Jennings as greasing the skids for approval of the Paramount Warner Brothers murder.
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A
I love this also because Scott Jennings literally speaks on CNN, 10 minutes a day at most, like, and then there's 23 hours and 50 minutes of other programming. But he says, not speaking, that they're
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B
putting him on more because he does rate. And, John, I would think about it a little bit differently in that I'm not sure it's like, oh, we're, you know, we're going to go after the Fox audience or other people. But what they showed with the acquisition of the Free Press was that was something completely different. Like, there wasn't really anything like the Free Press that had existed before, which Barry said, I'm leaving the New York Times and I'm going to go to Substack and start a new kind of publication that combines investigative reporting, unconventional investigative reporting that's centrist, and sometimes it covers the right, sometimes it covers the left. And then. And I'm gonna bring in commentators center right, center left. But it's that bucks the conventional orthodoxy. And these people, like, they weren't really. They were. She brought in people I've never heard of, but it was like, really a new kind of publication. And Paramount and David Ellison, like, took a bet on that publication and took a bet on her. And I would guess we'd see more experiments like that and new types of programming and people to bring in audiences who are disenchanted by all of the kinds of news on offer, including Fox News. She really cultivated a new kind of audience with that.
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C
Yeah, I mean, you know, the thing outside of Fox, every other news programming on offer is interchangeable. That is the problem. So to do anything different than just to keep going with this zombified, interchangeable model, you know, it's like when I go to put on the news and if I'm not going to watch FOX and I. And I have the other channels there, if it's CNN or Ms. Now or whatever, it reminds me of When MTV had MTV2 and then MTV3 or whatever, you know, like, and. And then died. I didn't know the difference between MTV and MTV2 and MTV3 and MTV foreign or whatever, you know what I mean? And to me, that's all those news. That's the slate of my news options. They're all essentially the same channel.
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B
You know what's a good example of this is that I'm just laughing about because our Style section newsletter covered this today, which is wonderful and people should sign up for it. But Brett Baer on Fox, you know, interviewed the members of the USA Hockey team and every other news network, the New York Times versus msnbc, cnn. They're all criticizing the members of the hockey team, and that's what you get on offer. And I think, you know, at the Free Press, they're doing something different than that.
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A
Let's talk about Aura Frames. So I have an aura frame in the middle of my living room. And last night I glanced up at it, and there I saw a photograph. Actually two photographs split in half because Aura does that for you. It sort of seems to understand what photos are related to each other. And we'll kind of edit them for you to put them together in the frame.
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D
And.
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A
And there was a picture of my late mother and my late sister Rachel, side by side. And I was, of course, very moved and pleased and touched to have this memory placed right in front of me in my living room for me to experience almost unexpectedly. And that is one of the great gifts that aura frames can offer. This is a wonderful, beautiful piece of living room, bedroom, whatever. I wouldn't call it furniture, but it's literally a photo frame. And you download your photos through an app, as many as you want, in whatever order you want, in whatever way you want. And they can provide you with all kinds of unexpected joys and pleasures. There is free unlimited storage, so you can add as many photos and videos as you want. You can add them from anywhere, anytime, using the app. If you want to give it as a gift, it comes in a gift box included. You can personalize the gift with a message before it arrives. And if you download the app yourself, you can text photos straight to the frame or to the person whom you're giving it to as a present. So that's Aura Frames, the perfect gift Anytime Named Number one by Wirecutter, you can save on this perfect gift by visiting auraframes.com for a limited time. Listeners can get $35 off their bestselling Carver Mat frame with code COMMENTARY. That's a U R A frames.com promo code COMMENTARY. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Look, you know you carry a lot of responsibility in your household. If something happens to you, there are real consequences, like a mortgage that needs to be paid, tuition that needs to be paid. Everyday bills don't just disappear. Thinking about that used to feel overwhelming for me, but taking steps to protect my family financially changed that. And that's why you should consider getting life insurance through Ethos, which makes getting life insurance fast and easy 100%. Online, you can get a quote in seconds, apply in minutes, get same day of coverage. There's no medical exam. You just answer a few simple health questions. You can get up to $3 million in coverage, some policies as low as $30 a month. As of March 2025, Business Insider named Ethos the number one no medical exam instant life insurance provider with 4.8 out of 5 stars on Trustpilot and over 3,000 reviews. So protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Now by going to ethos.com commentary in as little as 10 minutes, you can get your free quote and up to $3 million in coverage at ethos.com commentary. That is ethos E T H O S.com commentary ethos.com commentary application times and rates may vary, right? Well, I mean, look, everything is up for grabs in this sense. Like television programming of all kinds is astonishingly conventionally in the model that it has always been in. Let me just give you an example. Why do shows start on the top, at the top of the hour and end at the bottom of the hour? Why? Why does a Show start at 11 o'? Clock? Why doesn't start at 11:32? Why are there breaks in shows? Why are there different shows? Does anybody experience media any longer as discrete blocks of programming in which you say, I watch this show, but I don't watch that show? The people who are who have been trained in the modern media atmosphere by Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, whatever, are not hewing to time periods and, you know, credit sequences and things like that?
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B
You know what else is a really interesting experiment that is doing something totally different is Mark Halperin's two way, which is actually bringing the viewers in and conversing with them at times. And John, you and I have both done this, but that's another type of like, totally unconventional thing. And I often watch what he's doing there and think this is better than anything that's on offer on television. The sophistication of the conversation, the quality is so much better than anything you can get. Look, I always think my tastes are a negative indicator for what, like, most people would like, but that is what I think.
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D
Right, but look, the other question is like, is, is, is, is television in an arena where you can experiment like this? Does it have, does it have the room to grow? I mean, if you put Mark Halperin's two way on cnn, what would happen? Would it get the viewer? Would it change the, the trajectory of the company's viewership? Or do we like it because we have a, you know, because we're, we like the inside baseball stuff and, you know, that's really our speed and, and our taste and, and, and I'm not even sure that, you know, I'm not even sure that TV has the room to maneuver around this. I mean, the people who watch TV are, as John said, like a specific, There's a TV demographic. You can experiment with anything on the Internet, an Internet publication like the Free Press and see what works and see what doesn't. But CNN's not a startup. And I just wonder how much, how much TVs, you know, how much room they actually have to, to fix what they're doing and to grow. I mean, they seem to have a fixed audience. There's a, there's a, there's a TV demographic. Are more people going to be watching TV or TV news? I don't know what, but.
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A
So by the way, there's a fixed, let's say there's a fixed number of people watch tv. So you are playing in that sandbox. So there are 30 million people watching TV. I don't know.
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D
Right. And so you would, you would be
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A
wise, you got to take them away from someone who has them already.
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D
You would be wise to think like, what is Fox doing more than what is a new substack publisher?
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A
Let me give you, let me, let me give you an example of something that occurred to me the other day. So there's msnbc. It's sort of like in the second position, but it's also half the size of Fox or less. And we'll see how Versant does or what that means or how they feel about.
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B
I was just gonna say on, on Versant, they are about to, they either have or are about to ink a deal with The Pod Save America podcast Bros. And so there you're seeing another experime that I would guess we're going to see more and more of because people are acknowledging that the limits of this conventional stale cable television format are insufficient.
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A
Right. Well, so, but I'm thinking, okay, if you're msnbc, what is the secret of Fox? Fox Trump came in if Roger Ailes had not been, you know, basically humiliated and driven from Fox and then died. Ailes without Ailes. Fox tripled down on Foxism and like went further and further into the Trump camp and you know, fired Chris Stirewald when he called Florida for our, called Arizona, you know, for Biden and you know, sort of like when this whole way would Tucker would still be on the air if it weren't for the Dominion, for the Dominion settlement. And it is this kind of caricature right wing network and we look at Ms. Now and say it's a caricature left wing network. I'm not sure that left wingers look at Ms. Now and say it's a character. It's like what we want. It's not supply. It's not like our heroine. So if I were Ms. Now, you're saying the Pod Save America guys, the hell with them. Like they should hire Jennifer Welch, this lunatic podcaster. I mean, I don't know if you've, if anyone has actually seen her work. Like it's, it's all over. She's like this celebrity of the moment. She is bananas. Like if you think she is the Candace Owens of the left, she is a bonkers nut, total out of her mind, crazy person. Give her a show. Go get Graham, you know, go get whoever is the, the Graham Platner in Maine. Get him to quit the race for Senate and give him a show. Get AOC to quit Congress and give her a show. Go all.
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D
Or hire Hassan Piker. That's, that's their darling.
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A
Have the young turks go all the way. Because the whole thing is they've all been protected by the fact that they're part of the kind of liberal consensus which has moved to the left inarguably. The what, what we define as liberal now is way further left than it ever was. The way being called conservative now is way further to. I don't know if you would call it right, but way further in some weird swamp than it ever was before. But you know, they're all part of this ecosystem of the Ivys and you know, they're all married to each other. They're all, you know, they all want to go be members of the Council on Foreign Relations and get invited to give, you know, speeches at Harvard and be highlights of their class reunions and things like that. And the truth is that right now the media future belongs to, to psychopathy. And so if I were them, I would be going into psychopathy as opposed to like being rational and responsible even. Even though I don't think they are rational and responsible, but they think it as opposed to going, oh no, that's not who we are. Like who we are is we're going to have someone come on and say that, I don't know. It's not only that Donald Trump is a pedophile, but they're going to bring on whoever this psychopathic con artist woman who has been going around saying that they suppressed her totally, totally fact free, you know, claim that Trump raped her when she was 8, give her a show like go hog wild because you've got nothing to lose and everything. And this is the way things are going. And the only and this has become a protection program for hack liberal TV journalists who are, who no one will remember five years from now, who will all be in pr, if PR even exists. Nobody would ever accuse me of being a fashion plate. But I do know because I am almost 65 years old that a well built wardrobe is a about pieces that work together and hold up over time. And that I can tell you from personal experience, is what Quince does best. Premium materials, thoughtful design and everyday staples that feel easy to wear and easy to rely on even as the weather shifts. During this cold snap, for example, I put on a nice thick quint sweater. I put on my puffer jacket, which I can wear when it's 50 or I can wear when it's 0 degrees and feel the same level of comfort. Quince works directly with top factories, cuts out the middleman. So you're not paying for brand markup, just quality clothing. Everything is built to hold up to daily wear and still look good season after season. So look, refresh your wardrobe with quince. Go to quince.com commentary for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q U I n c e.com/complyment free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com/complyment It's a bit like beginning in
- [33:49]
C
the late 80s and then well through the 90s, major record labels started buying up every big indie band that were on indie labels because the, the, the, the force, the cultural force of what was Happening on these bands that were on independent labels was just too big to compete with. So they hoovered up like every last indie band, now we know the huge ones, but they also, in the process, they grabbed them all. And it was at the point, if you were at all around or involved in the scene, you were like, they're. They're on Geffen now.
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A
What?
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D
Yes.
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C
You know, like it's, it's like that kind of move just like grab them all because that. And, and by the way, it entirely changed the, the, the pop culture landscape.
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A
Right.
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D
And what, and what was the lesson that they learned when they hoovered up all the independent labels? The lesson they learned was that they didn't learn taste. They just hired people who seem to have better taste. Right? They didn't learn like they didn't suddenly learn how to spot talent, you know, at a local club. They just hired people who seem to. To get there. That's the other problem that these, these networks face, which is like you, you can't teach the ability to do what they need to do. Apparently they don't. It hasn't changed their taste, their ability to recognize, you know, MSNBC becoming, you know, M. Snow and whatever, Mississippi now. And all these different, like all. Nothing, nothing is resonating with anybody who didn't watch the network before, right? And so they can hoover up the local talent, but they ha. They have to figure out how to figure out what people actually like. That's the pathway.
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A
But they don't. That's the point. So you're. So as Eliana began this. So the only person in this ecosystem that is saying we're going to break all of the rules to see what on earth can work as all of this transformation is taking place is Barry. Are they saying it at the Today show? Are they, you know, is whoever run, you know, is. Are they doing it on the nightly news programs on ABC and NBC? The whole idea is we're all going to be gone in five years if we don't do something to make. To get to be sticky and to get people. Given the fact that there is an unlimited universe of attention getters that we are now just one small bobbing cork in the ocean of break all the china. See what happens. And the reason these newsletter, the newsletter that Eliana mentioned, the media newsletter of Oliver Darcy, but there are others. There's Lachlan Cartwright, there's Ben Smith, there are all these different newsletters covering the media freak out over Barry and stuff like that. And the reason that they are valuable is that it is literally like listening to people on the Titanic as they are drowning. And instead of them trying to climb their way up and figure out what to do, they're like sitting in their stateroom saying, the water is rising. It's so mean, this water. It's so cruel. And it's not fair. You know, glub, glub, glub. And then they're gonna drown. As opposed to, you know, like, trying to figure out how to get. Or the Poseidon Adventure might be a better analogy. Like, you either have to climb up to the top of the ship and get yourself rescued or you're gonna drown. And the. And the response of the general media is, America's a fascist country. Everyone is kowtowing to Trump. I'm, you know, we're here, the last bastions of da da da da, and they're trying to kill us off, even though we're so important. And then you're like, well, first of all, if you're so important and you're the last bastion, why can't you get anybody to pay watch you?
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B
Yeah, but John. Yeah, of course I agree with what you're saying, but from the standpoint of these specific individuals who are running and saying this, they personally, each one would rather go down on, you know, Battleship Resistance or, you know, Ship resistance, where they get paid $2 million a year or $3 million a year or $7 million a year, whatever inflated salary Jeff's Ducker gave them, which is way more than they're worth on the open market or the market that you're talking about. Then jump to Battleship Centrist, Battleship Barry, Battleship Center. Right. Whatever it might be, where they make $500,000 a year or $1,000,000 a year, because both of their ideological predilections and their conception about who they are in the world and what they do and what is right and righteous in their own minds and just what lines their own pockets.
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A
Right, okay, but you're talking about, like the on air talent. Like, obviously we're talking to these people,
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B
but also are the producers and the. Yeah, the sizes and the number. The number of people who produce the shows.
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A
Right. Both they think they want to go. Okay, so I'm saying let's, let's put it, let's put it in a slightly different frame, which is. Okay, I'm saying the smart money would be if you're Ms. Now or whatever. Or including, by the way, cnn, let's say, like, if it depends on how, like, totally unprincipled Perry and Nelson were willing to be, like, Somebody go make a play to make, to take, like left wing, psychotic resistance Twitter. And instead of, like gusting it up with lipstick so that it's, you know, Mika and Joe on Morning Joe, like, give it to Jennifer Welch. Give it to, you know, Joe from Jersey. You know, give it up to them.
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D
But isn't this Air America's strategy?
- [40:39]
A
Yeah, but Air America was. Was 25 years ago, and Air America was. Was a rate, was a, you know, was a radio network when radio was dying, like, then it didn't work. Also, it was timed very badly because it came. It was sort of like during this surge of pro American sentiment that. That was very fool. But Air America was just. It's not fair that Rush Limbaugh has this big audience. So we're gonna, like, do 24 hours a day of programming against Rush Limbo is only on three hours a day, is still gonna eat our lunch.
- [41:13]
C
Yeah. And Air America wasn't grabbing social media phenoms because there were no social media phenoms.
- [41:20]
A
Right. Well, they were grabbing. They, you know, they look fair is fair. Like they kind of invented Rachel Maddow. There were a couple of people who came out of Air America. I'm not. But obviously it died. It was unsuccessful the way that early conservative television programming. Like there was a network you've never heard of called National Empowerment, the National Empowerment Network that started in the, in the early 90s that prefigured. That was the kind of failed, run through, failed bus and truck version of what FOX News became four or five years later. And, you know, that Paul Weyrich was involved in. And so there are things where you can look at it and say, I'm saying there's all kinds of China you can break. It's not just give Jennifer Welch a show. It's also like I say, should there be shows? Like, why is there a show? Maybe it should be like Twitch, where there's just always somebody on. You know, it doesn't matter when they leave or when they come back. Or like one of those live streams where people are talking about a Supreme Court case and people come on, they drop off and they come in. There's no. There's no timing. Like, what. Why is it hour by hour? Why is it. Why is it structured that way? That's not the way people consume news anymore. And all I'm saying is that Barry, being not a TV news person, not a. Like, you come to her and say, I have this idea. Let's start a show at 9:47. She might say, why should I start a show at 9:47. That's confusing. Or she'd go like, tell me more.
- [42:56]
C
But if you go to, like, the
- [42:58]
A
head of ABC News are going to be like, well, that's not the way it works. We have our automatic system cut off at 9:59. And we obviously have to speak to the affiliates who are blah, blah, blah, and they'll tell you every reason not to change. So sometimes you got to bring in people who will say, here's how we change. There was a fantastic moment 30 years ago when we started the Weekly Standard, and Michael Kinsley, then late of the New Republic, went to Bill Gates and said, give me a magazine. Publish me a magazine. And he did. He gave him Slate. So it was going to be an online magazine starting basically inspired by the weekly Slate.
- [43:44]
D
That was, by the way, that's the original Slate pitch.
- [43:47]
A
There you go, right?
- [43:48]
D
Michael Kinsley, give me a magazine.
- [43:50]
A
Magazine. So Mike goes, and he gets this magazine and he's publishing it like a magazine, which is to say it comes out on Wednesday. It's a full menu of. Of, you know, there's a back of the book and there's a culture section and there are articles and there's front matter and all this. It's just. It's not in a. It's not in a codex. And people at Microsoft are saying to him, I don't think you really understand how this should be working, because you're not taking advantage of the immediacy of the fact that you can release something the minute that it's done. You don't have to like, wait to send it to the printer and that it goes to the printer, comes out, and then you have to mail it to people. And it took Mike a year to like, break free of the idea that he was a magazine editor editing. And this is how you edited a magazine, right. That. That he could release. He had an article, it was done. He could just put it out there. And Slate then kind of broke the model. If it was going to be an online magazine that wasn't going to have a print component, there was no reason to follow deadlines that were set, largely because you had to send things to a printer. Commentary still sends things to a printer, but we know we're bifurcated. So Beth writes blog posts every day. Abe writes a newsletter every day. We put some stuff out every day. And then we do still produce a physical magazine that we release online all at once, once a month. Eliana produces stuff that comes out all day. Right. And you have some Things that appear on a weekly schedule, like the style section, which you mentioned today by Andrew Stiles and others. And a back, a fantastic back of the book that the, that that Vic Mattis edits at the Washington Free Beacon, the best culture section now available outside of commentaries pages in America. But that's not the model, right? So television is still lost in this model. It's half an hour here, an hour here, this. And you have prime time and you have day part, and you have morning, and you have a morning show and you have this. And nobody under the age of 70 is consuming their media this way.
- [46:15]
B
I was just talking to somebody yesterday about how much this has changed for in digital, where you say some of it's on a schedule, you know, sections that come out. And Politico really changed this back in the day where it was like, we're going to publish things all day long. And then there was another big change with the advent of newsletters where this is how people are taking in the morning newsletter. But then people are delivering news straight into your inbox all the time. And so we, we, you know, are sending full stories all day long. We rarely hold something until the next morning. And I think digital media has been really nimble in a way that television has not, right? And, and so, yes, we're doing both. Like, there are sections and columns that hold, but so many things just go out when they're ready. And where it used to be, they'd post on a website and you can go see them there. Now they're coming straight to your inbox. Like you're, you're going to be alerted when it happens, right?
- [47:30]
A
But you know, just the human mind needs an organ, an organizing principle. Our organizing principle has been the 24 hour day, right? And so you sleep, you tend to sleep when it's dark and you tend to not, you know, be up when it's light. And you tend to want a certain type of food in the morning and a certain type of food in the middle of the day, certain type of food in, in the evening. And similarly with your meal.
- [47:56]
C
Candace Owens just discovered that blew her mind.
- [48:01]
A
Would you please, Abe, last night was so hilarious on, on Twitter because Candace Owens, literally somebody discovered that Candace Owens did not know until two years ago that thunder was the sound of lightning. And she heard, she heard thunder. And she was like, what is that? And her producer said, it's thunder. You know, there was, there's a lightning storm. And she's like, what is that? Anyway, so Abe was having great fun.
- [48:35]
D
It's Not God. Bowling.
- [48:38]
C
No, she thought she was safe because it's just thunder, not lightning. And the guy said, well, no, thunder is the sound of lightning. And she said, what? My mind is blown.
- [48:48]
A
Yeah. So Abe was extrapolating. Was spent the evening on Twitter extrapolating other discoveries that Candace Owens might have made.
- [48:59]
C
Frozen water.
- [49:00]
A
Yeah, Trees start out. That's the thing about Candace Owens, is
- [49:04]
D
that she, I'm not even sure, like, anything will top her. Remember that she thought that the quarters in Jerusalem were about who can live in which designated area. Why is it called the Jewish Quarter? Because Jew only Jews can live there. And she felt that the Jewish quarter in Jerusalem was, was clearly discriminatory because they had marked off an entire quarter for only Jews.
- [49:31]
A
Yeah, well, I, I, I, by the way, in that I'm sure she reflects the opinions of hundreds of millions of people who hear that and assume that that's, that's the way it is. But I mean, it's interesting. McKenz Owings, because she's both evil and stupid. And it, it raises this interesting fact that you can, apparently you can be really good as a communicator in some weird way and also be like blitheringly dumb, which does not compute. Like, it's hard to imagine how these two skills can coexist since basically you're riffing the whole time that you're so I don't know what's going on there, but give Candace Owens a show. That's what I'm saying. Not that I think that's terrible. And I don't want her to have a show. And I want there to be a culture that throws up guardrails and creates us. But if there isn't going to be one and you're in an industry that is dying, you do what you have to do to save it. And like I say, if you actually want to spend your life in television and you work at CNN and you are not necessarily part of the idea that your purpose here is to save America from the coming fascist takeover of the United States at the hands of Donald Trump and the Ellisons. Like, this is your chance to write a memo that says, I have this great idea to do this show at 4, 29 and 30 seconds for 12 minutes because somebody might actually listen. Or do you just want to do the same shit everybody has done every day for the last 45 years on this lame network that for a time had a monopoly on being a 24 hour news broadcaster? Like, or do you not even have it in you to think through Some way to do something that could be yours and could be fresh and could be interesting and that someone might actually give you a shot at. Okay, let's move on from this to talk about what's actually important, which isn't like television news, but the fact that the entire US Military is basically now standing there in the, in the Middle east with F22s on the ground in Israel. And, you know, I don't know how many ships are in the Gulf and near Iran. Israel spent the day yesterday blowing up all kinds of stuff in Lebanon to pacify, to sort of take Hezbollah out preemptively out of any kind of response if there's a war. Israel claims that they know that if a war starts, the Houthis are going to come in from Yemen. So presumably they have plans to preempt the Houthi efforts to hit Israel and all of that. And here we are. So either something is going to happen or something's not going to happen. And they can't stay there forever. These planes, these ships, these Americans, we're pulling people out of embassy. Mike Huckabee announced that American, some American consular officials or embassy officials or their families, if they want to leave, they should leave. China has a lot of its people out, huh?
- [52:53]
C
And leave fast was the message.
- [52:54]
A
And leave fast. Right? Well, it's actually not that easy to leave Israel, by the way, just so people understand, like, there aren't that many fake flights out of Ben Gurion necessarily. And, you know, so. But, you know, China said people should get out. Poland said people should get. All these countries are saying, you better get out now. So I assume that something is going to happen. Unless it doesn't. Because, Eliana, as you pointed out, we also have our vice president and whatever, like, weird rear guard Charles Lindbergh action he's playing there inside the White House is, is, is clearly pushing the boy. There's been a lot of progress with the Omanis, and we're going to have a meeting next week with Oman and da, da, da, da, da. And isn't this interesting? And, you know, we don't really want to fight, but we will fight, but we don't want to fight. We didn't. So either this is all just a kind of, you know, bodyguard, you know, like the. What was it, Churchill's phrase. So the bodyguard of lies. Either there's a. Either. Either we're just blowing a lot of smoke as we are getting our ducks in a row to actually do this strike, which has already been decided, or something weirder is Going on. So who's in which camp have we decided to go? And we're just waiting for our ducks to end a row or are we still like Trump still hasn't made the decision.
- [54:22]
B
I actually was struck by something else that Vance said in his interview with the Post, which was, and I'm not quoting it exactly, and this was on, on Air Force Two, he said something like, there's a belief in some parts of MAGA that, you know, it's never okay to use military force. And that's just not the case. We, we will never get dragged into a years long war, but, you know, sometimes we need to use military force. And that appeared to me to be preserving Trump's optionality here. He defended the potential use of use of military force. And I think that although the Omanis said there was a ton of progress, actions speak louder than words. And Huckabee's essentially action telling people, yeah, you should leave suggests that the talks did not go as well as the Omanis suggest. Notably, Witkoff and Kushner said nothing. The American negotiators on the ground. So I would guess we're probably going to see something happen.
- [55:34]
A
Progress.
- [55:35]
D
It's important to note that there is, there is no deal to be had. There's no deal on the table. It doesn't exist.
- [55:42]
A
What do we want?
- [55:45]
D
We went in and we said no, we said no enrichment, no missiles and, you know, cut all the other crap out. And Iran has been announcing publicly every day, well, obviously we're going to enrich uranium. We're not going to give up. There is no deal. So the question is whether the Iranians can somehow, I don't know, it's like Tom and Jerry tire Trump out from chasing them around the room and just look for a way out because there, this is not ending in a comprehensive nuclear deal. It's not. It's insane to think, to think that it is. What the Iranians want is for Trump to take a kind of buyout, a kind of off ramp. And, but that would just mean Trump got tired of it. There's nothing that Trump could sign that he could also spin as somehow a victory. The Times yesterday had this piece where it said Trump is looking to be able to sign a deal that he can say is better than the deal Obama got. And it's like, you know, getting robbed in the street is a better deal than Obama got. Like you could, if he wants that, he could have it anytime he wants, he doesn't want. You know, we're so far past the Obama Better deal than Obama where, you know, we're a decade since Obama left office, a decade. Trump isn't thinking that. He's thinking, how do I not look like I wimped out of this without, you know, taking some sort of strike? And the answer is there isn't. There isn't a way down from this limb, because as I wrote yesterday, pointed out, there are he sent to aircraft carriers, six missile destroyers, 10,000 service members, 16 naval ships, more than 100 fighter jets. There are 12 F22 fighter jets with US personnel on a base in Israel. There are 50 more aircraft at a base nearby in Jordan. And this is all after a fleet of F15s and cargo planes made their way to the area. And all of this needs support ships. So that is, that is more than most countries could possibly have at any one time. That is, that is a, all the wings of the armed forces, a massive, massive display of firepower and readiness. You, that's not a limb you can climb down from.
- [58:14]
A
Plus an entire army, military of another country that will be involved in a strike that is the successful military in the world, plus our military. And they're all sitting there basically, like, just push the button and we're going.
- [58:38]
C
I think we are headed toward war. But I cannot completely dismiss the possibility that Trump would climb down at this point. And I don't think it's because he's tired of the chase. I think it's because it would get him out of all the messy uncertainty of a war and its aftermath. And what concerns me is that the Iranians have started speaking his language in the sense that they're talking about opening up investment opportunities and natural resource opportunities and partnerships. And, and that's the kind of thing that Trump likes to come away saying, look what I got. I got great deals for the U.S. now, the thing is, I agree there is no deal to be had. It'll be a fake deal, as everything that this regime has ever negotiated with the west is. So I'm still, this is what, the third weekend that we've gone into thinking it could be now, you know, so I, I tend to think we're, we're going to attack, we're going to strike this weekend or not. But I'm not, I'm not certain. And I, and Seth, I think your piece is great, and I think your argument is great. I think there's, with Trump, there's always wiggle room.
- [60:16]
D
Well, there's, there's a, there is that possibility, and I leave that possibility open in the piece. But I Want to be clear to make the point that that is an embarrassing climb down, that there's no, you know, my point is not that there's no way Trump will accept a way out. It's that there's no spinnable way out. There's no victory way, way to climb the climb down. Now he's too far up for people to believe that he's made some sort of genius deal. That's, that's my point.
- [60:48]
A
Well, the difficulty here is twofold, one of which is that he, he can spin it any way that he wants and there is a phalanx of people who will support him and who he will be happy to hear are supporting him no matter what it is that he does. And they'll say that he did the brave thing and the right thing and the prudent thing. And he'll be, see, I'm brave and bright and prudent because I didn't get us in the, involved in this war. Or, or he'll say, I just made this amazing deal. They're not going to enrich for, you know, four years and they're, they've agreed they're not going to enrich for three years or what, whatever it is, what a fantastic deal. And we know it's nonsense and the world and people will go, ha, ha, ha, But I don't know, you know, it's not really going to matter in that sense. It could have gigantic geopolitical implications if people around the world see that he climbed down. My thing I just want to point out is it is now February 2026, right? The Obama JCPOA deal one year from now would, have, had it remained in place, would have given Iran the legal right under this agreement and international law to develop nuclear weapons. Just so people are clear, Obama claimed in 2015 that it would not because there were follow on sanctions and there was this and there was that. That would keep them, would push it another two years and then they would have all these incentives not to go to a nuclear weapon, but that they could enrich and then they could do whatever it was that they wanted. Which is why it was a bad deal because at the end of it, Iran got a nuclear weapon. That was the whole reason to oppose the JCPOA at all. And if they knew they were going to get a weapon by 2028, they could have gotten a weapon by 2022 or 2023 had they had the wherewithal or ability to do so. And if our sanctions hadn't hurt them so much and if the Israelis hadn't killed their entire nuclear scientific community off to make it harder for them to get there. But so Trump is sitting here having stopped the Iranian clock and then having bombed the Iranian nuclear program. Is he going to make a deal that effectively allows them in some weird sense to restart the clock by having a time limit on enrichment? That because there's a time limit means that the time limit ends. At which point of course, there's no time limit anymore. So it just goes back to Iran doing what Iran wants to do. And he will have been the president who agreed to that. I don't see that's where the climb down is. I don't see how he gets there. It violates his pulling out of the jcpoa. He's just, even if he says I'm not, he is effectively saying Iran will have the legal justification to enrich uranium to weapons grade levels as it builds nuclear, as it builds ballistic missiles that will be able to be tipped by these nuclear weapons and then they can go at Israel if they want to, or in an icbm, hit the United States. How can he do that given everything that he has said, not only in this administration but in his first. But he could. I just don't. But you know, and as I say, my hope is that we're going to learn as we did after Operation Midnight Hammer, that there was method to this madness, that this, that there is a pr, that there is a serious plan and that it is painstaking and that they couldn't just pull the trigger in January when the massacring was going on, that if they, when they said, okay, that we're doing this, they needed to pre position everything, they needed to have everything in place, they needed to have supply chains, they needed to have weaponry to replace the weaponry, that this is a multi day, multi week campaign, whatever, and that they needed to be prepped and that they needed Israel to prepare itself as well since it's going to be a potential battlefield that the Iranians will use and they need to prep American bases and American positions, you know, in and around the Gulf to save, protect them from Iranian strikes. So that's my hope is that having started this, they did it not, they're doing it not half acidly and with this weird lack of seriousness about whether or not to go or stay. But that basically the decision was made to go and that what we're seeing here is what it actually means to go. You know, remember it took two years for us to develop the plans and materials to do, to do D Day. That Was, of course, you know, 80 years ago. I don't mean to, you know, make a common analogy, but this isn't just a strike. 33 hours. You go in, you go out, you take out one, you know, mountain and, you know, one facility. So that's rare. Anybody have a recommendation as we go into the holiday? No. Okay. Nope. All right, well, watch whatever you want. Break. Break some things. Don't watch things on a schedule. You know what I'm saying? Like, watch 10 minutes of something and turn it off if you don't like it. That's. That's. That's what I say. I do that all day, every day. There are so many shows that I've started on Netflix and Apple. I got little, literally seven minutes, and I'm like, nah. And that's it. Okay, so I'm not even gonna tell.
- [66:54]
D
This is. This is why, by the way, this is why I found out that they do this on YouTube. They have a trailer for trailers. Now, I know when you cook because I watch movie trailers, you know, so I know what's coming. And, you know, I watch the trailer sections a lot, so I know what's coming. And everything is like, yeah, it's like Mission Impossible. Trailer starts in 3, 2, 1. And then it's the trailer. And I was very confused, and people online said they do this because of the attention span. So that, you know.
- [67:23]
A
Yeah. Well, the other good thing is the 30 second teaser that at the end of it says, trailer coming next week. So it's a trailer for the trailer is another winner. Okay. I don't know. We're just blathering on now. Have a great weekend. See you Monday. For Abe, Eliana, and Seth, I'm John Pothorts. Keep the caliber. Sat.