- 'Sup, ya beautiful bastards?
Welcome back to the Philip DeFranco Show.
I have a fantastic and jam-packed Thursday show
for you today.
So buckle up, hit that "like" button
and let's just jump into it.
Yo, first up,
we have easily the most requested story of the day,
and that is the controversy and backlash
around YouTube creator PewDiePie.
This all starts earlier this week
when he posted a video titled "My Dog Cringes at TikToks",
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 he also put in the thumbnail,
and who also happens to be a massive massive TikTokker
who is deaf and often posts storytime videos
where she speaks and signs at the same time.
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 the drive-thru,
and it has the people where they stand outside
and they take your order
before you go up to the window.
So I pull up and I roll my window down.
And this lady...
- No. I'm not listening to this.
Look, she has your crazy nails, Maya.
(PewDiePie pretends to speak for dog, mocking video)
- [PewDiePie] 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?
- So that moment gets clipped,
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 using 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.
It's only racism."
But also, at the same time,
PewDiePie had many supporters,
a lot of people defending him,
with 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?"
Saying 'Twitter has really set the bar low
for cancellation.'
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?"
Like I mentioned, the clip involving Scarlet May
has since been removed from PewDiePie's video.
Both of them have now issued a response to the situation.
You had Scarlet posting a TikTok saying...
- Apparently there's a big YouTuber
named Mike PewDie, whatever.
I don't know his name,
but he made a reaction video
to one of my TikToks,
making fun of my nails,
making fun of my signs with his dog.
Then, I guess, at one point, mocking my voice.
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.
It's been a big issue in the Deaf community.
I've been trying to normalize
and put it out that using nails while signing is normal.
It's okay.
But then a big creator comes on here
and puts us a million steps back.
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 'em.
That's fine. They're not for you.
- Scarlet 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 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.
I had no clue she was deaf,
but kinda dumb of 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."
And 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 Scarlet 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 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 wanna pass a question off to you.
What are your thoughts here?
Looking at the reactions we featured in this video,
do you land in a certain camp?
Yes? No?
Why? Why not?
Any and all thoughts, I'd love to hear from you.
Then let's talk about this wild news about a murder
that has resulted in a $7-billion judgment.
Specifically, a Texas jury
has now found Charter Spectrum liable for $7-billion
in punitive damages
for the murder 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.
So the question you probably have at this point is,
"Okay, well, how are they liable?
What did they do?"
As it turns out, the jury found
that Spectrum had "systemic failures"
when it hired 43-year-old Roy Holden Jr.
as a field technician.
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 the man stealing her credit cards
and going on a spending spree.
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've shown
that Holden had a long history of lying.
Past employers,
who weren't contacted when he was hired,
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.
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've saved a ton of money
as it would've just been on the hook
for the amount of her last phone bill.
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 wanna say, get that outta 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 are refused to investigate or report to police.
Yeah, that's cool.
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Then we absolutely have to talk about
US military veterans getting poisoned
by their own government,
which sounds like a story
where everyone would be on the same page
and on the same side,
but turns out, no.
So the center of 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.
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 a 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,
according to the DoD's own estimates,
with one service member describing what it's like:
- [Le Roy] As soon as I arrived in country,
I noticed a stench.
For me, it just felt like
I was living next to a landfill,
just that stench
of just burning rubber or something.
It's just 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 benefits status
to post-9/11 veterans.
So they don't actually have to prove
their illness was caused by time overseas.
Though, 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.
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.
- 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
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.
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.
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
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 backflip,
decided to throw the whole thing into limbo,
because you have 25 GOP senators
who previously voted for 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
and only a few votes shy of the 60 needed to pass.
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 the Republicans want to eliminate
some mandatory spending in the bill
and then they expect it to pass.
Right now, it's not clear
when the vote might be rescheduled,
since the Senate is taking a month-long recess
the end of the next week,
which is why, among many,
you have Democrats slamming the reversal,
with Veterans Affairs Committee Chair John Tester
calling it an "Eleventh-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.
- 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 gonna have to wait to see what happens,
but I wanna know your thoughts.
Of course I wanna know everyone's thoughts,
but specifically, if you are a military service member
or you have one in your family
or your friends with one,
what are your thoughts here?
Because I feel like there's such a disconnect
between what people say and 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.
Every year, we just throw more money at the military,
but only the part that kills other people.
We're like, "Fuck our own people when they're done."?
US military spending last year was $801 billion,
and we can't take care of our vets?
Especially when the thing
that was funded for $801-billion
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.
Then in absolutely massive news,
we need to talk about Meta,
which, of course,
is a company that is never done anything wrong
and is almost universally loved by everyone.
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.
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,
still a massive fuck-ton 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 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.
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."
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."
To 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.
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, Facebook, whatever the fuck you wanna call it,
they've had a very hard time over the last year or so.
A lot of it's been focused
on the platform having to remodel
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."
Just last week, Zuck and 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 content from accounts
that users don't already follow on their feeds.
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
in the main news feed.
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.
She had a post saying,
"Make Instagram Instagram again.
Stop trying to be TikTok.
I just wanna see cute photos of my friends.
Sincerely, everyone."
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 creator 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's 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 platform's later 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.
Zuckerberg has been spending a ton,
a just 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,
some investors are concerned that it won't pay off.
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
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 well, 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,
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 is not really a social thing anymore.
It's all about like consuming and performing.
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,
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 how much money is being made,
of-fucking-course they're 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.
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've got you covered here and here.
But, as always, my name's Philip DeFranco.
You've just been filled in.
I love your faces and I'll see you tomorrow.
Fuck. No. Monday.
Nailed it. First try.