BUCK: Clay and I were going back and forth this morning on Netflix, ’cause one of the things you’ve seen in recent years is just how important it is to have control of platforms and content. We usually talk about it in the context of social media, and for people who say, “Oh, I don’t care about Twitter. I don’t follow TikTok.” Well, Twitter determines the news cycle for all the news sites and all the newspapers pretty much that you’re reading.
In some ways, not entirely, but it’s very influential, and TikTok is brainwashing your kids. So these things matter whether people engage with them or not. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime. These are major streaming services. In the case of Amazon part of what is effectively the largest company in the world or in the top three, depending on what month we’re talking about, what the stock price is.
And Netflix has gone woke or was woke perhaps all along, we’re just more aware of it now. Elon Musk — who we give a lot of props to on the show because guy’s obviously a genius and a world-class entrepreneur — Clay, he says the woke mind virus is to blame for Netflix tanking. Its stock dropped 32%, on track for the biggest drop in a decade.
It is hemorrhaging viewers — and, remember, where did Obama…? This is important: Where did Obama go to get tens of millions of dollars basically showered on him right when he finished the presidency? A Netflix deal. This is the heart of the left’s cultural dominance right now, and something’s going on in Netflix. What do you think it is?
BUCK: Full-disclosure Travis over here.
CLAY: Yeah. The stock is right now — I’m looking as we’re speaking, Buck — down 37%. Basically, it has wiped out multi-years of gains that the stock had seen. It’s down around $129 as we speak, and I’m fascinated by this on so many different levels, Buck, because Netflix was over $700 a share as recently as basically a year ago.
And you know that conventional wisdom is often wrong. In fact, one of the big, flashing red lights for many things should be when the, quote, unquote, experts all agree on something. And so everybody agreed that streaming was gonna be the future, right, that your cable and satellite bundle, that you sit down, you put on your television, that that was fading rapidly.
And that certainly has been true as people cut cords. Netflix had a competitive advantage for a while, Buck. But then everybody decided to get into streaming. And you were just mentioning it. In my house we’ve got Disney+, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Max, Paramount, basically everything you can think of. I know a lot of people out there dealing with 8.5% inflation, what they sold us, Buck, was the idea:
Oh, streaming is gonna save you money, because you won’t need to pay as much as you are for your cable or satellite subscription. The reality is most people are having to pay as much or more now for their streaming services as they ever paid for cable — and if you are still keeping a cable subscription, which I am, all of a sudden the costs have skyrocketed.
And I was thinking about this, Buck, because, yes, the woke angle I think plays in, but also the idea that streaming was gonna be a great business may be a total lie, ’cause they’re not making much money. Disney is losing money on Disney+ right now.
BUCK: Look at CNN!.
CLAY: CNN+ just shut down basically.
BUCK: They’re on the precipice of bailing on the whole thing. They just signed Chris Wallace for I think it was $12 million a year which, by the way… I don’t even know what to say. Some people just don’t understand how lucky they are to be where they are and think that they’re always better than whatever incredibly lucky position they’re in (chuckles), and I think he’s one of those individuals. Left a great gig at Fox — which, as we know, Fox is unbelievably effective as putting programming on that millions and millions of people watch. Every show, right?
CLAY: It’s the most effective media company probably in the United States in terms of being able to mobilize audience, if you consider sports, if you consider Fox News, all of those rolled in together.
CLAY: No doubt. Yes.
BUCK: I have a family friend who runs a sort of small independent studio, and he complains sometimes about how, you know, you think that Paramount or you think that, you know, Universal is gonna right the biggest check for a new series or for a new film. Not true. Amazon, if they want it, they’ll get it. Netflix, if they want it, they’ll get.
They’ll write the biggest checks, which means they also have a tremendous say in what gets made and what doesn’t. The same way in the news cycle, everybody, really the biggest decision is, “What are you covering?” right, more than anything else. How you cover matters but what you cover. And in the content, in the creative side, what gets made, what gets green-lighted, green lit — green lit, green-lighted — and what doesn’t is an enormous, an enormous differentiator. I have noticed this. I remember in the early days of Netflix, I’m like, “This is pretty cool.” Were you a CDC DVD-in-the-mail guy? I would do it.
CLAY: By the way, we used to live in the Caribbean, you know, that’s where I practiced law when I first graduated, and so there weren’t DVD-rental places. You couldn’t get a subscription I was one of the early Netflix subscribers ’cause if you wanted to watch a movie there weren’t like DVD rental places that were easy to find in the islands.
BUCK: Just put that aside for a second —
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: — because I’m gonna speak on behalf of the audience and ClayAndBuck.com here when I say: We have not seen enough Clay Caribbean Lawyer photos or anything.
CLAY: I don’t know how many of them exist. They’re not digital.
BUCK: Ahhh.
CLAY: That was the day before —
BUCK: Remember those little cameras you had to take the…?
CLAY: Back in the day when you first got the camera on your phone, like, you couldn’t even really tell what you were taking a picture of.
BUCK: My life circa… I’m sure this is true for a lot of other folks here. My life circa 2012, 2011, is far better documented through email, video, photo, and everything than anytime before. It’s ’cause the technology changed so rapidly. But, anyway, back on to Netflix. It has been getting more and more woke.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: And it’s annoying. And I’ve actually thought about it. I give full credit to… I have a family member who we’re all boosting this one family member’s Disney+ subscription, and as soon as they fire Gina Carano this family member canceled it right away. So we all kind of got to ride along with that cancellation. But I would have canceled it on that.
And it doesn’t matter what the period is. It’s gonna be about diversity and inclusion or it’s gonna be about transgender rights. And they go to some pretty extreme lengths with that stuff in a way where you say I just want to be entertained but the left just like with Hollywood before, folks: They want you to believe what they believe. That’s even more important to them.
CLAY: I think there’s a big part there. Buck, I also think people are looking to save money, and what people have realized is you can turn your Netflix subscription on or off. So if you’re a fan, for instance, of Cobra Kai — which I’ve watched with my boys, the Karate Kid series — or if you like a dark series; I really like Ozark, right? But whenever they come out with a new version of that, you can wait.
You can sign up for a month, you can the catch-up on everything you might be interested in and then you can bail so instead of having to pay over a hundred dollars for a year, you might be able to pay 20, see everything that you need to see. And I think they’ve reached their apex, and I don’t know where we go from here.
I’m actually fascinated by Disney, for example, because the cable and satellite bundle is declining, the number of people have cable and satellite. So they were like, “Hey, we’ve gotta step from this sinking ship over to another ship,” right, the streaming ship. But they still haven’t made money there. And if we’ve already reached peak streaming, they may be on simultaneously two different sinking ships from a media perspective.
‘Cause whatever you think of these shows, Buck, they are wildly expensive to make. And so the only way you keep people signed up is by producing new content, and that new content isn’t very affordable. So Netflix now is saying they’re gonna do advertisements!
BUCK: The business model part of this is interesting to me, but the influence on the culture and on entertainment and our national perception and conversation to me, that… Even if you have a pullback at Netflix, we still have nothing on… There’s nothing that is… It’s not even conservative. It’s not even GOP. Just make things that are meant to entertain people instead of make things that are meant to create a political perception in the audience.
Doesn’t matter. They’re making a show about ninth century Viking invasion of England which is usually stuff that I love, there will be some wokeness thrown in there. They’ll be doing characters. You’ll be at, like, the Battle of Poitiers or Crecy, and all of a sudden, some character would be like, “Well, maybe we should consider transgender rights more.”
CLAY: (laughing)
BUCK: You say, “Wait. What? I’m pretty sure this wasn’t…” They will put it anywhere, and they are infusing the content with politics all the time. It’s because they have this vision of changing — and look, this is why it was so important to those Disney executives. I think that was what really rattled people when they saw from the very top, the chief content officer of Disney wants to talk about pansexuality and how there need to be more pansexual cartoon characters that your children are watching. That is just fact.
BUCK: That is the country we live in right now.
CLAY: Well, and it’s also the antithesis of everything Walt Disney stood for. So whatever you think about Disney today, know that Walt Disney would be rolling over in his grave at the idea of what his company has become, because if you’ve been to Disney World, if you’ve been to Disneyland, Main Street USA? There are few places that were more patriotic than Disney.
And there were few business executives more patriotic and anti-communist than Walt Disney and his embrace of American exceptionalism. So the idea that his company today could have become what it has, I think would infuriate Walt Disney if he were still alive at this point in time. You just look at when you walk into Disney World. It’s supposed to be a place that removes all politics, right? “The happiest place on earth,” and instead they have consistently made the decision that they have to put politics directly into their product.
BUCK: I think it’s even an escalation, what we’ve seen from the left is an escalation over something that is near and dear to your heart, Clay, which is sports as the —
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: — refugee that everybody used to be able to have, right? They’ve completely wokened, they’ve completely made woke sports now.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: And as you say, maybe even more so than the political media, the sports media. Now they’ve gone for children’s entertainment. Now they’ve realized that’s really where they want to push, that’s really where they want the messaging to go. And, you know, that tears down the patriarchy.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: All of this stuff is being infused in kind of your children. That’s also why… Conservatives, we’re not, by nature, the first to adopt some new, trendy thing, right? We like what we like. We feel like we know what works and doesn’t. We’re busy people, right? But when we talk about TikTok, I need people on the right to stop saying, “It’s a Chinese spying app. I’ll never touch it.”
CLAY: No doubt. And, Buck, I think you hit on it well. I’ve been arguing — and I think I’ve been correct on this — that sports was the canary in the coalmine. They were using sports to demonstrate how they could take over pop culture as a whole, and if you didn’t fight back against it, this was what was gonna happen.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
CLAY: Netflix, to their credit, stood up for Dave Chappelle in that transgender battle. But how many people would they be willing to do that for? Again, I give credit to Dave Chappelle for being willing to make jokes that make people uncomfortable.
BUCK: He’s also the most successful black comedian, maybe the most successful comedian, period, right, of his generation, and certainly among the very top in any categorization. He’s a guy who, for them to throw him under the bus would have been quite a move.
CLAY: Yeah, it would have been difficult for them to pull that off. But I think it speaks to the challenge that these media companies are finding themselves in. The only way that you can be all things to all people is just by focusing on making the best possible product, and that’s used to be what everybody focused on.
Now it’s, “Oh, we gotta send out an email and let you know what we think about this latest social justice warrior issue,” and that’s how you end up with Wimbledon, by the way, banning Russians ’cause people make stupid decisions when they’re trying to placate everyone out there on the internet.
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