John Bolton - November 23, 2024


Hating Half Your Audience Is Not A Good Business Plan


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

184.4554

Word count

1,011

Sentence count

54

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Why do companies and entertainers think it's okay to alienate a large portion of their potential consumer base and audience? Is it okay to call people who don't vote the way they think they should vote? Or are they racist or homophobe?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.160 Hi, it's John down in the basement having a cup of coffee Saturday, November the 23rd.
00:00:05.660 And on my mind this morning is something I've been thinking about for almost the last week,
00:00:10.540 okay? And it's a question. Maybe you can answer the question in the comments below. But why do
00:00:15.880 a lot of companies and entertainers think it's okay to alienate a large portion of their possible
00:00:23.340 consumer base and audience? And the reason I'm bringing this up is because of what you're seeing
00:00:28.020 on the screen right now. These people. Now the car company Jaguar, Jaguar as we say here in Canada,
00:00:35.180 seem to think these people are going to sell them a lot of cars. And over the last five or six days
00:00:40.880 there's been a lot of comments regarding the advertisement that features these creatures
00:00:46.140 you're seeing right here. Now let me ask you this. Is this representative of anybody in society today?
00:00:51.880 I would say no. But the people who are critical, first of all, they realize that there's no car
00:00:57.940 in the commercial that's selling cars and they think that Jaguar is trying to push a message to
00:01:04.340 them, okay? And you can come to your own conclusion on that. But instead of trying to explain what the
00:01:10.740 commercials are trying to sell, Jaguar is basically alienating a lot of people who might buy their cars
00:01:17.820 by calling them bigots, racists, and homophobes, all right? Which isn't a good idea. Now kudos to the
00:01:23.000 marketing campaign. They're certainly getting a lot of comments and a lot of eyes on the commercial.
00:01:27.740 But we'll have to wait and see if it sells any cars. Now up next, this is Joy Reid. Now she is a 0.99
00:01:33.940 commentator on MSNBC. And she seems to think it's okay to alienate half the potential audience she has 0.96
00:01:41.260 out there. She seems to think it's all right to call people who don't vote the way she thinks they
00:01:46.960 should vote or think the way she thinks they should think. Racists. And she thinks it's okay
00:01:52.200 to bring up a white supremacy on the air all the time. Now I don't watch MSNBC, but I've seen enough
00:01:58.300 videos of this woman to know that she is a racist and she really hasn't got a place on TV at all. 1.00
00:02:03.900 I mean, if you're, if I've ever been in the radio business, which I have, or if you've ever done
00:02:08.560 anything in TV, which I have, you realize that the more people that see the commercials that are on
00:02:13.660 your channel or station, the more money you make, the more profits you make to pay the people who
00:02:19.400 are actually on air. I don't think this person is doing any good for MSNBC. And it's quite possible
00:02:26.200 she could be out of a job soon because MSNBC is about to be sold. Which brings us to Star Wars.
00:02:34.800 Okay, so I love the first three Star Wars movies. I saw the first one when I was 12 years old and it
00:02:40.640 was right in my wheelhouse. And it's an amazing storied franchise with millions and millions of
00:02:45.940 people who love Star Wars. But in recent years, I've seen a few other movies, don't like them all
00:02:51.800 that much. And recently, by watching people who are critics of entertainment on YouTube and whatnot,
00:02:59.680 they don't like the message that's being passed along by Star Wars. And they really don't like
00:03:04.800 the stories that are being portrayed on Star Wars at all. So they're very critical of it.
00:03:09.580 Now, instead of trying to right the ship, Disney, which owns Star Wars, has thought the best thing
00:03:15.660 to do is to piss off the very people they need to watch their movies by calling them racists and
00:03:21.220 homophobes and on and on and on. Which brings us to my final conclusion here and my final example.
00:03:30.540 Late night talk. Okay, I don't have cable and I don't watch Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert or Jimmy
00:03:38.500 Fallon. But I've seen enough of them on TV to know that these people don't seem to like half of the
00:03:44.800 United States and half of their audience. Jimmy Kimmel, after the election, went on TV and cried
00:03:50.460 and basically called a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump idiots. Not in those words, but that's
00:03:56.360 what he was leading to. Now, for some reason, these guys seem to think it's okay to piss off half their
00:04:01.460 audience. And I go back to the point I just made about Joy Reid, that you need people to watch your show,
00:04:06.820 to watch your advertisements, to make a profit, to make money for the people who work on your network.
00:04:12.020 And these people aren't doing themselves any favors by pissing off half the people who could be
00:04:16.900 watching them. Which leads me to the final point, which I'll leave to Johnny Carson. He appeared with
00:04:22.800 Barbara Walters years ago and he was asked something about this and this is what he had to say.
00:04:27.780 When you come out and do your monologues, which are really based on what you've read,
00:04:35.540 do you go home and worry about things? Do you worry about this country? Are there things that
00:04:42.480 really bug you that you can't say in the air?
00:04:44.300 You're going to get serious, aren't you? A little bit. I think one of the dangers,
00:04:50.240 if you are a comedian, which basically I am, if you start to take yourself too seriously
00:04:57.460 and start to comment on social issues, your sense of humor suffers somewhere. I've seen other people
00:05:05.840 whose names I won't mention who do humor. And then somewhere along the line, they start to
00:05:10.380 want to make their views known. I try to do it humorously. I try not to, and we've had some
00:05:16.900 criticism on the show. Some critics over the years say, well, the show has no great sociological
00:05:20.820 value. It's not controversial. It's not deep. The Tonight Show basically is to amuse people,
00:05:27.980 to make them laugh.