And we're going to create environments where it is no longer socially appropriate

to be glued to the phone.

This is the main thing is that parents look at each other funny in 2026 when your kids are wandering around the neighborhood on their own unsupervised, which I think is wrong.

Of course, I grew up in the...

in the 90s, but they don't look at each other sideways.

When their kid is on an iPad at the Chili's dinner table with grandma and grandpa, nobody seems to care that this kid is completely checked out.

And I was getting pizza with a friend the other day, and the grandpa was at the table, the kid busted out his iPad, and the grandpa put the screen down he said i want to talk to you and i i was just listening in on this and he was drawing that kid into conversation we've gotten so used to the idea of pacifying and pushing the children away like we don't want to hear them we don't want to hear from them their disruptions because we are sort of an anti-child society in many ways i ran for city council in manassas virginia And one of the most unpopular positions that I took was that we needed to incentivize the school board to pick up yonder pouches in the school and lock the kid's phone away in mag sealed containers during the day.

But whatever you think about the whole scientific revolution and materialism stuff, right? extraordinarily bizarre way for people to look at the

Authorities say that the woman at the speedway didn't reveal this at the time, but investigators would later discover that Dean and Tina had traveled with members of a group called Christ Family.

The Christ Family seems to have grown, uh, slowly, beginning probably around 1969 or n- 1970.

It was around a person who came to be known as Jesus Christ Lightning Amen.

His birth name was Charles McHugh.

The three main doctrines of the Christ Family were no killing, no sex, and no materialism.

You're just out there barefooted, telling people that God wants us to stop killing each other and the animals, too.

I'm Stephen Kent.

I'm a retired sociology of religion professor.

That's what the information is communicating to you.

People don't think about percentages that way.

And this is again where you go to the Bloomberg piece, and it's sort of just this nanny state tone about protecting the consumer from this writer, Erica Smith.

And again, this Bloomberg story is in the opinion section, so it's one person's opinion.

hear about how consumers need to be protected from themselves when it comes to making investments in different outcomes.

But there is no evidence in this write-up of actual consumer harm done or large-scale money lost, because bad information does tend to wash out.

And you do get to actually... change and pull out your money at any given time.

Can you kind of walk us through your argument here?

But is it a winning strategy when the margins are so thin to just go with the people who are most loyal to you when the country is a little bit upset with President Trump right now based on the economy?

Well, Republican primaries are their own special kind of crazy.

You probably know that about Democratic primaries as well.

There are costs to appealing to the most hardline voters in any given state or district when it comes to picking your candidates.

I think this selection of the endorsement for Ken Paxton is a huge self-inflicted wound.

that is going to bog down the race in a bunch of different scandals and attack ads that talarico is going to be able to run against this guy assuming he does defeat john cornyn and i think right now what we've seen is that trump does have wind in his sails when it comes to picking winners he did not always have this kind of clout when it came to picking winners in primaries but this year he has been on a roll and that is because he still does have staunch support among 75 percent of republicans and this 30 percent hardcore maga base in the republican party who will jump as high as he asks them to jump So I'm not excited about the Ken Paxton pick.

I'm also not shedding any tears for Thomas Massey.

We have to find a balance between cutting out the fraud and cutting off the people who actually need it and making it harder for doctors to accept, or knowing they have to go through a ton of paperwork so they won't even accept new Medicare or Medicare patients.

W- what's the, the road ahead regarding the kind of civil integrity of our process?

This is a great question, and I will try to answer it in a targeted way because C.S. Lewis I feel like had an answer to it which works.

And it was regarding the inner ring.

It was sort of his solution to how we can break away from the rat race for power and influence and control.

Uh, it says, "For Lewis," and this is Aaron Earl's write-up in The Wardrobe Door.

He says, "For Lewis, the solution to the inner ring is friends, and if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside, that you are indeed smut- snug and safe at the center of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an inner ring, friendship." Um, that was Lewis there remarking that if you really wanna try to find a place where you're safe and secure and it feels like the inner ring, but it directs you towards something that is good, it's friends.

And the social fabric is in such rapid decline from demographic sorting in our neighborhoods away from people who don't agree with us on issues, uh, who have, you know, different educational backgrounds or they come from different parts of the country.

Mm-hmm.

Right

... untainted.

Even "The Hobbit," which sort of reeked of the "Star Wars" prequels in some of the ways that they were lackluster and looked really cheesy and corny, they've sort of avoided tarnishing the legacy of Peter Jackson's work.

And I would even say, you know, putting aside "The Ring of Power" on Amazon, um, uh, the, the legacy of the original "Lord of the Rings" movies are intact.

So every time you dip back into this universe, and we talk about the hunt for Gollum and Aragorn and Smeagol and bringing back the original cast, you are risking everything.

You are risking everything about the legacy of these movies, and, uh, there's cause for people to, to worry here.

Um, and Colbert, you know, he is a very polarizing figure.

I, I'm seeing the train wreck before it even gets here.

It's very bad

... what those editorial standards are exactly.

I mean, this, this tweet was funny.

Uh, it, it struck me as one of two things.

Either-- Well, actually one of three things.

[laughs] It's either AI, uh, dr- uh, written slop, uh, cutting corners inside CNN to put out a tweet that, you know, basically has no strong opinions about what happened, uh, at, uh, in New York City with this bombing effort, uh, or it was done by an intern who just has no sense of, of getting the tone correct, or it was maliciously [laughs] done by a CNN staffer to downplay the bad intent of these two teenagers who came to New York City, uh, with weaponry to do harm to Americans exercising their First Amendment rights.

I mean, it could be one of these three things.

It must be someone else's fault.

What were some of your takeaways from the earnings that we got this morning and also the reaction?

Yeah, well, you know, I think for me, when I think of Disney right now and looking at their five-year spread, we are still seeing a story of patience playing out.

I, by and large, look at Disney and go, there's a huge case for optimism for them actually finally beating the market in 2026. with some changes internally but also good headwinds on the legacy of Bob Iger which has no doubt been the building of the streaming business we are now headed into a new year where they're no longer going to be reporting on their subscriber numbers they topped out somewhere around 183 million last year and now we're just going to be seeing the money that they make on autopilot, which is not insignificant.

I mean, we're talking about just in the last quarter, about $450 million operating income.

That is up 72% from last year.

Like there's a huge case for optimism and their slate on the entertainment side this year is strong.

We've got Star Wars, Mandalorian, we've got the Avengers and Toy Story in the lineup for Disney Entertainment.

So if my question is 2 fold here does this indicate to us that the streaming wars have entered a more mature phase for Disney and also with less disclosure how should investors judge streaming performance now what metrics matter the most.

Why don't you walk us through it?

Yeah, absolutely.

So, you know, the first thing is that this whole deal of a sale of Warner Brothers is hugely indicative to me of just the end of traditional media as we see it.

Now, I know this gets said every year the next year is going to be the total demise of traditional television and uh you know pay cable based packages uh but this is really starting to accelerate in a way that i think people don't understand that youtube has become television and the reason that i point that out is because traditionalists year over year have always maintained that the competition is between the traditional television packages and then their streaming competitors.

So like your Netflix, your Disney, your Paramount Plus, but are completely neglecting the fact that most consumers are in fact sitting around in their living rooms and putting on their favorite YouTube television channels.

shakes up the entire dynamic of how people view stuff and Warner Brothers is buried under millions and millions of dollars of debt looking for a way out Netflix is currently completely stagnant as a company in terms of its content on offer traffic coming in and there's got to be a major shake-up on the television side between the streaming side of things and then the traditional tv side of things they're going to become one at one at some point and it's going to be in 2026 i believe because they have to actually unite at some point against youtube as the actual real driver of most people's entertainment time in front of a screen

You know, where does it go from here if you're a company like, I don't know, Paramount or Comcast? There's a lot of risks out there, I'd imagine.

Yeah, well, you know, by the summer of 2026, you are now going to be in a world in which over 50%, finally, and it's taken a long time to actually get past 50, 51% of all companies entertainment streaming activity is going to be happening in youtube surpassing all the broadcast networks and you're also going to have fast tv overcoming netflix this is going to be one of the big shakeups so fast tv is free ad supported streaming television so two examples of that would be pluto and tubi now if you look at Viewer stats from the past 12 months and this was the first year in which Nielsen was able to measure and was doing measurements of Pluto and to be in these other fast TV networks in September November 2024 fast TV was about 6% of the market to Netflix's 7.7 and then if you fast forward to this past year 2025 the fall that was completely switched.

I'm not listening.

Yeah, he, uh, he also did a wonderful Screwtape Letters adaptation, uh, for the BBC on YouTube.

It's fantastic.

And this is his take on Animal Farm.

Now, there has been, like you said, a right-wing backlash against this trailer.

And Tony, I'm not convinced that there's anything to be angry or upset about.

Uh, I think conservatives have a tendency to want a sermon when it comes to their pop culture and their entertainment.

That, that's, that's the idea of Pilkington.

Tell me about this Frieren thing, because I have no idea what you're talking about.

All right, so this is a show I am passionate about.

So passionate I have watched it twice in the past month, all 28 episodes.

This is, uh, I'm sorry, folks, a, a Japanese anime on Netflix that debuted in 2024 initially.

But it is now really starting to ramp up because its second season debuts at the beginning of 2026.

And this- this show shocked and surprised me.

It has also become very popular, uh, in Christian commentator circles because it is the story of an elven mage who is hunting demons across this land and working to- to wipe them out.

I know it's an Indiana show but I've never watched a shred of it at all.

Just takeaways from Netflix's earnings and also the street response that we're seeing today.

Yeah, we'll survive a 5.6 drop for this.

We are looking at Netflix having massive growth over the past year.

We've got just 40% alone in 2025.

And since October 2024, this stock is up 61%.

Everything is going fine in the world of streaming if you are an internet-only platform.

The same cannot be said for a lot of the competitors who are really burdened and held down by having to manage cable properties on traditional cable packages.

A little bit of differing opinions there on the performance for the quarter and going forward.

What do you think?

Yeah.

Well, there's no doubt that when it comes to pornography, adult content, um, explicit anything, what people experience in the online world is going to impact and shape the things that they want out of their real world lives.

That Newsweek survey that you mentioned, um, that people are reporting having, uh, romantic relationships with AI begs the question of what they consider to be romantic.

Uh, what kind of conversations, uh, activity and feedback and responses do people consider to be ideal for a partner? People are going to project what the AI gives them onto human beings.

You know, one of the things that I think anyone who's been married has to contend with at some point in their life is that their spouse is not designed to bring them, uh, gratification and satisfaction in all things.

You actually have to do a whole lot of creating that for yourself.

People of any age, because society is so hooked on it.

They're gonna be like a lovable Michael Scott kind of a thing." And everyone liked M- Ron Swanson dunking on her character.

Because the- the issue with- the issue with Amy Poehler, it has always been in- in- in her performances, particularly in Parks and Rec, is when she is the most naïve, th- she's the most funny, she's the most hopeful and she doesn't understand how the real world works, and it's okay that she's kind of some squish lib Democrat who loves Hillary Clinton, but it's when she realizes that not everybody thinks like her that she's actually hilarious.

But she becomes more and more self-righteous and sure of herself as Parks and Rec goes on, and Amy Poehler is something of the same and her performance as Pam Bondi is, I think, seizing on the best part of Pam Bondi as an attorney general, which is grumpy and not gonna take your- your crap bad questions.

(laughs) And, uh, so she- she basically just comes in to scowl, grumble and sneer at all of the different senators which, I mean, honestly, me too, right? Like, these people are cont- these people are contemptible losers and not willing, uh, of our being taken, uh, being taken seriously.

What do you think about the major stuff that everyone's watching right now? Is there something that everyone's watching that you're just like, "Nah," or maybe the other way around?

Ugh, man.

It has to be Monster, the Ed Gein story on, um, Netflix right now by Ryan Murphy.

So Ryan Murphy, uh, he is most well known for his show American Horror Story, and he also did the Jeffrey Dahmer series as well as something on the Erik Menéndez, uh, brothers.

Frame up the situation for us.

Yeah.

Uh, in this house, we believe women exist, uh, so does J.K. Rowling.

Uh, so Emma Watson has commented on J.K. Rowling for many years since J.K. became sort of the British face of the push for reality on biological sex.

She has criticized J.K., um, called her all sorts of names, and heartless, and all this kind of stuff, as the other cast members of the Harry Potter films have done.

But only recently in a podcast just a couple of days ago, Watson said, uh, "I really don't believe that having had that experience with J.K. Rowling on set and holding the views I do means that I can't treasure the person that I had experiences with." So sort of going a step backwards from slandering her for many, many years and saying she still treasures J.K.

and, uh, respects her views.

... with an old pervert.

Wha- why?

You know, this is- this is the kind of stuff that's- that's so dystopian.

I mean, uh, there's- there's again in- in Star Wars there's this situation where they massacre all these people and then the news media in Star Wars, you know, is of course reframing what happened as, um, you know, the- the rebels or the Gormans lashed out and they were attacking imperial police officers so they had to all be executed.

Uh, and then that's being used again as this point of, "Ah, Star Wars was trying to teach us about how the media is gonna spin what's happening in Los Angeles." Um, except that we don't live in that world.

We don't live in a world where you can't get online and see what's happening.

You can get on the internet, and everybody is, and seeing the burning down of Los Angeles and the attacking of police officers by really scary looking like thugs riding around on motorcycles with spiked bracelets and chains and masks.

I mean, i- it looks like a dystopian vision of the future.

But I wait- I thought that Christopher Columbus was bad, but how do these Mexicans exist?

Stephen, how's it going?

(laughs) Always good to see you, Tony.

Should we start with The New Yorker? I think that's what, that's what started this whole train wreck.

Mm-hmm.

Just what we always wanted.

(laughs) Yes, yes, we need, uh, everyone to be bi and someone to be in a wheelchair.

Uh, no, I mean, Andor is...

I know that they've said a lot that it's Star Wars for adults, but it's also Star Wars that sort of takes its own premise seriously.

Um, you know, it is actually asking people to consider what would government in this galaxy far, far away be like? What is it like when you sort of have a totalitarian state and a secret service or, you know, a secret police who actually try to plug all the holes of rebellion across the galaxy? I mean, we've seen and read stories about intelligence agencies trying to control their nations, but what happens when you're an intelligence agency that's trying to control an entire galaxy full of hundreds of star systems? What does that look like? Like, Andor actually shows you what that would be in reality, and it's, it's ugly, uh, it's really, really interesting, and the political stuff in Andor is real.

And I think you and I have discussed this a little bit, that the, the show sort of vibes in a lefty kind of way.

Maybe we disagree on that some, but, but the, the show vibes in a lefty sort of political way, but it's rooted in genuine political beliefs, not agitprop, uh, which most Disney politics is cheap sloganeering and propaganda.

But the way that this is being solved, I disagree with.

I mean, these things are just as big, if not bigger in many cases, as some of the traditional Hollywood studios.

Well, sure, that, that's absolutely the case, but, you know, again, going back to keeping production costs low, you know, Hungary and Romania, a- and Ireland have built up these massive, uh, film studio properties that people from the United States can come and film on.

Tons and tons of American projects are now shot overseas.

Game shows that are shot in Ireland, simply for a sound stage, not even for anything about the countryside of Ireland itself, but just because it's cheaper on labor and union costs and staff and crews and all that kinda stuff, tax incentives, to shoot in these countries.

You know, so this, uh, this business about the Trump administration wanting to impose tariffs on, uh, foreign films, uh, or things made outside of America is a really interesting subject because all of these streaming platforms are gonna struggle immensely to feed their platforms if they have to bring their stuff-... back home.

And then consumers get less choices when it comes to their streaming.

The way that these companies have started creating their devices, and this isn't new, you and I have talked about right to repair with Apple devices for a long time, I- I don't think that people quite understand how insanely some of these companies are manufacturing their devices, their equipment, so that they cannot be repaired, that planned obsolescence.

Tony, I think one of the areas that we can actually wrap up on here is this very topic was covered in Star Wars: Andor season one, the Rebellion against the Empire in that show focuses on this one kid named Nemik who is very, very worried about how the Empire has trained the people of the galaxy to use technological devices like GPS for their spaceships that travel the galaxy, but they don't actually know how to fix it.

... a little tenuous maybe to put 80% of an entire country's energy on renewables.

Well, it always works until it doesn't.

And at the Consumer Choice Center, the way that we, of course, look at this is that the- the first way that you should build, uh, your energy sector is around the best interests and needs of consumers.

The people who are going to be turning on the lights, using the water, all that kind of stuff every single day.

They approach energy from an ideological perspective.

What is the ideal form of energy for X, Y or Z moral purpose? Whereas you should be looking at it, what saves people the most money and allows them to have the things that they need.

And so Europe has, of course, chosen the former of those things, they do not care much about the needs of consumers.

It's kind of like an energy policy is, uh, incredibly important.

What do you think?

Well, I- I, for one, am very excited to see Andor season two return.

Uh, tonight when people are listening to this, the first three episodes of the second season will be out.

This is Star Wars for adults, people, directed by Tony Gilroy and following Cassian Andor, a upstart rebel who is just now getting involved in the rebel movement, but will go on to help steal the Death Star plans.

We know this guy from the movie Rogue One, came out 2017 right after Disney acquired the Star Wars franchise, and this series was, I think, objectively a hit.

I- I don't know many people who have bad things to say about the Andor first season, and it's finally back.

So that's gonna be tonight.

You know what I mean? Or we'd seen them too much.

... back into your accounts?

The magic of the internet.

I, I will tell you though, I mean, the, the financial harm of these overseas sites tends to be credit card and cryptocurrency fraud and scams.

And so, you know, US states who have regulated sports betting and legalized it are at least able to offer people who enjoy sports betting and watching these games, uh, legal avenues to bet using usually debit card only.

So actually, if they're going to run up a big gambling bill, that it's gonna be with money in their actual bank account.

And, you know, we have this big problem in the US, which is that Texas and California, two population powerhouses in the US, uh, both have still banned sports betting.

And so their population drifts over towards overseas sites like Bovada, uh, making these things hugely profitable, and it causes a lot of consumer harm across the US.

Was it The Princess and the Frog?

I'm not expecting a statue erected to Laura Jane Grace and the big disgrace over in that, uh, Trump project that he's talked about that... You know what I'm talking about, that beautiful statuary, uh, that beautiful, like, I, I'm trying to ima- I actually spent a little bit of time this morning thinking about what it would look like, um, to have an American national park, national monument, uh, with statues and rows and rows of, of beautiful pieces of art celebrating, uh, important individuals throughout our history.

Yeah. I would love to actually see this transpire. This was teased by Donald Trump f- uh, during his first term, having a garden of American heroes and then the country got sidetracked by, uh, COVID and the Black Lives Matter movement. And the reason that this is more important than ever, Tony, is because what Black Lives Matter, DEI, critical race theory, what they are all about is dismantling the idea of America's inherent goodness and you could say even the existence of goodness itself. They want to actually challenge the idea that good and evil are things that exist and that there are people in our history who are good who have done bad things, who have committed sins, but who are heroes. That's why this project is actually really important. It needs to incom- incorporate American historical figures who break a couple of molds and show us what it means to be a hero. But I would be interested, Tony, and, and you and I love stories and Hollywood and fiction, uh, I would actually love to see another sort of monument to American heroes in the story, in the, in the form of our great stories. Could you imagine sort of having historical figures in a garden but then also having our most iconic and important modern mythological characters, you know-... people like Luke Skywalker, Frodo Baggins, Rocky Balboa.

... where we've come from and where we're going, in a way that a lot of European countries don't have massive muralistic projections of their entire history. That's an American invention.

Well, you mentioned where we come from and where we're going, and I think this is actually my case for the first heroes that should be at the gateway of the Garden of Heroes. And that is, and, and I think, I think, uh, Christians I think will particularly take issue with this, because we're talking about, uh, now mythology, but Hercules. And the reason for that is because John Adams originally wanted the American seal to be an image of Hercules standing at the crossroads between virtue and pleasure. So Hercules had to go on this big journey, the different trials that he had to undertake to become a great hero. And he was offered a short path that was pleasure, women, the sirens, all that kinda stuff, and then there was a harder path, that of virtue, which was going to be struggle. America needs that, that question more than ever. What kind of pain and turmoil are we willing to go through in the i- uh, in the pursuit of greatness? Or are we just gonna be a libertine society that embraces endless live and let live to the point where we degrade ourselves into nothing? I would have Hercules at the beginning of the Garden of Heroes, and then all sorts of different figures, uh, follow after that.

So, I guess my question to you is, do you think that with the generation that's coming to play here, do you think that we're entering an age where we're gonna see maybe a bit of a revival of some of the older shows, not just Friends and How I Met Your Mother and Gilmore Girls, uh, but maybe some of the shows that focus more on adults at the parenting age, like Home Improvement, Everybody Loves Raymond. I mean, heck, even getting back into The Andy Griffith Show, uh, you know, those kind of things.

Hmm. You know, that's a, that's a tough prediction to make. I do know that '90s television sitcom programming is exceptionally popular with younger audiences. There's a lot of rewatching of old TV shows that you and I and a lot of your audience might have grown up with at the tail end of the '80s and the '90s. Uh, '90s nostalgia is very much in on everything from fashion to music, uh, also to television. Um, so there's, there's a lot of that going on. But, uh, is it gonna focus specifically on, you know, the nature of, of raising kids? I don't know. I think that would probably be a wild card for me. Now, I, I have to ask though, uh, are, what are your favorite pair of kind of, like, sitcom parents and, and-... a, a show that you think is particularly entertaining along those lines.

And, I don't know, one of the reasons that it's so appealing right now, at least to, to Bethany and I as we're watching these shows, is the, the, the na- the kind of things that were talked about on, again like Everybody Loves Raymond or whether it was, um, Family Matters or, you know, looking at, at The Cosby Show and how they communicated to each other that, that was so common sense, that in some of the modern shows, um, I, I just... It, it's so cringey and awkward and I don't relate to those modern parents at all.

Yeah. You know, I, I definitely think of the, the 2000s sitcoms as giving us the sort of Hobby Lobby, uh, suburban mom bumper stickers and, and kitchen signs that say, "Bless this mess." And it's, it's sort of a celebration both of chaos in the home and parents who, who of course aren't perfect and who yell at the kids and all that stuff, um, but there is a truth there which is that this is a lively house full of kids. When kids necessarily mean things are messy, dirty, uh, they're gonna be broken. And, you know, that sort of tension is actually, is there in the culture. Like, what kind of homes are we trying to idealize in our stories? And what do young people today really want? I, I think that there's just a lot of binging going on of old '90s TV shows and things like The Cosby Show.