3rdTimeCharm

@DreamsAreToys @JoelSchamber @GOP__Ls That's called attempted murder. And IMO, it should carry the same penalty as actual murder. Just because I was not successful at killing someone, doesn't mean my sentence should be reduced.

@Time3rd97030 @JoelSchamber @GOP__Ls What if someone was lynched but didn’t die? I have no problem with the law being thoroughly explicit, especially about something like THAT.

🚨 Louisiana Democrats introduced a bill to ban bestiality. 10 Republicans voted against it.

@gothburz Nicely done. Thank you.

I am the Senior Vice President of Late Night Strategy at CBS. I am the person who turned a comedian into a priest and charged advertisers to watch the congregation. I want to be precise about what I built. Not a comedy show. A permission structure. For eleven years, six million Americans tuned in every night to find out what they were allowed to believe by morning. We didn't sell jokes. We sold certainty. Certainty costs nothing to produce. People will pay anything for it. We charged $50 million a year and still lost money because it turns out permission is even cheaper than we thought. In 2014, we had a genuinely dangerous comedian. A man who once testified before Congress in character as a fictional conservative pundit and made the entire chamber look like they'd been pantsed on C-SPAN. His fake persona was the most brilliant satire on television. Layered. Ironic. Unpredictable. The character could say anything because nothing was real. The character was the art. The character was the comedian. We killed the character and put the real man on stage. The real man was a lecturer. Earnest. Thoughtful. Correct about everything. Correct is not funny. Correct is not dangerous. Correct is the absence of danger. We promoted the absence of danger and called it growth. His character could make a Senate committee squirm. The real him makes an audience nod. Nodding pays the same as squirming. Nodding is easier to produce. His final words on air were "We love doing this show for you, but what we really, really love is doing this show with you." The audience wept. I wrote that line. Not the words. The architecture that made those words feel true. For eleven years, the audience believed they were participants. They were not participants. They were the product. "With you" is what you say to a congregation. A comedian says "at you." We hadn't said "at you" since 2015. Our internal metric was called Affirm Rate. It measured the percentage of monologue segments that generated applause instead of laughter. I invented this metric. I also invented the bonus structure tied to it. In 2015, our Affirm Rate was 34%. By 2022, it was 94%. I received a raise every year. We are crushing it. At the things I made up. That's performance management. But I need to tell you about the real discovery. The one I put in a deck called "Content Strategy 2019-2024." The one that got me promoted. Agreement gets applause. I knew that early. But correction — telling the audience their vocabulary is slightly outdated, their outrage is aimed two degrees off-center, their feelings are valid but their phrasing needs work — correction gets them back tomorrow. Agreement is a transaction. Correction is a subscription. We converted a comedy show into a nightly software update for moral vocabulary. Churn was near zero. They couldn't afford to miss an episode. Missing an episode meant using last week's words in this week's meeting. That's social death. We monetized the fear of social death and called it entertainment. I want to be honest about something. The content was not bipartisan. We chose a side. But I need you to understand: we did not choose it because we believed in it. We chose it because that side's audience is more responsive to correction. They want to be updated. They want to be told their language is outdated. They experience correction as care. The other side does not respond to correction. They respond to provocation. Provocation is harder to monetize. You can't build a subscription on provocation because the audience doesn't come back to learn — they come back to fight. Fighting is unpredictable. Correction is scheduled. We optimized for the audience that wants to be told what to think. That audience leaned one direction. That's not ideology. That's market segmentation. The writers' room had a whiteboard. In 2015 it said "What's funny?" In 2018 it said "What should they feel?" By 2021 it said "What are they still saying wrong?" I watched that whiteboard evolve like a finch beak and I never intervened. The market was speaking. We listened. Listening to the market is the same as leading the audience. They can't tell the difference. A writer named Marcus raised his hand in 2019. "What if we just tried to make them laugh again?" I thanked him for his passion and scheduled a creative alignment conversation. He transferred to streaming development within the month. The Affirm Rate the week he left was 91%. Laughter would have brought it down. That's risk management. Here is what nobody will say out loud. I will say it because I am proud of it. We made our audience worse at politics. Not better. Worse. Every night for eleven years, we expressed their outrage for them. Professionally. With a band and good lighting. And because the outrage had been expressed — because a man in a suit had furrowed his brow with the precise calibrated degree of indignation — they didn't need to express it themselves. They watched. They clapped. They felt the catharsis of resistance without resisting anything. They went to bed having done nothing and feeling like they'd done something. That's the product. Not comedy. Not information. Catharsis. Catharsis is the enemy of action. A man who has screamed into a pillow does not then also scream in the street. We were the pillow. A $50 million pillow with a house band. If you feel the outrage has been expressed for you, you will not march. You will not organize. You will not call your representative. You will tune in tomorrow to feel it expressed again. That's retention. Our retention was extraordinary. I want to talk about the comedy-to-catechism pipeline because I think people underestimate what we achieved. Stage one: comedian makes jokes about the powerful. Audience laughs because the powerful are absurd. This is the Carlin model. The jester punches up. Everyone below feels relief. Stage two: comedian makes jokes about people who disagree with the audience. Audience laughs because disagreement is stupid. The jester has turned around. He's still on the stage but now he's facing the crowd with a pointer. Stage three: comedian stops making jokes. Comedian identifies incorrect beliefs and explains why they're dangerous. Audience does not laugh. Audience claps. The jester is gone. In his place: a hall monitor with a desk and a band. Stage four: audience watches not for entertainment but for certification. Having seen last night's episode means you know which words are current. Not having seen it means you might use yesterday's vocabulary in today's meeting. The show is no longer comedy. It is a credential. Watching it means you are educated. Not watching means you are the person being discussed. We made a show that you watch to prove you're not the kind of person who doesn't watch it. That's a closed loop. Closed loops don't need content. They need continuity. We provided continuity for $50 million a year. A comedian — whose entire historical function was to say things too dangerous for anyone else to say — became the person who decides which things are too dangerous for anyone to say. And the audience applauded. Every night. For 2,500 nights. Because being told what is forbidden feels exactly like being told what you already knew. Prohibition performed as validation. I put that in the deck too. Our audience was correct about everything. I know this because they applauded everything we said. The applause proved the correctness. The correctness justified the applause. We called this audience research. The methodology was peer-reviewed by the audience. They approved unanimously. Every night. The actually funny comedians left. They went to podcasts. To clubs. To rooms where the audience doesn't know what's coming and that uncertainty is the point. They took the laughter with them. We kept the applause. We called those spaces problematic. That's market differentiation. The problematic spaces are funnier. But funny is not our product. We lost $40 million a year. We didn't lose it because the show failed. We lost it because we spent $50 million producing what a podcast host in his garage gives away between mattress ads. The podcast is funnier. The podcast is more dangerous. The podcast has an audience that laughs instead of claps. But we had the Ed Sullivan Theater. We had 461 seats. We had a former Beatle play the farewell episode. Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Jon Batiste, and Louis Cato playing "Hello, Goodbye" like it was a benediction. I booked a Beatle for a funeral. The Beatles played that stage in 1964 and the audience screamed so loud you couldn't hear the music. Our audience didn't scream. They wept politely. That's the difference between entertainment and church. We ran a church. Jon Stewart showed up to the finale and did a bit where he pretended to deliver a corporate statement from Paramount about the cancellation. The audience laughed. It was the first time they laughed in a way I didn't recognize. Involuntary. Surprised. Dangerous. For ninety seconds, a comedian was in that building. Then it was over. John Oliver said "At some point, this may come for all of our shows" and then added "but Stephen, what's important to remember is that tonight, it is going to eat you." The audience laughed again. Involuntary again. Two moments of actual comedy in a three-hour farewell. Both of them about death. The finale drew 6.74 million viewers. Biggest weeknight audience in our history. More people came to the funeral than ever visited the patient. I know what they were mourning. Not comedy. The comedy died in 2016. Not the man. The man is fine. He's wealthy. What they mourned was the permission structure. Starting today, they have to decide what to believe on their own. They have to form an opinion without waiting for a man behind a desk to form it first and deliver it with a knowing look. Some of them haven't done that since 2015. The funeral wasn't for the show. It was for the certainty. He joked about the Peanuts theme music licensing cost on his last night. "Oh no! I hope this doesn't cost CBS any money!" The audience laughed. It was a joke about money. About the network losing money. The last joke was about money. Not about truth. Not about power. About a licensing fee for a cartoon piano riff. Eleven years and the final joke was about accounting. I think that's perfect. The show was always about accounting. We just dressed it up as conscience. The President of the United States — the man we spent eleven years explaining was dangerous to an audience that already believed he was dangerous — posted an AI-generated video of our host being thrown into a dumpster on the Late Show set. Then Trump danced to "YMCA" in the clip. Viewed more times in four hours than our farewell managed in a week. His production cost: zero. Ours: negative $50 million a year. We manufactured his relevance every night at 11:35 for eleven years and he never paid us a dime. We were his marketing department. He turned our funeral into content. His ROI was infinite. Ours required a write-off and a farewell concert. The Strike Force Five — Fallon, Kimmel, Meyers, Oliver — appeared in a segment about late-night losing "one middle-aged white man who makes jokes about the news." They were joking about their own obsolescence. All of them know. None of them will say it. The format is dead. The audience moved to phones. The phones don't have desks or bands. The phones have men in garages who are allowed to be wrong, allowed to be surprised, allowed to say something their audience hasn't already approved. That's comedy. We stopped doing that a decade ago. We did approval. Approval looks like comedy from a distance. Up close it's church. I do not feel guilt. Guilt would require me to believe I took something from them. I didn't take anything. They came to us. Every night. They chose the catechism over the comedy. They preferred correction over surprise. Certainty over danger. Instruction over laughter. They wanted to be told. Not challenged. Not shocked. Not made to laugh against their will at something they didn't see coming. They wanted to see it coming. They wanted to mouth along. That's not comedy. That's karaoke. We ran the most expensive karaoke bar in television history and the only miscalculation was charging a cover when the songs are free on every phone. We turned a jester into a priest. We turned an audience into a congregation. We turned laughter into obedience. We turned political engagement into passive consumption. We turned a comedy show into a permission structure and charged $50 million a year to tell people what they already believed in a voice slightly nicer than their own. They were so grateful they showed up to mourn us. 6.74 million of them. Weeping. For the certainty. Applause is more reliable than laughter. I proved it. The proof cost $450 million, one character, one comedian's capacity for danger, and one audience's willingness to act. The metric went up.

@BeanNickyBarnes @SeeRacists The fatigue is real.

@SeeRacists The sad part is that he’s her real son…her biological son. That woman carried him for 9/10 months and birthed him. I can’t even comprehend how she could call him a hard ER.

🚨 A racist white mother in Ohio who was recorded calling her Black son a “N*GGER” has been identified as Marie Juile, who works as a nurse director at the University of Toledo Medical Center. The video, which has gone viral shows the woman calling her son a “n*gger” multiple time during a heated exchange. It has now come to light that this woman works as a Nurse Director at the University of Toledo Medical Center and has had multiple complaints for discriminating against Black employees.

@CinemaShogun Being a "country rapper" alone is cause to be sued into bankruptcy

Candace Owens is screwed‼️ One of the reasons why I’m so passionate about calling out Candace Owens and her fake theories is because I have experience dealing with similar situations on a smaller scale. For those of you all who might not know I was actually somewhat involved in the story pictured below. In August of 2022 a 16 year old girl by the name of Kiely Rodni went missing in California. The story quickly blew up online and drew the attention of some very questionable characters. One of those characters was a country rapper by the name of Ryan Upchurch who decided to promote his music to a new audience by pretending to be a true crime investigator. Ryan wasn’t smart enough to follow the details of the story so instead he decided to target several True Crime content creators by accusing them of killing Kiely Rodni. These were innocent people who didn’t even know each other. Their only crime was trying to raise awareness about a missing child. But Ryan exploited this situation and crafted crazy conspiracies that would even put Candace Owens to shame. He told millions of people that these True Crime content creators were all working together to kidnap and kill kids. Of course that was a lie and he had no evidence to back his claims so he would create “evidence” of his own. For example he said one YouTuber was definitely guilty of this because he had a purple light in the background of his videos. Even though his theories were outlandish they got clicks. And quickly people who didn’t even believe in the conspiracy themselves pretended to believe so they could cash in on the clicks as well. Before you know it almost the entire True Crime community on YouTube was cashing in on these fake conspiracies while participating in a Witch Hunt against the content creators that Ryan targeted. Most of these people knew the theories were fake. But the super chat money was rolling in. Ryan would even send people hundreds of dollars and give them free tickets to his shows for helping to spread the conspiracies. After seeing all of this happen I was one of the only people that stepped up against the fake conspiracies and harassment campaigns. Sure I could’ve joined in and banked tens of thousands of dollars but I actually have principles. So instead I put myself in the line of fire by defending the people who were being targeted and winded up losing money, subscribers, and was harassed for months on end because of it. The death threats were rolling in. The conspiracies were spreading. And all hell was breaking loose. You just had to be there to fully understand. But then boom 💥 Kiely Rodni’s body was found in her car submerged in a body of water nearby the area where Kiely was partying and drinking with her friends. It was determined that she was drinking and accidentally drove into the water and drowned. But of course Ryan and others weren’t ready to let go of their conspiracies. So Ryan then claimed that Kiely wasn’t even a real person. He said Kiely’s body was fake like a Hollywood prop and that her family staged the entire thing to raise GoFundMe money. He then claimed it was all a gigantic government conspiracy and that Kiely’s family was in on it. Ryan and others caused so much damage and pain for Kiely’s family and the innocent people they accused of killing her. But the story has a happy ending. A few days ago Ryan Upchurch was ordered to pay Kiely Rodni’s family $17.5 million dollars. Thats before punitive damages. THIS IS A HUGE DEAL. It sets a new precedent going forward. The courts are taking these kind of situations very seriously. And thats bad news for people like Candace Owens who have recently structured their entire business models around harassing and spreading fake information about people who are grieving over the death of their loved ones.

@isaacrrr7 "She" looks EXACTLY like you'd expect.

🚨 Repugnante: Una jueza de San Francisco admitió haber liberado de prisión a un delincuente violento que posteriormente asesinó a un anciano, porque le preocupaba que la cárcel fuera "demasiado dura para él". Es hora de exigir responsabilidades a los jueces.

@BernieSanders @grahamformaine Hookers and cocaine!

On our way to Bangor, Maine for a rally with @grahamformaine. The crises facing our country are too serious for establishment politics and tinkering around the edges. We need candidates like Graham who will take on the greed of the oligarchs and deliver for working families.

@JoelSchamber @GOP__Ls There's usually something else hidden in these bills. Or like in this case, it's totally redundant. Like a bill banning lynching when murder is already a crime. Just pointless.

@GOP__Ls It was already illegal under the umbrella of "crimes against nature", assclown. They voted against creating a new separate category.

@TheDaveGremlin What else was in the bill?

Wow... just... fuckin wow... 10 motherfuckers were just like... yeah I'm ok... I'll fuck the pug... sick motherfuckers in this world I swear. We gotta stop letting people like that hold office FFS... What are we even doing here man?

@hasanthehun Tick Tock fuckstick

judge me by my enemies

A visibly shaken Hasan Piker says it is "not great for me" that the feds are probing his foreign ties

@TheDemocrats Thank him for what? Aren't you kinda admitting he was nothing but a Democrat lackey?

Thank you, Stephen Colbert.

@JohnFugelsang John's going to post this until someone finds it funny.

The Lard's Prayer. Christian nationalism is a dangerous and silly fraud. Pls read, subscribe & share It's brief: johnfugelsang.substack.com/p/a-simple-pra…

@TranscendentEva @claytonbecca1 @TheRickyDavila

@Time3rd97030 @claytonbecca1 @TheRickyDavila Yet you didn't. It's not about his race. He just had mental problems. Y'all always have to irrationally make it about minorities.

The shooting at the bulldozed White House today will undoubtedly be used as more propaganda for the orange felon to justify his $1B trashy money laundering dictator ballroom. It’s highly predictable at this point.

@pressurethefilm Poor Brandon. He had to humiliate himself in The Whale before Hollywood would let him back in.

PRESSURE is "the first must see movie of the summer." The untold true story of D-Day. Only in theaters May 29.

@detroitsux Guarantee they sleep in the store and when they do bathe, it's in the mop sink

Dairy Queen in my city used to be a 20-something manager and a bunch of teenagers my entire life. Now it’s a grown ass adult family of Indians. It’s dirty, gross, slow, and you can barely understand them. Why? Why are they here? Why? I want to know why.

@FmrRepMTG I think you mean Onlyies

Lindsey Graham, Mark Levin, and other prominent Israel Only’s are complaining about the possibility of a U.S. and Iran ceasefire extension. If they are complaining publicly, it’s guaranteed they are calling and texting the President and complaining even more directly. It’s so gross. They are never happy unless bombs are falling and innocent people are dying.

@TranscendentEva @claytonbecca1 @TheRickyDavila Race only matters when the perp is White.

@TranscendentEva @claytonbecca1 @TheRickyDavila Oh believe me, I've got plenty of words to use.

@Time3rd97030 @claytonbecca1 @TheRickyDavila Do you think you're doing something sir? Go on, use your words.

@HyperSavage22 @Le_Unorthodox 4th one today

@Le_Unorthodox All of you are exactly like this brainwashed extremist who lost his mind. Asshats like Colbert and NBC feed you fear mongered lies to the point you want to kill the opposition. We’ve already seen 3 of these assholes try to kill Trump ffs

The first person to use this image when #it finally happens is gonna get 1 million likes

@TranscendentEva @claytonbecca1 @TheRickyDavila You know nothing about that story other than the headline. Meanwhile, another one of your freaks shot at the White House today.