Good morning,

Happy Saturday and welcome back to the Backstory—your weekend capsule of the best work that we are publishing at Puck. On behalf of our incredible team of generationally talented journalists, thanks for spending some of your valuable weekend with us. 

Please check out our very best work, below, and stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.

SPONSORED BY FACEBOOK

MEDIA:

Dylan Byers reports on CBS News’ house of horrors.

and…

Brian Morrissey explains the media industry’s latest correction.

HOLLYWOOD:

Matt Belloni reveals the real victims of the Netflix-pocalypse.

WASHINGTON:

Julia Ioffe gets to the bottom of the Putin-Biden chess match.

WALL STREET:

Bill Cohan unveils the Jack Welch of crypto.

SILICON VALLEY:

Baratunde Thurston imagines Rachel Maddow in the metaverse.

And..

Teddy Schleifer reports on Jeff Bezos’ investment in ending death.

THE POWERS THAT BE:

Get the real inside story from Peter Hamby, Matt, Julia, and Dylan on the latest episode of The Powers that Be, our status-defining podcast. 

ADVERTISEMENT

Facebook is committed to your safety and security online

We’ve invested more than $13 billion in teams and technology to stop bad actors and remove illicit content.

Since July, we’ve taken action on:

• 1.8 billion fake accounts
• 26.6 million violent and graphic posts 
• 9.8 million terrorism-related posts 

Find out how we're working to enhance safety.

The Tomorrowverse

Nearly two years ago, in those early and haunting weeks of the pandemic, when the world seemed to have slipped irreparably off its axis, I remember listening to Scott Galloway, the entrepreneur and intellectual, recite a quote attributed to Lenin on his podcast, Pivot. There are decades where nothing happens, the proclamation goes, and there are weeks when decades happen. 

The citation got me thinking. I had studied European history as a college student and read tomes about Lenin’s intellectualizing of his ruthless and bloodthirsty revolutionary designs. But I love Pivot, which Galloway co-hosts with my media idol, Kara Swisher, and I understood the point that he was positing in a very different context. Indeed, during the early phases of the pandemic our culture had experienced a Three Mile Island-style eruption of long-simmering dynamics. Some were as prosaic as a rethinking of office life; others were as profound and necessary as ensuring true equity in our society. By the summer of 2020, it was clear to us all, we were living in a markedly different world from the one we had inhabited only six months earlier. 

In the process, many of us began to experience what seemed like a new economy. And in many ways, it seemed like an overdue economy—a place where streaming services had left movie theaters behind as day-and-date moved to digital; where Peloton had disaggregated value from Equinox; and traditional media and consumer packaged goods companies faced reckonings as consumers finally cut the cord or favored an unbundled option. 

Hibernating in our apartments and homes, it was only natural to futurecast. Workers fled expensive cities amid the pivot to remote work while large office holders held their breath. And it was all facilitated by Congress’ multi-trillion dollar firehose, the Fed’s basement interest rates, and a collective post-traumatic insanity that we haven’t seen in this country since the years after 9/11 and may not see again, justifiably so. Indeed, Galloway had a point: change can happen fast. 

But cultural change is not always linear and unperturbed, and the narrative isn’t always so simple. And without dabbling in a Leninist vocabulary, myself, I’ve been reminded in the past week of the complex dialectic at work in our culture. Naturally, this epiphany is a result of the sensational work taking place at Puck. 

Netflix’s narrative of global domination appeared to be a fait accompli back in the Tiger King phase of the pandemic. But now a gnarly quarter and relentless competition has led to a market correction for the streamer. Netflix shares used to kiss $700; now they’re trading at around $380. However, as Matt Belloni notes brilliantly, as usual, this hiccup won’t throw Netflix off its trajectory. Instead, it’s merely a reminder that industrial change isn’t always gradual and incremental. Fits and starts and unpredictability are part of the process.

Similarly, Bill Cohan takes a refreshing look at the whims and vicissitudes of Peloton, whose shares are now trading at about 20 percent of their all-time high, with a market cap of less than $9 billion. Only months ago, the company had convinced much of the sentient quarantining class that it was the forebear of a new connected-fitness regime change. But one of the things I love most about my colleagues here at Puck is that they aren’t only journalists—they’re also domain experts. As a former M&A banker, who had worked on gym equipment deals, Bill had the historical context to recognize that Peloton was a lovely piece of hardware floating high in a frothy Adjusted-EBITDA age. We may be headed toward a universe of interoperability and Web3 ubiquity, but a stationary bike is still a stationary bike, I’m sorry to say, at least until the day when we’re all riding along the roads of Antibes in the metaverse. And as the GameStop and AMC meme crazes remind us, not everyone is hurtling toward the future at the same pace.

Indeed, the Nasdaq’s recent correction, and murmurs about the Fed’s itchy rate-adjusting trigger-finger, remind us that change isn’t always so sudden. As Baratunde Thurston pointed out this week, with alacrity and much-needed humor, it’s still stunning to behold how poorly our own government and federal institutions have managed to keep up with the velocity of change. This isn’t merely evident in the meme of Boomer senators questioning millennial tech billionaires about how to hide the clock function on their VCR. There are more immediate challenges. We shouldn’t really bother with the metaverse until we figure out how to improve hospital performances and other simple logistical and technocratic efficiencies that the pandemic should have motivated us to solve by now.

ADVERTISEMENT

But if you read one piece this week, I behoove you to check out Julia Ioffe’s reported analysis of Joe Biden’s game of chess with Vladimir Putin over Lenin’s old stomping grounds. As much as things change, they also tend to stay the same. The irony of Biden’s openness to sending troops to NATO’s Eastern flank is that, while it’s the opposite of what Putin wants, the move would also create the sort of siege mentality that the former KGB officer apparently craves. As Julia puts it: “For one thing, it lends credence to his claim that NATO is breathing down his neck—how and why the alliance’s troops got there notwithstanding. It also feeds into and reinforces a historic narrative that Russia is surrounded by enemies on all sides. This fortress mentality, which was particularly strong among the Bolsheviks, is something Russian autocrats can’t seem to live without.”

Julia was supposed to be finishing up her book, Motherland, last month, but history waits for no one, I suppose, and she deftly threw herself into this unfolding event with characteristic perspicacity and wit. Her singular understanding of the Putin-Biden dynamic is unparalleled, and it’s precisely the kind of glimpse into the inside conversation that you can only get at Puck. And for what it’s worth, I do agree with Galloway. Our world is transforming before our eyes, and not always in a way that we can predict. 

Have a great weekend,

Jon