Hey everyone, John Heilman here and welcome to Helen Highwater, my podcast for the recount about politics and culture on the edge of Armageddon with big ups my pal Riza, the presiding genius behind the sound of Utenklan, and producer of our dope theme music.

This week we are taking an unscheduled and unexpected detour off of the main highway.

This podcast normally barrels down because as interested as we are pretty much all the time around

Hell and Highwater HQ in politics, culture, and their intersection, at this particular moment,

the keen-eyed, sharp-minded and sober-sighted crew that makes this show, and their shiftless,

aimless, usually bedraggled and always bourbon-addled boss,

that would be me, are incomplete and total alignment about our mutual obsession with a slightly

different point of intersection, the place where business, technology, culture, and politics

come crashing together. In particular, we are riveted by the splashy headlines involving two iconic American media

companies, one old, one new, both with truly global reach and influence, but each suddenly

caught up in a swirl of events and buffeted by forces that neither truly understands, let alone

has a clue how to master.

One of the companies in question, of course,

is Disney, which after a stunning spasm of corporate fecklessness, hypocrisy, and sheer incompetence

in handling its response to Florida's so-called don't-say gay bill, is now suffering the

egregious public humiliation of being turned into a punching bag by

Ronda Santas. The other company also, of course, is Twitter, which just yesterday shocked the

world by announcing that it had agreed to be taken over by this man. A lot of times people

are reduced to the dumbest thing they ever did. Like one time I smoked weed on Joe Rogan's podcast.

And now all the time I hear Elon Musk, all he ever does is smoke weed on podcasts.

Like I go from podcast to podcast, lighting up joints.

It happened once.

...