Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bullwark. I'm joined by Baxthani of Semaphore and JVL, here to talk about the, I don't know how you would describe it. Decimation, murder, bludgeoning of the Washington Post.

Happened today, I'm going to give a quick overview of some of the gruesome stats that we know of as of the time of this tapings, about 1215,

one third of Washington Post employees were laid off today.

Will Lewis, who effectively runs the paper, did not attend the meeting when they announced.

Neither did Jeff Bezos, who owns the paper.

The announcements were instead made on a Zoom call at 30 a.m. by editor Matt Murray,

among the sections that were restructured, which is just corporate speak for eliminated,

were the Metro desk, the entirety of the sports department, book section, the canceling of the daily post reports podcasts, and a dramatic shrinking of the paper's presence around the world.

Every reporter covering the Middle East was laid off. Jerusalem and Ukraine Bureau chiefs were laid off. There is a war currently in Ukraine, still happening. The Ukraine correspondent, Lizzie Johnson,

tweeted, I was just laid off by the Washington Post in the middle of a war zone. I have no words.

I am devastated. It goes on and on and on from there. But needless to say, it's horrifying.

I'm not nostalgic for it because we've been seeing this happening for a while. Now, I'm mad. Like, I'm

legitimately mad at what happened. We're going to talk about this, but I want to talk about it in

the big picture. And I want to start off with a basically sort of large general question

for you, JVL, and then for you, Max. Did this have to happen? Why did the post fail?

No, this didn't have to happen.

Look, it has been a long time since Jeff Bezos had to do something, right?

It's the guy's worth $250 billion, would it be, dollars.

He gets to live in a universe in which he is constrained only by his own desires. And so no, this didn't

need to happen. The post lost, I think we, I believe, we believe, people suspect it is more than

a hundred million, probably around like $150 million in 2025.

Jeff Bezos lost when all of a sudden done $60 million last weekend on the Melania

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