Tragic Real Reason Behind Bezos’ Gaudy Wedding

The New Abnormal

The Daily Beast

News & Politics

4.6 • 7.9K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Liz Plank joins Joanna Coles for a scorching postmortem on the Venice wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez—a $50 million display of “confetti capitalism” that collided head-on with a collapsing middle class. Plank, whose viral Substack column captured the online fury, recounts watching the foam-drenched bacchanal while her paper straw dissolved in her mouth and seniors were zip-tied at the Capitol protesting Medicaid cuts. She argues the grotesque contrast isn’t just offensive—it’s politically clarifying. As celebrities scrambled for camera time and Vogue’s fawning coverage backfired, Plank points to a growing revolt: from Zohran’s shock primary win in New York to Hungary’s defiant pride march. She connects the dots from Bezos’s billionaire cosplay to the Democratic Party’s disconnect with working people—and calls for all to use their voice, both online and off, to advocate for real political change.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Joanna Cole, Chief Content Officer of the Daily Beast, and this is an emergency Daily Beast podcast to address the huge world-shattering event that happened at the weekend.
0:14.6	You know what I'm talking about. Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez joined together in holy matrimony.
0:23.8	$50 million. We don't deny them.
0:28.9	Happiness or love. Hell, anybody who's been divorced, deserves another chance at happiness.
0:34.2	But Liz Plank, author of Feministabulous, doesn't agree.
0:39.8	She spent the weekend drinking iced coffee through paper straws and then suddenly realized there's something wrong with this picture. So we decided we would talk to the humorist,
0:45.5	the author, the podcast and the substacker to find out what she really thinks.
0:52.1	This is an emergency podcast, obviously, in the wake of the biggest event in the world this
1:00.2	weekend, the Venice Bacchanal of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez.
1:07.0	And Liz, you watched the whole thing while you were, while you were sucking iced coffee through a paper straw, which prompted a column which went completely viral.
1:19.2	Just take us through it.
1:20.6	I'm going to read a couple of lines from it, but just take us through the moment when you realized you were using a paper straw and they were spending
1:29.4	$50 million on their wedding in Venice.
1:31.8	Yeah, I think it's a feeling that is familiar for a lot of people.
1:37.4	Sometimes it's hard to name the sort of apocalyptic, right, sort of like dissociative state that we can be in sometimes,
1:47.2	where, yeah, I'll be cleaning out like a ketchup bottle, you know, to make sure that I can recycle
1:53.4	it properly. And then, yeah, I'll see Jeff Bezos, you know, on his super yacht.
1:58.7	In foam, in foam. Yes, and doing foam parties and, you know, on his super yacht. In foam. In foam.
2:01.6	Yes.
2:10.9	And doing foam parties and, you know, 94 private jets flying into, you know, Venice, into a sinking city, basically.
2:12.4	And I, yeah.
2:19.3	And then at the same time, I'm seeing seniors, you know, disabled seniors being zip tied at the Capitol for just fighting for their right to be alive and not have their meds taken away from them with this new
	...

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