The Breaker Pod is back for season 2, and we’re kicking it off with a bang as Breaker sits down with MSNBC's Morning Joe co-host, Joe Scarborough.

From The Bilt Neighborhood Cafe in Noho (Bilt has grown to over 5 million members who earn what The Points Guy calls the most valuable points available), Scarborough didn’t pull any punches about the burning media topics. Here are some highlights. 

THE FUTURE OF MEDIA 

“The media landscape right now. It's the Wild West,” Scarborough told us.

“So what does it mean to be CNN? What does it mean to be CBS News? What does it mean to be NBC or MSNBC? Bari Weiss and people at CBS News decide what that means over the next two, three, four years.”

“You've got to be entrepreneurial. You've got to constantly be looking around the corner. You can't go by the old benchmarks to say, Oh, well, this was a success in 1996 or 1997.” 

“You know, it's so funny, a lot of people in these big corporations, you know, if I ever wanted to knock somebody at NBC, I'm not knocking NBC here. They're operating like Seinfeld is still on. Right?” 

STEPHEN COLBERT, JIMMY KIMMEL, AND FREE SPEECH

“It's so shortsighted. So what happens? You go after Stephen Colbert, right? Paramount wants the merger to go through, right? They take Stephen Colbert off, and what happens? They sign Trey Parker and Matt Stone for like billions of dollars, who do things that are 8,000 times worse than Stephen Colbert would ever do, it's the number one streaming thing on Paramount at all times, I mean, those clips are beyond viral, so it's always whack-a-mole.”

“So let's say you get Jimmy Kimmel, and you get Jimmy Fallon. You get everybody off. What have you done? Mm-hmm. You have now created the opportunity for them to create something on YouTube. Where they can South Park you every day!”

THE TABLOIDS

“You know what's so funny is one time Mika (Brzezinski), this is, I think, after we went to Mar-a-Lago and everybody was melting down. At one point, Mika was turning her eyes to look at the monitor, to check her hair, and the camera caught her. I think it was the Daily Mail or the New York Post or somebody going, “Mika enraged at Joe”, and I said to her, "that's pretty funny when you can just like check your hair and it's a headline!”

TRUMP AND EPSTEIN

“I just don't think there's ever going to be a smoking gun on Donald Trump and Epstein.”

“Simply because if there were one, somebody would've leaked into the New York Times in 2021.”

TALKING TO TRUMP

“We've known each other for a very long time. We talk and communicate, and I try to get insight on what's going on.”

“For instance, whether it's on Ukraine, I called him, I think after Anchorage, to call and say, what are you doing? What's going on? And of course, it’s all, “you all are so unfair.” You know, we go through that dance and everything. “Why are you all so mean, why are you so tough?” Or whatever.” 

“But then we talk and I try to figure out where he's going, what can I do that will help my viewers understand what's going on and what's coming up? And I think in that case, especially with Ukraine, that helped.”

“Same thing with what's happening in the Middle East, I communicate with people of the administration. I talked to him to see exactly what the plan was and try to figure out what was the relationship with Netanyahu? Where was it going? And of course, I never get completely straight answers.”

BARI WEISS AND CBS NEWS

“You look at Bari, she's an entrepreneur. Look what she did with The Free Press.” 

“I've known Bari for a long time, got great respect for her entrepreneurial views. You know, Bari came along with The Free Press at a time when people in the media were not saying what most Americans were saying when sort of political correctness, or I hate to use the term wokeness, was, really sort of at the height of cancel culture. And people were, were saying outrageous things, and nobody in the media was calling them on it. She started The Free Press, and the timing there was perfect 'cause there was a great audience for that.”

“I think the challenge is where, where is that audience going to be a year from now? Where's the next opportunity? Where's the next cutting edge? That's gonna be the real challenge. It's also gonna be very interesting just to see her vision, where she takes.”

THE FUTURE OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

“I don't know what the Democratic Party is right now.”

“There's a reason why. If they have a 24, 25% approval rating, what are they, what do they stand for? What are they willing to fight for? I think a lot of that got kind of jumbled up in the 1990s when you had, and I'm not knocking him, this is what Republicans would want, but when you had sort of a Robert Rubin Democrats taking over the party of Bill Clinton, you had a lot of working class people that, that lost a home.”

“It doesn't make sense that billionaires are getting massive tax cuts that multinational corporations are getting massive tax cuts, that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk had been getting massive tax cuts, and when Democrats were in power, they had a chance, they carried the  interest loophole, they had a chance to raise taxes on billionaires.”

We have a stellar line-up of guests to come, so make sure you check us out and subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your pods.