Chapo Trap House - 364 - Human Deadspinality Project feat. David Roth (11/4/19)

Episode Date: November 5, 2019

We discuss Neon Genesis Evangelion through the lens of Liz Warren's Big Structural Bailey. Fan Favorite David J. Roth returns to discuss the life and death of Deadspin.com, and what it tells us about American private equity. We also speculate what sporting events Donald Trump might & might not get boo'd at.

I always down to talk over I feel like like there's a chance that like a lot of you like they bang the swords that's not good yeah the gang in it it's like it's run by a Satanist and his mother or something and they're like you ready to die like the way he says pig over and over again that was that like I love that era movies were like a gang like every bad person in the world was Satanist like no one was after really profit or anything like that like courting the drug market they're just like I like being bad it's like not at all supernatural a lot of like wet interiors in that too as I recall a lot

of the axe gang they're like they're there they're like clanging the axes together and like the base this is also the era like basic where every every street gang had to have like a big clubhouse but in Cobra there's this like inexplicable be like a still working foundry there's one little line from that that was like before memes existed this was just something that my high school friends I understood was funny which is like his Cobra's getting dragged for for being too real and like fighting criminals too well and what one says you got a real attitude problem Cobra ready and his comeback to that is

to say I know but it's just a little one it's not an own it's not a comeback it's just like the thing that he says before he leaves and I remember watching it in a friend's basement and we all knew somehow to just rewind to that moment just to be like let's really get a sense of why this is happening and what it might be supposed to mean we didn't talk about it we never really talked about it we just kept saying it back and forth to each other for the remainder of our time in high school well it's a good one Cobra is an absolute classic um all right let's um let's get us started we're joined here it's a it's a rare

episode of just me and Felix but luckily we have our good friend Matt Christman has been fired we after an internal affairs investigation on Matt Christman for several infractions we have we've terminated his contract we are moving forward yes we've put we've put Matt Christman on on waivers of Virgil Texas has still not returned from Germany in fact he's we've lost contact with him entirely he's gone he's gone native he's going he's gone native he we're told that he has both dreadlocks and a ponytail the last transmission we got from him was several weeks ago and it just said a derfunk boom boom and like

that's the last transmission but like we are we are going to mount a mission like similar to heart of darkness to travel into my into the depths of the most depraved sex clubs in Berlin to find him my human has indicated to me that Virgil is in contact to start a franchise of restaurants called sexy burger no but luckily we have if you like dear hunter where you confront him and it's just at a shop that only sells sweatsuits and you have to like try to get through to him but he's gone yeah no but luckily we've got our friend David Roth sitting in today and like obviously I would like to to get your

perspective David on just how yeah private equity vampires continue to destroy everything that is I don't know good or even mildly enjoyable in our culture and society because you certainly been on the front lines of that recently yeah but before that I was just wondering because you know Felix is this is now been like this is a this is a something there's a major cultural institution that's been sort of a cult thing that has now been absorbed into the Felix headcanon with surprising and impressive results so I was actually just gonna start off by asking you David are you familiar with or have you ever

seen the the animated television program neon Genesis Evangelion I've seen the words like the best minds of my generation talking neon Genesis Evangelion or Galeon I have no idea what it is I'm grown man I don't know is it on Galeon okay it me in literal translation is the the script the testament of the new century I think could be scripture I forget but um no this is a grown-ass adult show yes it's not for babies yeah no this isn't baby shit yes is it about max sort of but it's about a lot more because you like try to explain to David what the show is about or what happens on that right it's

very simple a sounds it sounds really simple based on what you've said so far and a moral side a moral widow or a scientist who heads a giant the state project in the aftermath of an event called the second impact operates giant mechs that fight otherworldly creatures monsters called angels gender Ikari is reunited with his son Shinji Akari who is the only one who can pilot the robot Eva unit a one I'm following you Shinji Shinji the only one who can do it but he has been spending his entire life running away he's like seeing is like a timid boy just does whatever he's told goes to school goes to school in Tokyo

three get all the problems you have going to school as a 14 year old but he's got he's got to get in that mech he's got to fucking fight those angels but we find out you know we find out about the death of his mother find out about the true nature of the mechs the avas why the second impact happened the the history behind the second impact you learn a lot about the meaning of our lives through our connections to others rising to the occasion the choice to the the choice of self-sacrifice the nature of motherhood fatherhood misado is so hot yeah it's basically about a scared little boy who has to get inside it's

like they're they're giant robots but they're actually also like living creatures yeah they're sort of like cyborgs well I don't want to spoil I'm trying to do this that's spoiling too much about like the big revelation about Rey and really a big you know one but this is like just in for my old person just ease of understanding where we're going here people you really like this like this is this right cool this owns this is so fucking good all right I can never tell amazing point when something achieves this level of ubiquity where I'm sort of like I mean I know like it's not snakes on a plane or whatever like I

can tell like at the outer boundary of it so this is like a like a cult like Japanese like like anime series that's like had a very long half-life so I think it was like made in like the 80s or something like that 90s 90s okay so it's been around for a while why is it having this moment because Netflix has finally put the entire series on it's you know streaming platforms you know it's like before that it was like you know you have to pass around like you know ancient VHS copies or like bit torrented or something but now it's available for everyone to see and I think it says you know a lot about the world we live in

today no 100% I mean who is Shinji Akari but Donald Trump and getting in the Ava is becoming president and his father going to Akari great brain he gave great brain I was gonna say I think the the AV unit one for our current moment is of course big structural Bailey yeah yeah yeah you guys really with big structural Bailey yeah it's very similar to click to play on the video but just the like wicker man still the starting image is so unsettling that I never will yeah that every year they have to send a wonk who's never earned a land near a big wicker Bailey big structural Bailey is the closest things like the American

version of an Evangelion an AV unit one two or three or even zero it's gigantic I mean it's like like it's a it's like a living thing sort of but it's also deeply monstrous and terrifying oh Liz Warren's mom was killed in the construction of big structural Bailey and so she could never truly determine her genetic heritage yeah yeah yeah no 100% and you know Elizabeth Warren running towards it and then like the people chanting big structural Bailey big structural Bailey is getting the robot yeah I mean yeah that is like yes you must pilot the Ava yeah and someone has to pilot big structural Bailey because like we need

to fuse Elizabeth Warren's intelligence with its like sort of giant animalistic cyborg body but if her sit like there is gonna be time where she gets in big structural Bailey and the book oh my god we've never seen sink rates with big structural Bailey at 400% but they're like then it starts moving on its own and it starts like doing the shoot dance and they're and they're like what what is big structural Bailey and so Pete Buttigieg also pilots a giant inflatable dog but he's like he's like I'm the best the left is pompous I can unite this country I was born to pilot an inflatable dog and and and she's like

stupid Liz idiot Liz idiot Bernie think they're the best I'm really the best I'm the only one who can share access to health care for all Americans no but yeah just like I imagine imagine big structural Bailey just like stomping through a city yeah but like but like protecting us right I think that's to get something terrifying angels are the bad form of capitalism yes yes exactly yeah yeah you tell me what actually happens in the big structural Bailey video okay so it's it's Elizabeth Warren has a dog named Bailey this night and yeah I was like as Chris has pointed out she got probably two weeks

before she declared her run for presidency yeah I can't wait till we get corrected on this by like just like one of those people who is an entire sentence is a display name not me minor sentence fragments and who's like actually here's an interview with Liz Warren about Bailey in 2013 in the hill try next time thanks regardless of the you know the providence of of big Bailey it's you know it's like this it's a golden lab right I mean she let's be honest she got the most white people who dog manager and so and somehow like went to had multiple appointments with a breeder about it 100% I know this because you

know this is how I get dogs and after a week I get rid of them not good after that so for some reason her campaign has decided to you know make Bailey I guess kind of a mascot and again I have watched the video but I am still as perplexed as you are yeah there's like there's a golem version of it if they they created like you know it's sort of similar to scabby the rat but not all right it's a giant inflatable animal and it's like a a giant golden lab wait the campaign did yes the campaign I thought she like discovered a piece of pop art during her travels through Iowa these I don't even really know who

created it I mean it's pretty fucked up boiled rice actually no no the big Bailey just appeared it crashed into Antarctica and that's what is known as the second impact and you know I rendered much of the surface of the planet of the earth it was an extinction level event and we're now living in the in the post big structure we're all DC3 yeah yeah and in Decapital 3 and like the Senate and White House it rises out of the ground because it's also like an underground city as well don't worry too much about that yeah all right it's fine but um so in the in in in this video this found footage it's Elizabeth Warren

running towards a it's sort of like almost like a statue of ball or malla yeah arms arms outstretched yeah in the yeah I'm just going off the still but there's a lot going on it's a giant inflatable version of her dog big Bailey and then she's she's running towards it sort of waving her arms doing the Liz Warren like I'm excited kind of thing she's running towards this giant dog and then like her you can hear her acolytes in the background start chanting big structural Bailey big structural Bailey which is you know a very clever you know mashup of big structural change yeah and and the dog the dog's name Bailey

yeah right yeah that part I get yeah and currently through memes um Elizabeth Warren's you know comms team are attempting to source which child would be best to put inside big structural Bailey and and control it yeah no yeah they they're operating entire long it seems like a normal long school it's actually like all the second children who will pilot the Bailey normal walk school is the delightful I mean you think it's a normal walk school you like the one like the kind you walk by every day you're doing you're doing stats you're like doing Freakonomics or whatever yeah like means testing you have fun by

like doing escape rooms or some bullshit but really you know there's a entire project behind this okay who's Ray Ayunami in this? Tulsi Gavir? Yeah yeah yeah she's like doesn't care if she lives or dies yeah like completely just no affect she's been you know injured and work out yeah accidents yeah yeah yeah okay um Pete Asaka mm-hmm I'd actually say Bernie Sanders is Jendu Ikari because he you don't want to play God by giving everyone health care mm-hmm the human instrumentality project he wants to escape death not good he like always just like misogynistically ensnare his women in his plots you put them inside

giant dogs no not just that like how Ritsuko represents the squad like how he used her yeah he's well I'm similar glasses to Gendo when he yeah no okay yeah he's Gendo Ikari right I think I think I think I've done my task of yeah like giving in giving our listeners the kind of brain poisoning that they that they need and that they crave to have yeah yeah we've now done the synthesis of big structural Bailey and the ungenesis Evangelion so just think about that you know from now on it's a bully holidays are coming up you guys are going back to Thanksgiving you know you have a big problem where you know

your mom is a Marxist Leninist but your dad is like committed member of ISO or some shit and you guys always have arguments because you're a dem stock cock and you guys just you always fight a Thanksgiving but instead of like the usual stuff you guys fight about Thanksgiving we want you to come home talking about this crap yeah yeah oh wait I forgot I forgot the last and actually I think most interesting detail of the big structural Bailey found footage is that for some reason the dog the giant dog has two pennies on its collar and I still haven't figured that out it's change I guess like oh it's

also like you know here's my two cents oh yeah it's the two cent wealth tax it's a okay so it refers to a two cent wealth tax as long as it can be mistaken for some sort of a cult signifier I did some digging and found the the war in camp relevance of the two cent wealth tax but I'm sure you will other people immediately assumed that is is the pennies that it leaves on its victims eyes after it assassins you can't see two pennies on something and not think about that right you know how like when the angels blow up like oftentimes it like it creates like an explosion in the shape of crucifix yes yes structural

Bailey defeats the angels with the tech knife like it blows in the shape of two cents because they're angels of bad capitalism there we go all right well whoo okay we put that to bed we put that to bed but I think maybe we should talk to David about something that he does know about I'm happy to go on I feel like I've got a lot to learn about the show I think Felix and I could we could probably extend this for another hour or so that's yeah that's being conservative I could be here all day but I think maybe there's a smaller portion of our audience that would actually like to talk hear your thoughts about you

know dead spin or what is dead spin may never die oh yeah suppose yeah I mean I definitely think that referring to the the thing that's still at that URL is dead spin is imprecise yeah insufficient but yeah there's everyone in dead spin is you know everyone that work there is no longer working there so wherever we go that's where it is now yeah which is it sounds like powerful but at the same time I'm unemployed so it kind of it cuts both ways yeah it's it's pretty bad man sucked David knowing you when you first walked in and I said I you know you're running a little bit late and I said I felt like Eric Roberts and the

Pope of Greenwich Village when he gets Mickey work fired and then just goes what's the matter you don't got a job to go to no more but you know you know we should be clear this like you know like obviously we're friends with you we're all big fans of the site but as far as like the ranked scale of like you know injustices in the world that we talked about on this show I don't want to you know play it too much up but like it does suck and it is indicative of like a much larger problem of like what's going on and also a personal connection to us because like you know dead spin really gave Felix his start anything

happened on the show and then like also published Brendan James's brilliant piece about national security psychopath Robert Caruso yeah yeah dead spin was I mean that's really how I remember it they just took a lot of chances on both like people and rating that like I don't legitimately think would have found a home anywhere else certainly the stuff that you've run with us was never like I mean it was all quite good but it was also like very much more in the Felix Lane than in like the sports lane like the rich Piana thing like it being like huge and taking winstall is not a sport no you know and he wasn't even like

you can argue you know competitive bodybuilding support he wasn't even like in competition right yeah he was just kind of a YouTube man yeah like Marchman pretty much say he's the only one of the only people and like when he worked there is like one of the only people in a job like that who told me what will tells me every week which is like give brain damage to our audience but it's like that was before I showed any ability to like get people to click on something or generate money he's just like everyone at dead spin just like they wanted to do things they believed in constantly and the amazing thing was

it worked like it was an incredibly successful place well we can get into like actually the actual metrics of like why it was successful and why the people who took it over have you know for whatever reason through business business genius mindset have a completely run it into the fucking ground I love that like now that this guy who spent his entire life just like but you know borrowing money to just replace their assets like he has to run the block yeah more on but why don't we start like I guess like David what could start like wherever you want to in this story I mean you were inside it like like

narrate for us if you will like what happened at dead spin I guess over the last like five or five six months and like even just the last week yeah so pegging this to it's like hard to because you can do a version of this that goes back to previous ownership and in folds like Peter teal and the sort of like expanded hellworld cinematic universe broadly speaking like we were sold to a private equity concern called Great Hill Partners last spring one tree hill yeah which by the way I didn't realize until just all the shit went down that it's based out of Boston yeah so that I honestly every that was the

final piece that clicked into right it does sort of start to all of it is like the Kobayashi porcelain at the end yeah this was so yes they put this Boston private equity concern bought dead spin and the other GMG websites at a discount a guy who had run Forbes.com back when it was like the skankiest content mill that they were putting up like thousands of posts a day like 10 or 11 years ago he put up 10% and installed himself as CEO and this was the real problem the reputation that that Great Hill had nobody in media wants to get bought by a private equity concern because well for obvious reasons

but like the way that they've done newspapers in the past a couple of really big ones like they destroy them like basically the model is to make things shittier and cheaper faster than advertisers can leave and that's that margin is your profit and also the fact that you're paying yourself this management fee for doing the hard work of you know what they did in like Denver which is basically firing two-thirds of the staff of the Denver Post so that is is a bad way to go and that was our fear in this case was that you know they could do something like that and to a certain extent the CEO his name is Jim

Spanfeller has done that but we're also in like this weird sort of like avant garde business realm where if it was a sort of thing where like if we were caught in the gears of someone trying to extract maximum profit from our website and you know make us do stuff we didn't want to do I think everybody was prepared to eat a certain amount of shit just because like it's a job you know and that's what you do and at some point it became clear that making money was maybe not the main concern of the CEO and at that point it's real difficult to know what to do because the usual levers that you can push or pull in an

employer-employee relationship don't do anything nothing is connected to anything else that this first getting rid of splinter which he did that was like a couple just a couple weeks I know this is fucking amazing about it I was like I was in late 2015 when he got rid of splinter like splinter was like ostensibly like the politics site yeah that was like the most one that was like the like Gawker Mark 2 kind of like specifically about politics and you know like they always had kind of you know an uneasy that was always tenuous and then like they just shut they shuttered splinter yeah a lot of people left

splinter around the time there's a there's a buyouts and then like you know through the through the GMG union they were able to negotiate um a like like a severance right you can eventually splinter as more knowledge than me but yeah um yeah like so like because of the I mean it was again like you see like once a private equity takes over it's sort of like the writings on the wall yeah some people took buyouts and the ones you suck around thanks to the union were able to negotiate like a severance which is basically like I mean as far as you like this was like the concession it mattered like it wasn't going to save

their jobs but like they were able to like have it so like when they got the axe it wasn't like completely like a complete they weren't just like like some of the other places like Mike or whatever we were just like right you know they don't exist anymore like then you get nothing yeah like in this case it was I mean this is where the union does the best possible work is like it's just mitigating the the lower lows of this whole thing the challenge with all of this though is that like there's a way that union and management have interacted in the past and in this case it's like the assumption is that what

management wants is they want concessions from you so that they can have more money for themselves which is fine you know it's not ideal but like there's a couple hundred years of best practices in terms of how you negotiate that I think that the decision to get rid of a news site right before the beginning of a fucking year-long news cycle that promises to be the biggest and most irritating and most widely read about in the history of the country is not a business decision it doesn't there's no way in which you can say that that works if advertisers don't want to have their shit in front of politics you know

stories like to a certain extent that makes sense but it also at some point enough page views make it viable mm-hmm it felt to me like it was just this guy not liking the staff of splinter there's a lot of real ardent unionists on that staff it was hard to parse but again this is crazy this is fucking two weeks ago because it feels like something that happened in like the mid 70s yeah we are all experiencing the time dilation effect for sure but then it was like you know so they gave the access splinter and then like you know yeah the two guys here was a gym spam filter and Paul Manafort yeah like these are like the hatchet men or whatever

could you speak about like like they're who these guys are and like what their roles were and all of it so uh Manafort of course everybody knows the famous ostrich coach yeah right I think it's cool that he can work from prison like I don't agree with what he's doing the first time he showed up at work wearing a suit made out of dolphin skin well this is interesting he so that guy was a journalist at some point and actually was like a dude that had which is you can see now because he's writing a lot of the unbi-line blogs that are running on site which are fire yeah which is funny because they're like at the most basic

level like they're competent it's not like like barstool level thing where there's like randomly five spaces after every period like no one taught you to do that like I don't know where you figured that out like it's like how about that world series yeah it's incredible it's it yeah I I saw some screenshots of it on Twitter and it's like that's that old dead spin style I love yeah it's like when it comes to football yeah there's gonna be Super Bowl next year a winner and a loser that's always been the way of the game 30 yeah right but like that obviously is not ideal but that guy I think was given a

terrible mandate by the CEO I mean obviously he made the choice to carry it out and all that but he was so this is the thing that I want to emphasize about all of this that like the CEO is the problem with this company because of the fact that he's a fucking maniac and as hack as it is to compare somebody you don't like to Donald Trump it's the same shit where it's just beefs and like weird like in fighting and he's constantly he's turning on people he's at this point I think he's like purported to be down on other different people in upper management he's bringing in his guys who are like as with Trump like

just otherwise unemployable 61 year old men which is all like not ideal obviously because like they sort of come in and they're like we're gonna do it the way that we did it like in you know whatever 2007 like five fucking internet yeah and you know this became a problem in terms of like the site's user experience and the general experience of being there but none of this was coming from the point of it being like well like I'm trying to make more money for you guys and you gotta either like ride with me or not like the ways in which the sites had become unprofitable were the result of neglect

in the previous ownership a little bit of trimming here and there literally like turning things like advertising on videos back on which had inexplicably been turned off like seriously it was just like it was like so like um yeah like but like and now this is like one of the things like in recent weeks for like like the the tension like really got ratcheted up with like the autoplay video ads on the site like what happened with that so this was a well another one of the the business masters that spanfeller had brought in I believe called out a retirement I'm not exactly sure whatever it was there's like some

dude that had sold ads for him it in 2008 closed a he he sells the ads that pop up on illegal sporting right which is the vibe that the site came to take on like it went from being this like clean Kinja experience to like those weird like pop up like the come play my lord video that follows you around the screen and you can't close it I love bleacher report dead spin that's like I mean they're close to literally just doing the bleacher report just like a 30 part slideshow where everything's a new page of a new audio play video in between everyone so they had like mentioned slide shows at one point to

somebody like early when he started and they were like I don't think we're gonna do that slideshow about that but that's cool that you're engaged with our content and like in in this case though it was like the stuff that that the video shit was like done with it with an insurance company it was done basically and pitched to us as the same sort of deal that places like CNN and ESPN have which if you've ever visited either of those sites it's not fucking usable user experience absolute dog shit I had to upgrade my Nvidia card to run ESPN yeah no seriously like the GMG like Kinja sites that like made me like

just a medium post I feel are the only websites other than like Twitter I can read anything on right I want to click a news story I want to read it and then you had any news based website and they make it fucking impossible and there's a way that sites look when they're dying or when they're struggling like that which is exactly what you're talking about that like it's trying to give an example of like all newspaper websites like local newspaper like if you look click on like the Miami Herald or like anyone any newspaper other than the New York Times it's like you oh you click on a story video immediately starts

playing okay stop that turn on mute you try to scroll down to find the text the video follows you it follows and the video the video is always like what are the best new roller-backpacks traveling like they immediately they're like stop you have an ad blocker on yeah turn off the ad blocker now the police are coming to your house this is something that happened with us with like literally getting the like the spam ads that you see if you've ever like illegally streamed a boxing match not that you should do that if you've ever seen any of those ads it's like the same sort of shit we're like your flashes at a date

and you're like I know that that's a lie I don't trust you what are you trying to put on like the whole the whole like game with that was trying to figure out which of the X's you were presented with actually the window opened up like a I don't know a live stream of murder we're just like immediately FBI on either way to your house so this was yeah so those those were not optimized user experience experiences we're describing so you're having issues with that and like people were writing in and being like I can't read the site at work or on my phone and those are two of the places that I like to read it

forward the shit along and just like sort of try to do our best that a complicating factor for me is that I did a lot of video stuff for dead spin like just like silly stuff that we would do just like to try to you know whatever they want video we did video was chill and pleasant and you know I shouldn't have to emphasize this always consensual if you watched any of those videos it was something that you chose to do after those ads would play though I would be presented on the site so a dozen times a day just in the course of doing my job with my own awful face and voice like talking about baseball players of the

early 1990s and I didn't sign up for that shit in the least in terms of doing these videos these are for other weirdos to watch as like ASMR like if it's like soothing to you to hear me be like oh yeah Ron Hasse briefly on the white socks like that's cool like and I love you for that but like that's not the sort of thing that I chose to hear every time I tried to edit a post or write one and it's not something that you know whatever should have been playing at the same time in a different part of the page as the ad for insurance that was playing in the middle of it I mean yeah that's like I mean that's sort of the

story of what happened to everything on the fucking internet you just summed it up I mean deadspin was sort of this last bastion because it was like we've previously alluded to a lot of weird shit that had no home anywhere else and make of course it was amazingly successful because it was one of the few places you would go where the entire website didn't just seize all of your CPU like here's what you want dumb fuck yeah and a lot of the traffic that we had reflected that like people would just literally type the URL into like just type deadspin.com and like scroll down and read it which is like kind of

sicko behavior in 2019 like nobody was only read articles through links right yeah so media like yeah which is it's cool I mean in all of that especially because of the fact that you can scroll down through it and it's not just like endless hockey transactions or whatever that there is different shit there's like other stuff there's things in there that aren't necessarily related to sports there's like and not a ton of stuff about like movies or music or culture or whatever but enough that you're at least breaking it up so that you're not just like binging on like free agent gossip right and like so like so

there was the autoplay video ads which was like done large people like without the really knowledge or consent of anyone who worked at the site it also wasn't worth very much money as a deal that's how fucking could it be where it just like you know click this balloon to get a free credit yeah there's the autoplay videos were designed they were sold to us as a seven figure revenue opportunity which is to say that if we hit this mark that the guy that our dealmaster had carved out with the insurers then we would receive one million dollars that that standard that we needed to hit and the reason why the

videos were playing automatically required 16 times the number of video exposures that our site was capable of creating like we would have needed to hire twice again as many video people as we had it was beyond not being a good deal it was like kind of borderline fraughty like it was it is borderline fraughty because the only way you could or like and the only people who do click on that are like just bewildered old people interacting with the internet like they're like they're just like oh it's telling me to click here now I feel like I'd like to read the story yeah my dad got a terrible virus on his

computer a few and this is like a thing that he can somehow do despite the fact that he never uses it he's just like as constantly at war with technology as anyone could be and I was for a while convinced that he had gotten it from reading one of my stories that he had just like seen something where he was like well Davey site says that like our my flash player isn't working so I'm gonna download this thing from like mold over and see if that fixes you know the internets that I have in my computer run program acid slash burn right it's like anything to support my boy he got it some other way but it was like yeah so the site that was was

grinding to a halt all the while they're sort of leaning on us about this the idea of like what has been termed like sticking to sports right it's like this tiny fraction of the shit that we do basically like it was not directly targeting Felix's posts but everything that you've done for us could have been I literally like I just like never did like under 200,000 250,000 reads like it was making money for the place but they just Jim Spanfeller hated my post so much he drew in the site my bad what leader came out is like we were concerned at first we were like we were like so what is it like do you want me to stop

writing about Donald Trump cuz like I've been waiting for someone to ask me to do that and it turns out it wasn't that it wasn't the fucking Joker piece especially because like your pieces always did big traffic mine generally did pretty well people are saying that I actually the most phage who you have anyone on the internet that is yeah many people know like it in like the secret like in like the surveillance proof like you know safe room at the center of one tree hill media they have like on the whiteboard there's just something called it says the Felix paradox problem yeah yeah I mean like I'm sorry I'm sorry like they

did I actually you know the CEO of Fios called me like when the Joker piece went up and said they're asking for permission to put more service or the most powerful reading it yeah I've ever seen that picture of you you looked really upset on your porch but David like the stick to sports thing like this was a series of memos that were internally circulated from Jim Spanfilter and Paul Manafort yes the company so it was it's a Spanfilter initiative that was then like delegated to poor Paul Manafort do you want to know more yeah so the that came down to us finally like the way that this all worked so this happened really

really fast it was we knew that this was something that they were mad about and we'd periodically hear again like and my apologies for the Trump comp again but there would be rumblings from upstairs like not literally worked on the same floor as us but like rumbling part was literal where you get mad about some post that went up there was a video of staffers tasting different yogurts that he was incensed about a three-minute video that took an hour to make that he was just sort of like well this is first of all this is not sports when obviously yogurt tasting is a competition that's just on its face is obviously wrong yeah

tell tell that to the Macedonian yogurt right I dare you bring it to him but this so it was just a guy that had a lot of anger issues and I think also very much wanted us to do what he was saying and was like like and this was sort of couched in a kind of like you know management versus staff I can culture clash about the political thing but like that was kind of a smoke screen for what was really going on yeah because like again like as pointed out before like the politics post or the things that were not technically strictly sports like did extremely well or even outperformed because it's like that's the funny thing

it's like god where can I go on the internet to just read about sports part of it that's like that was complicated about the idea of wanting it to be more like every other website you can see why we would resist that that like this was just on principle the fact that like it's not what we want to do but also like yeah like it's not why anyone went to densify right like if that's the the reason why people went there is that it wasn't just that shit because it's like there's places that have credentials that have like reporters in locker rooms we don't have that like we couldn't do a lot of the stuff that other places would

do and so we would find the shit that was interesting and show you that or we would aggregate stuff that people actually worked harder on and then we would link back to it it's all like old-timey internet shit there used to be a lot of sites that were like this it turned out that like those things dying I mean seems now less like a natural death than just sort of like the idea of what they would always say to us was that they wanted like a clean product that the idea of it not in the sort of like Dan Ninen but in the like that they wanted something that would be easy to explain to people who might someday buy

it okay and so that was as it was explained to us that that was the argument and what we would say was you would probably have a better time explaining to someone who wanted to buy our website that we were very successful and that we turned to profit and generated this much traffic despite the fact that our staff is that much smaller than other places that that would be something that would be easier to sell than it's the same thing as SB Nation but the user interface is different and yet like that we said it it didn't get through and at some point like Spanfeller went on vacation he came back on

Monday we got the memo saying that we were to stick to sports and that this was non-negotiable he had already Megan had left at this point hoping that she would basically who was the editor yeah Megan Greenwell a hero specifically in pro like before like everyone else left this was like in protest so she left in August after Spanfeller basically made clear that he was gonna make things really bad for her because of an investigative story that one of our writers had done about the media group that had purchased right that Laura Wagner did and Megan basically hoped that because Spanfeller he did it so much

he published a investigative piece on the people who bought you yeah I mean it that is like I mean it's something you're noticed at them but like come on like no it's for sure it is and it's also I mean it was done fairly like they were given opportunity to answer questions it's kind of the thing when you buy the Gawker sites you got to deal with the annoying stuff about Gawker too which is fine you're buying it because the sites make money like you're not buying it because it's like gonna flatter you and the point is or the reason they make money is because like they do stuff like that yes and and also

the fact that like that in itself is like the thing that makes readers trust us that this is like that basically like that that transparency as like sort of showboaty as it might have seemed at times in the past and everybody's like saying who they're gonna vote for in the election like old-timey Gawker stuff that basically like in doing that post like I think that it communicates to the readers that we are going to be straight with them about what we're doing that they should know what it is that they're consuming and if we're not telling them to go away the idea of it or that we're telling it to antagonize

the powerful people in charge the idea is that like the relationship that we had with the readers is where the value of the sites is it's why people came to them it's why people cared about it when it was gone so and then after Megan left is that when Barry took over Barry took over as the acting editor-in-chief and they began a long process of interviewing people that obviously is still ongoing to find the next editor-in-chief they got some good candidates they got some then they put some recruiters on it and they asked some less good candidates and whatever it was they were casting a wide net they

were just continuing to sort of have people back for endless rounds of it I have no idea how close they were to actually hiring one by the time that Barry left Barry is the greatest blogger in the history of deadspin like had some really good shit on the website by 10 in the morning every single day for 11 years or however long he was there and everybody respected him the idea that he was fired by spanfeller because of our sort of unwillingness to go along with the sticking to sports stuff which we did basically this through putting up some like silly posts that were not the most related to sports and this is

like the like the final like week of deadspin it was like you had the you had the piece about trumping booed at the world's yeah and then every other piece that day it was about like wedding dresses to buy yeah and like yeah like but I mean we found it you're going to make it annoying in the dog yeah the pictures of dogs that Tom Lays on Mexico you know breaking down tape of a bear that showed up like wandering through a motel in Tennessee and he was like you know like like good center of gravity not much burst like he did his best to make it sound like football he'd be like it was an honorable effort but yeah so

we got a few of those posts up that day Barry got called in spanfeller told him to get the fuck out at which point we were now down to editors-in-chief in three months and at this point it just sort of became clear that whatever it was that we could do to go along with this like there was not going to be a getting back to normal too many people were leaving they weren't being replaced and it was clear that you know the issue was that if we made it through this tantrum and sort of just ate shit and tried our best to do blogs like we would continue to have our jobs but we would also be at the mercy of the next

tantrum that there is no sense that this was ever going to get better or change there was a sense that it could die down before blowing back up again yeah and like I'm so like yeah the rest is history like you know a deadspin as you know everyone you know knows it is gone it's it's no more I mean like it's it's like it's corpses like you know technically you can still visit the website yeah but they're cross posting stuff from other GMG sites just to fill it out while they I guess try to I mean I did kind of feel bad for that one guy who like oh yeah dude that just like cold emailed them and was just like yeah

I'd love to write for you so that piece was apparently assigned by HR which is incredible classic editorial best practices stuff so that's like again forbidden mind realms untold for all of these processes like none of this has ever happened before this was just some dude that like had some silly thing he pitched it he didn't get even a quote on what he was gonna get for it and then yeah and then he got fucking dragged to hell by people calling scab which was like you know it's not technically wrong but I do feel I feel bad for him he really understood what he was getting into yeah he got a handsome 30,000

deadspin credits spent on new video experiences it's like this entire thing I don't know again it speaks to something broader that's happening in all media which is you're really not allowed to have something that's like in the sort of in the middle class of popularity or in a niche anymore right everything has to be geared to be the biggest thing for absolutely everyone which is strange too because journalism is not a field where you're gonna make money like that media in general even including like movies and television is necessarily a field we're gonna make money yeah well you guys really lost

the lottery in the sense that you got the private equity guy who's so stupid that he did private equity on journalism yeah yeah right which is not they're not sending their best but this was also like the sort of thing where they weren't even doing private equity on journalism right like well like this was if you if you want to just like ring us ring profit out of the website and the traffic that it generates like you do that right up to the point where people stop leaving not past that point and then you do it and you fucking sell it to someone who wants to own it it's not that hard right if you if you wanted

to be totally a moral and do it right you would let deadspin do the exact same content they've been doing but up the intrusive ad experience and probably fuck over people's benefits like that's the model for it but this I he Jim spam filter really confuses me yeah well first he has like he is a lovely bob haircut that I've noted travel it's like a lego man hair like it just is like it snaps under a little knob on the top of his head I was thinking it's more like a flapper haircut it's a very strange hair choice for a man of his age but he yeah I mean like when you guys got purchased yeah I thought like oh well they're just

gonna like you know data harvest more than companies than like you know the geo media already does and they'll probably be like some auto play shit and the like people's contracts will be fucked with a little bit but like this guy really came in there and was like why don't we do a slideshow that's like the 30 coolest quarterbacks incredible baffling I feel so fucking naive about this because I think that's exactly right but I remember the first like all hands that he had like there's like a country like a company history of like super shitty all hands where like everyone's sitting like there's like a

roll of editors in the front they're all like aggressively vaping at the guy while he talks like in some ways but he came up there and he was like he's kind of corny but like you know also like I'm kind of corny at this point like he was like sort of dressed like me which I didn't appreciate at the first one so he's up there like and you know he he didn't really seem to know or care very much about the sites which in retrospect was the issue that he was just like he's wearing one of your your trademark David Roth flannel yeah right next to you it looks like a magic eye everybody was mad at him but I was like it's a solid

plaid let's give him a chance but he you know he's talking about the sites he doesn't know much he's like I'm gonna get up to speed on it that's not a thing that he did but the rest of it where he was like yeah there's more money to be made in these sites and I want to make it like at some point like it didn't I didn't want to fucking party with the guy or anything but I was like all right good do it like that's what we want like make the sites more valuable and more stable and make our lives easier share the portion of it with us that the Union contract compels you to share and like let's all get on with our lives like I'll

see you at the Christmas party and he just couldn't fucking do it like he couldn't stop messing with stuff well I mean that's what I think like I say like whether it's like deadspin or just like all media in general which is like especially like you know news of any kind it was in very dire straits and is increasingly you know turning to more like more and more venal and corrupt sources of money to yeah like to be profitable or get clicks or hits or whatever but I think like the point that has to be stressed here is at the end of the day like this really wasn't about money like deadspin was like a very

successful site like I think like this idea that like oh it's just all about like that you know like these writers are like this is like a vanity project and like in the real world you know you just got to like you got to make hard choices yeah and you know like you know buckle down a little bit but like like really like that's not the case like I mean like the it was more about like not about like money but like they're like their control and they're kind of like like all like like an entire class of people like political or otherwise are just like their pissiness about being rude or yeah being like the smart

people are being like rude or pissy to the wrong kind of people and like that's really I think the rock in their shoe about all of this that's the part of it that I can't I can't speak for everybody on the staff but for me a sort of a moment when I realized it obviously like you don't get to pick your owners and you don't there's plenty of sites successful websites that are owned by cretinist people that don't read or don't care about the stuff that's on the website and if they only cared about money then you know like it's possible to have a relationship a symbiotic healthy relationship with an owner like that

that works in this case it was about I think not the politics of what we were doing but about sort of and not even about how annoying we you know inherently were as people at this website I think that there's this sense among rich people that journalists are class enemies and that fundamentally you don't owe them anything that like you're not just even if they're making you money even if they are both like the product and the labor of that of the thing that you sell that like fundamentally like the most important thing is making sure that they don't get over on you that they don't win

anything which is weird because we talk about like you know class solidarity among like the elites in the ruling class and like it's just another example of their own incompetence because I mean if they were smarter they'd realize that journalists are they're like most sacred class allies and their actual function in our society right and that's the part of it yeah it's crazy that way I mean just I think it brings home how like sort of not just like pissy they are obviously very pissy but like just how like actually mediocre and often dumb these people are like the idea that like like Trump's issue with the media is

not anything beyond the fact that they periodically make him look bad yeah like it's not this he doesn't have like a nuanced idea of like whatever the fucking third state is supposed to do or anything like that that this is all like the sense of I get the number of a state right is the fourth state is the third state hasn't tree of aunts and regime yeah Trump has passionate deeply held opinions about aunts and regime France but not about journalism but like some very tall and handsome songs bullets guildsman come up to me crying John Valjean what a great voice but yeah like all inspector Chavere a great blue

life standing behind him with like a weird like a David Clark hat on some press conference giving him a giant medal before he jumps off the jumps into the river sand to kill himself but I think it's like it's more like the idea that like writing of any kind is harder and harder to make money doing it and like if you are doing it within the confines of like an organization or a company or an institution the people that own that are put up the count like the capital behind it they know that the writers think that they're smarter than everyone else you know good for better I mean fair enough like I'm gonna sit here

and pretend that that's not like I think I think we're comes down to is that like they they feel that like because they are the capital that like they they are there like they are the better yeah and like the people beneath them like need to understand that and that's just the thing that Megan wrote which I think on her departure which I recommend everybody and I think is like really the last word on on what we're dealing with here called the adults in the room is it's about that sort of condescension towards people that that have less and this was the thing that I think animated all of the spanfeller period at the

these companies he came in and just sort of like systematically pushed out not just like journalists people but people that did revenue people that like were administrators just because like for I mean for one thing they were there before so like they must have been asshole idiots or why weren't they working at some other company but then also I mean just because he had this this idea in his head that like because of the fact that these people were holdovers they couldn't possibly understand the things that he understood or do the stuff that he wanted to do the other point that Megan makes in that

piece that I want to emphasize is that like it is difficult to make money in media it is not impossible to make regular decent profits in media like sustainable business stuff absolutely can be done even on the internet even with the capture of online advertising by this duopoly of Facebook and Google it can be done it can't be done like Felix said at these fucking like bizarre 10x ideas where they think that like somehow dead spin is gonna become uber because like it has enough advertisements on it but even uber isn't really a fucking legit 10x thing too that like this is what they what they've come to expect is

that you get a winning lottery ticket one time in three and that's just not the way that it goes and the idea of owning a business that makes a steady profit is somehow like for poorer people to do like it's just not like a goal that they see as worth pursuing yeah private equity is the it's you know hopefully if we get out of whatever we're in now and people in the future look back at this time they'll be amazed that we allowed this to be legal for as long as we did incredible they all of it is but man you can own a business without really having any any skin in it you can just run it into the fucking ground

nothing will matter people will give you money after you can do it to the next place because like you said hey maybe the next one we just buy out and fucking ruin we do it right this time you don't actually know anything about these businesses you don't know anything about how it works it's legal for you to just fucking rip these places apart redo contracts fuck over people who've been there forever if you don't fundamentally understand why whatever place you bought whether it's a media concern whether it's a whether it's a company's are us you don't understand why it makes money hey who cares you'll get the next one

right like in fact like the people that gave you money to do this they can just write this off you created a loss to them they're happy to do it again if on the next time you make some sort of you know 500% return a five-year period by just making life miserable for everyone who works for this company or anyone who buys anything from that's the part of it that's so disheartening about all of it is that like it doesn't at some point matter if you get it right that like it doesn't the idea of these that you pay yourself either way that you can run up this debt on this company crash it into the ground in the way that you did with

Toys R Us which was like a profitable concern in every way except for the fact that the private equity people that ran it borrowed so heavily against it you know you get your management fees when the thing goes bankrupt you're fine and then it's like it almost doesn't matter if you do it right that like it seems almost at this point as if that's no longer the point that the idea of like owning something or keeping it is like for suckers or for small-timers that that's like for people to have like a bunch of subway franchises you know that like and it's it's strange too because I think of like we talked a lot

I mean I even just in the few times that I've been on here about like this side like small business fascists like the backbone of like of like what's wrong with like our political culture at the moment I think that a lot of venture people are at a different line know that that's been fellow himself as far as I know is not politically conservative he's not a Republican that this is like that this level of like sort of zipless consequence free wealth is like those people can be elite Democrats they can have enlightened political opinions and like the most baseline like just sort of like standard liberal ways and yet like

because of the fact that this is all unreal to them because of the fact that the companies that they own don't matter because of the fact that the people that are involved in it are like you know theoretically could do some sort of like means-tested retraining course and get back on you know on the job or whatever that all of that is like it's at this level of abstraction where sort of anything any outcome feels possible because like all the stuff that's supposed to make sense the idea of like making the company profitable and then harvesting those profits as capitalists have for hundreds of years seems

somehow to be like no longer state of the art it's I mean private equity is something that can only exist in a diseased world absolutely it's a it's an absolutely fucking diseased way of thinking that this is it's just acceptable that you're gonna have a certain you're gonna fail a certain amount of times and your failure rate it means nothing for you means nothing for your investors it means nothing for your creditors they can the creditors are gonna get their money back the investors they get it right off or they just are made whole again that that percentage of failure that is acceptable when you run

your numbers is just destroying people's lives and for what like at no point at no point does anyone who does private they don't ever seem to learn the business better than the people who did it before they purchased it's not part of how they understand their job you know and people like McKinsey consultants come in people like Mayor Pete told them how to rework contracts to pay people less and I mean not just the fact that this exists but the fact that it does and we're all just like ah that's life these guys can just literally borrow tens of billions and you know best absolute best case scenario just

make life like 30% shittier for about you know 10,000 employees that that's the best case that we're all just like oh yeah that's part of the part of the finance economy it is absolutely disease and you know like as you pointed out like look anyone who has a job or like exist in any kind of institution like you know in a capitalist economy blah blah blah like you know we no one's hands are really clean but like it is possible to like make money yeah or like run a profitable concern and you know what you're about you know like the market sucks but like it has rules everybody knows what they are like you know like

and it's just this thing like whenever I hear about like oh like you know Twitter is in trouble like you know how can they possibly do you know how can how can a website that's used by 30 million people possibly make money you know cuz it's just like because it's not about that because they've signed on to this like the people who have invested way too much money in of it in it have like it's pinging to this like infinite excessive growth right it's just like nothing is ever enough and you can see this with like the sites that are actually considered to be successful the like four or five concerns that everybody's

like well Amazon everybody can agree on that shit like the endgame for those sites is to become the entire internet yeah that's what Facebook wants Amazon wants to replace all retail like that is not the that's not like healthy growth or competition in any meaningful way it's just like the endgame of inequality is like somehow just like a totalizing version of capitalism that doesn't have room for smallholders for anybody except for the people like that I have the absolute commanding height and you know like and like I said at the beginning like this example of dead spin which was like you know a fun website that we

enjoyed yeah he had some personal connection to get from there to totalizing capital like you know it's like you know it's again like it's not the the worst outrage we ever talked about on the show but like people have lost their jobs it sucks but like overall like like it's an example of Felix what you're talking about earlier like whether it's like culturally or otherwise what we see happening is just this like great flattening of like anything that has any possibility to be even slightly interesting or different into this like mass homogenization of like where everything has to be it everything has

to appeal to everyone and the net result of that is always just like just like the stupefaction of like everything where it's just like the dumbing down and flattening of anything and like the removal of any possibility for anything new or different to happen we yeah and we saw it we've seen this like this is the final conclusion of the media cycle the past few years like we said in 2013 2014 places started like paying people to do like horribly exploitative first person essays about like every bad thing that had ever happened to them and they go yeah here's $250 to talk about the worst fucking moment of your life it

went from that you know they ran out of those stories so it just became all right just write something that people will hate we're not gonna tell you we're not gonna tell you that's why you're doing it but it's like yeah you're a fucking scared shitless 22 year old with a useless fucking journalism degree you can't get a job anywhere else so like why don't you write an article like saying that coming to America is canceled yeah and like yeah so like Donald Trump Jr. can get like his once a month like successful tweet making fun of it but people will click on it and you'll make like $970 for the website and as that

winds down we just go into the bleacher report of vacation of everything where they've exhausted all other options they sort of the few places that did anything that had any like natural audience a natural group of people that enjoyed it they've been fucking driven away because you drove away the people that did that and you drove away the ethos that made people feel like they were in a place that wasn't like anywhere else so your only destination is this just the fucking flat affect at this time so I said it before like no one's gonna remember being alive now and they're not gonna remember it because

everything everything we did in our free time everything we ostensibly did for fun was the fucking same nothing feels memorable at all and that's not just that's not just like getting older and feeling like you've determined the formula for all entertainment or anything else it's that everything is so financialized and churned into an algorithm that yeah why would anything be that different from itself I think that narrowing that you're talking about I think is really it's hard to be positive about the experience I mean obviously I'm very happy to have worked at that's been I'm happy to have met the

people like but the thing that I can say that I feel optimistic about in all of this is that what you're describing sucks ass and everybody knows it I think that people hate it and I think that you can feel a certain there's a certain clammy-ness and desperation to especially I was thinking about this today about Bob Iger getting like picking a fight with Martin Scorsese because he doesn't like MCU movies and that like to me also doing it and explicitly like like you're racist if you don't yeah right yeah I'm sorry that you can't understand how beautiful this story is that like whatever we made specifically

so that somebody like who speaks no language that lives in like Western China would pay to watch it that like all of it to me is like that's not I don't think that Bob Iger thinks very deeply about any of this stuff I think he has to know that a world where there are 20 movies a year going to theaters and they're all based on previously existing intro like intellectual property or whatever it's like sooner or later people are gonna be like well this actually blows to me that like some people will not some people that's all they want and certainly for Bob Iger's purposes those movies are all

fantastically profitable so why not but that's not the way that any of this works because there's people in you know as the inputs and outputs in all of this that like I think that everybody is demanding a little bit more out of life than our culture and our life and our media is currently affording to us well speaking this isn't like and it's not like I hope you're right I do I don't know I may be in a bit of a bubble of like people who just have consumed so much that they're kind of this conclusion very quickly but it is you know this is one of those things that wouldn't be revolutionary but it would be

like it's like everything else the things that people actually want and our brand it is revolutionary aren't things that would totally upend the system they wouldn't make guys like Jim Spanfeller not rich anymore but it would least remove the boot from the neck if you didn't go bankrupt for going to the hospital if you didn't just fucking sort of passively drift into suicidal ideation every time you watch TV yeah all the fucking same shit and you feel like there's no future because you've seen everything you know exactly what's coming next but you know I know I do hope you're right I do I hope that

everyone starts to realize we've all been slurping the same shit out of the same toilet for about a fucking decade it's taking a slightly different direction I mean speak speak speaking of people who expect nothing out of life and get no pleasure out of it whatsoever one of the interesting things about this saga is the way how quickly it has been conscripted into a kind of a culture war point scoring specifically because you know like dead spin it was associated with you know smart urban people basically and I had seen a lot of crawling from the likes of people like Ben Dominic to be like you know

surprise surprise like you know you have to vote if you run a website you got to have something that people want to read my god or like are all the barstool in the end or thaws or whatever just being like oh come work for me yeah shouldn't have tried to do something that didn't suck that's your first mistake bitch and I think a hilarious coming from Ben Dominic is the EIC of the federal I legitimately I myself the post that I write in a month do more traffic than Ben than the federalist know what yeah not only this is literally is literally only online due to inefficiencies in the tax yeah that's it that's fucking it see

that to me is the part of it that that's frustrating I mean like I'm fucking grown man I can't have room for barstool in my life like I just like I wish all of those those guys the best on their series sevens or whatever like but it's not like and then you know whatever they're not I think it's good to have like a make-work program for people that would otherwise yeah people that say things like I thought about being a cop like no it was like part of it was a like New Deal program for Boston but the like the certainly the like the conservative element of it or these like whatever like people with like

peculiar anime logos coming in and like telling me to code or whatever that like shit like that is like oh you just got memed on you're a cock like by sharing with me the one joke that their culture has repeated back and forth but all that I mean for sure the idea of like some like fucking like welfare queen like bandana she's just basically like some still unknown rich dude is just basically like floating his shitty enterprise that nobody cares about because it's like important to have more garbage out there in the world that like that model is like that's one of the two that works yeah like that works

very specifically because the people who fund it explicitly understand that these concerns will never make any money right ever and so that they are essentially like 90% of conservative media outside of like they're like you know the big like Fox News or like talk radio which is a lot of it but like I'm talking about the vanity concerns are all totally insulated from anything that would even remotely supposedly like August stuff and they're like well the national review a home of thud like a last outcast of like like formal thought yeah it's still the same thing it's just I'm fucking rich guy like writing

something off to a foundation as long as you never surprise them by saying something that might bother them like Ben Dominic will die employed decades hence and not only that but like you guys who works in journalism who has failed up after being fired for plagiarism like twice or something like that well how bad I mean the only thing that could get him fired from his job is if Benny Johnson yeah but I mean Benny is ridiculous too because that guy I don't think really believes in anything and yet has like eagerly gone fashion like that's just like that was never like a negotiable thing to him

like if it's like that's what it takes to go down to like the next like place that'll have him he'll like sure he'll fucking like absolutely like do the nay nay while Donald Trump talks about brown hordes on a video behind him like that's not like a difficult point for him Benny Johnson is he's a fascinating case you know maybe he'll be taught like advanced courses years from now a pure freak like a golden man in some sense that he just he's literally only in this because he's a fucking freak who loves making content yeah that's the only thing he actually enjoys is when he makes like a giffable moment of him

like doing the shoot dance in front in front of like a cop who heroically shot like five unarmed people he's responsible for what is to my mind the single most chilling bit of content ever to appear on the internet have you seen the when he went to Fort Hood shooting yes so to me that is like for those who have not he was still at Buzzfeed at the time had not yet been fired for being a plagiarism happy psychopath and they sent him down there after this catastrophic act of violence on a military base and he went there and just straight-up photographed the Arby's on the base and was like they have an Arby's

just like us like and then like a photograph of the soda found inside where he's like different selections it was absolutely sociopathic like disconnection from any of the stuff that he was doing was basically just like these guys are normal this base is beautiful not anything about the shooting not anything about what the people on the base because there are no people spoken to in the entire story like it was just a man whose mind is completely like brands and signifiers yeah if you hope like if you did an MRI and Benny Johnson that brain is just filled with candy yeah fucking bowl on Halloween

I guess like I can't let you I can't leave go David without talking you know about the cross-section you know the crossover between sports and politics specifically there about Donald Trump's appearance at sporting events you know your last one the piece for I think for density famously was him being booed at the World Series yeah and you know and you know it is okay to boo a president and chant lock him up when he shows his face at a baseball especially when he's never shown his face in front of people that could conceivably have booed him in the past like everything that he does is like a fucking convention center in

Fort Wayne Indiana and you have to take like a loyalty to get it so what I love about that is like him showing up at the Nationals and like in DC and being booed by stadium full of people is that like you know immediately like his defenders could immediately say this is DC these are swamp style sports fans there's 100 many tweeted that it was 100% lobbyists and and bureaucrats in the crowd which you know I guess you could maybe make that stretch if it's a Nationals game just the other day yeah showed up at the UFC fight in Madison Square Garden and was booed again by a stadium full of people which is that

because USC as a baby second to NASCAR in terms of like the shithead sport of America so it's a little harder to make the argument that is only the swamp style elites going you 100% bureaucrats yeah the UFC should be like that is a pretty bad sign for him because the UFC is his exact base it's you know US tickets to the UFC are very expensive like for good seats and like actually going there are Jewish it's his exact base it's like people who make a really good living who affect a sort of blue collar like bullshit affect and if he like can't get a good pop there that's fucking that's super not good for announced

today like this is I think this is going to be an interesting trend his like ongoing search for a sporting event where he won't get told to like be dicks until he dies just announced after the USC right on the heels of the national world series and then you see again Madison Square Garden it's the heart of Manhattan again swamp style human beings this is deep state people he just announced that he will be attending an LSU Alabama game and if he can't get a pop in that audience then honestly I'm you know I'm betting heavily against him in 2020 it's hard to know where else you go after that like if those student

sections can come through on this like he just I think like I don't know where like you could possibly you'd have to go to like door-to-door at the what's that fucking giant retirement community in Orlando the villages yeah like you could go to like a pickleball tournament in the villages and they'd be like oh we love you sir thanks for like standing up for our cops the only like major event he could go to is like I guess like one of those places in India where there's just like all those BJP people who like worship Donald Trump playing cricket against each other that's like the only like mass event he could go to because

yeah I mean maybe college football because those are people who just like go to different like they're night out at age 60 is like go to different neighborhoods and call the cops on like suspicious people like trying it out in new locales but I had like a list in my head of like venues that he could go to and either get owned at or like possibly not like I think like a Phoenix coyotes NHL game thinking probably do okay there yeah but like you know you never can't tell like I think he's he's doing a pretty bad job it's like most people think this he's just somehow has managed to keep himself insulated from

that experience but also the dude that like got knocked out in the main event at the UFC thing was like a real vocal pro-trump yeah yeah he got nerked at knocked out by a Bernard brother yeah yeah Kevin Kevin Lee Kevin Lee's sick yes what was the Instagram it was like Bernie Sanders you bastard yeah yeah yeah Kevin look yeah I did not know that Kevin Lee was a was a Bernie bro but no Kevin Lee is a fucking sick fighter too he's fun to watch oh but I think as you were saying earlier actually Bernard should start going to UFC events no well he needs like the opposition that he's gonna face he needs like an army of

guys from Ohio and Western PA he needs like guys who have traumatic brain injuries and emotional trauma from being forced to wrestle since they were four years old permanent cauliflower ears can't wear like earbud headphones just those types I've got like that's his that should be his army the study the Stipe Miochich dad yeah every day his name you see pay me oh yeah like it should be right it should just be guys named Brendan Brandon protect him ever like those because those are the those are the American Doc Estonis Ohioans and Western Pennsylvanians they're no they're terrifying or just someone who has

honor tattooed on their back exactly yeah yeah Bernie could like if he gets those guys and I think he could unstoppable unstoppable he would yeah like any parking lot in America he's the safest man in the world no he's I think he could do it I think he could have feel to them he might already I don't know I think he kind of does and that's like the thing that sets that's from a part is that like because what you're describing is like there's nobody that's more of a non-voter than the dude you just described yeah and yet like that's the people where they sort of really like they don't think that he's

bullshit yeah which is like a good place to start you know for a politician because I don't think there's really anybody else that like could lay claim to that and yeah he puts things in these terms that like appeals to like non voting Americans or it's just like his message there's a straight straight up being like no it's it's bullshit that you like you can't see a doctor and by non-voting Americans we're talking about at least as far as the last presidential election goes a hundred million people right yeah which is probably easier than trying to like persuade somebody that's like whatever

that voted for someone that they knew was a sex criminal because they wanted a tax cut not to do that a second time you know but like the flat brim guard like if we get Bernie his flat brim guard like I don't care you know heart attack gun poison darts no they're stopping all of it absolutely like no no I like his chances well we should we should wrap things up for today I want to say thank you to David Roth thank you again to you everyone who worked a deadspin and best of luck to you guys in the future but one minor caveat if you listen to this episode or already follow us on Twitter please stop asking us to finance the new

deadspin or media project because a it's way more money than you think it is it's so much more money than you think it is man way way too incompetent yeah like this is literally the only job we can do I know I know if you want to like put their hope in like you like a new like independent model that's that's free from all this bullshit but please don't put your hopes in us doing two episodes a week is just about them limits of our capabilities I will I will if someone who's like has made their bed once as an adult wants to put this together like put together a new great deadspin I would I would scap I would write for free

to get you guys engagement but no I would I would run it worse than Jim Spanfeller if we did this I think this is kind of like the dark part about all this like I mean I say that it's easy to run this stuff at a profit but also like I arrived 45 minutes late for a podcast on my first day of unemployment so like maybe like keep looking find another guy yeah if you if you're out there and you have like a good sense of morality and you know like what a good website is when you see it and also like you know you the only time you've woken up at three o'clock as an adult is with a violent sickness like with a horrible

illness caused you to do that you know get in contact otherwise we're so not your huckleberry yeah it's a nice thought though and I appreciate you yeah no well that does it for us this week again thanks again to David Roth thank you for having me it's been forever but it's been forever a good website