The Press Box - Axios’s Big Sale, Rachel Maddow’s Future, and Brian Phillips's New '22 Goals' Podcast

Episode Date: August 8, 2022

Bryan and David kick off the podcast discussing Axios’s half a billion dollar sale (7:12), before diving into the Vanity Fair story covering Rachel Maddow’s $30 million deal with NBC (18:05), and later, the revitalization of the Quarterback Show with Josh Allen (33:25)? Then, Bryan and David are joined by The Ringer’s Brian Phillips to discuss his upcoming podcast, '22 Goals', where he dissects 22 of the greatest goals ever scored in men's World Cup history (41:32). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Brian Phillips Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's the NFL preseason. Check out the Ringer Fantasy Football Show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Also, if you need fantasy rankings, we've got our rankings and sleepers at Fantasyfuttle. So come listen to Danny Highfitts Craig Horlebeck and me, Danny Kelly, on the Ringer fantasy football show. David? Yes. I was thinking over the weekend a little bit more about Vince Scully. The baseball announcer who died last Tuesday at age 94.

Absolute legend, and your piece about him was just amazing. You're very nice. A couple of a pantheon-level Vin Scully calls came up. During the celebration of his life, one was Kirk Gibson's home run in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series. And of course, two years earlier, Scully had the ball going between Bill Buckner's legs in Game 6 of the 86 World Series. John is at second base with two out, three and two to Luki Wilson.

Little roller up along first, behind the bag. It strikes me, David, that we have lots of lists of great sports moments. But these kind of moments belong on a different list. I was trying to use the word electric last week. I don't think that's exactly right. I think a better word is gobsmacking, a list of gobsmacking. a list of gobsmacking sports moments. Right.

You know, to use Jack Bucks call of that very same Kurt Gibson home run, I don't believe what I just saw. Mm-hmm. A moment that seems to defy sports narrative, that seems to defy physics, that doesn't make any sense.

And I almost think announcers should get a different merit badge for calling and nailing a gobsmacking moment. just because nobody, them included, could see it coming. Yeah. The degree of difficulty is just incredibly high. You know, the phrase that we always hear is, you know, it wouldn't have been better if it was scripted,

which is to say it was just like some, well, it follows the course of some beautiful movie script or something, but really it's not what you would have expected it, expected to happen in that moment, which necessarily means. you can't really prep for it, right? I mean, I guess you could go out there and make up crazy calls

for a million different eventualities and practice them all every week or something, but presumably that's not what's going on. No, I mean, and at that moment, the announcer ceases to be our explainer, you know, and becomes our avatar, right? Becomes the person kind of experiencing that

for us loudly, for us all to hear. And it's not as easy a turn as you might think it is. No. And the avatar part is what announcers, even really good announcers often get wrong. They're too excited for a big moment. They're too subdued for a big moment. Or they just can't get that disbelief into their voice, all of which is happening, of course, in a split second.

I was thinking of other gobsmacking moments from recent years. Malcolm Butler's interception in the 2015 Super Bowl, called by Al Michaels, with just the right amount of, can you believe that freaking happened at the goal line when Seattle was about to win the Super Bowl? LeBron James's block of Andre Aguadala, the 2016 finals. Oh, yeah. Mike Breen. If we want to put the helmet catch with David Tyree in 2008, but again, it starts to shade a little

bit into great moments. These are not great moments necessarily. They're gobsmacking moments. They're mind-blowing moments. And you're part about rehearsing. I mean, I think we need an episode of the rehearsal where Nathan Fielder can go through all the eventualities with one of America's announcers. Maybe Joe Buck would volunteer for this. Just have a tree. Of everything that could possibly happen. Mm-hmm. First game of Monday night football, you're sitting next to Troy. Let's go through all the possible things that could happen on the opening kickoff.

Oh, wait, there are no more opening kickoffs in the NFL just goes to the end zone every time. Never mind. Let's start with the second play. Yeah. Well, you know, I talked to legendary wrestling announcer Jim Ross not that long ago. And you think about what his job was. It's got to be like he always says he didn't like to know the plans ahead of time, which is wild. presumably if Joe Buck could get the script,

he would like to get the script, right? And that's not specific to Joe Buck. I'm saying any announcer would. It allows you to do your job better unless you really factor in what Jim Ross was trying to accomplish, which is the urgency of the moment, right? He was trying to be there experiencing it

for the first time, like a real sports announcer, which really worked to his favor. It worked a great effect. But when you think about the amount of possibilities in a pro wrestling show, always. It's sort of, you realize how great the degree of difficulty is. It's not like an unexpected block is going to change the course of the night. It's like, you know, a demon coming forth from underneath the ring from the fifth dimension. I don't know.

You know, I guess in some sense, it's, it is, it being scripted does sort of limit it in a sort of, in an interesting sort of way. But yeah, it's, it's really, it's a, it's a, it's a, no matter what you're doing, real sports or the performative kind, it's an incredibly difficult and amazing thing when you can pull that off. It really is fascinating about Jim Ross that those baguads were actually bar gods. Coming up on today's podcast, David, another media company has been sold for megabucks. And it's one that loves brevity.

Would you buy Axios for half a billion dollars? Rachel Maddow will now host her show on MSNBC once a week rather than five times a week. So why is NBC paying her $30 million? We have some notes on the future of the NFL quarterback show, plus one of our favorites. One of the very best sports writers on the planet, Brian Phillips stops by to talk about his new World Cup podcast, 22 goals, all that and more on the press box, a part of the ringer. Podcast Network. Hello Media Consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, and producer Erica Servantes here.

This was not a slow Monday in August, David, because I woke up this morning with the news from our friend Ben Mullen of the New York Times. Axios, the politics site whose editors would think my intro is already too long, has been sold for $525 million. Founded 2017 by among others Jim Van de Haid and Mike Allen, who were also among the founders of Politico. What do we think about Axios? selling for half a billion.

Well, the half a billion part, I feel like it's probably fruitful to set it aside because it's sort of funny money at some point, right? I mean, you mentioned Rachel Maddow. I mean, we're just talking about figures for her contract and for this that are just like, I don't think it really gets us anywhere to say whether or not this was worth

the number of dollars in sort of whatever, like rough comparison to your average newspapers, budget, or, you know, one person's salary or whatever. So, but so setting that aside, I mean, it's not terribly shocking, right? I mean, they've been looking for a buyer for some time. And I think when Politico was sold, it sort of set the market and also set the pathway, you know, it, it confers value onto like sites.

And certainly there's nothing else quite, there's nothing nearly close to it as like Politico is Axios. but I think that there's a sort of, I don't know, it normalizes it in a certain way, right? There was one quote from Vanda High who said, The Lesson of the Digital Era, Chase Fads, Fantasy and Clicks, you fade or famish, chase a loyal audience with quality information you can flourish. You know, I think that there's a lot of truth to that, right?

I mean, it's not, although I think that there's a lot of people who would look at Axios and say there is a sort of empty calories approach, right? I mean, I think that the great, I think you could apply some of this to Politico, but Axios even more so, that I don't know. It just seems like there's not an outlet that we encounter on a regular basis that has more just like inherent detractors and more inherent value that tries to, it's like kind of like the CNN of the new media, right? It like tries to walk such a down the middle line that it sort of is worth a whole lot of money and it seems to have everybody mad about it all the time, right? Just sort of like, like if you were just to retweet an Axio story and you were like a lot of good nuggets in here, you would definitely get a lot of replies that were just like, F off, Brian, like whatever, like people would just be mad that you would post it, you know?

I mean, but it's, it's obviously this, you know, goes to show what kind of, what kind of of respect that people have. I mean, that sort of broader business world has for it, right? Is Axios anger-inducing, or is Axios just unloved? I don't know that there's much of a difference in the modern ecosystem. And again, what I'm talking about is a very narrow, very potentially blindered view of the sort of, the same people who get mad at the Times op-ed page and, you know, the Washington Post in general, the sort of media fishbowl has very strong opinions about places like this. And I think that Axios, and again, Politico too, but I think Axios in particular has a sort of

an interviewable place of being an outlet that was created in the modern Internet era, but that Hughes, or at least attempts to hew to a lot of the same sort of journalistic morality or amorality of the intermorality of the internet. Institutional papers, right? They can be easily perceived to sort of catering to the status quo, catering to the, you know, powers that be in Washington and, and being sort of apolitical at moments that seem to require, to demand some sort of moral judgment. And I think that that's, you know, it kind of says everything about where we are in the media

a world right now. I guess the way I would see it is that when Politico was created, it was a world newspapers and they were accused of gaming the system. We're going to look at the political reporting in the New York Times and the Washington Post and we're going to slide into this space that they're not occupying. We're going to take these articles with, as you say, a nonpartisan down the middle overlay and just jack up the angle to such a degree that it's going to seem different

than something you could get in a newspaper, make it a little more active. And like I said, people accuse them, you are gaming the system. You're not, you're not doing something that is necessarily for the greater good

so much as just doing something to try to get more attention. But then they produce Maggie Haberman and Ben Smith is there, Jonathan Martin, Alex Burns, all these guys are there. So there's a little bit of that.

When Axios is created, It felt like even more they're gaming the system. Right. Now we already have Politico and you're trying to be short politico with single sentences for the constitute paragraphs. You remember when you were working at The Daily Beast, you helped launch the Daily Beast. I remember hanging out with some of your coworkers at some point in probably that first year. And we joked afterwards when they were talking about, oh, if, you know, if I started my,

for some reason the conversation was if I started my own news outlet, which, is probably half the conversations to go on in the media world. But if I did it myself, and I remember just how sort of like craven it all seemed, right? It's like, well, it would start off with something, it would start off with something with your heart in the right place, right? Well, you know, I wouldn't run something like that. If I was going to start my own side, I would be, I would do it this way. I would focus on this stuff. But I would definitely have a lot of slideshows. And I would always be like the handful of things that really got traffic, you know, whatever. It's like we have to do that, those things. And you're right,

they game the system, you know? I mean, and to start off with, I think to be a spinoff of Politico that is at once sort of even more gaming the system, as you said, but also just like so similar to the untrained eye that it seems unnecessary, you know? I mean, that's, I think that's going to, you know, get a lot of people talking. You mentioned that gaming the system, you know, when it comes it just sort of national news and whatever. You know, there was a talk that, I mean, who said it today? Oh, the chairman of Cox Enterprises said that this is going to be a big move for, or the big part of the investment is to expand into the number of local markets that they serve

for Axios, which is just sort of the mantra you have to say, and I guess at every, whatever we're talking, I mean, whenever a media out, a company is talking about massive expansion, you have to sort of faint towards going local because the potential growth there, I guess, is so great. but do you think that there's any chance that actually comes to fruition? No, because I think the reason people go to Axios is beyond the clever gaming of the system is because there are real scoops there. Jonathan Swans reporting on politics.

He's certainly been the biggest breakout star from that world. Sarah Fisher's scoops on media. I read Kendall Baker and Jeff Tracy's sports newsletter every morning, which is big and media and fantastic. But I think there has to be something there. And I think the problem with local stuff is if you could tell me I could get a great digest of all the local stories, I might be interested in that. But the problem is I also want people to report on local events and come up with stories. This is what we're lacking, right?

The newspapers are shrinking and shrinking and shrinking local newspapers. And they have been replaced in people's minds in some ways by like institutions like Axios and the New York Times. So I just wonder if smart brevity works when the newspaper itself in those markets has become a pamphlet. Now, if you're talking about creating real newsrooms in those places, that just seems like a much more ambitious goal. That seems impractical. And you're right. The previous thing seems a little bit like, I mean, the whole thing seems a little bit like trying to close up Pandora's box, right? They've rendered local news, you know, a dinosaur.

And now they're like, but now we're going to rediscover it, you know? I mean, it's not like sports, right? It's not. And the athletic has had, you know, different success in different markets. And in terms of covering local sports from a, on as a major, you know, obviously national enterprise. But it's not like sports, you know, people, there's not the necessary draw of like, how did my team do last night to bring people into the site? And yeah, it'll be interesting to see if they find a way to sort of parlay that line of thinking.

I don't know what keeps people that motivated on a local level outside of like, you know, parenting blogs. But again, maybe really specific blindered opinion of myself. One other quote I want to throw at you. This is again from Jim Van Dyheye. Hopefully with Politico First and Axios today, we have shown a way for, quote, serious journalism, and quote, to thrive in the digital era. I don't dispute that in a literal way, but coming on the heels of a giant half billion dollar sale, is it implicit lesson that you make yourself,

that you have to, that you sell your, that you get sold? That's how you become profitable? I think the time stories that they were profitable for the last couple of years, but not profitable this year because they made some investments. By the way, whenever we talk about these figures

and we're throwing out half a billion a lot here, we don't know what's behind the hood of these figures. No. This is something more complicated. Cox was an investor already in Axios. This is something more complicated than here, founders. Here is a check for half a billion dollars. Same thing with the Athletic in the New York Times.

We don't understand completely the economics of these things. It can be like one of those quarterback contracts where it's like, is the biggest contract ever signed and then somehow they get cut the next year with no, and no money is left on the cap. do they have guaranteed contracts and media? Is Mike Allen getting a signing bonus? It's a lot of option. It's a lot of team options.

Speaking of stories, I don't totally understand, David. There is a big new magazine piece in Vanity Fair about Rachel Maddow. Wait. Yes. Can I just jump in now? I understand all the words of this story. I understand, I think, sentence by sentence, what was meant to be conveyed by this story.

But there is a, I think there is a deeper, there is some sort of gap, some sort of chasm between the existence of the story and what I feel to be my comprehension of it. When you set up top, when we were starting the show that we're going to be talking about Rachel Maddow's new TV, new contract or whatever, however you said it, I almost jumped in because I was like,

people are going to think this podcast is two months old because the stories of her resigning have been around for a while. I don't know if we ever talked about it on the show or if he repeatedly said. I don't know if we've talked about this on the show. But it's a story that's been floating around out there without a whole lot of real explanation,

a lot of real definition. So finally, we get this big Van de Fair profile, which is very lovely and well written. It didn't really answer the question, and I'm not exactly sure why I'm reading it right now. So the question, the little kernel that was out there was, why is NBC paying Rachel Maddow a reported $30 million a year to not host her nightly cable news talk show? Like most other people on television, Rachel Maddow hosted five nights a week. Then her contract's coming up.

she comes to NBC and NBC reaches this new deal with her that it turns out she's going to host one night a week Monday. Yeah. While working on these various projects. So this story in Vanity Fair is a chance for Rachel Maddow to, and the story explicitly uses these words, open up as to why she wanted this deal and for NBC to open up about why they would agree to it. Now, the first thing I loved about this story, David, is it felt like we had gotten in the magazine journalism time machine and gone back to 1996 because writer Joe Pompeo went ice fishing with Rachel Maddow.

Yeah. Now, Rachel Maddow seems to genuinely like ice fishing. But the ice fishing in the story seems to serve the need of what will be the opening scene of my magazine story about Rachel Maddow? Right. which I always love those celebrity profiles. So Rachel Maddow's NBC show starts in 2008. She's been doing it about 14 years. It's a lot of work.

Pompeo writes including a big and often very complicated A block she writes. She gets new agents. As her contract winds down, she gets interest from the late but not lamented CNN Plus, Sirius XM Radio and other potential suit. then she signs what Pompeo calls a mega deal that left jaws on the floor, a reported 30 million annually not to be on the air five nights a week. Starting at some point in 2022, she'd get to do a lot less gabbing about the news cycle

and a lot more premium long-form projects, podcast, specials, documentaries, film adaptations, etc. So do you totally understand what this deal is about and what information are we we missing here? Well, I'm not sure that we're missing anything. I think it's a little bit more of a question of emphasis, and I don't know. I think that you mentioned the new agents. I mean, I think that it feels like the whole story could be simplified to.

Now, when her contract, when her contact negotiation started, Rachel Matto took on Ari Emmanuel and Endeavor as her new agents, and they went and got her a giant deal, right? endeavor not exclusively obviously not exclusively negotiating contracts for cable news hosts right I mean they can sort of swing a little bit more wildly or you know they can take a bigger swing to pick your metaphor they can ask for they can ask for the world this is the most one of the most powerful people in the entire media ecosystem he knows exactly what the most important on-screen talents in every walk of life receive and knows that he can ask for that right It could be as simple as that.

There was another part where there was some blind quotes from other TV execs who talked about how nutty it was to give Maddow such a big deal to not be on TV. That seemed sort of, well, inauthentic a little bit, but also just sort of beside the point. I mean, how much money are you willing to pay your biggest star to not go to the competition? Isn't that what it comes down to? If CNN was going to ante up a lot of money, she said there was a giant offer from Sirius. In the age of media consolidation that we keep seeing, I mean, would it be crazy for, and Peacock is not one of the bigger streaming platforms, but I mean, like, would Discovery Plus

having just acquired Warner Brothers not find a home for Rachel Maddow to draw more people in to Discovery Plus? I mean, it's just there, there's just so many options out there. And consistency, constancy, whatever you want to say, is probably one of the most valuable things for an outfit like MSNBC or more broadly NBC Universal. So we say on this podcast, I think that's right. You could feel that in the piece. This worry that what if she goes over to CNN and MSNBC, which as we've seen,

is constantly trying to find its foothold in this new media universe, we just let her go and solve one of CNN's problems. Yeah. There's a primetime show with a big built-in audience. Yeah, it's like a player going to team trading another player or somebody in the same conference, but if that's like that one, if it's a player that's clearly going to put them over the top. Yeah. And if there were three teams in the conference.

Yeah. Instead of. But I do think that the streaming, a lot of times people just sort of use the new streaming platform world that we live in as a sort of hand wave to say, well, it's different than it used to. I do think it's different. I think it really applies here because the one thing that you hear from, well, we talk about our moms on this show a lot, but moms from just a lot of people of our age and older who make up a huge portion of the audience for a place like MSNBC,

a lot of things you hear from them and from everyone is I just don't know where to find it. I used to love that show. I don't know where to find it anymore, right? It's that sort of uncertainty that keeps people away. And if Rachel Maddo disappeared or popped up somewhere else, that could just change a huge chunk of the audience's perception

of MSNBC, not just are they going to find someone else that can replace her, blah, blah, blah, but it can just like, they've let me down. They've made me confused, you know? And that's, that's, the value and the consistency is more important now than ever. This person who more than anybody is the identity of MSNBC, Rachel Maddell, for the last 14 years. I've been looking for Keith Oberman's show for at least a decade and I can't find it anywhere. It's a, it's a podcast now. I don't know if you know this. I know. I know. The, Mannell clearly cites burnout. as one of the reasons she wants to go to this new schedule.

She says, I think writ large if they, meaning NBC and associated companies, ended up with like a hit award-winning podcast and a hit movie and a docket series and a serial TV show and I'm covering the State of the Union and some of the time I'm doing the Rachel Maddow show, that's probably a better deal for them long run than me just doing the Rachel Maddow show and killing myself.

So under that scenario, she's churning out all these projects, podcasts, entertainment things. She did Spiro Agnew as a podcast and as an associated book, if I'm remembering correctly, she would produce these politically tinged, historically tinged kinds of things for MSNBC and the NBC and Peacock and everything else

that would run up and down the various verticals. I was a little disappointed. I got to say, David, and how much punting there was in this profile. Matt out was asked about the viability of cable news. Now, you know I always say that we sit here on the internet and look at things like sports radio and cable television. You go, oh, that's a dying medium where often it has plenty of life left in it. But when she was asked about cable news, she said, it has sort of been like chronicle of a death foretold the whole time I've been doing cable news.

Stuff changes at the executive level and stuff changes in terms of who's up and who's down. Which network's winning, which host is hot, but ultimately does anything really change that much? Point taken. But 2022, where the number of subscribers to the cable bundle is shrinking before our eyes, surely there's a different answer than just a bunch of executive and host intrigue to what the future of cable news is. Yes. I think the conventional wisdom for some time is these apps like Paramount Plus or Peacock, whatever else, they're going to proliferate and proliferate until the things like, you know,

the time where discovery merger start happening on a giant scale and there'll be two or three giant apps that have everything. I mean, and the ones that are left will probably form one giant Voltron of an app and we'll basically be back to our cable package. People have been saying that for a long time, right? So, but it is necessary to keep the conceit, the punting conceit just feels like something we have to talk about. No one knows quite what it's going to look like.

it has to be part of the conversation. I'm not sure how helpful it is when you're reading a profile like this. But that does seem to be true. I think that by and large, and again, this goes to the value of someone like Rachel Maddow. Anybody that's worth talking about to the tune of $30 million should be what you're planning your future around, right? That's your that's your North Star, right? That's what's going to lead you into the future. That's not some, well, how are we going to justify the money? It's kind of, you obviously can't run that through a P&L, but I think that that much should be fairly obvious.

I do kind of wonder, though, about the vagaries of the new job description. Obviously, Richamatta was one of the hardest workers in the business, as the article went to great lengths to point out, and I think that we all sort of know that to be true. But I do think that, I mean, like, the one day a week thing just really, really gets me. It's hard to imagine the productivity level staying the same, even with all these new opportunities allowing for different forms of creativity and for more things to happen at the same time.

I don't know about you, but I think it would be much easier to do to turn the press box into a daily podcast than it would be to add an entire, to add like, I don't know, like a documentary series onto our plates, right? Does it like once you're doing it, once you're doing it some, the rest of them come more easily than doing all these different things. Maybe I can speak a little bit

from personal experience, who knows. But it will be interesting to see how much of that $30 million is tied up in like delivery schedule and how much of it is just like potentially allowing you to, you know, write poetry or whatever. You end up deciding to want to do with your time.

The thing that got me in the article is the long tours around the property, right? The ice fishing. I can imagine moving, at the middle of nowhere. I can also imagine that the whole time I'd be incredibly frustrated that I didn't have enough time in my work schedule to wander the property. I have to be at a meeting. I have to

do certain things at certain times. So yeah, I mean, you know, I think that everybody should work from home if they want to in finding that piece. But it will be interesting to see how much stuff comes out of this. I mean, it's so far the signs point to lots, but we'll see. One day a week is just a funny number of days. It's odd. It's like if Johnny Carson said,

you know, I'm done with the Tonight Show. I'm actually just going to do Mondays, and Jay Leno is going to do Tuesday through Friday. It seems like there's like three or four nights a week would be like, okay, or five nights a week, but one night a week is just a weird number of nights to do the show. I mean, maybe the part of MSNBC's model is they just want people there on weekday nights, and that help us bring, you know, rise the tides, lift all the other shows, everything else. But it does seem weird because like we have the model for once a week. It's not that crazy. We have, you know, meet the press or, or whatever, on the one hand, we have John Oliver on the other.

There's a model for this, but it popping up as like part of a weekly show, a daily show on one day a week, just seems like I don't really know. I just don't know what to expect. This made me think about the mid to late career contracts that television people have been able to finagle. You remember when we were kids and Carson in like April or May would be like, well, I'm gone for the summer. See you in September and then would just disappear for three months. Like is Johnny Carson an elementary school teacher? Where's Johnny Carson going?

Late in his run, David Letterman taped his Friday show on Monday. Mm-hmm. You know, those jokes were super fresh in the monologue when they were taped on Monday. And then Howard Stern, this one always makes me laugh. now does Monday to Wednesday. Right. And Thursday, Friday are tape shows, I believe, from earlier in the week. So Howard Stern does a daily show three days a week.

And again, famous media people, I understand burnout. Go get it, right? Go get that deal that allows you to do that. That's awesome. It's just kind of fun. Well, it is. I think, but that's symptomatic of like the, you know, the media world. obviously it's not doesn't affect most people because you're talking about the super duper stars

but i think we're past the era and our not just immediate in our culture in general where you don't just choose at some point between continuing what you're doing or retirement right it's in everybody's interest both sides just to keep going in some form of fashion just to you know as long as you possibly can and if that means doing half the work for twice as much money well it does makes a certain amount of sense, right? If it means doing 10% of the work for 10 times of money, I mean, there's going to be some people that can justify it. It's not like we were before, where it's like one day Walter Cronkite signs off. You know, I mean, it's, Walter Cronkite would be, you know, hosting the Friday show and doing a podcast if you were still going around.

Absolutely. He'd be doing one day at least at the press box every week. Another news item for you, David about the quarterback show, one of the venerable forms of sports radio. So Kyle Brandt, who everybody knows from Good Morning Football and from his Ringer podcast, announced he has a new podcast on ESPN called Kyle

Brandt's basement. It's going to run weekdays. And Brandt was talking with Pat McAfee on Wednesday and planted this little acorn. Are you going to have people in your basement or is it going to be via Zoom or call? They'll come to the basement.

And Pat, like, I don't know if this is going to drive you crazy, but another thing I followed in your footsteps for, every Tuesday, I have the same guests as you do. And it is a very, very, very, very, very big NFL player who is committed to come every Tuesday and unbelievably excited. I'm kind of not supposed to say it. Do you want, can you guess? Is it Aaron? Zach Wilson. I wish you was Antonio Brown every Tuesday. Hold on, wait.

Because your tweet said most talented player. Is it Patrick Mahomes? It's not Patrick Mahomes, but you're on the right track every Tuesday. Josh Allen. Bill. It might be Josh Allen. It might not. Oh, hey.

Okay. So for years and years, quarterbacks in the NFL had a show or segment on local radio where they usually appeared on Tuesdays, which is their off day, did an interview about the game that just passed. Those kind of timed out because we decided they weren't very interesting. or the quarterbacks had their own Twitter accounts and other ways of getting their story out. And then a couple of years ago, Pat McAfee revives the quarterback show in incredible fashion with Aaron Rogers giving these Rogan-length interviews where he often makes news both about what's happening on the field and what he's doing off the field. Do we think a quarterback show with Josh Allen every week could be successful? Well, I think that's the question or that's the problem

implicit in what you're asking, right? it'll be good if it's good. You don't, just having to be, listen, we had this big conversation about Tom Brady. And if Tom Brady is ever makes it in the announced booth, and if Tom Brady turns out to be

hugely successful, if not, if, and not entirely, not incredibly talented, you know, I'm not saying it's going to be the case, but he might be the exception, he will be the exception

that proves the rule. Everybody else is got a rise or fall based on how interesting they are, right? I mean, how exciting they are, how much news they,

attention they get when they do it, what the chemistry is like between the host and the athlete. Because you're right, the regular stuff isn't interesting. I don't care about Josh Allen and, you know, the X's and O's and what they're trying to do, especially not when you're trying to cover up for what you're about to, what you're planning for next week or you don't want to cascade anybody too much or what happened the week before.

You know, if Josh Allen doesn't come out with the stories about what it's like to be to hang out with the quarterback, that's playing that night or if he's not, you know, talking about what the, what the team is doing and they're off. If they're not having, if it's not interesting, he's not going to work. So it's just kind of impossible to predict to some extent. Yeah. And I just feel the Aaron Rogers thing was such a one of one. Because you get a guy who wants to get on there and be interesting. And let's face it, lots of athletes, even when they do their own slot, not just obligatory interview, but this is my own slot, my own show, go on there and try not to make news.

You have Aaron and Rogers who was happy to talk about Game of Thrones and stuff that was on television in addition to just the mandatory football stuff you're talking about. You had Aaron Rogers who won back-to-back MVPs, who had gut kick losses in the playoffs two years in a row, and Oh, yeah, became the public face of vaccine skepticism at one point last season. So Kyle Brandt's really talented, but I'm just interested to know which player, given a big weekly slot like that, could just be consistently interesting, even if it's not Aaron Rogers' level, it's somewhere in the up there. I mean, honestly, I think that Kyle Brandt's probably talented, not just on the years, probably talented enough to know that this is going to work, or to have a good

feeling that, that Alan's the right one of the right person to go to for this. If it is Alan, yes. But regardless, yeah, it is a little one-on-on. I think maybe more so than Aaron Rogers, though, you have to start looking, and you look at the Peyton Manning model. Because as we've talked about it with Brady, with Mating with everybody else, like why not get a jump on this?

There's eventually going to be, like we said, a player that's making $25 million to be a broadcaster at an athlete, separate from his athlete contract, right? Start broadcasting while you're so playing. Figure out if that violates the CBA, later, you know? And I think that with the amount of money that someone like that to make, people like that are making, it's not necessarily a negative for Josh Allen to go kind of shoot from the hip or to start creating his brand at the same time that he's playing. So I think that

it's the opposite of the standard Tuesday quarterback radio shows, you know, this is, this has the potential to be something really a whole lot more, a whole lot more vital. But again, it's going to rely, it's going to, it's going to depend on the chemistry and the, performance of Allen to see what it is. If you can shoot from the hip and not piss all your teammates off, because remember, anything's going to get aggregated and come right back to your teammates. And the moment you have to spend 30 minutes walking around the locker room

trying to explain something is the moment a show like this becomes less interesting. One more for you, David. We've talked a lot about Donald Trump administration memoirs and how hard it is to come up with a title for these things. things. Because the Trump administration, breaking news, was not a successful presidency, but the person who's writing the memoir is often trying to sell it to people who are fans of Donald Trump. So I've got a new one from Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and advisor here.

Oh, no. The title of his memoir is Breaking History. Breaking History. I mean, you're just serving it up, right? It could be like, is it, is the title they can, they can be read as positive or deliberately negative? I don't know either. I think it feels like he certainly.

Who's reading Jared Kushner's memoir? It's a great question. I don't know. I mean, really? What is the audience? Who amongst Donald Trump's most ardent supporters, what is the Jared Kushner contingent? It's a great question.

It's a really good question, seeming that Donald has tried to minimize Jared Kushner, post-presidency. Even if he had, I don't know, I don't think Kushner had a lot of big fans. I mean, he doesn't fit the model of, I don't know. Like, I just don't know anybody who's a big Kushner head. Let's bring on the ringers Brian Phillips to talk about his excellent new podcast. But first, David, it's time for the overworked Twitter joke of the week, where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly. the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always

always gratefully received. Today's entry comes from valued listener Noah Kozlov. David, while you were away, there was big news in the airline industry. JetBlue announced they bought Spirit Airlines for $3.8 billion.

Yeah. It was an overword Twitter joke to write. The price is actually $1.1 billion, but Spirit is charging an extra $1.3 billion for oversized bags. 1.1 billion for early boarding and 300 million for Wi-Fi. If you flew spirit exactly once in a moment of extreme desperation, congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week.

All right, David, our guest today is a fantastic writer who this Wednesday, August 10th, will unveil a fantastic new podcast called 22 goals. Though it's not a soccer podcast, he says, it's a euphoria machine. Please unveil your best and most Delirious smile for Brian Phillips. Brian, welcome to the press box. Thank you so much.

It is a pleasure to be here. And if I can open with a small detour, I feel that this is a historic moment in the greater ringer universe, because Brian, you and I have been getting confused for one another on a regular basis for like 11 straight years. So now we can finally prove to people that we're not the same. same person. The best was when I got that postcard from Europe. Do you remember this? Yes, I was getting postcards from an artist in Europe who I don't know and had never met that were very strange for a while.

And so I think some of those went to you, didn't they? Yeah, I felt like I'd come into an, you know, English boarding house mystery. You know, Brian, I believe this is for you. I don't know who this woman is. Like, I've never heard of this before. What? No. But please forward it along if you could, yeah. Yeah, there were some photographs of like dismembered dolls and there was a whole thing. But yeah, memories. I always said this, David, whenever somebody came to me and said, you know, fantastic piece about the idea rod, Brian, I would say, thank you very much. Yeah, so same. Absolutely same.

People would be like, you know, I love that. That was so moving. And I'd be like, yes, well, I feel deeply. All right, Brian, before embarking on 22 goals, how did you feel about doing? podcasts? Well, you know, as the first internet writer to make the jump into doing podcasts, I really do feel like I'm a pioneer for the whole profession. I hope that people will be able to learn. No, I was the last internet writer to get into podcast, obviously. I resisted it for a really long time, to be honest, because I just, you know, I love writing. I grew up wanting to

be a writer and wanting to like put words on a page. And I didn't, grow up wanting to be a, you know, a radio host. So I just felt like this is not my thing. This is not for me. And then at some point, you know, at some point it clicked for me. And I realized that these things are not at all incompatible. And I, you know, podcasting just offered some advantages as a storytelling medium that I could take advantage of. And it's been, it's been a learning experience for sure, but it's been really, really fun. Like way more fun than I thought it was going to be. Like, I thought this was just going to be like, just basically like small humiliations for like a solid year.

And it was, it hasn't been like that. It's been great. I don't know about your experience. Mine has definitely been, well, I mean, it's sort of like if someone said,

hey, Brian, can you write, you know, the five funniest things about last night's episode of Succession, you would say, yeah,

I could do that. I've read those blog posts before. And you would probably end up writing 4,000 words that would feel a lot like a Brian Phillips piece because you sort of, you can work in a bunch of genres, but you kind of come, You realize, I don't know, maybe this is too existential. I feel like you realize you have more of a creative soul than you thought you did when you

start working in a totally different form. Would you say that you figured out a similar thing? Maybe so. I'd like to believe that I have a creative soul to any percent at all. But yeah, it's definitely been, you know, it definitely just kind of opens up a new side of your approach to these things. And yeah, I feel like I'm, I feel like I'm. I have compared this podcast a few times to my old soccer blog, the run of play,

which was just this kind of like kooky, experimental soccer blog that ran for a few years like a decade ago. And it's because I've had that same feeling of kind of experimenting and exploring and like finding new ways to do things. So to that point, there is a certain vocabulary we have come to know with a long form podcast. The author provides a little narration. then we cut to some archival sound, then we cut to a new interview the author did. And now from the Times of London, here's soccer writer, so-and-so.

You self-consciously and wonderfully to my ear did not do that with this podcast. Why did you decide to make it more like a Brian Phillips piece? Terror. I'm very afraid of talking to people. And it seemed easier to just write those parts and say them myself, than to, you know, I, I don't know, that's actually partly true.

But I also think that I just, I liked the idea that this would be, this would basically be an extension of the writing that, that I've been doing, that it would be like, I'm, you know, I've almost thought about this as like my next book. Like, this is, this is going to turn out to be like a 500 page, you know, overall script length. And it's just the, the episodes are like a 500 page. book that we're releasing a chapter at a time over 19 weeks. So I kind of liked the idea of having the ability to fully shape the narrative and kind of fully explore the questions that I was interested in exploring.

And maybe it would have been better if I had asked other people for their thoughts about those questions rather than just yammering about my own thoughts. But that was just sort of how it shook out. You mentioned being the first podcaster or first writer to make the journey into podcasts. It's funny because I felt the same way. I think everybody that's done a podcast has felt the same way. I remember talking about the Grantland days. I remember when Grantland was launching Zach Lowe's podcast, the low post.

I remember actually saying out loud, I think we probably have enough basketball podcasts in the world. Which was not only insane thing to say because there were now infinite numbers of basketball podcasts. So many. Yeah, we had like three at that point. Yeah. also because I think I miss the most central thing about podcast about doing anything in life

is that if you have, if you're good quality sometimes wins out, right? I mean, imagine my, I can't even imagine my podcast intake diet without Zach Lowe's voice every week.

I don't know. What is your, do you have any misconceptions about the podcast world before you went in just as a listener that you immediate, even on the cusp of release

having gone through the process, you realized we're crazy? You know, it's funny. I was never even that much of a podcast listener before I started working on this show. When I first decided to kind of jump into this, I went through a period of like four or five months where I just tried to like devour the whole medium as fast as I possibly could. But I didn't really, you know, I just kind of had this idea in my head that like podcasts were just like five people chatting about a sandwich. You know, like, just didn't really know exactly what the...

Some days. Yeah, exactly. And I had nothing against that. I just, I didn't really know. So when I really kind of jumped in, I was just fascinated by the range. You know, the medium by the time I discovered it had had time to go a lot of different places. And I was able to listen to, like, true crime podcasts and narrative podcasts and chat shows and podcasts and podcasts about analyzing the news and, you know, all kinds of. of different things. So when I really fully started, I did have a sense that there was a big

universe of this stuff out there and kind of felt like I was free to pick and choose from various genres in putting my own thing together, which was lucky. Let's talk about episode one, which is about Argentino's Diego Maradonna. You say no athlete in history has embodied the mess and confusion of being alive more consistently. Tell us what you mean by that. Well, I I mean Maradonna was an intensely vital presence. You know, you never saw Maradona being less than a thousand percent Maradonna. Like at any giving, Maradonna asleep somehow exuded this feeling of just like burning through the fabric of reality with his Maradonna nests.

But he did not make wise choices. He did not have impulse control. He did not act correctly in. many situations throughout his life. So I just feel that when you're going at life that hard, but at the same time, you are that charismatic and sort of radiant a presence, you just scramble everything around you. And Maradonna just had this power to kind of like upend the world within about a 500-yard radius of his presence in it. And I don't know, that combined with superlative talent just makes him one of the most fascinating athletes to look at, I think.

You talk about two big moments in that episode. One is, of course, the hand of God goal. Yes. Probably the most famous moment in soccer and football history. I mean, in terms of just like the public conception of it, what was, what did you find in creating this episode? Did you come to any new, great, deeper understanding of that moment? And if so, what happened? You know, one of the things that really jumped out at me, this may not seem like a deep insight, but one of the things that really jumped out at me when I was working on this episode

was what an unfair advantage the hand of God goal has just by virtue of having such a cool nickname. Like, when you can call something the hand of God, like, of course that's the most famous moment in soccer history. That's a killer nickname. Maradonna, three and a half minutes after he scored the Hand of God goal, scored the greatest individual goal in the history of soccer. Absolutely revered, absolutely famous goal.

The Hand of God goal has its own Wikipedia page. The great goal has a subheading. So, like, to me, that was just an incredible indication of the power of language and the power of names. I think we need to put our heads together and come up with a good nickname for the second goal because it's, you can't say it's been overlooked when people say it's the greatest goal of all time,

but like, it's been overlooked. How did Maradonna handle, pun sort of intended, the legality of the goal in later years? Well, Maradona, for him, performed a very delicate and very nuanced tap dance around the goal for a really long time. You know, he was the one who coined the name. He said right after the match, the goal was scored a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God. and he would tease you about it for a really long time. You would tiptoe right up to acknowledging that it was a handball and then step back.

I mean, everybody knew it. The Argentina commentator during the game knew it was a handball and was like openly saying, I love that goal, but it's a handball. But Maradonna didn't want to admit it for a long time. And then he finally did kind of come out and admit it. And then that led to a whole range of controversy because there were all these tabloid stories about how he'd apologized to the English for scoring the goal.

And he had to come back and say, like, look, no, I admit that it was a handball, but I'm not apologizing to the English. So it was like he had done something, you know, illegal under the laws of the game, but he still didn't feel bad about it. Come on. So, yeah, finally it all kind of came out. But it took a long time. Is there a deeper piece of that?

What are some other, what are some correlaries to when he, when such an important moment goes against, like you said, the rules, the heart of the game. And yet, it's not, if it had happened at a different moment in time, if it hadn't been a goal, if there's a million different, you know, what ifs, it wouldn't have been that big of a deal, right? It's a, it's the sort of rule, it's like a false start in football. It's like it's only bad if it gets called, right? Right. Absolutely. I mean, that's, you know, the number of handballs that have led to goals being incorrectly called in the history of soccer is not a small number. And there's nothing particularly remarkable about this goal except the stakes, I think. I think it was just like it was a

match against England in the World Cup. It was a knockout game. England and Argentina were geopolitical arch-nemesis at that point because of the Falklands War four years earlier. You know, Argentina had tried to take back the Falkland Islands and England had sent in destroyers and and driven them away. So, you know, the Argentine players going into that game, and Maradonna has talked a lot about this, they were looking at that game as revenge, you know, to them. They were, like, consciously kind of tricking themselves

into blaming the English players for what they saw as the suffering of Argentinians during the Falklands War. So it was like the stakes were jacked up about as high as they can possibly be in sports. Maybe if it had happened in a World Cup final, it would have been a bigger moment, but it really almost couldn't have been a bigger moment. So I think when something controversial happens, you know, in a giant moment like that,

it's like imagine if like the Warriors blew a 3-1 game in the finals and game seven was decided like after LeBron took like five steps. Like LeBron like clearly traveled and everyone saw it and dunked and that that decided the game. Like we'd lose our minds and I think it's the same kind of story. goal number two from the 86 World Cup is, as you say, the very blandly named goal of the century. Goal of the century. What is that? I know. That's like the game of the century we get in college football every five years.

So what exactly the game? Why is it the goal of the century, even if we reject that name? Well, he ran 70 yards solo through the entire English defense, and it's just like one beautiful move after another. I mean, it's just, I just feel that the goal of the century, sorry, is a, it's kind of a connoisseur's goal because he doesn't, he doesn't do anything that looks that impressive. Like, he's not, he doesn't jump 15 feet. He doesn't spin around a bunch of times.

Like, it's just a very efficient takedown of an entire defense in which he just basically makes like six guys in a row look silly for trying to. to take the ball away from him. They're all named either Peter or Terry. It's just this onslaught of English players named Peter and Terry. The goalkeeper's name is Peter. And he just beats all of them. And it's, you know, whatever, it's like six seconds long and maybe a little longer than that.

And just so comprehensive. And again, for the same reason that the Hand of God goal was such an inflammatory moment, the stakes being so high. This just felt like just a transcendent. moment because he did that incredible thing in this supercharged context. I want to go back to the zoom out a little bit to the to the broader concept for the series. Yeah. How did you get to 22? Well, I, first of all, I do feel that at the ringer we like a number in our in our podcast titles.

You know, we've never never turned up our nose at a good numerical title. And then this is 2022, and it's the 22nd men's World Cup. So I just thought, that's a nice coincidence. Let's do 22. And it was less work than doing 25, you know, it was. Well, it also asserts a little bit of like, you know, editorial judgment, right? I mean, 25. True, true.

I'm working on a 25 podcast right now myself, but 25 is a little bit like, oh, it's 25. Yeah, exactly. Right. 22 means he got all of the ones he wanted to get in there. It's tightly curated. It's tightly curated. I mean, I was saying earlier, I feel really lucky that Zlatan Ibrahimovich, you know, the mercurial Swedish striker, has never scored a World Cup goal because I would have wanted to do like seven Zlatan episodes, even if it was, you know, the most basic little dink tap-in of all time. I just would have had a hard time not covering Zlatan. But yeah, it was a lot of back and forth to arrive at the list. And a lot of good goals had to be left out. Some of the inclusions, I don't know if people will agree with.

But I'm excited about it. All right, Brian, not to have any spoilers. But I'd love to end here. You're in third grade in 1986 while the events we're talking about are playing out. What was you? Unusual experience you had with an art teacher in Oklahoma. Well, I had a couple of unusual experiences with art teachers in Oklahoma. I talk about this in episode one.

The first unusual experience was that my art teacher went to Europe on vacation, which was mind-blowing for all of us because I didn't know anyone who'd ever gone to Europe on vacation from small-town, Oklahoma, in the mid-80s. And she came back. She'd had this, and she'd been all over. She'd had this incredible experience. We all knew she was going. going. So we'd had this substitute for a while. It was a big deal to the class. She came back. She sat us down. She was going to tell us about the cultural riches of Europe and what she had learned.

And she said, children, what I learned in Europe is that if the United States went to war with every other country in the world at the same time, we would win easily. That was her takeaway. Her takeaway was, we've done. got this. None of these countries can touch us. She just kind of came back with like a sense that like this was a sad show from the Italy's and France's and Germany's of the world. And like I was super proud when she told us that. I felt like, I was going to ask. Hell yeah. Like I feel like that shaped my, uh, my geopolitical outlook for many years and I've had to deprogram quite consciously from that. Now you don't, you don't still think that's true? We're going to put you on the spot here. I feel like it would be, actually, this is a better question for me than having to just pick a winner for the 2022 World Cup.

So I appreciate this. No, I don't think we could beat every other. Well, we could do okay. But no, I think we would eventually lose that war. Yeah, thank you, right. Please compare America to one of the teams in the 2022 World Cup in a potential every country for itself world war. I like that. All right, 22 goals starts Wednesday.

Brian, would you like to stick around and help David Shoemaker guess the Strain Pun headline of the day? I would be honored to do that. Yeah. It's time for David Shoemaker and Brian Phillips. Guess the Strain Pund headline. Headline from two Thursdays ago about the unlikely longevity of a rock band was Zizi Top's Got Legs.

Today's headline comes from Greg Freeze. It's from the Stevens Point Journal in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. Brian is a daily reader of the Stevens Point Journal. I subscribe. The paper reports that one of the reasons behind all the delayed and canceled flights we're seeing this summer is pilot shortages. Now that people are becoming more comfortable with flying and traveling, the paper says, the aviation industry is struggling to find enough pilots to fly the flights they need to keep up with the demand. Fewer pilots means fewer flights.

what was the Stevens Point Journal's Strained Pond headline Fewer pilots Is pilot in it? Pilots The word we're going to work off here is airlines Airlines

Oh, something long line or short No What rhymes with air? Airlines Big problem for the airlines. Airlines are Dead air are lessening the number of flights.

Reduced. Oh, deflated? You might even say shrinking as a part of American life, those airlines. Does air shrink? Air loss of Blank Airlines. Here we go.

Dead airlines. Little airlines. Oh, not dead, but getting smaller. Dying air. Moving back, you might say. Declining. Moving back. What?

Why is it so hard? What? Is it like a common idiom with the word air? Like, is dead airlines the right format at least? Oh, oh. Oh, no. Let's all just look into the Zoom camera. The airlines are moving back.

They are. They're receding? Receiving airlines. Receiving airlines. Oh, that's great. I'm sorry I stayed around for that. He is David Chewaker. I'm Brian Curtis.

Production Magic by Eric and Servantes. Thank you, Brian Phillips, for coming by. My pleasure. We're all going to listen to 22 goals on Wednesday. Speaking of soccer, we're back Wednesday with Rebecca Lowe, who was the host of NBC's Premier League studio show, talking about her career in the UK taking the American citizenship exam and the phrase they use on NBC so that newbie American soccer fans will not feel like dopes.

Plus, David and I are back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Ryan.