The Press Box - Beto Get Your Act Together | The Press Box

Episode Date: July 19, 2019

ESPN is getting into the daily podcast game (03:00), the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week (14:30), the racist Trump rally (18:00), Beto O’Rourke is plummeting in the polls (32:15), and more. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelly and welcome to The Ringer Podcast Network. It's the season finale of Big Little Lies on Sunday, so make sure to check out our final episode of our live after show with the ringers Amanda Dobbins and ESPN's Mina Kimes. You can tune in on Twitter to Big Little Live right after the episode ends. Also, this week's 2019 Open Championship marks the final major championship of the golf season to check out Fairway Rowland where Joe House is joined by a cast of Ringer and golf world personalities for everything you need to know heading into the weekend. You can find new episodes on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. David, ESPN is going to be doing a new daily news podcast in the fall. What I want to know is, if we were hosting The Ringers Daily Podcast, what stereotypical podcast voice would we want to adopt?

I would just like to start this off by saying that one of the most awkward compliments I've received in my three years of the ringer is that I'm good at podcasting because I just don't know. My mind immediately goes to the way I'm going to answer this question, which is like, am I doing a Mark Ameren neurotic thing? Am I deliberately perform? Or like is the answer like, people listen. There's the Michael Barbaro daily voice, which is a little bit NPR-ish, but a little bit, so has a little bit of a, well, unprofessional sounds like I'm being insulting.

More of a, more of an unpolished vibe. Yeah, uninflicted is what I. I would say. Uninfllected. I mean, you're not, you're not trying to give it any English, right? You're just kind of,

yeah. It's not quite concerned newsman, but it has a certain, this is the daily, this is the daily, you know, quality. The broader podcast world has a lot of people who are doing schick,

but not news, I mean, like, you know, Adam Carolla is doing a, is, I mean, I guess he's just playing Adam Carolla. Joe Rogan, kind of the same thing.

Kevin Smith is out there, like, he's an incredibly gifted orator, but he is, you know, you can hear him take hits off of his vape pen during the course of the show. He's very laid back.

Maybe that's the one I would pick. I was going to say, that sounds like the ringer. As someone who does not regularly take hits off of a man in the office, maybe I could just back into that one. I don't know. What is your choice for this? Well, I'm going to do it right now. You ready? Are you ready? Oh, please. This is the press box, a part of the ringer podcast network.

Hello media consumers. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. A bunch of great stuff to get to on today's show. We're going to talk about the racist Trump rally that resulted from the racist Trump tweets. We've got our lead sentence of the week. That's going to be a big honor. We're going to check the pulse of better O'Rourke's campaign. And I have a feeling there's going to be no pulse.

Plus listener mail and the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, let's start with the news from the world of sports. Those of us who are lucky enough to get sports media press releases in our inbox, got one this week, announcing that ESPN is getting into the daily podcast game. And wait until you hear what they're calling it. There's no guesses here. They are calling the new pod the ESPN Daily. Now, was there no worry from Bristol that that was maybe a smidge too close to another popular daily podcast?

My reaction upon hearing this news yesterday was, and I'm not, this is not a joke, was that I just assumed it was in partnership with the New York Times. Because how would they, how would they land on that title without that, without that. without some sort of partnership in place. I mean, obviously they can't, New York Times doesn't have a copyright on the word daily, but still, it's pretty, well, maybe that's not what we should spend the next 15 minutes belaboring, but, oh, but if we can for just like 15 more seconds, remember that incredibly useless New York Times item that said how the Daily got its name? That was like, it ran in the paper. And he were kind of like, please tell me about the deliberations. I actually want to

know how ESPN the Daily got its name. I do. I do. want I do want to know the deliberations because it is a little confusing. Some highlights via Ben Strauss in the Washington Post. This is from Norby Williamson, executive at ESPN. It's not going to be SportsCenter. It's not going to be news and highlights. It's not going to be three people sitting around a microphone talking either. Hey, watch it, Norby.

We want this to be elevated and highly produced. So he is swimming upstream against, I guess, one. the direction that most podcasts that are not the New York Times Daily are going, but also even ESPN podcasts are in the three guys sitting them out of microphone, right? All that stuff in the Lebitard universe. Yeah. And Zach Lowe and Barnwell and all of our old pals over there. Yeah. I mean, the ESPN Pod Center, and I've not spent a ton of time on the page in the past couple years, but it's, I mean, it seems to be their podcast program is pretty evenly divided. I mean, there's kind of two sections of it, and one is podcasts, and one is other material, be it radio or TV, that is reformatted as podcasts.

And the notion of like a daily show, I mean, listen, ESPN of all of the news outlets in the world is best equipped to put this kind of thing together, because obviously they're multimedia enterprise. They have people who are literally on campus ready to go around the clock. You don't have to worry about rescheduling tons of people, presumably. And then, you know, they have all of the news at their fingertips. They put out the primary sources for all this stuff. But I'm not quite sure how the show, no matter how it ends up being, I mean, we've talked before about how everything that goes on ESPN TV. And I think this is specifically in reference to high noon, but everything sort of is drawn towards this gravitational center of talk shows that they all end up the same. I'm not sure how different this is going to be than any of those or than sports center,

no matter how much they're saying it's different. And at the end of the day, I'm not sure, even if it is completely different, how much it's really going to feel substantively different than the PTI podcast or then the Dan Lebitard show podcast. You know, I mean, these things are already, especially the radio shows, get edited down so much that they're pretty concise pod listens anyway. Once you take out the replays and the commercials and the, you know, the live reads and the riffing and everything else.

I mean, there's only so many ways that you can deliver the day in sports. And they do a lot of that already. My concern to that end would be, I'm not sure what the audience for the sports generalism is. Like, I know what it is. I know the news generalist who is like, I'm interested in politics and foreign affairs, essentially a subscriber to the New York Times. But the person who's just kind of interested in all. sports and interested in, as Strauss reports, 18 to 25 minutes a day about like one topic in sports,

you know, ESPN really bet on generalism when they doubled back down on SportsCenter. And I think it turned out well, right? SportsCenter had more life in it than maybe a lot of us thought that franchise did. Yeah, for sure. But this is sort of an interesting, like Norby Williamson's quoted in this article saying, he's talking about the free agent, Kwai Leonard signing. The idea would be to put that signing into context. How does it affect the clippers? How does it affect the balance of power in the NBA? And we have reporters, Zach Lowe, Wodge, Brian Winhorst, Stan Van Gundy, who could talk about that. Okay. But

Zach, Wodge, Winhorst are all talking about it in more depth elsewhere. So essentially, like, because they're talking about it on Zach's podcast and on Wodges podcast and on the jump and all these other places. So essentially you're saying, we want the person who wants to know a little bit about the Kauai Leonard signing. And then we're saying, and then we're going to, will want to know just a little bit about something else tomorrow. I'm not saying that person doesn't exist, but it reminds me more of the person like 20 years ago who used to watch the old school sports center

and subscribe to SI and that kind of stuff. And it's just kind of an interesting audience to go after. I think that there's sort of, and pardon me for, you know, falling backwards into the sort of meta discussion here. I think there's a sort of inscrutable audience for all these things where like there are people that are listening to the daily that probably that were you know I mean it's the obvious parallel is like these are npr listeners right but why are they choosing the daily instead of npr podcast and I think that there is a there is a

you know a a listenership that is waiting for something to be targeted directly at us right so it's like I don't want to listen to a radio show turned into a podcast I don't want to listen to a you know pre-existing property I want something that is that is set that sets out to be a podcast and is and is and is interested in targeting me as a podcast listener So I think that, I think in some sense, there will be people who are interested in, you know, who are willing to give it a shot. But at the end of the day, all these things do end up being sort of cult of personality type things. Now, I'm not sure that the ESPN Daily is going to discover the next Dan Lebitard. But it could discover the next Michael Barbaro, you know, it could, it could, you know, help build the next Mike Pesca, you know, in the sports world.

and I, you know, it'll be interesting to see, you know, how, if they, if they are as adept at identifying that sort of, it's a totally different sort of, you know, media figure. And it'd be interesting to see if the ESPN machine is as adept at defining what that is or, you know, casting that as they are, you know, in other areas. It's a totally different media figure and also, I think a different tone. Because I think most of the time, the sports news is not, you know, if you think of like, if we look back at the daily and. and the kind of like shows they've done, there'll be a lot of Trump, a lot of rise of right wing fill in the blank, people at the border, people in cages, that kind of thing. But sports news is not going to be tonally like that on a daily basis. I don't think. No.

And it kind of made sense that one of the people that was an internal candidate under consideration, according to Strauss, was Mina Kimes, who, you know, can happily work in that zone, but would be somebody who would be a lot, you know, I don't know, a little bit of a lighter touch than the heavy news show. Yeah, I mean, the daily is, one of the things that I think the daily has done really effectively is sort of, I don't know if rabbit holeing is the best term or just sidebar, you know, sidebar pieces.

They've done a bunch of really good reporting on China when China's been in the news for, you know, obviously for trade purposes, but they did a two-parter on the Chinese surveillance state, but I think the best one was what the West got wrong about China, which is also a two-parter. And I think that if ESPN finds a lane somewhere between SportsCenter and, you know, 30-for-30 podcasts where they can use some of these 18 to 28 minutes a day or whatever it is to sort of explain the backstory. You know, we hear about whatever. I mean, like Latin American baseball farm systems are sort of back in the news. I mean, I would probably not Google to find out more. more about that sort of thing, but would definitely like, you know, if a deep dive podcast came

into my ears in my queue, I would probably eagerly listen to it. There's a lot of elements of sports that I think deserve a, you know, I mean, that the ESPN would be well positioned to sort of inform us about if they, you know, again, choose to go that direction. Yeah, and that's stuff that would have been on E60 or O'TL and then you're sort of creating. I mean, that, to me at the end of the day, these are all about, mostly about creating a new product rather than creating new journalism. You know, the Times thing was how do we, how does the New York Times have a podcast? That was the question I set out to answer. And, you know, monetarily probably answered it very successfully. And this seems like the same thing to me at ESPN, at least from the Ritz Cracker, we know

about it right now, which is how do we create an ESPN podcast? How do we get in people's feeds every day? and create something that's sort of not sports center but kind of a successor to sports center meets O'TL meets E60 meets ESPN the magazine. You could totally imagine the Wright Thompson postgame interview when one of his pieces comes out. And maybe there's a little sound that Wright recorded during the interview and then Wright's talking about, you know, how he drove through the south and found his subject sitting on a rocking chair on the porch or something like that. Like that pot I could totally imagine right now. Yeah, they can't do it too much. It'll be a lot of rocking chairs. But I agree.

You know, one of the, I mean, I think has been really effective. Another effective thing about the daily is just like the kind of, I don't know if they're reporting simultaneously in different media at this point. But I know some of them they had to re-report along the way. But just to hear the kind of contemporaneous audio, that sort of thing is, is, can be a really effective way to give people a deeper understanding of the stories that they're already telling in other formats. Yeah, we had a, there was a spirited daily discussion in ringer slack and I will not blow up any of the perpetrators. But I think one point that was made by Mr. X was that a lot of the New York Times stuff is stuff that has

already been in the paper. So if you read the New York Times pretty regularly, the daily is less important to you. Now, it may be really cool to hear the way Bill O'Reilly sounded when he was trying to deflect the New York Times reporters questions. And of all people, I am the audience for that. But I, but I wonder if this is at ESPN. Like, you missed, you didn't watch E60. You didn't watch O'TL. You didn't read the giant feature that just dropped on ESPN.com. So you're going to consume that. through a pot. And that makes a lot of sense. It does make a lot of sense.

And it's a way to get into people's phones, which is now the single biggest goal of any media organization. All right, David, 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. Please send your nominees to at the press box pod where they will be gratefully received.

Instead of working this week, David, everyone did the face app thing that made you look old. It was an overworked Twitter joke to post a photo of the old you, but in fact, it was just a photo of George Clooney. Thanks to B-Train for sending that one in. By the way, we had what a turnaround for the face app thing after everybody read the terms of service where you granted them rights to your face forever. And I know that's like a standard thing. And then also that the company was based in St. Petersburg. Whoa.

That was fun while it lasted. Alan Corridor loyal listener writes in to tell us David that it was an overwork Twitter joke to refer to the fourth installment of the Marvel Thor Thor T-H-O-U-R

and first I thought it was kidding and then I looked it up and oh my God did everyone have that joke this week anyway thanks to Alan for bringing that to attention yeah just look up Thor

noted Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg British politician celebrated England's first ever win in the cricket world cup by tweeting quote we clearly don't need Europe to win so you're working your Brexit sloganeering into your sports punditry which is always a good combination. It wasn't exactly an overworked Twitter joke more of an overworked Twitter dunk

to remind Reismog that England's captain is Owen Morgan who happens to be Irish so score one for multinationalism thanks to Philip Weifer for that one. And finally, David, we have news from the continuing legal saga of Trump Gadfly Roger Stone. Wow. A CNN headline reads this week, quote, Judge Barr's Stone from Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write. How can I get this judge to do this to me?

Yes. Thank you. Jean Monoristelli and Ben Gibson. I was my favorite subgenre of tweets are tweets begging to get off Twitter. That's always a good combo. All right, David, before we move on, let's take a quick break. Today's episode is brought to you by Luminary. New podcast subscription service with some of the best content around.

I'm excited about Luminary because it's the only place you can listen to the newest show on the ringer network. Break Stuff, the story of Woodstock 1999. This is a podcast you cannot miss. Break Stuff, the story of Woodstock 1999, tells the story of a music festival that took place in upstate New York that became a social experiment. There are riots, looting, numerous assaults, and it's all set to a soundtrack of the era's most aggressive rock bands. Incredibly, it was the third iteration of Woodstock, a festival known for peace, love, and hippie idealism. But Woodstock 99 revealed some hard truce about the myths of the 1960s and the danger that nostalgia can engender. The Luminary app is free to download, in addition to this can't miss original, you can use it to listen to thousands of podcasts, including this one.

Whether you're into music, TV, and film, comedy, sports, and more, Luminary has the right. right show for you. Check out Woodstock 99 and so much more only on Luminary. Get your first two months of access to Luminary's premium content for free when you sign up at Luminary.com slash press box. After that, it's only $7.99 a month. That's Luminary.com slash press box for two months of free access. Luminary.com slash press box cancel any time. Terms apply. All right, David, time for the notebook dump. And thank goodness that we're not needing more Trump racist stories this week. And we can skip right over the that oh wait.

Trump went to Greenville, North Carolina, Wednesday night, and this happened. And obviously and importantly, Omar has a history of launching vicious, anti-Semitic screams. We'll take a five second pause here just to remind listeners that this is America where the speech is happening, and that is the president of the United States

behind the mic there. And David, I know you've seen the very, video. So you see how Trump steps back from the mic a little bit puts his both hands on the podium. And does everything to encourage that chant short of putting, cupping his ears like Hulk Hogan. Like he, he absolutely wants that chant. And as John Chate noted over at New York, Trump's defenders spent the week after his super racist go back to attacks, basically coming up with this defense saying, no, no, no, Trump, Trump wasn't. being racist. He was just saying if people aren't happy in the United States, which is a great country, they, they don't have to stay. They can leave. It was almost like when Robert Altman was going to move to France when George W. Bush got elected. Oh, we're just, we're just offering people

the chance. Then he goes into North Carolina and everybody is yelling, send her back, which is not a phrase of, oh, hey, you know, if you don't like United States, maybe you should just, you're totally free to go somewhere else. That was just a racist thing. So I guess if anything else, it reset the conversation back to its original parameters. Yeah. It's just, I mean, I know that this is a conversation we've had before.

We had this, we've talked about it last week. But in a broader sense, like, why, what is the, what is the what is the the the why did why are people interested in trying to come up with like like philosophical defenses of like of what of trump of trump's clear racism people or even if it's not the people who don't work in the white house or people who just are we talking about who are we talking about here just just just anybody but I guess if you're in the white house you get sent out there right but I mean but like other republicans like what is what is the point in trying to in trying to you know find a find an explanation and find a fall explanation for this stuff. I mean, it just seems it just seems like such a waste of everybody's time. I guess if you really want to get on TV and you know you're going to be asked that, then you've got to find some way to dismiss it. But I think honestly the answer to that question is

Trump says something racist. These people are in the halls of Congress. Reporters walk up to them and said, what do you make of this tweet? What do you make of this statement? And they don't feel whatever they believe, and I'm sure some of them don't think it's racist, but whatever they believe, they can't say this is racist. So then you get those weird tortured things or they just run away from the reporters altogether. It's a weird deal.

Speaking of making excuses or making up weird scenarios, how about the weird three-dimensional chess thing that Trump is allegedly playing that came up again after these tweets? I saw Jake Tapper, who had talked to a bunch of anonymous House Democrats saying this. this is him quoting one of those Democrats. The president won this one. What the president has done is politically brilliant. Pelosi was trying to marginalize these folks, aka the squad,

and the president has now identified the entire party with them. Tapper also goes, what are Dems focused on? Is it what will help the class of 2018, largely more moderate than the squad, get reelected? Then quotes another representative. The president's words and action speak for themselves. We need to focus on the issues that got them,

here jobs, health care, et cetera, et cetera. Do you believe for a second, I think there's actually two parts. Do you believe part number one that Trump is doing this as part of some evil diabolical scheme? And number two, do you think that answering Trump's racist remarks actually sets the Democrats back in any way? Okay, there's two very different things. I think that I think that a lot of the Democrats.

lot of the response to Trump's I mean a lot of the defense might not be the right term but you know if you choose to believe that Trump is not just a virulent racist who has you know

unfortunate and unfettered access to Twitter then I guess the only thing I mean the only other option is that he's doing it that he is that he is using racism in a very deliberate way to say come up with new catchphrases

for his voters you know for his the tendons to chant at future pep rallies, which is, I think, by any definition, even worse than being a racist. But that's fine. Set that aside. Yeah, I mean, I think that if you take that, then yes, I think there's every reason to believe that Trump is deliberately sort of unmarginalizing those Congresswomen, although I'm not sure that he's doing it specifically because, you know, to spite Nancy Pelosi and more because I think that in his mind, those are easy target. And, for the sort of voter he's trying to energize. That's right.

But I'm not sure that the targets he's picked before, people of color. Exactly, yeah. And I'm not sure that there's much of a distinction between, between, I mean, whether or not he's trying, I think, spiteing Nancy Pelosi is, you know, might be a happy accident along the way. But I can't imagine that he's, that he's thinking along those lines. Maybe is, who knows. I'm not sure there's much of a difference at the end of the day. to your other question about whether this is going to affect the Democrats at all. I mean, listen, I do think that there is a vicious cycle circle that like that that that we're in people in the news media like Jake Tapper.

No offense to Jake Tapper, but yes. You know, talk about a thing being significant. And then it becomes, you know, item one on the next episode of the show. And then it becomes the going concern. And it actually does affect the votes because all the people that tune into the news are hearing about is how this negative thing. is happening. I do think that that happened. I'm not sure I'm not sure that this sort of like

gatekeeping or provincialism inside the Democratic Party is going to is a I'm not sure if Nancy Pelosi had her way that would have been a net positive just like anybody that tried to you know the Democratic establishment that was aligned

truthfully or that you know or falsely against Bernie Sanders four years ago was not doing the Democratic Party any service, right? And I think that we're looking at this wide open primary right now, and, you know, it's difficult to kind of absorb all the different candidates and their varying degrees of legitimacy. But I think that it's important for us to not dismiss people because of weird, because of like, you know, ironclad concepts of age or gender or race or anything else. And what is or is not electable? And I think that this sort of falls into that same,

that same discussion where it's like, I'm not, I don't know that that Alexander Ocasio Cortez's presence on the news is going to negatively affect Democratic voter turnout. And I think to assume that it does is at best creating a self-fulfilling prophecy or at worse. I don't even know which one that is. That's right. And I'm not even sure the self-fulfilling prophecy works because you remember right before the 2018 midterms, it was going to be all about the caravan. That was it. And Trump had brilliantly. brought the caravan into the news and then the Republicans got trounced anyway.

Josh Barrow makes this point in a tweet. He says by taking the bait, Democrats are giving Trump the news cycle he wants, but that does not necessarily mean they are giving him a new cycle that helps him politically. And I think that's actually a really good way of making the point. Trump often thinks if I just get people talking about immigration and if I demonize immigrants, that will help me. If I, you know, weighed into racial waters here and demonize these four members of Congress, that will help me. Just because the Democrats then go back at them, there's, it's not obvious that that helps him at all. And I, and I think it probably doesn't. Because again, one thing we learned from 2018 is Trump needs suburban voters.

The Republicans need suburban voters. Suburban voters don't like this kind of thing. Yeah. They don't. There's anything we know it's that they don't like this kind of thing because we just had a ton of evidence. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think that this is where the campaign from four years ago is going to, you know, if there is a sort of cloistered element to Trump or to the people around him, if there is a bubble, this is really where it's going to negatively impact the campaign. It's one thing to make jokes about Trump not believing his pollsters or firing them if they don't get given the answers that he wants. but like his exposure to his popularity is at these rallies.

And the rallies are not going to change in size or scope. Or they might get bigger for all we know. Who knows? The more racist and more offensive that he gets, maybe he attracts more and more people. But those people, the people that show up for his rallies are voting. I mean, they are, I mean, that's, that's, their votes are already cast. But that's not going to be enough to win an election.

Now, on its own. Now, there are a lot of other factors. That doesn't mean Trump's going to lose. It doesn't mean anyone on the other side can get complacent. But it is, you know, in so much as those suburban voters you talk about are more likely to vote than maybe some others. I mean, that could be a real problem for his campaign. When we start talking about his diabolical plans to win reelection, it just, it starts to sound like a Q&ON theory after a while. You know, Trump put Acosta in the cabinet in order to to direct attention at Jeffrey.

It was like, wait, what? I don't think Trump is capable of playing three-dimensional chess on the level he is often given. This is what I would say, though. I think somewhere in his reptile brain, he is sort of pushes himself at any kind of fissure he sees. He did this effectively with Hillary and Bernie back in 2016 because he understood. I don't know if he could articulate it. know if he knows anything about it, but he understands that like Bernie and Hillary represent two different factions of the Democratic Party. And I can drive a wedge in there and just try to

muddy up the waters enough so that either Bernie people won't vote for Hillary or maybe a few people picked off from me or just just create tons of confusion. I think that's what he's doing here. It's just Trump being attracted to any kind of, any kind of fissure, any kind of split in his opponents and you know he doesn't know that the political differences between nancy pelosi and the squad he would call he would call all those people socialists not just the squad by the way he has no he has no idea but he knows that they are at least if not at odds at least sort of you know representing separate wings of the democratic party and so he just dives right in in his own spectacularly ugly way and that's yeah i think i don't i think that's that's all the

credit I can give him. And I don't know if he knows what the result's going to be. I don't know if he has a plan beyond that, but I think he is just attracted to those kind of splits. I think that, I think that's right. I think that about sums it up. We could try to break down whether or not the, if it's an active logic that leads one

from that point of view to like, you know, go back to fill in the blank comment or if that's just a passive element of one psyche, but I guess we can save that for another installment. That'll be for a psychology edition. week. All right, David, the lead of the week.

This was sent to us by a bunch of people. I saw Nash, Cato and Jesse McIntosh. So we had to read it. It was from a New York Post article that was titled, Man Caught with $34,000 worth of cocaine under his wig.

And if you see the New York Post piece, there are helpful photos showing the wig rolled back so you can actually see where the cocaine was stored under the wig. How did we become like the cocaine? trafficking podcast. I don't know. Just wait, by the way.

We're going to come around to that again, too. Anyway, Youron Steinbuck wrote the New York Post lead, which is quite good and goes right to our love of puns. Are you ready for it, David? This is about the man storing $34,000 worth of Coke under his wig. Quote, he had hell to pay. Had hell to pay. Congratulations to your run.

own for your service and journalism. By the way, this is also the perfect tabloid story because, of course, I see this. I'm like, oh, wow, they busted this guy at JFK, right? No, no, it's a Colombian man that was arrested in Spain. So this is important news to the people of New York that we should know about this Colombian man arrested in Spain for drug trafficking. And by the way, to bring it back around, this is yet another Spanish airport drug scandal. This is our second, this is like our second week in row. The cocaine in Spain falls mainly on this guy's head. under his wick. I don't know. The rest of the rhyme there. That's weird.

If we could just put out a call to listeners, please keep sending in your drug trafficking stories. We might have to have a separate segment here. David, our next section is called Beto Get Your Act Together. Because tonight, Thursday, CNN is going to do that ludicrous draft lottery for the second Democratic debate on July 30th and 31st coverage here at the press box. Your daily reminder.

Beto O'Rourke has already qualified for the debate. but he may not be in the Democratic primary race in any real way anymore. Beware of all polls, especially with polls with a 5% margin of error like the St. Anselm College Survey of New Hampshire. But Beto came in at zero. And he was also the rare Democrat whose approval rating is actually in the red. His second quarter financing plummeted, that's the official political journalist verb, to 3.6 million. Beto had raised 9.4 million in the first quarter. And then this, David, from Robert Zimmerman, Democratic donor and guy who people call for political quotes.

He tells the Washington Post, I'm a great admirer of Beto O'Rourke's, but he has to perform the third act of IEDA in the next debate to be considered a serious prospect again. Wow. I can't decide whether I want to hit you with a question about Beto or the third act of IEDA. you better go with the former because I'm not sure if I'm equipped to answer the letter what do we think what happened to Beto did anything happen to better or was Beto just hapless and hopeless from the beginning that's I was going to say the exact same thing I think the next headline for Beto is I was born for this question mark but the but yeah I mean I think that he's I mean there's a really strong case that he uh he uh

is proof of the complete lack of power of the mainstream media or at least the whatever category you put the vanity fair and HBO into that you know you can roll out the carpet for somebody and name them the spiritual air to JFK or anybody else and it really is utterly meaningless if they're not an establishment candidate or if they're not a you know forcing their way into the conversation on in places like Iowa Can I play devil's advocate on that point for just one second? Are we sure it is not proof of the power of the mainstream media,

but the power to accidentally cut somebody's legs out from under them in what should be a neutral profile or a documentary that praises their effort, but people actually consume those things and look and go, hey, I don't think that guy should be president. I got enough information and I'm all good. That's actually, I mean, that's a really smart point. I think that I mean, maybe if that's true, then that's,

then the cases like keep your head down in general, but I don't know. I mean, I guess you can look at, you can look at, you know, some of the lower polling candidates, Yang is a good example where people are just sort of like, I don't really understand this, but I kind of want to know more. And maybe if there had been. What a compliment.

Maybe if there had been, you know, a 10,000 word Atlantic profile that only a man could write that like we would that would be the place that everybody went to and if there was damning information into it in it then everybody or you know a damning scene

that was painted in it then maybe everybody would be you know would read that and immediately jump off the Yang bandwagon I mean I'm just spitballing here but I do think that like we were in an era

where you know being anointed can be a bad thing. And I mean, because the backlash, sometimes the backlash is more powerful than any sort of whatever the opposite of backlash is. And part of it is that you have to have momentum. You know, you can run a campaign of going out

and, you know, rallying up a crowd and giving good speeches. But there's only so many of those that MSNBC even is going to put on TV, right? I mean, I think they put on his announcement and I don't know if he was, if they ever just put them on unedited again. You have to give people a reason to cover you.

And maybe that's more important than giving people a reason to vote for you. Beto to me never answered the question of why should he be president. And it was clear from that I was born to be in it bit from the beginning. Because that didn't answer the question of why should we vote for you? Why should we vote for you guy who has a thin resume but just ran a kind of semi-inspiring Senate campaign. Pete Buttigieg has done a better job. I'm not sure Pete Buttigieg has totally answered that question,

but I think he's given people the outlines of an answer. As far as I can tell, Beto hasn't given anybody an answer to that question. Yeah. And I think even if he had, I think that I was born to be in an line was just sort of, so that came to sort of, that swallowed the entire campaign, right?

So even if he had given us a proactive reason for why he should be president, the average voter, even who's paying attention now, remembers that quote and thinks that that's as deep as he got. Does that make any sense? Yeah. No, I think that's right. That became the answer, even if there's more answer out there.

And it highlighted his worst qualities or his least presidential qualities, which was, ah, I'm just this kind of guy, and I think I should run and I'm young and sort of, and seemingly not very deep. And, you know, I've said a couple of times that I think the Beto, the post campaign Beto story is going to be amazing. It's going to be one of the most emotive why it all fell apart profiles of all time. And but now that we talk about this, I think I want to see the, the, the after action report on the Vanity Fair profile.

Can we get Neiman's storyboard in here or something and just talk about like how that came together and how that accidentally undermined Beto's campaign? I mean, to me, that's a fascinating ending story. Totally. Because I'm not sure that that didn't just, you know, again, I'm, I think part of the, the biggest problem here is Beto. The biggest, the single biggest problem is his manner. And again, as I said, his inability to answer the question of why he should be

president. But I think you can look back at that and say, can we get in the time machine? Beto puts his head down and all he does is visit every Iowa county for the better part of a year. and what do his numbers look like? Does he win Iowa? I don't know. But maybe that just launch was just absolutely the worst thing for him. It's a fascinating question.

Speaking of fascinating, David, can we talk about the pundit career of Rahm Emanuel? Former Chicago mayor. Yeah, Obama Chief of Staff Congressman Clinton Apparachic is joining ABC News. This is yet another gig for Emmanuel after he joined the Atlantic, of course, as a contributing editor and join the athletic to cover sports business. I just made the last part of it. He's not covering sports business. The joke should have been he's going to cover European soccer for the athletic.

You might have maybe. People might have actually believed it. I think my question here for you is, what is the upside to hiring ROM as a pundit for any of these people? What are you going to get at a ROM? Well, you're going to get a talented talking head. Are we sure that he's good to quote the boss? Are we sure he's a talented talking head?

I feel confident in saying that he's above the talking head Mendoza line at CNN. He's just as far as, you know, ability to fill airtime with nonsense. He's probably a net positive for their site. Okay. He would not stand out. He would not stand out for the worst on political television. Okay. I'll grant you that.

I think he's sort of a signifier of, you know, the different stations of politics, right? I mean, I think they're probably just imagining election night and having, you know, a Bush, someone with the, from the Bush, the George W. Bush administration, from the Obama administration, somebody who probably from inside the Trump administration, or at least the Trump campaign, your old school commentariat, maybe you're, you know, Paul Bagalas of the world or whatever. But like, I think that he's just sort of, he fills a segment for, for CNN. Or he fills a segment for CNN. or he fills a slot for CNN. And I think that, you know, our friends at Pod Save America aside, I mean, of all the people that were involved with the Obama campaign, he's probably one of the better talking heads and certainly more appropriate for the sort of traditional ABC audience. it's funny to me when TV networks hire commentators because I often think it's just it's it's almost like sports networks hire ex-athletes. The biggest thing is to get a big name. And the second thing is to get somebody who actually knows how to talk about politics well on television or will actually come out and say something like the crooked media guys will actually be interesting. And I think like to me, Rom, if he's going to be interesting, I read his, um, his maiden voyage in the Atlantic.

which was a piece called, it's time to hold American elites accountable for their abuses. Did he headline that or did somebody at the Atlantic say, we never get a headline that's just going to make Twitter hate you even more. This is going to go out there and people are just going to, people are going to be mad at you before they read one word of this thing. We know as writers, you should never,

you should never blame the writer for a lousy headline, but it's really fun to do it when it just sings exactly like you think it should. That's the let Detroit go out of business. business of the of 2019. But yeah, no, I think the, I think Rom could be interesting if he really wants to lean into we can't let the Democratic Party into the hands of progressives, because that's what he clearly believes. And, and as you and I have said, no matter what you read on Twitter, that is the very

live battle that is happening in the Democratic primaries. This is why Kamala Harris has three or four or five answers. about what medical plan she, what health care plan she supports. This is the tension from the Biden campaign and the Warren campaign, the Sanders campaign. I mean, this is just to me,

if he were willing to own, I am the voice of democratic centristism. And these people are going to ruin our party. And I'm going to lean into that and take as much fire for that position as I can. Yeah, I'm kind of interesting. Kind of. But, but that's about it.

All right, David, How about some listener mail? Sounds good. We have some further Fia rehab that Chris sent us. He's making Guy Fierry, that is, whose rehabilitation in public we are endlessly interested in is making ribs for people who are going to storm Area 51, that whole bit.

I'm not sure. By the way, Kate Nibs wrote about that beautifully on our site this week. I'm not sure that just like injecting yourself into Mimi's stories is like the way it really counts as rehab. but I guess, you know, whatever. It's 2019. The New York Rangers podcast, Blue Shirts Breakaway, sent that to us as well and said,

aren't you guys kind of responsible for all this at this point? And I don't believe that, but I'm starting to feel we might need to cancel this segment. I thought Guy Fiori was canceled last week after the whole SVU bit. And in an abundance of caution, in an abundance of caution, we've listened to our readers,

and we've decided to edit VIRIFE. out of all preceding podcasts. It's done. I'm just, I'm, I think this, I think this segment is gay. I think we, I think we've reached the end of this segment. Either, either Guy Fieri is just, either we haven't answered the question or just, we don't actually want the question to be true. We don't want him to be the ability.

Anyway, it's over. So don't send those anymore. Don't send those to add the press buck. David Tuesday's strain pun headline, which was a story about chess, was grandmaster flush. Grandmaster flush I just walk around walk around my hotel room

saying Grandmaster flush all day It was about a chess player who cheated in the bathroom Listener's sannic hedgehog Thought the proper strain pun Should be King caught on throne Which is not Not bad

Pretty Chessy Andy Cliver writes in to say That he was convinced It was going to be stall mate It's a checkmate I guess Stallmate which is kind of like stalemate Stalmate yeah Yeah, I know, but that takes a few jumps, right?

Yeah, no, Stalmate works. Stalmate is a chess thing, right? Sure. And Ben Willisky, Wollinsky, Willinsky, excuse me, thought it was be master mater. The guy was a chess master. This is not actually,

I was just cheating in the bathroom, by the way. I think Ben is confused what was actually happening in that story. I mean, maybe go back and edit that one out too. Got a couple of emails, a couple of tweets that I should say from Matt Carroll. And one from modest Yahoo pointing us to the new issue of ESP in the magazine where the aforementioned Mina Kimes writes a cover story on Baker Mayfield.

The picture has Mayfield walking his dogs or someone's dogs. And the headline is Mayfield and the Browns have a new leash on life. A new leash on life. Oh my God. It's good. That's good. When I was in Albuquerque, there was like a pet spa called New Leash on Life. So I think that's probably one of those that's in the world.

No, I'm pro this. This is great. This is great. All right. Now it's time for everybody's favorites. I've been including Davids, which is David Shoemaker guesses the strain pun headline. Great. David?

We always take a pause here so that David can moan out loud. This is from Jesse McIntosh. There's a second contribution of Jesse on this podcast. I don't know if you saw this, David. I hope you didn't. But it comes from the venerable journal, current opinion in microbiology. I'm not kidding. That's not real.

It's real. I mean, I believe that a journal with that name exists, but I don't believe that this is, how, how the rest of the journalism world has failed this week. If we're going to current, what do you say, current opinion in macrobiology? Don't get confused. You might miss the headline. Current opinion of microbiology. All right. And then one in sit any biology turf wars here.

Go ahead. I can't, I couldn't actually pull up this piece. I'm sure there's an expensive subscription. This is an academic journal. It took a little, it took a little while to find. I hope this is real, by the way. Hopefully we're not being pranked. I don't think we are.

The subheadline is the hidden diversity of dimorphic fungal pathogens. Now, that's not what you would call funny, exactly. But the headline is funny. And I don't know what to do with this, David, other than to tell you it's about yeast. Many varieties of yeast Just that's all I get is it's an It's an academic article about yeast

Okay let me Like microbiology? It's a little, it's an article about It's an article that conveys at least in the headline An enthusiasm about many varieties of yeast Where one could potentially locate many varieties of yeast Okay If you rhyme the word yeast you're going to get yourself there, trust me

It immediately went to one of my favorite childhood films, The Beast Master. Okay. You've used the rhyme. But Yeast Master is, I'm assuming not it. That doesn't really fit the rest of what you said. Go with Beast. Beasts.

Remember, these are really great yeast. Really great. And this is where you would locate them. Yeast of the Southern Wild? No. You're close. It's related to one of the biggest pieces of IP right now in Hollywood. Yeah, there might be a ringer podcast.

cast about this. Wait a second. You got to give me a second here. Mallory Rubin. I know I'm already at Mallory Rubin. I'm going through. Fantastic. Oh, God.

Fantastic yeast and where to find them? There you go. Congratulations. Fantastic yeast and where to find them. Oh my gosh. That's fantastic. I bet the editors at current opinion in Micropology were just like,

we're just sitting on that title for two years waiting for somebody to write that piece. It says the December 2019 issue. Are we absolutely sure this is true? Do journals just come out like six months in advance? It is feasible that a quarterly journal would already have announced their December cover or something like that. Now it's their cover. They don't do like a they don't do like the New Yorker and publish it on Friday before the thing comes out.

So the cover's pretty. I think what is the deal with the cover month that that tells the people in the newsstands when to take them out, take them out. So I think some of those quarterlies are byannuals are way out in advance. hands. In which newsstand were you envisioning that I would find current opinion in microbiology? Would that be like Grant Central Station or something? Just go outside and listen for like the kid with the cockney accent shouting extra extra. By the way, I did look this up and fantastic geese and where to find them is a fairly popular pun headline. This is not the first. But anyway, congrats to the fine folks at the journal Current Opinion in Microbiology, which you should pick

up immediately. It's sold wherever fine microbiology journalists. journals are sold. I am Brian Curtis. He is David Shoemaker. Chris Almeida is on research. Jim Cunningham is on production. More big,

meaty, lukewarm takes about the media next week. See you later, boys. See you, man. David? Sure. How do we create a podcast? You ready?

Are you ready? Oh, please. I just walk around my hotel room saying Grandmaster flush all day. Okay. cupping his ears like Hulk Hogan. This is real, by the way. Sure. Now, that's not what you would call funny, exactly.

Whatever the opposite of that. Big, meaty, funny. I don't really understand this, but I kind of want to know more. What a compliment. Maybe if there had been, you know, a Beastmaster. That's weird. Amazing. That was fun while it lasted.

Please keep sending in your drugs. Grandmaster flush. Grandmaster flush. Grandmaster plush. Grandmaster plush. Grandmaster flush.