The Press Box - Jake Tapper on Writing Novels, the '70s, Print Days, Rupert Murdoch, and the New CNN

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

Bryan is joined by CNN’s Jake Tapper to discuss his upcoming thriller novel, ‘All the Demons Are Here.’ They begin talking through the writing process whilst being a lead anchor, discuss why Tapper chose to write a novel based in the 1970s, and touch on which characters in his novel were inspired by actual media members. Then later, they assess how CNN should define itself in the year 2023, and finally, Tapper explains just how difficult it was to watch the Philadelphia Eagles lose in the Super Bowl. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Jake Tapper Producer: Erika Cervantes Additional Production Assistance: Eduardo O'Campo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello, media consumers. Welcome to another summer vacation edition of the press box. Brian Curtis of the ringer here, along with producer Erica Cervantes. You know, we have an informal rule here at the press box that we don't have many authors of new books on the show. Nothing against authors, nothing against new books. It's just that those authors are often on lots of podcasts and we try to do something different. I will happily make an exception, however, for Jake Tapper. One, because he's one of my favorite cable news hosts, and two, because his new thriller novel, All the Demons Are Here, includes a main character who is a reporter.

A reporter for a particularly shameless Washington, D.C. tabloid who finds herself tracking a serial killer. Interested? I was, too. Tapper and I started there and talked to. about writing novels, Tapper's career in print, Evil Knievel, the 70s, Tapper's beloved Philadelphia Eagles, and much more. Note that we recorded this before Chris Licked got fired, so I didn't get to ask him about that, but I did get to ask about what he thinks the new CNN ought to be. Here's Jake Tapper on All the Demons Are Here. All right, Jake, before we dive into All the Demons Are Here, when during the day do you get time to work on novels? Okay, well, first of all, just to establish, of course, I am a little

crazy. I get that. But beyond that, I just try to write for at least 15 minutes a day, and sometimes it ends up being more, you know, in the morning before work or lunch or after work and weekends. But if it's only 15 minutes a day, and it's a busy week, by the end of the week, that's an hour 45. That's, you know, that's a few pages. And that's not to say that I'm not going to go back and edit them or even throw them out, but like the general rule of thumb is writer's right. And like, everybody thinks they have a great novel in them. And probably a lot of people do, but you really just have to sit down and do the writing. How do you switch your brain between TV Newsman mode and thriller writer mode? I flee from TV Newsman mode. I flee from TV Newsman mode. I flee from

the serious job I have and the difficult and complicated and sometimes heartbreaking stories and run into the challenge and the fun of making stuff up. So this novel, All the Demons Are Here, It's got a copy right here, hasn't come out quite yet, but will come out July 11th. It takes place in 1977, and it's just like a bunch of wild, fun characters, some real, some based on real people, others just purely fictitious. And it's fun just to run into this world and make stuff up and then not have to think about the gravity of how we're all going to die because of artificial intelligence or whatever. So you think of these

books as an escape from your day job? Hopefully they're a great escape for me. Hopefully they're a great escape for the reader as well. But when I wrote the previous novel, The Devil May Dance, which takes place in 1962 during the Rat Pack years, and it had all the characters of the Kennedys and Sinatra and all that. That was during COVID, and that was a great escape, to leave the world of this horrible plague, and then all of a sudden be in an Italian dining room with Sinatra and Dean Martin. That was a lot of fun.

Let's set up the novel. You created a journalist protagonist here named Lucy Martyr. What kind of reporter is Lucy? She's green. She's a very young, naive green reporter who worships Woodward and Bernstein. This is 1977, so Woodward and Bernstein have, you know, already had their big Watergate scoops and their second book. The Final Days has come out. In addition to the movie, all the president's men has come out. So they're legends,

and she wants to be that kind of journalist. She wants to speak truth to power. But she's a woman in 1977. She's 22 years old. And, you know, it's not, it's not going as quickly as she wanted. And she gets won over and seduced by a family that has just moved to Washington and has started a tabloid. Because this is also, 1977, this is like the birth of the tabloid era, the summer of Sam when the Daily New York Daily News and the New York Post, when, you know, newsstand sales skyrocketed because people wanted, were really interested in tabloid coverage of stories, salacious stories, horrible stories. You were a green print reporter once upon a time. Did you reach into your memory to create

that character? Yeah, I think so. I mean, the desire to please, the feeling like you don't really belong, not really understanding the world, coming face to face with some of the compromises that sometimes present themselves in the world of journalism. Yeah, I mean, it wasn't difficult to come up with a lot of that. And I identify a lot more with Lucy than with her brother, Ike, who's the other main character in the book, who is an AWOL Marine and motorcycle enthusiast, and I am none of those. But am I a persnickety journalist? Yes.

You mentioned the Washington tabloid Lucy goes to work for in the family that owns it. It's owned by one Max Lyon, who is a British press baron, and stop me if this sounds familiar, who has come to conquer the U.S. media. What's Lyons idea of a newspaper? Well, I tried to, obviously, he's based in many ways on Rupert Murdoch. And there are actually lines in one of the scenes that are things that Rupert Murdoch has actually said. And there's an end notes in the back. of the book that you can find out what I'm talking about. But Rupert Murdoch, he co-exists with Max Lyon. He's referenced a few times. He finds the world. I really tried to get into the head of Rupert Murdoch in a, and not, you know, so he is not just purely villainous, but also you can understand his philosophy. And his philosophy is that the elite newspapers in the UK and also in the United States, do not care what readers want to read about and are therefore out of touch. And that was and is Rupert Murdoch's philosophy about elite media. And I can understand why he

felt that way. I don't necessarily agree with it. I mean, obviously, a lot of what he has done has been, I'm referring to Robert Murdoch, not Max Lyon, has been, I think, detrimental to societies all over the world. But it is also true that, I mean, there are also things that Max Lyon and his son say in the book that I agree with, which is, for instance, you know, the New York Times did not cover the summer of Sam in the way that if I lived in New York in 1977, I would have wanted them to cover it. I would have wanted to know, I mean, there was a serial killer loose in New York, and he was killing random people.

And the New York Times kind of treated it like a minor crime story, as opposed to the Daily News and the Post, which obviously made it huge. You could say that they went too far the other side. But in any case, my point was I was trying to get inside his head to really make it so he wasn't, you know, like Mr. Burns, you know, that he was, that he was, that he was, was actually a character and you can understand why he thought the way he did. The Lion character says that in the United States in the 70s, there's, quote, an anger that needs channeling, a rage that needs to be sated with enemies. Is that what Murdoch did in the

70s in the United States? I mean, I think it's what he did. I think it's what he does. I mean, I think that a lot of the philosophy of Max Lyon is lifted directly from books of about Rupert Murdoch, like the idea of anger and outrage being, you know, two emotions that you want to tap into with the, with the public. Yeah, I mean, if you watch or read Murdoch's publications or channels, you will see lots of efforts to find enemies. And it's not, it's very seldom a nuanced discussion of what's going on in the world. It's quite often, and, you know, just bombastic. And when there isn't an enemy like Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden,

then it becomes, you know, AOC. That's what was so interesting to me, that that anger may be kind of inchoate and not really have any purpose. But what those publications are doing and be like, look over here. Here's something to be mad at. Right. And one of the things I also tried to do in this book is with the, with, so that's Lucy's story.

Ike's story is Ike is in Montana. He's gone AWOL and he's with Evil Caneval and he ends up with a group of people who have kind of been ostracized or feel excluded from American society, Vietnam veterans and others. And so, and this group ends up being the angry mob. And then the, you know, so it's, so you have the guy exploiting with Lucy and then the actual angry mob with Ike. but I wanted to like show that some of these people actually had things that they're mad about that are legitimate um there is um you know agent orange had yet had yet to be recognized uh as caused by exposure uh in vietnam and you have people dying of uh agent orange uh in the book agent orange exposure and that's a legitimate thing um so again like i was trying to i didn't want to even though even though

though I was dealing with things that have resonance today in terms of exploitation of angry people and angry people. I didn't want it to be caricatures. I wanted it to be, well, look, some of these people actually have a reason to be angry and suspicious and upset with people in power. And, you know, and I want to make sure people understand that you please read the book because it's not like I'm justifying violence or Murdoch and his view of journalism. I'm not. But I'm But my point is just, I was just trying to make it like they're human and not caricatures. I asked this to a couple of people who covered the Fox News Dominion lawsuit. What did you learn about Murdoch from reading his emails and those of his employees?

The cynicism was even worse than I thought. I guess, you know, we all saw this happening in real time. And I mean, I think I said on the day. of January 6th, I think I was talking about the responsibility that Fox had for what happened. And during that whole era, and when Trump started, you know, in November, when Trump started denying that he had lost the election, November 2020, I started talking publicly about like the responsibility that Fox and others had to tell the truth. And the question always was, well, do they actually believe this nonsense? are they just cynically exploiting it? And, you know, it's always the conundrum of evil or incompetent when it comes to

Washington, D.C. villainy. Is the person evil or incompetent? And in this case, they were, they were, it was kind of both, but they, but generally evil. They knew what they were doing was wrong and they did it anyway. The only true believer that I can discern from the lawsuit, is Maria Bartaromo and her source, who I think spoke to ghosts or something like that. But then you look at like, you know, what's going on and like, you know, anchors, so-called news anchors, like leaning on the decision desk, you know, and the scene from episode eight or nine of the last season

of succession had already been done. They didn't know what had happened. So, I mean, I guess I just learned that it's even worse than I thought it was. I'd assumed that they were dumb. And it turns out they weren't. They were evil. Putting inside the Murdoch you part of this equation for a second, when you were a print reporter, did you think of yourself as a tabloid style reporter? Well, that's interesting because I wrote for salon.com, which at the time was very different

than what it is now. No. But I did think that there was an opportunity to report things that were more interesting because so much of the media was hamstrung by and afraid of, no, I guess more, I guess I probably thought of myself a little bit more like gonzo journalism, more in the, not that I was Hunter S. Thompson, but kind of like a dash of that. Like I just remember one time when Jeffrey Skilling, I think, the CEO of Enron was hauled before a committee and he was complaining. about somebody making a reference to him going to prison and don't drop the soap and,

you know, just some member of Congress, I think, had made an inappropriate joke. And he was citing the fact, like, how inappropriate was that people were making prison rape jokes about him. And I mean, I, you know, I led with that because I thought that was fascinating and whatever. And like, I don't, in a lot of coverage, it didn't even get mentioned or if it did, like, the 20th paragraph. So, I mean, I think I saw myself more in the Gonzovane, which is, like I, you know, like the village voice, Rolling Stone tradition, not New York Post, but definitely not the state and serious New York Times, Washington Post kind of thing, back when I was at salon.com.

Yeah, there's a character in the novel that tells Lucy, you can walk through two doors. One door is Bill Sapphire, one door is Jimmy Breslin. And what you're saying is you would have walked through the third door, which is Hunter Thompson and Joe Esther Hosson. Yeah, yeah, I guess. but Breslin was a huge I mean, Brezlin's a legend, right?

Also, I mean, that's the other thing. There's also a difference between because Breslin was like a player in New York news. And one of the reasons for people who don't know that his story is mentioned in this book is because the summer of Sam,

because the killer, he wrote to Jimmy Breslin. He wrote letters to Jimmy Breslin. And so, I mean, that's how important Jimmy Breslin was in 19, 77 in the summer. But yeah, no, I mean, Margaret, I'm sorry, not Margaret's the mom. Lucy wants to be William Sapphire, you know, elite, erudite, clever.

If not, Woodward and Bernstein and, you know, the paper she works for, the tabloid, wants her to be Breslin, wants her to, because in the book, there's a serial killer in D.C. You mentioned Lucy's brother, Ike, who's the other protagonist in this book. who works for the daredevil evil can evil i'm heartbroken to report jake there are people younger than you and i who do not remember evil can evil so can you explain what evil was back in the seven years first of what's spelled e veel so people know an evil can evil was a kind he was kind of like an outlaw showman p t barnum motorcycle stuntman he was not a great motorcycle rider but he was willing to do almost any stunt.

And he made a lot of money. And this was the 70s. And he did a lot of wild stunts, including jumping over the fountain at Caesar's Palace. I think that was in the late 60s. And then there was a, everybody thinks they remember him jumping over the Grand Canyon. He never actually jumped over the Grand Canyon. He got in some crazy rocket in 1974 and tried to jump over part of the Snake River.

in, I think in Idaho. And it didn't go so well. And so he was this crazy figure that, like, he inspired so many people. Like he's in, like the X games and there's a whole generation of people who do these stunt athletic type things that were inspired by Evil Caneval. But Evil Caneval was, first, well, wild, abusive, drunk, anti-Semitic, like just, I'm not a good guy, and still was embraced by ABC Wide World of Sports, was on the cover of Rolling Stone, was on the cover of Sports Illustrated,

I mean, was a huge figure in that era. And I want to just note one of the reasons why Evil Canebel is in this book is because, so I'm friends with, uh, Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Kimmel has a lodge in Idaho, not far from where this almost, well, this jump took place. It wasn't very successful. And when I was there, Johnny Knoxville was also, it was a fishing lodge. Knoxville was also there. And those two are just huge evil can evil fans, huge.

And they, I was not growing up. I was not an evil can evil fan for some reason that I just missed it. I was into the Philadelphia Phillies and I was into the, the bio, Man, but I didn't I didn't get the evil-kneville thing. But these guys were so obsessed with evil-con-eval that they kind of just like were my muse, Kimmel and to a lesser extent, PJ Clap, which is Johnny Knoxville's real name. And like, that's why they are, I mean, they're thanked in the acknowledgments, but they're the reason why evil caneval's in the book. It's interesting with Knoxville, because evil was a little bit like, what if one of the jackass

guys took themselves very, very, very seriously? Right. And instead of trying to Right, instead of trying to have a rocket fired at their crotch, was trying to jump over 15 double-decker buses. But, you know, it's funny because there's a scene early on in the book where evil, and this is based on a real event in January, 1977, jumps over a tank of sharks in Chicago. And I didn't put it in because I thought it would take people, out of the narrative. But this is this was before Fons jumped a shark on Happy Days,

which was later that year. And I contemplated whether or not I should put that in there, but then I thought that's just like it's to 2023 to even acknowledge jumping the shark as a term or anything like that. This is an audience that will be sophisticated enough. And then they can look it up and see that this actually happened. But like he was jumping the shark before Fons jump the shark, which is, you know, interesting. This book is set mostly in 1977. Why was writing a 70s novel appealing? So the first book takes place in the 50s, and it's about McCarthyism, and the second

book takes place in the 60s, and it's about the rat pack. I was going to bypass the 70s because I lived through them, and I did not, I don't think all that highly of them as an era. But I was encouraged by a journalist to take a look at it, that there's fun stuff that happened there. And around that time is when I was at the lodge with Kimmel and Knoxville. And then also around that time, Slate launched, you know, they have this podcast called One Year.

Sure, Josh Levine. Yeah. And he did one year. And they did 1977. Now, I only, he, he, Levine, who did a great job, one of his ideas, one of his subjects, Laetrile, the fake cancer drug, because of that podcast, I used that as a subplot in the book. But it turned out there was actually a lot of fascinating stuff that took place in 77, specifically, Evil Caneval, but, you know, basically ending his career. and Elvis dying and the Manhattan Blackout

and Studio 54 launching and Jimmy Carter's first year of his presidency and the summer of Sam and it just was one of these things you're like wait this all happened in 1977 I can have all of this thank you I'll take it not to mention Star Wars and Roots

and Star Wars and Roots both mentioned in the book Ike and his and the love of his life Rachel have just seen Star Wars when the book begins Richard Nixon resigned in 74 and one character in the book says that by 77, the country is in kind of a psychic hangover. How would you describe it? Well, I think it was.

I mean, if you look at what the country was talking about and the direction of the Republican Party, 77 is also when Richard Nixon does the David Frost interviews. And the Republican Party is trying to figure out what it is and what it's going to be. Is Gerald Ford going to run for president again? Is Ronald Reagan going to run? He ran in 76. He lost to Ford for the nomination. Is he going to run again?

Is the Republican Party going to become more conservative? Or is it going to stay with its more moderate roots? Nelson Rockefeller, Gerald Ford. Richard Nixon was actually fairly moderate as these things go. So that's also one of the things that was going on in 77. And as you know, there's a big convention of Republicans at the end of the book. that, you know, kind of like the setting of the, of the, of the climax of the book. And it's all these, it's all these people who are going to be the future of the Republican Party

from George H.W. Bush to Rupert Murdoch to Ronald Reagan, et cetera, et cetera. So lots of ways the book speaks to the president, but I thought the Nixon part was interesting because the country's just had this historic liar as president. And as one character puts it, you get to make a choice at this point. It's like, do we insist upon truth from our leaders or do we just shrug our shoulders and go, eh, nothing matters, which sounds kind of familiar. Right. Well, that wasn't a coincidence. And yeah, I mean, it's one of the things that was going on then and is going on now in terms of what does the party want to be. Does it want to embrace the previous Republican president or does it want to become something else, not including Gerald Ford, who kind of inherited the role? And one of the things that I think was interesting is I have, so Charlie Martyr, who's the main character in the first two books, is now Senator Martyr. He's a congressman in the first two. Now he's a senator. But he talks about how he was on the House Judiciary Committee, and he was one of only two Republicans to vote to convict Nixon on the articles of impeachment. And the other one is a real person, Charlie Martyr is invention. But the other was a real person. It's Larry Hogan, Sr. Larry Hogan, Jr., of course, the recent two-term

governor, Republican governor of Maryland. And we, we romanticized the, that era where we think like, okay, this happened and then the country moved on. But Larry Hogan, senior, ran for governor, and he got trounced in the primary because he had been anti-Nixon. The Republican voters of Maryland punished him for it. And, you know, that's, that's, anytime I have Larry Hogan, Jr. on the show, I say something to him about his dad, because his dad was his hero. Very few of us get to actually have our heroes being one of our parents. But his dad was that kind of larger than life character. And, you know, it's just, it wasn't as people were still clinging to Nixon back then.

They still were clinging to him. And, you know, just the whole notion of how we pretend that, like, you know, Nixon resigned and then everybody moved on. That's not what happened. That's not what happened. You mentioned earlier a lot of journalists have entertained the idea of writing a thriller or a mystery someday. What do you find hard about it? The hardest part about it for me is the plot. And George R.R. Martin, who writes Game of Thrones, he has this theory that writers are either architects or gardeners.

So Gardner just sits down and writes. He doesn't know where it's going to lead, et cetera. And an architect is somebody who plans it all out. And I am definitely an architect. I am definitely, that's not to say that like I know everything is going to happen and I'm not making stuff up as I go along that might deviate from what I originally planned. But I need to have an outline of where it's all going. And so I mean, like, so I knew that the book was going to end with. So the book starts with Ike and Lucy together.

And then you see them again in the, the middle and then they're again together at the end. But the chapters are alternating between Ike and Lucy telling their different story. And I knew that that was going to be the plan, and I knew how it was going to end with them coming together. And that's the toughest part is the architecture, is planning all of that. That's the stuff that is the most difficult. And it's also why I'm so in awe of, you know, like TV shows like Succession, where they haven't planned four seasons, you know, they're doing it season by season and to have it all work out is remarkable. A couple of things in the book that made me perk up when I read them.

There's a doctor in here named Thomas Boswell, which is the name of the longtime Washington Post sportswriter who just retired. Is that a journalistic Easter egg? It's just an homage. His name was, I mean, he's not a particularly good doctor. But it was just, it was just, meant, I mean, one of the things I do when I name characters is try to make names that are distinct. I remember, actually, I remember telling, so Taffy, Akner is a good friend of mine, and I read an early draft of Fleischman is in trouble, which is a fantastic book and also a great show. And one of the things I said to her, I think she had two characters, two male characters whose name started with an A. I think it was like Adam and Allen or something like that. And I said, you just need to, like,

You can't do that. They have to be, they have to be different. I'm dumb. So just please make it as easy for me to. And so a lot of the names I pick are just like, just so it's a name that just like is different so that nobody gets confused about it. You've written a novel about the 50s, about the 60s. This is your 70s newspaper novel.

Isn't the next logical book about the 80s and television news? The next book is about the 80s, but it's not about television. It's about, although there is a television journalist in it, it is about Lucy, the daughter, and one of the lead characters here, and her parents going on a cruise that is commemorating the 40th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. And they go on a cruise set up by this rich guy to pay tribute to his father, who's an admiral who passed away. and it's full of World War II heroes and a bunch of fancy guests who paid for the privilege of being on this fancy boat, like 150 people.

And on the first night, one of the generals who was part of the war council that helped make all the decisions in World War II, General Whitaker, on the first night he disappears. So that's the next book. then intrigue and thrills and soon. Yeah, but it's also really taking more look at decisions. It's a look at, this is before Brokaw wrote the Greatest Generation, and it's a look at how we romanticized the World War II and all of the really, really difficult and in some cases awful decisions that the U.S. made during that era.

There's been a lot of talk about your network CNN and how it's trying to redefine itself under new management. How do you think CNN should define itself in 2023? I think we should define ourselves as a news channel that offers opportunities for left, right, and center to discuss and debate, not facts like Joe Biden won the election, but debt-sealing, economy, what should we do in Ukraine, that sort of thing. And I think that we should not be ideological about the news. We should report the facts and try to be as fair as possible.

And I think that that's generally what I've been doing. And I haven't, I don't think I've changed, and I certainly haven't been asked to change, how I do my job at all. So, I mean, I understand some of the criticism, both of what CNN was and of how, people are perceiving what our marching orders are. But I don't think, I don't think that, I don't think a lot of that criticism is accurate. I think that we were, I'm very proud of the work CNN did and that I did in the previous era under Jeff Zucker. And I think I'm doing the same thing I did then, except I'm doing it now. So, I mean, I get it. There's a lot of noise out there,

but if people just like turn on the TV and watch what we're doing, I think they'll get a much better idea than if they read angry tweets. So that vision of CNN writ large that you just outlined, that was, do you think the vision, the governing vision of CNN, say, four years ago? I mean, it was for me and my show, and Jeff Zucker was certainly a huge booster of me and my show. I mean, I will say that I think Donald Trump was and is a disruptor, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, often for bad, for instance, January 6.

And I think that his predilection for lying and indecency, and by indecency, I mean name-calling, racism, that sort of thing. That had a way of throwing a lot of journalists out of whack. He upset the equilibrium so that if you, you know, sort of the, you know, sort of if you stood up for the idea of democracy, you were liberal. I mean, we're in an era now where people are calling Liz Cheney or Rhino. Liz Cheney, who by any measure on issues of policy is more conservative than Donald Trump in terms of what a traditional conservative is. But because she was not allegiant to his election lie, she was replaced by a New York Congresswoman, Elise Daphonic,

who was more liberal than her. I'm just saying like, did Donald Trump throw journalism out of whack to a degree, not just CNN, but MSNBC and Fox and the New York Times and the Washington Post? Yeah, I think you can find instances absolutely of that happening. But as a general principle, I tried, and maybe I failed sometimes, but I tried to stick to standing up for facts, standing up for decency, but then just reporting the news and allowing debate. And I'm not saying that, you know, I batted a thousand, but I tried. Last question for you.

A couple months back, we talked about your favorite football team, the Philadelphia Eagles. And you told me that watching the Eagles win a Super Bowl in 2018 was, quote, a joy that I've only experienced with the birth of my two children. So what was the feeling of watching the Eagles lose a Super Bowl like? Well, it was not akin to, the loss was not akin to the similar metaphor. It was very painful watching all of that. Not the first half, but the second half. And it was very painful not understanding why our defensive coordinator was doing what he was doing or not doing what he was doing.

I was not unhappy when he left. But look, I mean, it's not just the Eagles. We also lost a World Series. And we also just got lost a game seven in the play. off to the Celtics that we shouldn't have lost. So this is the lot of a Philadelphia fan. As you know, the Super Bowl victories are few and far between and the losses are plentiful. But look, I didn't go to Arizona. Put it that way. Because you didn't want to? Because you were afraid? I just had a bad feeling. I just had a bad feeling. And you went to the last one. But this time,

I did go to the last one. So yes, if you're blaming it on me, if you're saying, because I wasn't there, they lost. No, I'm reading your feelings here before your premonition before the game. Well, it was also easier to get to Minnesota than it was to Arizona. I don't know. I just had a bad feeling. I mean, the Chiefs are really good. And also, by the way, I'm married to a Chiefs fan.

My wife is from St. Joseph, Missouri. So this is a painful thing. And we're taping this a few days before I go to Kansas City for this annual charity thing I do with a bunch of Kansas City. celebrities like Paul Rudd and David Kekner and the like, Jason Sudecas. So I'm going to have to hang out with Patrick Mahomes, which to you probably sounds like a lot of fun.

Yeah. To me, that is going to be a painful experience. Also, the wrong Kelsey will be there, the wrong Kelsey brother. But that's a, you know, it's my cross-diver. Jake Tapper's book is All the Demons are here. Available at fine bookstores everywhere. Jake, thanks for coming

on the press box. It's always fun. Thank you. That's the press box. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantis. If you are hearing this podcast, that means that I am back in the United States. And back on press box duty, I'm going to rouse shoemaker. We will get together, put out a podcast with more lukewarm takes about the media. I cannot wait to talk to you soon. See ya.