The Press Box - Kamala Harris and Joe Rogan, Democratic Panic, and Tom Brady in Week 6

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

Hello, media consumers! Bryan and David return to discuss Kamala Harris podcast appearances and her upcoming sitdowns with Fox News and Joe Rogan (5:39). Then they discuss Bob Woodward's new book and the “vibes switch” (17:41). They close with discussing Tom Brady’s growth as an announcer and local angles (32:20). Plus, David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Stefan Anderson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Look, it's not that confusing. I'm Rob Harvilla, host of the podcast 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, except we did 120 songs. And now we're back with the 2000s. I refuse to say aughts. 2000 to 2009. The Strokes, Rihanna, Jalo, Kanye, sure. And now the show is called 60 Songs That Explain the 90s,

colon the 2000s. Wow. That's too long a title for me to say anything else right now. Just trust me. That's 60 songs that explain the 90s, in the 2000s, starting Wednesday, October 2nd, preferably on Spotify. David? Yes.

Are you feeling a little anxious these days? A little, no more so than usual, though. A little panicky, perhaps? Yeah, well, you know, I think a lot of people are. Well, David, you sound like a member of the Democratic Party. Because if there is anything that characterizes journalism here, three weeks from election day, repeat three weeks from election day. Crazy.

It is Democratic panic. Mm-hmm. Susan Glasser of the New Yorker says, if Democratic Warring were a natural resource, there would never be an energy crisis again. Now, Nate Silver does say that there has been a half point of erosion in the blue wall states for Kamala Harris.

Mm-hmm. She's significant to close election. So there is a little bit of a real basis for Democratic Warring. But my God, God, what a boom time for journalists. Yeah, oh, God. And it's for two reasons, right? Because on the one hand, nervous Democrats are Democrats who pick up the phone.

Yes. And tell you that they're nervous. That may say out loud, of course, under the cloak of anonymity, that Kamala Harris and her campaign is blowing it in some way. Sure. But here's the other thing. Not only are your sources nervous Democrats, your audience is. is also nervous Democrats. Of course they are.

It's resistance Twitter. It's people that watch CNN and MSNBC. So you are calling people who feel one way and then serving readers who feel exactly the same way. Have you ever seen campaign journalism tied up at a bow quite like that? Yeah, it's pretty neat. It's a pretty good deal for everybody. Politico says the right only in journalism phrase here is sounding the alarm.

That's terrible. I still remember it. I don't know why this is just imprinted in my brain, but October 2008, George Packer of the New Yorker comes back with this giant article about Ohio. He's talked to people, and here is why it's going to be incredibly hard

for Barack Obama to win Ohio. And every liberal, every Democrat in my life was absolutely terrified by that article. Yeah. Because this is back when we all read The New Yorker every week. the TOC, here we go.

This is the Word of God. And then Obama won Ohio by five points. Yeah. And he won it again in 2012. So just something to keep in mind. Maybe we'll give out the George Packer Award here before the end of this cycle. It's a prestigious award, yeah. For people who have, you know, scared their readers most efficiently.

Here's the result of panicking Democrats. And this is the second thing I think about reading stories with three weeks to go. it's that you're never wrong as a journalist. Sure. So if you say here's the demographic group that could swing the election. Yep. You could be right. Sure.

Why not? You know, it's a margin of a few thousand votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan. Mm-hmm. It could be anybody you pick. Yeah, yeah. It's just like a point. It's like the thing where you like tweet both, you know, you tweet both. you tweet both Super Bowl outcomes

and then delete the one that doesn't work out and then you just like jokingly retweet the one that was right over and over again except kind of seriously. Yeah, you're right. It's also a little bit like the keys to the game story except what if the keys to the game were by virtue right because the election was so close?

Yeah, of course. I also saw Jonathan Martin column in Politico. Here's what Harris must do the seal the deal. And then he goes through all his prescriptions. he's also right. Yeah. Because it's close. Yeah.

So nothing could, again, what a wonderful time to be a political journalist. You can't be wrong. You're empowered and people click on that one. I want to know what Kamala Harris needs to do. Yeah, of course. Drag this thing across the finish line. I like this tweet from Carrie Howley, New York Magazine writer, Normalize having no effing clue what moves will win this election.

Here we go. that's what we need with three weeks to go for real. All right, coming up on the podcast, lots more from the presidential election, including Kamala Harris is doing Joe Rogan. Is there a pro-Trump vibe shift? And David, and a much-awaited Tom Brady Week 6 check-it.

Oh, yeah. We'll let him much more on the best box. A part of the ringer, podcast network. Hello Media Consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, and producer Stefan Anders here who is sitting in for Brian Waters. David, I think we can take that Kamala is playing its safe

take and put it back in our drafts folder. Sure. Because guess what? Tomorrow Kamala is doing Fox News. Yes, she is. It's not just for Pete Buttigieg and Ian Sam's anymore. Kamala Harris is going to talk to Brett

Bear. So I was trying to remember the tier of Fox News hosts who it's safe for a Democrat to talk to, Yeah. It's Brett Bear, Shannon Bream, and does Neil Cavuto sneak into that tier? I think Cavuto's in there now, yeah.

Harris is also doing a town hall with Charlemagne the God today in Detroit. That could offer some unpredictability, if you remember Charlemagne's interview with Elizabeth Warren back in 2020. And last but certainly not least, Kamala Harris is thinking about going on Joe Rogan's podcast. Yeah, I think she should. Why do you think she should do this?

I want to take, your media analysis here. Well, I think that he has a huge listenership. He has a listenership that is, in many ways, sort of the most perplexingly pro-Trump, if that's the way they're going to go. I mean, I don't think they're like explicitly, like, uniformly, I should say, pro-Trump by any stretch. But I do think a lot of that listenership are people that will be, well, I mean,

the target for any big interview like this, right? It's the audience that's going to be surprised to find out that you're like a kind of regular, coherent, intelligent person who's suited to lead the country, right? I mean, so much of the, especially like the under 40, under 40, 45, whatever demographic you want to point at, male, you know, pro-year. Trump constituency is sort of nihilistic in a weird way. There seems to be a vibe of like, why the fuck not Donald Trump, right? And a part of that nihilism comes from the feeling that our leaders are all worthless

and corrupt. And I think it's actually a pretty easy job to convince them otherwise. And for a lot of them, just sitting down with Rogan, I think, is symbolic enough to, you know, build some bridges. It's funny is it when you have those moments of, oh my gosh, so-and-so sat down with Rogan, because I remember Lawrence Wright, of all people doing that a few years ago. And getting at least one text from a friend,

you're like, do you hear Lawrence Wright on Joe Rogan's show? It was like this bridge between two worlds. Yeah. Which you're totally right. I mean, you could not have said that better. This is from Reuters from Jeff Mason and Nandita Bose, who broke the news that Kamala was considering going on the show. They write that a poll by you gov last year found that 81

percent of Rogan's listeners are male and 56% are under 35 years old. So she accepts the invitation in this theory and then she just shows up and talks. And it doesn't totally matter what she says to Joe Rogan about this issue or that issue. Yeah. But as you say, it's projecting that I am not the cartoon character. I am not the lull. Nothing matters. Everybody's corrupt candidates you might have thought I was.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think that that's kind of the Joe Rogan position too. I mean, and frankly, like, you know, like every great host, he's actually surprisingly easy to win over, it seems, you know, from as I can say, as a sometimes listener. I think it can only work out well for, really. It's not going to be like a trap if anybody is expecting that. I had a friend text me and say, were we sure that Rogan doesn't have more to lose than Harris?

yeah, I think that that's real, but also don't think that he would ever admit to that, right? Or I don't think that he would ever be self-aware or not self-aware, is not the right word. I think he thinks that he's, that he's, you know, kind of as an open-door policy there,

especially for people of significance and, you know, to the extent that his, his guests kind of skew in one direction, it's a little bit self-selecting, right? But I think, I think that he, He would probably be happy to have her own.

What a moment for podcasting generally, huh? Mm-hmm. This has been a big podcast presidential season. Oh, my God. So we had Harris on Collar Daddy, all the smoke, the shade room. Yeah. I looked up today and Trump is doing bussing with the boys. Yeah.

Trump, by the way, is also probably doing Rogan show, which he confirmed on the Nelk Boys pod. Yes. So just follow the bouncing ball there. you notice how bad the coverage of podcasting is. What do you mean? You mean like the actual content? Yeah.

I just think like, look, podcasting's hard to cover. It's probably like what covering Rush Limbaugh and the dawn of talk radio was 100 years ago. It's a lot of, you know, that's a lot of work. It's a lot of hours to plow through.

I remember Al Franken in his book about Rush saying like, I just would turn off the, radio when I was doing research. I don't want to listen to this anymore. Yeah. So there's a little bit of that element to it. But also just every piece I read about a podcaster is like, this person is really

important and influential and has a big audience. Mm-hmm. Like, okay, I got that. Yeah. Is it because do you think the numbers, both the economics of it and the actual download numbers remain ambiguous? Ambiguous. Yeah.

Yeah, there's some of that. I mean, and also I think it's, I think just about every, more so than any writer or, or, you know, television anchor or anything else. I feel like there's like everybody has baked in preconceptions about podcasts, partly because it is such a lift, right? Like you and I can turn on an episode of whatever the show is on Fox News at 430 in the afternoon and. Half Neil Cavuto, sir. Sorry. And come back with a, you know, report on it without too much difficulty, but to go in from, spend like, you know, three hours listening to whoever's podcast. You know, you end up just

sort of just believing what you choose to believe about a lot of the different hosts until you really, you know, weighed in. And it's not, and you can barely do it with one episode. You know, you don't get Theo Von from YouTube clips or even from just like picking out a stray episode. You really got to, you really got to dedicate yourself because that's what the audience does. And so I think that, yeah, I mean, the coverage of it is often skewed by everybody's preconceived. notions of it. Yes. And if you come in from the outside and say, oh, I have a, I have a take on you, then it's the old Dan Lebitard line. You don't get the show. You've only listened for a couple of days or a couple of weeks, and you couldn't possibly understand all the, you know, hidden messages here and

little things we do and little sayings we have and all the texture here. Some might say that about the press box even, but I don't think so. I think we're pretty accessible. In other news, not everyone is scoring a Kamala Harris interview, David. Time magazine owner, Mark Benioff, who is also the CEO of Salesforce, reports that his magazine has not gotten the Kamala interview. And in fact, he tweeted out a cover of Time. And I assume this is a mock cover, not something they're actually printing, because it just has in white type on the front.

Harris declined repeated requests for an interview for the story. In contrast, Trump talked about his policy vision with a Time reporter for 90 minutes across two interviews. Biden spoke to time at similar length before dropping out of the race. So Time Magazine does not score the elusive. Kamala Harris interview. It's a little bit strange to the assumption. I mean, the presumption.

I'm glad you went there. Okay, continue. But it does tie into the podcast thing, right? I mean, for all the people that are like, why are these politicians doing these podcasts? It makes sense they would be. And they're not, they're not upholding the, the decades or centuries-long tradition of sitting down with the editor-in-chief, the editorial board of Time Magazine.

I mean, come on. I was at the Walgreens yesterday. I can tell you, they did not have Time Magazine in stock on their very paltry magazine section. They did have the latest issue of National Geographic, colon, witchcraft. And which one would you have bought if they had both? A hundred percent witchcraft. It is funny because I think on the one hand, we here on our media podcast can support

a journalist demanding, asking for interviews with politicians. And in my happy universe, Kamala Harris would talk to Time Magazine and also talk to Joe Roke. Sure. Because I think we'd get something out of both of those. But I am always find it funny how PR departments

and maybe even political comms departments, more generally, are a little behind the media times on how people consume stuff now. It's like, oh, we got a big movie coming out. We want him on a magazine cover. Yes. And I'm always like, buddy, I don't know how to tell you

this, magazines don't exist anymore. Yeah. Like, so what you're saying is you want a time cover that people are going to tweet out and then you want an internet article because the overwhelming majority of people will never see this in. you want an article on the internet.

Yes. And you're shopping for that, but then you're going to old media institutions. I could say the same thing about Kamala Harris being on the cover of Vogue this month, which feels like the SI cover jinks of politics now. Yeah. No, no, don't go near Annie Leibovitz in her camera.

Do you see what happened to the Bidens when they tried that? Remember when they had to take a little timeout from should we drop out of the election? Yeah. There was some Annie Leibovitz photographs that needed to be taken. Yes, I remember that well. It's truly, truly amazing. David, a lot of people in journalism are doing this thing this week where they're saying,

you know what, I've never listened to Caller Daddy. I've never listened to this crazy podcast, which is about relationships and sex and stuff, but I did it because I wanted to hear the Kamala Harris interview. Acting a little squeamish, acting a little surprised. I had a very similar experience, not with Alex Cooper, but with Stephen Colbert. You what? So I had just not watched the late show ever. Ever? I feel like we've talked about the late show on this podcast.

I mean, I've definitely watched it accidentally. I've definitely watched. But it's been a while. Oh, yeah. Since I pushed play, not just watching a clip on Twitter, which is different. Yeah, sure. But pushed play and watched the episode from the beginning. Mm-hmm.

And David, let me tell you some. It's not funny. it's really not funny. He reminded me when he was doing his monologue of late stage Conan O'Brien, this funny, admirable person who is locked into this desperately funny TV show, excuse me, desperately unfunny television show that he just cannot escape. Yeah. Because it's doing relatively well in 2024 TV terms.

And I was like, oh my gosh, it's one of those things. You know, when you watch a sitcom now and you're like, not only do I not find this funny, this isn't a. joke what you just said. Yeah. Like it's not a laugh line. There wasn't nobody in a room was like here as a joke. Yeah.

I felt that when I was watching Colbert. Mm-hmm. Next topic for you. It's Bob Woodward Week in America. Again. Yeah. It's a big one. It's that time of year.

His new book is called War. This follows one word, Woodward titles. Say that three times fast, such as rage and fear. Mm-hmm. I love those titles. Love those words, go. Don't those feel like Richard Bachman novels as well as Bob Woodward's books about Biden and Trump? Yeah, absolutely, yes.

Some big headlines. One is Mark Millie, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, calling Trump a total fascist. Also, the note that Donald Trump sent Vladimir Putin COVID tests. Yeah, that seemed to be big news. When it was a little tough to get COVID tests here in the United States, also that he was back-channeling with with Putin even when he was no longer president. What do you make of Woodward Week and the way that we receive

the Oracle's latest volume? It's sort of weird. It's all I kind of tamped down, right? I mean, it's like we're, I think we're beyond being shocked by whatever Woodward reports. And now sort of we're also beyond being shocked that he didn't report it.

Like that used to sort of be the refrain, right? Like there was that and the, and Maggie Haberman, book where it felt like we were just sort of all unified in our oh now you tell us sort of of you like shouldn't that have been news when you first found out about it but it feels like we're a little bit just sort of exhausted by that whole thing too so i i don't know i mean listen anything on trump is gonna i mean as we well know just sort of gets drowned out by the by the persistence of trump right um dude he like stood on stage for 45 minutes listening to

to his like mixtape last night and it barely got, I don't know, it barely got covered. I mean, that might have been the pinnacle of it because it was like, I saw people talking about it this morning on television, but it just sort of didn't, it was almost impossible to discuss, right? Like, no one quite knew what to say because you just wanted to kind of stare slackjaw out of the screen and be like, what the hell is happening right now?

And yeah, so, I mean, you know, he's a little bit impervious, even to Woodward, you know? I don't know. I mean, I don't know if we're in fully like a post-woodwood you know, bombshell world, but does feel like it has less currency

than one might have expected it to. It's part of it that we just think nothing matters when it comes to Trump that you could have whatever Woodwardian bombshell and it wouldn't move the polls. Yeah, I mean, if any other president

had been sending secret tests to Vladimir Putin, I think that probably would have been a pretty fucking big story. You know, I mean, I think that would have been like a action, like a first line in your, in your obituary sort of story.

It's a little bit weird. I mean, I don't know how much of this is Trump. We all, we've also kind of all memory holds COVID as a culture, you know, like, willfully.

Yeah, I mean, I think as like a, as a protective measure for like commutal psyche or whatever. I was watching, I walked down the living room, another night, my wife was watching reruns of Superstore, which I never watched in real time, but have encountered only through the magic of streaming. And apparently they did a whole

season, like, post-pandemic with the masks on in the store and the whole thing. And I'm just watching this and I'm just like, why would they make the effort to do this? This never really happened, did it? And then I was just like, no, this was our life. I like, it's not COVID denialism. It's COVID retroactive. negative denialism. Yeah. That stuff really happened? And listen, it's just,

it's structurally difficult to put into context, not just the COVID that we've all forgotten, but the fact that like he was sending him tests at a time when like our hospitals weren't getting these, these tests, right? Like, and to remember how dire that felt in that moment. Yeah,

I mean, it's pretty pretty fucking significant. And yeah, it's not going to have a lot of effect. I'm glad you brought up Trump playing DJ on stage because right before we came on today, I'm looking at Twitter and I saw a bunch of people story shaming and headline shaming the New York Times about their coverage of that. Strange happening. Folks, the criticism in the New York Times, we're here on a media podcast. So I totally understand it. If you want to

criticize the times, they mess up all the time, they mess up every day. There is no way to write a story about Donald Trump cutting off his rallies that he can just play music and not his head along that makes Trump look good, that sane washes Donald Trump or whatever you want to. call it. Yeah. I'm sorry. And they were just people are quoting paragraphs in the story. The reporter sitting there being like, I have no idea what I'm looking at. This is the strangest thing that's ever happened.

Yeah. They're playing YMCA and November rain on that playlist. I'm not making that up, by the way. In one with Ave Maria. And you're just like, folks, they were not trying to sanewash Trump. This is not like trying to, you know, take his answers about a complicated issue and giving him an issue position that he is not articulating. Just describing what happened

What you want From the New York Times All right Last election topic for you The vibe shift Have you read about the vibe shift? Wait, tell me about this vibe shift Okay, so three weeks to go

There has been I don't know How does one describe Noting a vibe shift It's been detected in the air People pulled out the The Star Trek tricorder or whatever.

People have detected a vibeship. Politico wrote about it because Sarah Longwell, who's the bulwark, who's everybody's favorite pollster, was sensing it when she was talking to focus groups, particularly men in focus groups, that they were now, had sort of more interested in Trump

or more likely to vote for Trump. Our old friend Charlie Pierce wrote this in Esquire. There just seems something, I don't know, flat about the Democratic campaign as we grind on through the last few weeks. It's like watching reality, getting the stuffing beaten out of it and having no real way of fighting back.

So I think what he's referring to is this idea that Donald Trump can say things about FEMA that are completely crazy. He can say things about migrants. Sure. He can launch this whole fusillade of BS. And he still might win the election. Yeah.

Right. And maybe this idea that the Democrats and the media, and I think this is partly what Charlie's getting at in his blog post, are unequipped to stop it. Yeah. So that makes you feel worse about Harris's prospects.

It feels like, sure, I mean, those are two kind of separate things. I mean, I guess they're very connected, but it feels like the media in general has gotten better at pointing out Trump's falsehoods, dating back to the end of his presidency. But now we're in a position, where they realize that pointing out the false

doesn't make any material difference, right? Or maybe their audience was already fully aware of what was false. And that's either baked in, if we're talking about people who are like nominally pro-Trump or just that those are, that, you know, the pro-Trump audience or the people who could potentially be affected by it

are just not paying attention to what we're doing. Which isn't hard to imagine. As a thing is how, you know, Trump's been agitating against the media for his entire public or political life. So yeah, it's just a weird situation. Now, in terms of it's the sort of feeling about how it affects the election, I mean, I think that it's hard to just draw a straight line, obviously.

I think that there's a that a lot of the most problematic stuff about Trump is, not the kind of stuff you can pull. You know, it's a little, it's just, people who are kind of like quiet quitting on the Trump campaign, people who are just going to probably be outwardly Trump supporters until they walk into the voting booth. You know, it's,

I don't think we're going to see a big sea change. But, and frankly, there hasn't been an easy narrative in this campaign since Kamala Harris, you know, took the reins of the Democratic Party. She didn't take over the election. It didn't, you know, just immediately become a 12-point polling advantage and whatever else. And I think Trump's persistence is a little bit hard to describe, right? I mean, it always has been.

Even more difficult than pointing out when he's lying is pointing out what's working, you know? And, and yeah, so I think that from a narrative position, that sort of despondency makes some sense. I agree. And then when you combine that with some actual Nate Silver tightening of the race, minor as though it may be, right, still very much in toss-up territory. Yeah, for sure. Or it's more firmly in toss-up territory where I think Nate had everybody at toss-up, but I'd rather be playing Kamala Harris's hand right now.

It's an interesting, like, psychological phenomenon. Yeah. That I'm not sure we'll have anything to do with the way the election turns. out. I think people are also just waiting for this election to break one way or the other. Yeah. Instead of going all the way to me, if you remember with Biden, there was a, you know, what people thought was a fairly comfortable Biden polling lead in the electoral college down the stretch.

Oh, he's going to win, it'll be fine, turned out to be tighter than people thought because Trump's voters were undersampled. Yeah. But I think people just keep waiting for this election to break. And it doesn't break. Yeah. So then you perceive very, very small things, little data points, the Quinnipiac poll that comes in, something Longwell told us.

whatever it is as a vibe shift. Yeah. Particularly those panicking Democrats we talked about. Yeah, I mean, so much of the Harris campaign, obviously the beginning was about vibes, which is not to shortchange her as a candidate. I think she's been in a lot of ways just really impressive. But just the entire pretense of, you know,

Joe Biden steps aside. Kamala Harris steps in. It was a, it was a, it felt like a moment. It felt like a thing. It didn't. It really, it wasn't particularly

about substance, right? Although substantively, I think she's significantly better than the alternative. But yeah, I mean,

like I said, the vibes are, the, the vibes are a narrative construct, right? I mean, it's, it's the way we kind of

interpreted them on a personal level, but this goes back to the very bit to the nervous Democrats you're talking at the beginning of the show. It's like,

you know, I've been, who, knows. I don't know what's going to happen. I don't pretend to have any kind of secret knowledge, but I do believe that this is going to, the whole thing is going to come down to what have I said before, 1,500 people in Pennsylvania. It's like, if you're that nervous, go, you know, like, go make friends at a coffee shop. You have a better chance of impacting the election than talking anonymously to the reporter from whoever's given you a phone call, you know? I mean, it's,

there was no time where this wasn't going to be marginal. And, you know, frankly, I think that the most admirable thing that Trump has done short of standing on the stage and listening to a wonderful Shnayette O'Connor's tune

was it was actually just like spiking the ball, not spiking like to celebrate, like holding the ball, you know, like running out the clock. I think that he's, I don't know if that was a deliberate plan, but I think that he's you know, he's done more water treading than, you know, trying to spike, then trying to score again. And I think that I think that's probably going to end up benefiting him because I don't think he's going to do anything that's going to really help him at this point.

Podcasts aside. Yeah. All right. Coming up in 30 seconds. And speaking of Pennsylvania, there's always a local angle in Philadelphia. But first, David, let's do 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 Pressbox spot where they were always,

always gratefully received. How's this for a New York Post headline? David, and I quote, top German neo-Nazi plummets 200 feet to his death while hiking on Hitler's favorite mountain. It's real. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, it turns out there will be no fourth hike.

Okay. You thought the New York Post headline writers left something on the table for once. Congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke

of the week. All right, in the notebook dump, I checked in on Tom Brady on Sunday. Actually, I was checking in on the Dallas Cowboys

who played like absolute crap. You want to talk about that? Sure. Let's get everything. Did you hear Jerry Jones today on the radio? No,

what do you say? So there's like a radio station Dallas has the Cowboys' Rights, and as part of this, they get the Jerry Jones call in every week after the game. And Jerry Jones did not like the tenor of the questions today. So he was saying, you know, I could get some other people to ask me these questions. These are not people who work for the Cowboys, right?

This is just the Cowboys' rights holder. Yeah. But the whole interview is absolutely amazing. And he's like, well, why would I sit here and revisit decisions I've made in the offseason with you? We're like, well, I don't know. They seem to be coming home to roost. when we're giving up 40 plus points at home for the lions. Yeah, I don't know.

But enough about the Cowboys, David. Tom Brady. Tom Brady sounded really good on Sunday. Yeah. He was fired up. He, there were no more Biden-esque pauses that we heard in week one. Mm-hmm. You could tell he felt more confident because not only did you hear it in his voice,

he was talking over the snap. Yeah. So that's the big dividing line, right? Football broadcast boosts. As soon as the ball has snapped, I, the color analyst, hand the baton to the play-by-play announcement. Sure.

That's your time. And then when the plays over, that's my time. Brady would have a point, and he had needed clearly two, three more seconds to finish it. So he would keep talking over the snap. Yeah. And you'd be like, ah.

He's got the rhythm. He's got the rhythm. And he's confident, right? It's not that whole thing. Oh, shut down. Stop talking about it, even if you're in the middle of sense. Yeah.

You could see that. Also, you could tell the production team really set him up to talk, to break down plays out of commercials. That's how Chris Collinsworth has made money for 100 years on TV. We're coming out of a good. Let me show you what they're doing here with the defensive end. Yep. Brady did that really well on Sunday.

Overall, he just seemed much more locked in. Yeah. If still feels like there's a lot more to access, like here's some stuff I learned playing football that I would like to share with, you. He had a few moments where he was talking about like whenever I saw receivers make this move, I'd just be ready to rip it. I'm this, I'm going to, I'm throwing the ball right now because I know you're about to be open. Yep. But he is now, I feel like we're now, and I started to tweeted that on Sunday and I was like, I don't know if people are here. I never know if people on Twitter

are watching a game like this. Or if they're just had read bad coverage in week one and we're like Tom Brady sucks. Yeah. He doesn't suck. He's getting really good. And again, this is the sixth game for real he's ever called. Yeah. So you figure 10 more weeks, then postseason, then the Super Bowl. Yeah, I don't know.

No, I mean, yeah, I mean, I think the expectation that he'd be good right after bat was always kind of nuts. But it has just been sort of informative to watch him learn and grow in real time. and that's sort of the way it works the quarterbacks too, right? It's just like they're not hitting anything and then suddenly it's just like it's just a perfect pass, you know, 20 yards down the field.

You're like, oh, wait, what? Yeah, it all clicks. It all comes together. Maybe we just saw that. Totally. It hasn't been like a smooth upward curve either because week two clearly heard a lot of the talk from week one, probably mostly from his producer, and he was better in week two.

But then I thought in week three, he wasn't as good as he was in week two. Yeah. So it really did have a rookie quarterback kind of mountain where you're getting better, but there are weeks where you're just not that great. Yep. And then watching him in week six,

I'm like, I don't know, man, if I didn't know this was his first year, if I had just come in out of a time machine, I were like, oh, he's been calling football for a while. Sure. He knows what he's doing. Yeah. David, new topic.

Always a local angle. Okay. So this comes from alert listener, Jay Fisher, you know how we like to consume local newspapers now. We either like to tweet the front page. Yeah. Much like we do the Time Magazine cover. Or we like to share a headline because there is a local angle being given to a national story.

Oh, yeah, sure. Sometimes comically. Sometimes, you know, sometimes, you know, local man loses presidential election, that kind of thing. Well, Jay Fisher sent us some headlines from the Philadelphia Inquirer, and I thought you would like these being resident of these parts. And their commitment to finding local angles in national stories. Are you ready for these?

Please. All right, here we go. Who is Lindsay Davis, the ABC news anchor moderating the presidential debate and South Jersey Native? I like who is Lindsay Davis, the South Jersey native? That's just a very funny way to ask that question. Another one

about a movie flop. Megalopolis may be a mess, but the music by Philly trained Osvaldo Golahov is a quirky triumph. Okay. One more. Meet the local creators and Philly sports fans behind Fox's Universal Basic guys. Oh, my God. That is probably a little more justifiable because I'm not sure I'm going to read about

the creators of Universal Basic guys unless I know they are Philly sports fans. Sure. And this is my favorite. Delaware native Aubrey Plaza. plays off Taylor Swift's childless cat lady proposed with her own Harris Wall's endorsement. So we didn't think there was enough buy-in on Aubrey Plaza, but we need Delaware native.

I think that's for the grandmas out there, right? It's just like, oh, I always thought she seemed like a nice girl. Now I've got, now we've got validation. She's from around here? Yeah. Brian? She went to school with my kids? Yeah.

Did you know this Aubrey Plaza? I'm pretty sure we're about 10 years apart in day. Oh, man, did you ever date her in high school? Did you know her? Do you guys hang out at all? I do think you're doing the right thing by thinking about local news as the Philadelphia Inquirer. The one thing local papers should not do by any means is just try to be bad versions of national stories that everybody can read elsewhere. Yeah.

I read a lot of these Twitter accounts. like here is something that happened in the presidential race says the local paper. It's like, okay, unless you have something on this. I think that's not the business at this point in history. Yes. So the inquire is really trying. We had a listener, Chris Cameron, who told us Joe Flacco, the old guy still got it. Does he qualify for our old guys?

Yeah, Andy Dalton over there in Charlotte, too, but Joe Flacco is the real one. I mean, it's kind of hard. I literally don't know how old he is, but he does seem to qualify for old guy. Well, quarterback years are different than, like, Francis Ford Copeland years. No, and I know he watched a lot of his career with the Ravens. I mean, he's been around for a while.

I don't think he's young, but also if you told me that he was, like, you know, shown the door by the Ravens when he was 30 or, like, 40, I would believe both of them, you know? Joe Blacko was 39 years old. All right. There you go. Oldish for quarterback years.

Mm-hmm. Some only in journalism for you. These are words that you read constantly in news articles, but never actually hear in human speech. Blake Messina sends us along the sports writing classic journeyman. Yeah. Also, Journey Woman. The Athletic Sabrina Merchant wrote a piece recently about NBA, WNBA,

Journey Woman, Courtney Williams. Hmm. Gerds? This comes from Alex Panhands. Gerd, yeah. Gerds is a great newspaper word because it's short for headlines, but he sent me the Dallas Morning News headline. This is about the baseball playoffs.

Bobby Witt Jr. Girds for Yanks by watching Derek Jeter. Yeah. Now, is that just an incumbent, by the way, I added the first name. So this is a reader of the paper, Witt Girds for Yanks by watching Jeter. Yeah, I don't know what that means.

Yes, exactly. And this is a great one sent in by both Zach Otter and Seth Whiteberg. Jeremiahed. Yeah. Jeremiah. Jeremiah. Yeah. Jeremiah.

Literally trying to like say, like imagine in the voice of John Hamilton our high school, SAT prep and presario. Jeremiah. I think Jeremiah. Is it Jeremiah? It is a long, mournful complaint or lamentation, a list of woes.

That's one of those words when I broke into journalism. I just remember reading that. because people were looking for synonyms for complaint or speech. Philippic was another one that hit me in that time. And I was like, oh, so that's what we're supposed to call it. Yeah. We don't say complain or list of woes. We say these words, which might be pronounced a couple of different ways.

Also got a media piss test from a press box fan who would like us not to use their name, but I will read the email. This is an anonymous. This is like a panicky Democrat. We cannot possibly quote them by name here. Pressbox fan writes, last week I was at a leadership summit for my company. Our COO took the stage to inform us

that the way we have been doing employee evaluations is being replaced. And the new program, David, is going to be a, quote, performance evaluation on steroids. Oh my gosh. This was at an actual corporate retreat, corporate summit.

our anonymous listener says, I barely contained my laughter and quickly scan the room for any other press box. Such good stuff. Yeah. Hopefully he said, I think that's right

under his breath. Did I tell you what I'm doing this weekend, David? No. I'm going to Austin for the University of Texas versus the University of Georgia. Nice.

Football spectacular. Yeah. The Cowboys have disappointed you so much. You have to go. Yeah, screw them. Go back to college. It's winning. Yeah.

Rodney Dangerfield style. And let me tell you some about my beloved alma mater. They really have tried to buff out the game day experience around the stadium. Mm-hmm. Because Texas was, Texas, you went there when you were at Baylor, you came down for a game. It was fine, but it was not a ravenous, crazy place that it should have been for that big college football experience. So now they have this midway outside and stuff to do and stuff to buy. Well, UT has hired Spoon.

I'm not making this up, Spoon to play the free pregame concert right outside the stadium. I saw this, actually. That's great. So could anything be more Austin than transferring from Spoon to the SEC matchup of the week? No. And by the way, that's what I loved about Austin. You know, everybody's like, Austin, awesome, man. South by Robert Rodriguez, Austin City Limits, Willie, this is fantastic.

So I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's cool, but also big time college football. Yeah, yeah. I know Austin isn't cow talent. It would have been, you might want to get just a small, I guess Bivo sort of fills in that, fills that void. Just make sure we get some horse and cattle in there too. In that list of cool things about Austin. Yeah. So we're going to pet Bivo on the head.

We're going to watch our Richard Linklatter movie. Yeah. And we're going to watch them football. Absolutely. It's the mix of the worlds. I'm so excited. All right. It's time for David Shoeaker guess is the strange.

pun headline. Yeah. Thursday's headline about a corporate logo appearing on every batting helmet during the baseball postseason was ad nauseum. Today's headline

comes to us from alert listener Ryan Smith. It's from the Times Picayune and New Orleans advocate. Saints quarterback Derek Carr has an oblique injury. David, he's expected

to miss multiple weeks, multiple games. So I think that's about it. Car is out for multiple games. What was the Times Picky Union, New Orleans advocates? Car. Car. Strained upon headline.

Yeah, you're going the right way. Car. Car. Oh, my God. This is going to be so obvious, isn't it? You're right on the doorstep. Carthet. Missing car, car.

Yeah, it's out for a few weeks. You're not going to be able to. to drive for a few weeks. So car... Is it a car pun? Like, it's like a, like, it's as to do with, like, having a car. Yes. It's not like Curtis interrupt us or something. Car, uh, God, this has got to be so obvious.

My car, I cannot drive my car. Rental car. Because my car is... Car broken down. Car's in the shop. No, but where... A car is in the shop. Thank you. Car is in the shop. Car in shop. According to our friends down in New Orleans. He is David Schumaker.

I'm Brian Curtis Proxia magic by Stefan Anderson. Thank you, Stefan. Coming up Thursday on this podcast, Jasmine Wright of the website Notice, a reporter who knows Kamala Harris backwards and forwards and cannot wait to pick her brain

about the election. And then Monday, Shoemaker and I return for more lukewarm takes about the meeting. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.