The Press Box - Listener Mail. Plus, Gideon Lewis-Kraus on Covering UFOs.

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker are answering your Listener Mail! They touch on The New York Times’ interest in acquiring The Athletic, discuss Bob Garfield getting fired for violating anti-bullying policies, and answer which Texas food dish they miss most since leaving the state (4:00). Later, Gideon Lewis-Kraus joins to talk about his piece in The New Yorker, “How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously.” (32:06) They talk through how this story came about, how the pandemic affected the writing process, and the response to the piece. Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline of the Week.  Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Gideon Lewis-Kraus Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Ringers Charles Holmes and co-host Grace Spellman present the most notorious new podcast in the industry, the Ringer Music Show. Every Tuesday, they'll bring you the latest news, the hottest takes, and the deepest reporting about the wild world of music and the chaotic industry that creates it. Check out the Ringer Music Show exclusively on Spotify. David, using reporting from Edward Isaac DeVier's new book, Fox News, and then the New York Post. I'm starting to sense a pattern here reported that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders makes certain demands when he's on the road. Bernie wants a king-sized bed.

Bernie likes his hotel room kept at 60 degrees. What listener Mike Morris wants to know is where does this fall in the litany of failed hit pieces? As someone who, in all seriousness, purchased a king-sized bed within the last week and who by not my decision, but by mutual consent, has the AC running at about 65 degrees all the time,

I feel very bad about my chances forever running for president right now. This is, I can't imagine a bigger failure of a hit piece. And part of it was the positioning as a, I mean, it was, it was, you know, all caps, tweets with the siren emoji and stuff. It was a terrible, it was meant to be nothing but a hit piece. But substantively, it was, I mean, they could have said he requested his room comes with a key, and it wouldn't have been less damning. Like the AOC has a Tesla story we talked about the other day. There's this whole subset of the liberals like nice things, hit pieces.

Yeah. What nice thing would Bernie have to really like for this to actually, like private planes are a big one. Yeah. with climate change. I don't think anybody needs to listen to the show or I'm not claiming that anybody does listen to the show. It's been, I think it's been at least six months since I made the joke that the conservative ideology, like,

you know, the evolution of conservative ideology ended at Al Gore has a private plane. You know, I mean, there's like, there's nothing, there's no philosophical, I mean,

it's just a dead end and it, and there's still there. It's variations at that point. But it's so, it's so, weird. It's just it's, I don't, there's I guess there's just a, I guess

we should be taking somewhat seriously the degree to which they're committed to, you know, the Democrats are socialists and we know exactly what that means even if they don't because there are a lot of people that are voting for them who must agree, but this was,

this was just, even if that was, I mean, listen, a Tesla, you'd be for, if you've never seen a Tesla before, you might be forgiven for thinking they cost $200,000, even though they don't, right? A private plane definitely has a certain connotation to it. But I'm not even sure for the people that are determined to hate Bernie Sanders and his socialism. What does a king-sized bed do for a king-sized bed? A king-size bed is great. A king-size bed is a luxury? I've never been able to fit into a room in all my years in New York. I understand

the barrier for some people. But is it that weird that you'd want like the same size, if you're traveling with your wife that you guys would want the same size bed? bet on the road that you have when you're at home? It's just so silly. Coming up on today's show, we answer your listener mail, including questions about the New York Times and the athletic, Bob Garfield and on the media, and Shannon Sharp and Julio Jones,

plus a press box post game interview with Gideon Lewis Krause about his new story in The New Yorker about UFOs. All that and more on the press box, a part of the ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Kerr, Curtis and David Shoemaker here, along with Erica Servantes. Listener mail, David, we got to answer some. It's Thursday.

Can we start with the New York Times and the Athletic? Okay. Big media story of the week. It came from Sarah Fisher of Axios. Fisher wrote, The New York Times is looking into a potential acquisition of the athletic. The resources familiar with the matter tell Axios dot, dot, dot, dot. The Times is eyeing a full acquisition, not a joint venture or

strategic partnership. Were you as befuddled as I was by the idea of the New York Times purchasing the athletic? Yeah, this is one of those stories that I saw and I immediately dreaded like the group text I was going to get from you or Bill or Jason Gay or some combination. You know, like I was just like, because I don't have. Just note it only came from Jason Gay. I was not bothering you about this. No, just because I didn't have anything smart to say about it. I mean, I did, like, I don't get it. I think as I befuddle, I think is the right word. I do think that there's sort of, you know,

something approaching, you know, tasty irony that, that the New York Times, which has been, which has had the farthest thing from a sports page about possible while still having a sports page over its entire existence, right? I mean, like, we're,

like, we love local sports pages and also the rest of the New York Times. It's, it's sort of, so there's a sort of irony that they're sort of now looking, they're in the market to absorb, of all the local sports pages more or less. And it's, I guess there's some sort of affirmation that they see value there.

But I don't, but as far as like what the, what this says about the future of media, I don't, I'm befuddled. I don't know. I don't know. What do you think? Well, that's a, that's a big, that's a big question. I was just on the narrow thing, you know, I, I, I, on Twitter, I said, look, this last Sunday, which was the day Phil Mickelson won the PGA.

And there were tons of NBA playoff games on. It was one of those Sundays where you just really could not leave the couch. The New York Times had three pages of sports. Like three pages. And that's it. And I'm going, and again, that's fine on what it is. That's a resource thing. I understand all that.

But I'm going, wait a second. Now, this is the publication that now wants to buy a Padres writer and a Dallas Starr's writer and a Minnesota Timberwolves writer. Like those are the two things going together. Not to mention the New York Times has cut down the amount of straight up beat writing in its own sports section too. They decide a long time ago, we don't need a gamer

after every Yankees, Mets, Knicks, Rangers story in the paper. That happened a long time ago. So now what you're doing is buying beat writing. And I saw people say, well, you know, the New York Times is in all these businesses. Now it has, you know,

it's doing things with recipes, it's doing things with puzzles. It's doing things with modern love, right, became a TV show. And I'm like, well, yeah, those are things the New York Times already does. And it is now spinning those off

into other side businesses. So I'm not sure that's exactly the right analogy. I mean, that's like saying the ringer is going to take the rewatchables franchise and do something with it versus the ringer is going to buy axios. Those are completely different things.

So I guess my question is there's somebody, perhaps somebody, maybe somebody at the New York Times who says, okay, there's this big collection of beat writers and feature writers and people And we see something we can do with that, something that is interesting to us or the price is right. And we think we can add this sports writing business to our business, which has de-emphasized sports writing. But I'm really interested to know who that person is and what they see as the potential strategy there.

Yeah. I think there's a version of this story where you would expect to get a press release saying that the New York Times sees this as the athletic is the model for a, national takeover of news full stop, right? I mean, they're going to, they are going to hire beatwriters in other fields and, and, and try to replicate the athletic model in, um, local politics and everything else. But I don't think that's going to happen, but that wouldn't, if it weren't the New York Times, it wouldn't, if this were like, you know, a media conglomerate absorbing it, it wouldn't shock me to hear that sort of explanation. Um, the idea that it's just sort of like, here's

another side business that we think we can retool and make some money is sort of deflating as far as these explanations go. But maybe that's it. Maybe it's that simple. Maybe it's like, you know, getting another little podcast group or something on the on the books, you know, and we'll see if we can turn a profit. Well, that's what, that's kind of how acquisitions usually go, right? It's not like we're going to get this thing and try to lose money, right? We see a market opportunity here. So maybe that's it. Matthew Zeyland, our pal asks, which crossovers between the Times and the athletic would you must want, would you must want to see in an eventual merger?

Shams covering the NBA. Well, I guess we already got that one. Peter Gammon's writing a political column. Jonathan Martin on the college football beat. I think Jonathan kind of is on that beat already on Twitter. Ken Palm doing election projections. I think I'm into that. Paul Krutman doing analytics.

I'm going to, I'm going to pass on that, maybe. I'm just going to let that question stand. I think I endorse all of those jokes. On the matter of Bob Garfield and on the media, we got a question this week, David, saying we've got a lot of questions, actually. Can the press box talk about this? Is the prex box allowed to talk about on the media?

Just note to everyone, we don't have a feud with on the media. On the media doesn't know what we are. They're not like, oh, damn it, those upstarts at the ringer. This is all fair game. We just not had not gotten around to talk about the story that last week, one of On the Media's two hosts, Bob Garfield, was fired for violating New York Public Radio's anti-bullying policy. We'll pick it up here with the New York Times as Ben Smith, who writes, during a meeting last June, a producer suggested that the show, which was hosted by Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield, do a segment on whether the media's coverage of climate change had overlooked minorities. after an extended back and forth, Mr. Garfield got sick of his staff pushing back, dismissed the story with a barnyard epitette,

and eventually yelled that he was tired of being accused of not being woke enough. Two people in the meeting recalled. Someone complained to human resources about that incident and two others during which Mr. Garfield screamed at producers. Mr. Garfield was told by management if that happened again, he could be fired. So that was round one. Here's round two. This spring, Mr. Garfield's suffered. suffered a shoulder injury. During a virtual meeting with his colleagues, he said he needed surgery

sooner than he planned. He said he then faced 15 minutes of what he viewed as bullying from Ms. Gladstone and their executive producer, in which they viewed as him bullying them, according to a spokeswoman. Eventually, Ms. Gladstone accused Mr. Garfield of bathing in self-pity, he recalled. He swore at her and slammed his computer shut, he said, calling the incident an appalling abuse of an employee's health prerogatives. WNYC fired him for a violating its anti-bullying policy, and he is, wait for it, starting a newsletter on substack on Monday. So Brent is an ass-s-s-s-this.

What are your experiences with heated arguments and anger in media meetings? Strongly opinionated and willing to speak one's mind characterizes journo's arguments seem inevitable. Are we at an inflection point? Remember a while back when somebody was asking about how much we thought our faces matched our voices? Was that the question? That was the question.

Like, I don't put it past anybody at any sort of public space, especially anybody who's like name is attached to a show for getting to a point where they're, you know, yelling in meetings and whatnot. But Bob Garfield's voice is enough to make me believe that he is not a bully just full stop. And I know that's ridiculous. But there's, like, like, next to the definite, next to the definition of a vuncular in the audio dictionary is like a push play and it's a play. button and his voice comes out. It's like so calming and chummy. All that said, I'm sure that I'm I'm sure this is all true. I don't I don't I haven't had a lot of experience in the media world of yelling in meetings. In the book publishing world, yeah, I mean, I got yelled at, but mostly by one person, but yelled at a whole, a good bit. I guess probably bullied by today's

standards a good it's not ever helpful it's not it doesn't ever it's it's never a good idea and never I mean there's no there's no iteration of facts where like that helped get a job done or whatever it's sure it didn't even make the person yelling feel

any better so it's it's ridiculous and it's also a terrible way to treat people yeah that that's where I come down on this because it's like on the one hand you're in a high pressure media job and I'm sure national public radio is much especially a big show like that is much more high pressure than what we deal with on a biweekly basis but or twice weekly basis but i think that yelling so on the one hand i want to say okay you're going to get you're going to get passionate about things you're going to be

under pressure you're going to say things and then you're going to go to your colleagues say hey i'm really sorry i was just under pressure right i'm trying to do a good job and i got a little carried away about something but i think what mostly happens in these cases is somebody starts yelling and then they create a culture of yelling at the business. And then people just start yelling because that's what they think is the right thing to do. And it just, as you say, it's just completely pointless. It's not a reaction to circumstances. It's just yelling because, oh, everybody in the media business yells.

And that just becomes its own self-sustaining thing. And there's not really any good work that comes out of it. It just becomes this kind of performance. I used to always say in book publishing, back in the book publishing role, I know I said this to you, that in the 80s, there was this sort of, um, they became this sort of archetype where all the, the grand men and women of publishing were just like, just brilliant assholes. And then at some point, they just, you know, the applicant pool sort of ran out of, you know, the cross section there. So they just started hiring assholes instead of,

instead of brilliant ones, um, uh, or instead of brilliant people since they had, if given the choice. But yeah, it's, it just, it makes it, it's, yeah, the idea that that this is a workplace where people yell is just never fruitful. All right, David, I had to hear a note from you texting me. You did not text me about The Athletic, but you did text me about Tim Tebow. Did you have a point to make about Tebow journalism? I just can't believe that Tebow journalism. I mean, actually, as crazy as this might sound, I am shocked that Tebow journalism is still a thing.

I don't watch a lot of the morning sports shows as a rule. I was watching the other day, and there were just multiple segments on Tim Tebow. And I thought, I wonder why. I know, I know, because people pay attention to it or whatever. But it's like, at least at this point, can we not just start, can the morning shows not start interrogating the concept of the Tebow, even on the air? Get your Tebow, get your Tebow viewers in, but ask these questions. Why do the Jaguars hire this guy? Is he there to mentor their new quarterback?

Is he there as a deliberate misdirect? So no one's paying attention to the other stuff that the coaching in front of the coaching staff in front office are doing? We're just going to stare at Tim Tebow while you're over here, like hatching some dastardly plot or creating a new offense. There could be positive aspects of this. Or, you know, like, wouldn't you like to hear, and maybe they have, so forgive me if I missed it, but wouldn't you love to hear first take, just like have a segment on why do people care about Tim Tebow?

Like, wouldn't that be a million times more interesting than what Tim Tebow is going to do in the NFL this year? Yeah. And it's interesting because I've heard a couple of segments where they get to that. That's never in the Chiron. It never is. Why are we talking about Tim Tebow should be the Chiron? And that would actually be an interesting discussion. Yeah.

But it's always about will Tim Tebow do X, X, X, X, X, and then we maybe get in passing to why he is such, why he is on the morning shows to begin with, given that he is trying out for a backup, tight end job on the Jacksonville Jaguars, the worst team. in the NFL last year. Yeah. Speaking of morning sports shows, how about undisputed over there on Fox Sports, FS1, where Shannon Sharp,

one of the co-host, called Julio Jones, a wide receiver with the Atlanta Falcons this week. And on the air, kind of holding his phone out, like you see people do when they're just, you know, at Starbucks sitting at a table talking to somebody, interviewed Julio Jones. on the air. Here's a little of that interview.

Ideally, where would you like to go? Right now, I'm just, I want to win. Okay. We don't go to Dallas. If you go to, you ain't winning in Dallas, Julio. Yeah, you all right, listen, come on, man, you already know, I know. Okay. So there was this whole argument afterwards, David, about whether Julio Jones knew he was on television when he was being interviewed by Shannon Sharp on Fox Sports One.

I don't think we have gotten exact confirmation of that fact yet. I mean, Julio could hear Skip Bayliss talking in the background. So that's probably a good sign. You know, it's kind of unlikely that Shannon Sharp is calling you and also Skip Baylis is just standing next to him wherever he is off the air. It's probably a good sign. But there was this whole thing about, oh, wait a second, did some law or rule get violated there? As long as we can establish as Julio Jones knew he was on the air, I am in favor of, of just doing this all the time.

I think Shannon Sharps should just look at his contact list and just call current players and just interview them live. I think he will like 100% of the time get interesting stuff in that kind of setting. Yeah, I'm not sure about the journalistic integrity angle over the morality of this. Watching it, I did get the impression. All right, I was possessed of some level of anxiety, one because of the way that Julio Jones started the call. I forgot exactly what he said, but he was basically just like, hey, I'm, you.

running an air. He said something so inconsequential and intimate at the same time that it seemed like it would only be said in a one-on-one phone call. And then Skip, Skip's reaction was, Skip looked very, like, oddly uncomfortable with the proceedings too. And maybe he's just not used to, you know, cell phones

being whipped out on the show, but he's, he seemed uncomfortable with it. But, but yeah, I mean, yeah, call people, get scoops. I think that's, that is a better version of that show than what would have existed without it, for sure. And the fact we're talking about it. If it was planned, it must have been exactly what they're going for.

Our pal Chris Finini sent along this headline from the New York Times, Risk of nuclear war over Taiwan in 1958 said to be greater than publicly known. Subhead, the famed source of the Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg has made another unauthorized disclosure and wants to be prosecuted for it. Chris Finini's comment is, the old guy still got it. all I had in that one. From Jody Canada, talks about the comments from Tua Tua Tua Tua,

Tua is the starting quarterback of the Miami Dolphins. He came out this week and said that last year he was not comfortable calling plays. Jody asks, with quarterback Tua being the latest example, sports radio starts a segment with an obligatory, I want players to be honest, but, he criticizes what Tua said.

Does sports media really want people to be honest, or do they want to make fun of their honesty when they are? Is there any way to fix this paradox? Oh, I'm reminded of, I'm reminded of, I'm reminded of Sam Darnold saying on when he was miced up. Was it a Monday night football game where he said he was seeing ghosts? Yes. Totally different situation, obviously.

But a statement, like an honest statement that just makes people, and an understandable statement, the statement that people, the people on the radio have probably said 100 times. Sam Darnold looks like he's saying. ghosts out there, there too, it doesn't look like he's comfortable calling plays, but when you get the confirmation

of it, part of me wonders if it's, if it's because to it was just using a sort of terminology that everybody can understand too well, you know, like you would be expecting to kind of talk

around the issue or to use a sort of like more inside baseball, highfalutin way of saying this exact same thing. But it was just sort of like, oh God, all of our worst fears have been confirmed. So now we have to,

now we have to live up to all the, all the talk. that we had about him on the radio. I don't know what it is. We don't want him to be that. I understand the impulse of not wanting him to be that honest, but at the same time,

it sure does help with, like, diagnosing the problem and fixing it, right? If you have information in that straight, that, when it's that straightforward. Diagnosing the problem and also just having something real

to talk about on the radio. Yeah. Rather than, hey, let's speculate what could be wrong with two in the dolphins. He's telling us. That's happy.

And I, and I think it's funny. I just think whenever, whenever athletes, just for even 10 seconds stop saying the cliches we're used to them saying and just talk in a direct manner as you point out there everybody loses their mind. It's like what?

Why is he telling us? He was, well, he's telling you because he's telling you the truth. It's weird. And again, I always think, again,

you don't have, if you want to, you know, say, hey, he should do, he should work or the coaching shafts should work to make him more comfortable.

This cannot, you know, if he's going to be the starting quarterback and an NFL team, he needs to be comfortable. doing what he's doing, go off, have your take. But yeah, of course, we want to reward players for being honest. Like, reward the act of honesty. You don't have to agree with what they said, but don't punish them for being honest.

I have never, ever gotten that. I think you're right about the cliches that we're used to hearing. I think it just makes everybody incredibly uncomfortable to hear a real thing. That's so stupid. No, I know, but I think that, I mean, it's a normal reaction when you hear a thing you're not used to hearing to feel uncomfortable. But then part of, but then you put that sort of discomfort into the, you know, world of sports talk radio. And you immediately have to process that as I'm angry right now. You remember when Tony Romo blew that game when he was still Dallas Cowboys quarterback and he said afterwards,

this isn't the worst thing that's going to ever happen in my life. He said it in the post game interview and he got absolutely crushed. And it was funny because I went, that's Tony Romo. He just gave it to you, folks. Yeah. That's not only the difference in talent, but Tony Romo is not Tom Brady. He is not Peyton Manning. He just explained to you part of the reason why that is.

He just explained it to you. If you just listen, he's telling you. He's telling you he's giving it up, but you want, oh, well, how can you say that after a game and we're all sad right now? Funny how that works. This is from Dannosaur. I am driving from Kentucky to Gulf Shores, Elleson. Alabama next week. And apparently there's a Buckees en route. Is it worth a stop? Does it count if it's not in Texas? The whole Buckees thing has kind of been worn out at this point, even nationally. But absolutely,

you got to stop with the Buckees. Have you actually done the Buckees since you have been back in Texas in a while? By the closest I've come was a Buckees T-shirt you were wearing one time. It's the Walmart of gas stations if people don't know. Yeah. And I would love to go. I would love to check it out. I mean, listen, I've been a New Jersey resident for less than a year. I'm still in all of the Wawa every time I enter one. And the Wawa to me is what Bucky says to you. It's just this thing that exists in legend. Yeah. And I'm like other people know about Wawa, but I've never been in Wawa. The coolest part about Buckees for people like you and I who have very, very pedestrian concerns about food is when you walk into the candy section, there's a whole wall that just says gummies. Like a big label. And I think there's a big label. And I think there's a very,

another one that says sours, which is kind of a very old-fashioned candy term. And that's all the wall is, is variations on this thing. Wow. So it's not like you can get, oh, you can pick up some gummy worms and some gummy peaches and some gummy bears. No, no, no, we got a wall, baby. It is awesome. This is from JW. Any thoughts, Brian, on Huntington Beach making national news?

Did you know this happened in the moment? Have you been following these stories from Huntington Beach over the class week? Are you asking me? I'm asking you, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, no, listen, I've seen, I saw someone ask you that question online, and I've been following only very vaguely, but would you fill me in? Yeah, well, first of all, there was the dead whale story, which was basically there was a dead whale in San Diego, and they took the dead whale and put it out into the ocean, and then the rotting whale washed up in Huntington Beach. So this was not like a whale beaching itself and dying.

this was a whale that had already died and came back from the dead to die more on the beach here. And when I saw the story, David, the first thing I did is turn to my son and say, well, we got to go today. We have got to see the dead whale. And I was not even dissuaded by the L.A. Time story, which said that basically people were like us were very interested and they would go up to the whale and they would just throw up immediately because the smell was so gross. And let me tell you something. We went down there. We sat down wind from the whale. We watched as giant construction trucks just pulled the whale apart. I mean, picking up the whale and literally yanking it apart so it could go to the dump. And by the way, if you've ever thought about an eight-year-old's bingo card, dead whale and construction trucks,

the only thing that could have finished it off, if a ray from Star Wars showed up and started cutting up the whale with her lightsaber, I mean, it was actually his dream. It was incredible. And we actually, it's funny, we sat there on the beach and we actually got bored of the dead whale after a while. I don't care about that anymore. Just start playing in the sand. It was kind of fun. The second thing was that there was a TikTok birthday party in Huntington Beach.

The invitation went like this. This is according to Taylor Lorenz in the Times. Slide true this Saturday, we finna turn up. I hope that someone clips that for posterity. Anyway, there was a TikTok birthday party. Thousands of people showed up at least around or such. say around a thousand. This was a week ago Friday. My wife and I are asleep and we get, you know, one of those really weird sounds on your phone in the middle of the night. Oh, yeah.

Like the Amber Alert. Yeah, you're like, didn't I turn that off? And in fact, it said, please clear out Huntington Beach right now. Like, it's all over. And we're going, what happened? But I got to say TikTok birthday party was actually the best outcome of that. Yeah. Given the various protests that have been in town over the last few months. All right. last one for Matthew Moore. Keeping it light here. What's a food you had growing up in Texas that you miss dearly now that you've left? Oh, man. There's one right answer to this, and it's not barbecue. I'm trying to think what your one right answer would be. Something we perhaps sought out in New York City. Well, I mean, Tex-Mex is, I mean, is the toughest one. I mean,

there's a lot of chain restaurants that do that okay now, but it's just the fact that everywhere that you went. I remember one of, I believe one of your former co-workers once took their first trip to Texas when we were adults relatively speaking in New York and said, and you said, what was your favorite part?

They said, every time you sat down at a restaurant, they gave you a giant water. You get like a 32-ounce plastic cup of ice water without ever having to like go through the motions of like, do you want sparkling or still or whatever? You just get, so there is a certain just like baseline comfort level of

You sit down on a table. You get a giant beer or Coke or whatever you want. You get better than passable chips and salsa. You don't have to ask if their margaritas come frozen. Those things are just available. You know, the frozen margaritas, the good chips, all that kind of stuff. And it's always going to scratch the itch. For years in Texas, we were eating, like, Mexican food, not Tex-Mex, like, Mexican food,

trying to find places that had just a piece of that. itch or that scratch, I guess, right? You're talking about it. In New York, in New York, we were doing it. Yeah. You said in Texas. Yeah, you'd have the place with, the place with, you know, the passable chips or the, you know, they would pour cheese on your burrito. They didn't call it casso or whatever, you know. But yeah, I mean, to have, the really good Tex-Max experience is hard. I mean, there's also, it's not as, I don't know if it's as hard to get, but I, but there was a lot of, I consumed a lot of chicken fried steak when I was in Texas, especially in my early years there.

And I kind of missed the experience going to a restaurant and just getting the giant chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes engraving. You can get that at a lot of kind of comfort food places. But, man, I think about that a lot. I think the giant water is actually the winner. And I'm hoping Erica on behalf of both of us goes and grabs a giant water or a giant iced tea tonight. All right, 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 press box pod where they're always gratefully received an item from the hill, David, which just serves them up for this feature. Singer Gwen Stefani defends herself against long time

cultural appropriation claims. Quote, all these rules are just dividing us more. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write don't speak. Thanks to Ken Barry. and gruns. We also had a James Bond

overworked Twitter joke of the week, David, because we had a big business deal announced. MGM, which is the home due James Bond, has been bought by Amazon for $8.5 billion. So Amazon bought James Bond. Now, you may

remember this quote from Goldfinger. No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die. With the Amazon purchase, it was an overwork Twitter joke to write, no, Mr. Bond, I expect you to prime. Expect you to prime. Thanks to Ben Mullen,

Matthew Zitland, and many others who will be thanked on Twitter. If you remembered a favorite scene from Bond and applied it to our current reality, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, in the notebook dump, we're going to do a new feature here on the press box. We should, we're still workshopping the title, but how about something like the press box post game interview? I like that.

Yeah. Instead of a quarterback being interviewed on the football field after a game, let's go down to Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker. We're going to interview a writer after they polish off a really cool piece. And just like the sideline reporters, I think we should have some questions we should ask every single time. Our first press box postgame interview is with Gideon Lewis Krause of the New Yorker who wrote a fantastic piece about UFOs.

Go read it and then come back and listen to this. Here's Gideon Lewis Krauss. All right, Gideon, let's start here. Whose idea was this piece? Yours or the New Yorkers? I would say it was kind of collaboration. They were the ones who had first mentioned it last spring when I had first come onto the job.

It was one of the first things my editor said. She said, oh, you know, we have a couple pieces, piece ideas that we've sort of earmarked for you since we knew where you were coming. And a bunch of, I mean, they were all good ideas, but most of them were like, you know, five paragraphs long with 100 links, like really elaborately described proposals. And then one of them was basically like, I wonder if it's time for us to put somebody on

the question of what the hell is going on with UFOs. And I was like, I would consider that one, but it was the beginning of the pandemic and didn't seem like the right time. I mean, I certainly, it wasn't a moment where I was able to read any kind of interesting counter programming. So I thought, like, I am, let's flag this. I'm interested in it. Maybe we should come back to it a little later. So then in the fall, I had actually kind of forgotten about it. My editor came back and was like, what did you think of that UFO idea? And I said to her, let me look into it and let me try to figure out if there's any way to do it seriously. That I don't want to do like a fish in a barrel thing about this. I don't want to just like go to a UFO convention and make fun

of people because there have been plenty of pieces like that. And I also said, you know, the Times and some other outlets have done really a lot of good reporting on this. So, and there are people out there who have cultivated these sources for a long time, you know, I don't really want to do it unless I feel like I can really add something to that story. So the first part, so I said, let me go try to figure out if I think there's really anything there. So I, you know, Google like, what are the serious books about UFOs and came across this book by Leslie Kane from 2010? And I read the book and it's funny. I had sent it to a close friend of mine.

I was like, wow, this book, like I didn't know any of this stuff. and his reaction was like, this book is kind of boring. And I said to him, like, I didn't think it was boring at all, but I actually thought that was one of the virtues of the book because it's not sensationalistic at all. You know, there's no abduction talk in it,

no probe talks, nothing like that. So I saw that Kane lived in New York, and I wrote to her and I said, you know, do you think we could talk about this? And we went and took a walk, this was probably in November. And she started to tell me about her long history of being involved in this.

And I thought, like, oh, you know, there's really something here. And, you know, at first I was kind of hesitant, like, you don't really want a character in your piece to be another journalist. I mean, of course, there are plenty of good precedents for doing that. But the more I talk to her, you know, she sees herself as an investigative journalist on the one hand, but she also really sees herself as a UFO advocate. And she had spent 20 years trying to get this taken seriously. And to me, like, the most interesting part of all this was she had been spending all

of this time in Washington, these meetings with John Podesta, briefings at CAF, meetings with senators, and just desperately trying to get the government to take this seriously. And then she finds out 10 years later that at the very time that she was out there trying to do all of this, there was, in fact, a secret Pentagon program, which then she was the one to break later. And then in my own reporting over time, I found that the story was even a little bit more complicated than that, because it wasn't just that she revealed the existence of this really formidable Pentagon program that had been going on behind the scenes,

but that in fact, program she had revealed and kind of depending on who you talk to, and I obviously don't want to be too pejorative here, but was like maybe a little bit of a clown show, and that, you know, it was $22 million, which kind of sounds like a lot of money like us, but of course in the defense budget, that's just a rounding error.

And it was just this group of people who had all been working on paranormal things in one capacity or another for 30 years and that it was basically then the revelation of this program which was not fundamentally all that serious of a program that then kind of prompted the government to then create a serious program. So I thought, oh, and then there's a way

to kind of go past the time story at the end of this. So that was when I started to see the shape of it. Well, that was a lot of information there. Yeah. Sorry to go on for someone. No, no, no, but actually that leads to my next question. At what point in the writing process or the researching process did you realize how expansive a piece this was going to be? Because this is a long piece even by New Yorker magazine standards, right? I mean, this is a very, very...

Well, no, no, no. How far back are we going here? No, no, no. There are certainly pieces this long, but this is, I would say, longer than the average feature story in the New Yorker, right? So, I mean, at what point did you realize how big of a piece this was going to be? I always write long in a first draft. And I had said to my editor, like, and this was someone I, actually, my editor was a close friend of mine, although I had written for her at a different venue, but years ago. And I said, so this was kind of a new relationship.

And I said, you know, are you going to be mad if I give you 20,000 words? And she was like, what if we said 16,000 words? So, like, my first draft was about 16,000 words. And with the idea that it was never going to be anywhere that close to that long. But then as we kept working on it, it just, you know, there was just so much interesting kind of low-hanging fruit in the form of just the history of all this stuff, which I certainly didn't know about it. I thought most people didn't know about, you know, that this was something that was on the cover of magazines and newspapers for 20 years, more than 20 years. There was kind of this forgotten history of America's, like, legitimate fascination with the phenomenon. on. And then we were just kind of crossing our fingers and hoping that like we would get it

through at length. And then we were pretty lucky. And I mean, I think part of it just has to do with the fact that at every, I mean, you know, the reason the reason I ultimately agreed to write it was because I thought like I would really want to read that, which is usually, you know, why I write things. And I thought like, I think, you know, in the wake of last year, there's a lot of appetite for kind of weird counter programming stuff. Although then this ended up being somewhat less counterprogramming than we expected given how much news story it became. All right. So you mentioned making

another journalist essentially the main character of this article, Gideon. Tell us a little bit. The piece is about a lot of things, but I think one of interesting kind of sub-story is it about not only how the Pentagon started taking UFOs seriously, but how the media started taking UFOs a little more seriously? How did that

happen? I mean, it's a good question. As I describe in the piece, this was that the media took really seriously until about 1970. And then in January of 1970, when the government closed down their one official UFO investigation, it had done so issuing this report that basically said, there's nothing to see here. And that from that point on, the media felt licensed just to ridicule the phenomenon. So for the most part, media coverage then between 1970 and 2017 was

mostly kind of mocking. So when these, you know, this ex-Penegon figure and some of his colleagues had gone to Leslie Kane and said, you know, very explicitly, you can have these videos that we've managed to secure for public release. Although lots of stuff says that they were classified. I don't believe there's any evidence that these videos were ever classified, actually. They were cleared for public release in a somewhat murky process, but I don't think they were ever classified.

And they said explicitly to her, if you can play something in the Times, you can have these videos. And it's funny, actually, just this morning, there was a long piece in Political Magazine by Brian Bender, who's been covering the stuff also since 2017, in which he says that he was shown the videos at the time, but was not given copies of that, which I don't think has been reported before. So clearly they were fishing around, and their goal was to get it into the Times. And then Leslie went and talked to one of her colleagues that she'd been writing about UFO stuff with. who was a longtime time, veteran who had retired at a certain point, and said he was still freelancing for them. And he then wrote an email to Dean Bequet saying,

oh, we have this story, this explosive story about a secret Pentagon program about UFOs. And of course, the story then was not UFOs are real, which is what most of the UFO people would have wanted and probably actually what Leslie Kane would have wanted too. But the story, of course, was the Pentagon is studying UFOs. Like, that's, you know, a media-worthy story. So when they could do...

So that was certainly the way that the Times in the Washington Post and Politico all ran with this story was secret Pentagon UFO program running from 2007 to 2012 and kind of in a different form beyond that. So there's kind of this feedback loop here where the government had this small program. The media then felt like, oh, the fact that the government had this small program

means that we can really run with this story. And then that encouraged the government to then take it even more seriously, which encouraged the media to take it even more seriously. And that's kind of where we're at right now. Is the government angle sort of incidental? I mean, the way you just described it made it sound sort of like the government angle wasn't quite getting at the, you know, what the sort of the long time adherence to the cause would have wanted to.

but it also sort of feels like a means of getting the story out, right? Not just by the reportage of the facts, but the angle is a little bit more palatable, right? To a mainstream media, whatever, that's not as comfortable with the subject matter. Oh, absolutely. And I mean, I think the UFO people have had to make a lot of different compromises here because for the most part, they also hate the fact that this is treated like a national security issue. They're like, look, it's really clear that these UFOs are non-hostile. So we're only going to provoke them somehow by continuing to treat this like a serious national security issue.

But then the other ones are like, oh, but you know, that's the only way to get the government to pay attention. So if that's the sacrifice we have to make is have them treat it like some kind of unknown airborne threat, then like font. I mean, they're actually, the UFO community, at least some parts of it, seems to have been very flexible in their approach because they understand that they really have to persuade people to get them on board. all that dogmatic about things. They'll, you know, they'll say, they'll grumble about how like, oh, you know, this media treated this as just a Pentagon story and then the Pentagon treats this as a national security issue. But, you know, we should be really happy that anybody's paying attention to this at all. Leslie Kane is an interesting figure because she's got a particular journalistic approach to covering UFOs, which is perhaps unique or somewhat unique.

What did you find that was in the reporting of the piece? What do you mean? Oh, her sense of, I think, taking them not, she's not somebody who's writing a book that says it essentially that she was dissected by, you know, aliens in 1975, right? Or she's taking a very, at most of the time, you have a few exceptions to this, but a fairly hard-nosed, data-driven view of UFOs. Yeah, the phrase that she likes to use, which she's taken over from this political scientist at Ohio State who's really interested in UFOs is militant agnosticism. So she basically says, let's remember that we're talking about UFOs in the strictest possible sense of the term. These are just unidentified things in our airspace. And there's more than enough evidence over the years that at least UFOs in that strict sense are real. Although what she never quite says is that, you know, UFOs in that very strict sense, sure, that might be real, but that's also kind of trivial.

I mean, it doesn't necessarily mean anything that there are things in the sky that people don't recognize. of course there are always going to be things in the sky that we don't recognize. So she plays a little, I mean, her sense was when she came first started doing this in the late 90s and early 2000s was most of these euphologists are kind of nut cases, although she would never say that. You know, this was a time when they were, this is kind of the opening of the piece. This is a time when they were talking about capital D disclosure, which was this kind of like almost religious millenarian sense of the government coming out. revealing everything they knew. And there was lots of talk about abductions and alien bodies and all this stuff. And she said, like, look, if we want people to take this seriously, we have to stop talking

about alien corpses and probes. We really have to just talk about the stuff that we have data for. And so she, for the most part, has, I mean, she's done a lot to shape this coverage in terms of, like, we're just going to talk about military sightings. We're going to talk about, you know, esteemed, like, obviously credible figures who have been in positions of military civilian power.

But then of course it's a little bit of a shell game because as much as she says, we're just being agnostic about this, we're just talking about stuff we don't recognize. I don't want to say it's this ingenuous. I don't think it's this ingenuous. But she and the people she's talking to all really know what they're talking about,

which is like clearly they believe that these are alien spaceships. of some kind, or interdimensional travelers or time travelers or, you know, whatever they think they are. Those theories have changed over the years. It's also struck me as significant, and I don't know how much there is to say about it, but it also struck me a significant that Keene herself is the one writing for the New York Times at this point, right? That her, like her career arc, well, at least specifically as it pertains to UFOs, maybe in another era, she would not have been the person that would have even been allowed to get that byline, you know?

And I wonder if that's, if that's significant in terms of just the way that we, how accepting as a culture we are of UFOs at this moment in time. I mean, you know, there are certainly people who have been critical of the times for having, you know, commissioned somebody who was so transparently a UFO advocate over the years to do these stories. But I think she was actually very, very careful. I mean, and also her reporting really holds up. I mean, there, nothing, nothing has come out for the most part that undermines what. she's done. And there was kind of this famous correction that they had to issue where Harry Reid said, like, no, I don't believe that there's, you know, crash debris at a military contractor. And then I kind of pushed him out of the phone. And he finally said, yeah, he believes that there's crash debris at Lockheed Martin. I mean, what he technically said was he had heard

these rumors, but these rumors were enough to push him to try to get classified access from the Pentagon. So obviously, he believes this personally and had just tried to walk that back. And the times had let him lock that back. But, you know, like, they didn't, they didn't use any anonymous sources. Everybody was on the record for attribution. They had Helene Cooper, one of their long-time Pentagon correspondence as a kind of babysitter supervisor for the whole thing. So, and, you know, she had told me that there were sources that she wanted to use that they said, look, we do not consider these credible sources. So there was a lot of vetting there. I don't, I don't think they just, like, let her riff on whatever she thought was going on.

Yeah, do you find, I mean, if we, if we say all that is true, do you find that any of these newspapers, you mentioned the Chicago Tribune, ran a very, very highly trafficked article about an encounter at O'Hare Airport, the Times articles do very, very good traffic? Are this the idea, the willingness of these organizations to get onto the UFOB? Do you think that is driven by clicks? Because anything the New York Times does is this New York Times UFOs is going to be hugely popular. I mean, I guess my general feeling is that place, like, there's a kind of this, there's criticism of like, oh, people do things for clicks. But I think it's very rare that anyone is

that cynical, that they just do something for clicks, especially at the times. I don't know, maybe you guys disagree with me. I just don't think people think that. I don't think editors think that way. I don't think anybody at the Times thought, like, oh, if we do a UFO story, we're going to get a lot of traffic out of this. And, you know, there was, even if you look back at the top New York Times stories from 2017, I mean, the original UFO piece is on there, but it's on there at like number 50 or something. I mean, it wasn't like one of their top 10 stories of the year. And they certainly, you know, they could have milked it a lot more if they wanted to. Like, they only did, I don't know, maybe four major stories over four years. It's not like

all of a sudden they were rushing to the UFOB just because there was a lot of traffic there. Well, let me turn it around a little bit. I mean, we could almost say that you could almost imagine a number of media organization should have had a reporter covering this in a hardheaded evidence driven way before, right? If people are interested in it, maybe clicks is the wrong word. That sounds too scummy. But you was like, why haven't, why haven't the media covered this more other than, you know, the random news magazine cover on some new book coming up? I mean, I just don't think that there was enough news, really. Um, uh, I mean, you know, so what, what of the big kind of beats been over the last four years? There was the revelation of this program and the release of these videos.

And then, you know, I don't think that the Times ran a story for another year and a half after that. I think then there was another story in the spring of 2019 where they had, they talked about different sightings off the East Coast and they had other pilots on the record. And then eventually there were stories when the Navy confirmed the authenticity of the videos. There were stories when the Navy publicly, actually, I don't even think the Times ran a story when the Navy publicly said that they, were unidentified. But, you know, it was just a handful of stories over a couple of years. There were other places that did more, but there just wasn't that much in the way of news. I mean, like, these, I had to listen to a lot of UFO podcasts for the stories.

And, like, a lot of these people podcast weekly, and they just don't really have that much to talk about. So they end up in these, like, endless rabbit hole arguments over, like, the most minor pedantic details. Well, speaking of those details, you mentioned the, um, the question. the credibility of the sources that Leslie Keen was working on, I mean, for sources

when she was writing for the New York Times, when you were reporting out this piece, how much, was there a column for less incredible sources that didn't make the cut in the piece? Is there, is there a whole, is there another 16,000 words of stuff that you would have liked

to source a little bit better and put in? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's funny, kind of, in the end, I think the list of sources that I'd sent to the fact checker was like, I don't know, maybe 15 people, but I'd probably talk to 50 people. And, you know, a lot of them seemed kind of, I say in the article, like there are some people

who at the very beginning of our conversation seemed very sober and credible. And they were like, we only want to talk about things. The military is seen and has sensory data for and radar information. And then an hour later, they'd be like, so, you know, what the thing you have to understand is that the aliens have been living in these bases under the ocean for millions of years. And they, like, genetically engineered primates to become humans. and were actually their big experiment,

and that's why they never contact us because they're just monitoring, you know, like people would kind of reveal their actual feelings about this. But then there were a lot of people who did seem genuinely credible, but they said such astonishing things

that just, like, either they said them, like, off the record, or they said them in ways that just, like, totally couldn't be confirmed. I mean, like, one guy told me, one guy who, like, seemed perfectly sane to talk to was, like, Oh, I always really believed in, you know, I always believed in disclosure. I always believed that the government should really come clean about this stuff. And then I was invited to a highly secret meeting at the White House in the 80s or the 90s in which 20 other scientists and I sat around discussing like what are the implications of the government coming clean about what we know about UFOs. And we debated this over a couple of days.

and we decided that actually, like, the potential consequences were too scary and the government was not, in fact, going to come forward with this stuff. And I was like, I mean, if that's true, that's incredible, can you give me any confirmation for the fact that this happened, even like one other person that was there and this source couldn't do it? So, like, sadly, I, you know, I couldn't use any of that stuff. But who knows? You know, that doesn't mean it's not true.

It just meant that I didn't have the confirmation to support it. A couple more postgame questions for you, Gideon. William Volman in one of his books had an acknowledgments section and an anti-acknowledgement section. Here are the people who did not help me in the reporting. Any anti-acknowledgements you'd like to share for people that stiffed you for an interview or didn't help? It's interesting. No. I mean, one thing that I found is that certainly other reporters on the UFOB,

at various places. It's always kind of a touchy thing when you contact another reporter for help with something that you're doing because you never know who's going to feel territorial. One of the things that I found

is that the other reporters that I contacted, I think because they had this sense that they were just like out there on a limb like risking, seeming crazy to talk about this stuff that they were just thrilled

that anybody else would take it seriously. So there's a guy, the guy that I consider like the best contemporary UFO reporter is this guy called Tim McMillan. He's a retired police lieutenant who lives in Germany, who writes for this site called The Debrief. And he's done, I mean, most of it is anonymously sourced and it would be hard to print elsewhere. But I totally trust the guy. I think the guy has like really good

connections and really good sources. And he was incredibly helpful to me. Like, we spent huge amounts of time on the phone in a way that you wouldn't necessarily expect other reporters to always be so helpful. I mean, the people who, the people who appear in every single news story about this, kind of this like small cohort of like Lou Elizondo and Chris Mellon and the like the people who are involved in breaking the, you know, in getting the stuff out of the Pentagon and then who are involved in Tom DeLong's edutainment company. All those, I mean, they, they had a TV show. All those people are kind of like classic autopilot sources where like you're just getting the same thing that they've said 300 million times.

And then they certainly embellish those things because they get bored of hearing themselves say the same things over and over and they have to raise the stakes. So even a lot of things that Lou Elizando said in the 60 Minutes segment are things that seem like embroidered versions of things that he's been saying for a long time

just because he has to keep kind of upping the stakes to try to say something interesting. But I'm not sure he has all that much more to say. I love autopilot sources. It's the new dial-a-quote. Kind of a nice aerial metaphor there, right? just engage quotes, you know, quotes for hungry reporter. One of my favorite parts of the story was that John Podesta, who is a autopilot source

in so many other genres, just kind of came in off the top rope as like totally opened himself up to this incredibly interesting pursuit for this whole thing. I mean, Podesta was amazing because I had, you know, he was so involved with the transition. I first written to him in January. And I was like, I know that you're like, you've, like, you've got a lot of stuff going on right now, but maybe you could talk to me for the story. And he didn't write back to my first email. And then I wrote back to him a couple weeks later. And I was like, look, you know, I know that you're heavily involved in the transition. You have a million things. You're going like fishing with Joe Manchin or whatever. But like, wouldn't

it be fun just to take an hour out of all that serious stuff and talk about UFOs? And then he wrote back to me and was like, yeah, you're right. Let's do this. And then he was great. He loved talking about it. And like, actually had like an incredible memory for details of this stuff. It felt like you could have kept going, even after all that you wrote.

How long, if this was, if you had just a foundation that was funding this piece and they wanted it to be 100,000, where like, how long could you have gone if you had all the time and all the resources in the world? I don't know.

I mean, there's especially over like what this question of, like what ATIP the original Pentagon program actually did and who was actually involved. Like, these are, this is the thing that UFO people have been debating for years. There's so much there. But I think for most readers,

it would be kind of boring to hear about like, you know, what exactly did the Pentagon say about this at one moment? And then they took it back and said something else. Like, it's just kind of tiresome. I mean, I certainly could have kept going. But I think there's a limit. to the like kind of inside baseball that people want to hear about with that stuff. That brings me to my next question.

Book deal or no book deal off this piece? I mean, my agent wants me to take it seriously, but I don't know. I mean, I don't know that I have really that much more to say about it. I have gotten a couple of like, I mean, I've gotten hundreds of emails. Most of them are like inviting me to like somebody's basement in Westchester to look at old slides they found when their dad died or whatever. Or to look at like strange YouTube videos. Most of those I've like, you know, if they're polite, I respond and say thank you.

Although some of them are very strangely hostile. I did get a couple of more mysterious emails from like, you know, can I, what's your signal number? Can I write to you? And like, who knows? You know, if any of those things come through and it's like really worthwhile information, maybe I would keep going with it. But I think I feel pretty satisfied by it at the moment.

Two more for you. What was the rough total of your expense report for this piece? Oh, I mean, like $0. I mean, this was still, when I started, it was like still pretty serious pandemic conditions. Leslie was in New York. And actually, that was one of the reasons that I had wanted to do it in the first place was, like during the pandemic, you're always looking for stories that will have some kind of like interesting scenic quality, even if you can't go report a scene. And so I knew that there would be some built-in set pieces here that would feel scenic and like descriptions of the encounters and stuff like that, even if I couldn't actually go out and report scenes.

So I had to buy a lot of books, but I haven't expensed those books. That'll be on the next expense report. Tag that on a couple months later. I mean, in some ways, I felt like I was saved by the pandemic because under ordinary circumstances, I would have felt like I had to go to some UF.S. convention and to do some of that, like to get some of that scenic furniture. And then I probably would have had to make, like, take some of it a little bit less seriously. But luckily I didn't have to do that. All right. And this is the last one, Gideon. On a scale of one to 10, 10 being I just rewrote John Hershey's Hiroshima. And one being I bought and pulped as many issues of the New Yorker

as possible. So no one would read this piece. How did you feel about this story? Oh, I really like this story. I had a great time. I mean, it was really fun to do. And because, I mean, this is one of the things that, as far as this coming back into public consciousness, people will take, like, the bare minimum of the plausible excuse to speculate about this stuff, just because it's fun to think about. So all you have to do is present people with, like, just enough kind of bare bones plausibility to take it seriously. and everybody's just off to the races with it. So I love thinking about this stuff.

I don't know, David, that sounds like a seven to me. No, no, no. I mean, to give it a numerical value, I really like this story, actually. Like, I had a really good time with it. Well, you got to let you go, but I have a follow-up. I can't resist. Well, two things, and I'm sorry,

they don't really even go together. One, just going off of what you just said, how big of a deal was tone in your presentation of this? because it did feel like you, it felt deliberately measured at times, and I mean that as a compliment. Like you were really, you were trying to, I think it felt like you realized that you had to be very straight about some of the more,

some of the more shocking stories that were being told. And then second of all, what was the craziest story? Of all of the actual UFO encounters that you wrote about, which one is the most compelling to you? Okay, so, I mean, the tone question is easy. This was a hundred percent tone. But in a sense, I mean, like this only worked with like the kind of reserved restrained tone that you're, that you identified. I mean, because it's a classic case where the weirder the material is, the more restrained you kind of have to be. This wouldn't have worked with like a kind of gonzo approach. I mean, a gonzo approach would have been completely superfluous, but also that like, like, the content is just so bananas that it had to be in, you know, kind of an austere vessel for that to work. As far as the, you know, skeptics love to ask the UFO people like,

okay, what's your best case? What's your best case? Because if I can undermine your best case and I don't have to take the whole thing seriously. And, you know, every case has problems. There's no case that's like completely simple. You know, there's always a way to undermine it. Like there was this famous setting that I didn't talk about over Anchorage, Alaska in 1987, where a Japan Airlines pilot saw a UFO that he said was the size of an aircraft carrier.

And this, you know, this comes up a lot as like one of the best cases. But then when you dig into it, like, it turns out that that pilot had repeated multiple UFO settings before. And the UFO people are like, yeah, see, he's, you know, he has like, he's good at spotting them. So we should trust them. Whereas other people are like, no, maybe if he's a serial report. then like that undermines him. So, I mean, certainly there's been a lot of attention

to this Nimitz case, the 2004 Tick-TEC-Tech encounter off of the coast of San Diego, because the pilots are incredibly, you know, are totally credible witnesses. And there's multiple confirmation on different kinds of, you know, advanced spy radar.

But then what I found in general, when you look back at the more historic cases is that it's the, and this was kind of an issue in writing the piece is that it's the ones that are a little bit less sensationalistically weird that are more credible. I mean, like, the really, really weird ones, like, you know, a landing at a school in Zimbabwe in 1994 where an alien got out of a ship and like telepathically told all of these children in Rural Zimbabwe that we should dismantle our nuclear weapons. Like, there's, you know, it's harder to get broad confirmation for that kind of thing. Whereas the ones that seem to kind of hold up

the best are the ones that are only slightly eerie rather than just fantastically eerie. So this citing I read about over the English Channel in 2007 where two pilots saw it from different directions, it was on radar. At least three of the passengers, probably more the passengers saw it, but it was just a glowing disc in the, there are two glowing disks in the sky. There was nothing all that sensational about it, but even a skeptic wrote a 200-page report there and said, like, I can't come up with a good plausible explanation for this.

So you can read Gideon Lewis Krause's story, the UFO papers, web headline, how the Pentagon started taking UFOs seriously. I always love the difference between the New Yorker web headline and the actual New Yorker headline in the New Yorker. Gideon, thanks so much for coming on the press box. Hey, thank you guys so much for having me. This has been great. All right, it's time for

David Shoemaker guesses the strain pun headline. Yeah. Monday's headline about would-be Oregon secessionists was their own private Idaho. Absolutely too easy. Today's headline comes from Corbyn Dubois, or Du Bois, longtime contributor. Someday I will learn how to pronounce Corbyn's last name. It's from the New York Daily News, David. You saw that the New York Knicks, after losing Game 1 in Madison Square Garden,

came back and beat the Hawks in game two. big deal here big deal on the NBA big deal at the ringer big deal for Sean Fennessee it was awesome all right they won game two at the garden tying the series what was the New York Daily News's strained pun headline

um notice I said garden more than once yeah I know I know um garden a live garden uh garden

garden Garden of Even. Garden of Even. Garden of Even. Garden of Even. Oh, my gosh. That's terrible. I love it. He is David Chewbaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. We are off Monday for Memorial Day. But back next week when more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. Later, Brian.