The Press Box - Listener Mailbag on 'Gutfeld!,' Mike Pence’s Book Deal, Paul Pierce, and More

Episode Date: April 8, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker are opening up the mailbag and answering your Listener Mail! They address Fox New’s new comedy show ‘Gutfeld!’ (3:10), Mike Pence’s seven-figure book deal with Simon & Schuster (20:00), and ESPN’s decision to fire Paul Pierce (37:15), before they rank Texas’s literary novels (53:10). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week, and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On TV concierge, the ringer staff delivers a guide to the vast streaming landscape by discussing one show or movie per day, including premieres, the latest surprise Netflix hits, periodic check-ins on favorite TV shows, new movies available for streaming, and the host's favorite shows to watch right away. Check out TV concierge exclusively on Spotify. David! A lot of people have been guest hosting Jeopardy in its post-Alex Trebek phase. One of those people was Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Robbins. What I want to know is what do you think of Aaron Rogers and who else should get a crack at hosting Jeopardy? Aaron Rogers is just amazing. I mean, I knew that he had a sort of effortless charm from various like video podcasts and podcast appearances he's made. You know, his commercial work was good, but it's kind of hard to, you can't necessarily extrapolate out from that.

I don't know if it's a media training or is there something in the water. but man, NFL quarterbacks just keep, the best quarterbacks just happen just are very good at this sort of thing. But specifically to this, Aaron Rogers didn't have to be good at this. I mean, he could have been totally fine at this and just passable at this

and everyone would have like just eaten it up. He's very good at hosting Jeopardy. He's really, really good at it. And of all of the hosts, I think what you realize is, of all these guest hosts, we all say we love Jeopardy, but we really loved Alex Trebek.

Like you need, Without the sort of arch presentation, it really loses something. And Aaron doesn't have the exact same presentation by any means as Alex Trebek, but he has a little bit of magnetism that's sort of separate from the show itself. And I think that's really important to the format. I just answered that question way too earnestly, I think. What about LeVar Burton for Jeopardy host? What do we think of that movement?

I like Levar Burton. Again, I think he would be a very passable host for the show. If the point was just continuing the show, it's sort of like the Meredith Rivera takes on the, Meredith Rivera takes over a millionaire in like the afternoon edition or whatever. He would be fine in that role. But I just think you need something that's just kind of, you know, reminds people that the show is on.

Can I read you the lead of the New York Post item about Lavar Burton potentially hosting Jeopardy? Oh, God, please. Take a look. He could get booked. written for us is it not coming up on today's show we answer a big old bag of listener mail including questions about Greg Gutfeld's new Fox show Mike Pence's book deal and Paul Pierce's ejection from ESPN all that more on the press box

part of the ringer podcast network hello media consumers Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here David if it's Thursday that means it's time for a little listener mail we're going to get our timing down one of these weeks. Topic number one is Greg Gutfeld. Gutfeld, of course, is a veteran of the Five and Red Eye on Fox News. He has a new comedy show called Gutfeld, exclamation point.

And the Gutfeld logo is a numerous people that pointed out, looks exactly like Jim Davis's Garfield logo. A first very elemental question. Do you think Greg Gutfeld is, money. Oh, man. We're going to get in this real definitional conversation here. I think, I think Greg Gutfeld is humorous. I think that, I think that, I think that his demeanor can lend itself to humor and hilarious. Like if, like he, he would be a fun slash funny guy to have a drink with or his personality would.

But, you know, when you get down to brass tacks, and I think his show is pretty good evidence of it, he's not like just a natural comic. He's less funny guy than sarcastic guy. Right. And to be a good sarcastic guy, you kind of have to have good material. Yeah, where Dennis Miller ended up is where Greg Gutfeld started. you're not making jokes per se you're just kind of raising an eyebrow at things yeah joe biden pretty old huh look at him too old to be president it's not a joke but you're right it's it's humor adjacent

but you are not carrying the rock humor wise and i think that's actually the first and biggest problem of Gutfeld is casting sarcastic guy as a guy who can do a monologue. You and I do not start the press box every week with a monologue. And there's a reason for that. What we do, we just don't hit record until it's... That's right. We don't share it with the world. The reason we don't is because that monologue would not be funny.

No. And it's not just sarcastic guy because the sarcasm is a big part of the schick. but as you watch the show, it's also sort of inside joke guy, right? It's like the sort of like, is like the accumulation of a million, like, bad Twitter joke seems to just like be what passes for humor.

And I don't mean that as a total slight, but it's like, like, it really is just like, like bad tweets, you know? You can get the likes on tweets without actually having to be able to deliver a punchline. But like nobody cares. Like, no one is going to laugh at Al Gore rides in a private plane. One of my favorite points of reference for Republicans,

despite the fact that like someone might, that might go over well on Twitter, or like despite the fact that everyone that you know makes snide comments about that every now and then. It's not, it has to be, there has to, it has to be fresh. And it has to actually be funny. It can't just be, this is a thing that we all kind of make fun of off camera. And it has to be different and better.

As offensive as Donald Trump was, when he stood in front of a crowd and rifled off all the familiar, Republican, conservative subjects and sort of, you know, targets. He knew he had to have a joke about them. He knew he couldn't just say Al Gore Private Plain, ha ha. He knew he had to make a joke. Often it was a terribly offensive joke that, you know,

just should have never been made by anyone. But he knew he had to say something. You couldn't just name check it. And Alex Shepard in his review of the show for the New Republic, which I'll reference a few times here, points out that Gutfeld is kind of doing a quote-unquote comedy version of what Fox News is already saying. Right. So Sean Hannity says the thing.

Laura Ingram says a thing. And then Greg Gutfeld just says a slightly jokier version of the thing. For example, here is a bit from what I believe was his first monologue in episode one of Gutfeld. All right. Here we are again, a brand new show and a brand new Greg. I'm as giddy as Kamala Harris, explaining. kids and cages. What?

First of all, you mispronounce the name of the vice president of the United States. On your first show. And apparently your first joke. And number two, explaining kids in cages. What does that mean? Was that written on the teleprompter? Explaining them? What?

And as you say, that's not a joke. That's just something people say on Fox News. Yeah. There's not a punchline there of any sort. No, I mean, certainly is there. I would love to know what the writer's room situation is for this, because whoever is working there has done them a real disservice. I mean, I will, I mean, probably it has something to do with, you know,

and all trickles up to the top in that case, too. But, I mean, part of what, you know, comedy writers' room should do is just, suggest 100 jokes for everyone that makes it on the air. Watching the Greg Gutfeld show, you're very much under the impression that just the first thing that occurred to anybody became the final joke. Yes, yes. Here's another one.

He showed a picture of the Easter Bunny costumed character at the White House. And then he says, well, that's where Adam Schiff's been. What? I know Adam Schiff is like, again, a popular target on Fox News. I don't know why that's funny. Has that just been missing? I don't know. I don't know.

We don't watch enough Fox News to know, obviously. We've talked about before how liberals wasted a huge amount of time and capital trying to clone Rush Limbaugh. I'm so glad you brought this up. Yes, go on. Conservatives have wasted even more time and capital trying to clone John Stewart and his daily show. they want so bad to have a daily show just like liberals wanted to have this obnoxious take no prisoners radio host who was just doing his thing all day they want to have their own daily show it's not working no it's not working at all so maybe we'll just

not do a daily show well i mean it's if this is that if that's the attempt here it's just really bad i mean but i think you know obviously there's an element to which Gutfeld is a, you know, a star on the network. There's probably a pretty, I mean, in so much as one can be. He kind of has his own lane there. There's probably not a lot of downside on doing this. But it's not, it's just not the daily show. It's not even like, I mean, it's much closer to a, it's not even a Tonight Show.

It's like Fernwood Tonight. It's like a bad parody of a, of a, I mean, it's, Yeah, taking as a parody, it's kind of funny. No, I know, Fernwood tonight was brilliant. But it's like it feels like it is exclusively referential, right? Like it's like the monologue only exists to reference other, like reference the form of the monologue. It is not this heady. But it's like it seems like it's an accidental commentary and almost nothing else.

Yeah, it shouldn't be a monologue. If you're going to try to use Greg Gutfeld in this. format. Should it just be a panel show? Yeah. Where he's kind of the cocky, mildly funny leader of the panel. Yeah, where you can ask a straight question with the smirk on your face or then kind of hit the walk off at the end, but you don't actually need a live audience responding, right? I mean, he kind of, he'll just, if you watch the five, or watch, sorry, watch Red Eye, you know, which was sort of where his comedy chops sort of came to the state they are now. Like, he would often get the last word going into commercial and there was just like very rarely a joke there but it was

delivered as if he was telling a joke much like what we're seeing on gutfeld right i mean it was the affect of telling a joke and you know maybe to a room full of people that are desperate to find their own john stewart that's what you think you need you know it's more like you need the form and not the substance certainly not a lot of other people that form uh hanging out in the fox news building i'm sure so you know i i guess i can see a little bit of the logic but it's just i don't really i don't know how you could do something this kind of interesting and seemingly put so little resource into it. I think what you said just a second ago is what's so jarring when we see these clips on Twitter is that it has the grammar of a joke. Like it has the lead up. It has item. Joe Biden did this.

This thing happened. But then the punchline is not really a punchline. Sometimes it's not funny. Sometimes it's just not a punchline. So it's like people that have watched tons of television and can't replicate kind of the sounds they hear and the rhythms they hear, but can't replicate what happens on television. Though on that note, I would like to say something mildly in defense of Greg Gutfeld.

Oh, okay. Network late night shows are also not funny. Okay. They are less not funny than Greg Gutfeld. But they are also not funny. And if you watch Colbert and those shows and have watched them over the last couple of years, there's a lot of Orange Man bad humor that is at least structurally similar to Greg Gutfeld, Joe Biden old humor. Yeah. I think that the real problem besides, I mean, we said before, is that there's this expectation that anyone watching the show is like so ingrained in conservative Twitter or whatever else that you like get these jokes that literally nobody else is.

even aware or subjects being discussed, right? So at least when you're making Orange Man bad jokes that's like part of the national conversation, even if you disagree with it. And the other network late night shows, just to go back to what you're saying about Rush Limbaugh, you know, I think when we talk about Rush Limbaugh, I said that the error was trying to, was assuming there were all these liberal, there was this huge liberal audience for talk radio, for political talk radio, when in fact those liberals were like they were listening to Howard Stern, right? The liberal audience for radio already had other radio shows they were listening to. They didn't, they weren't desperate.

There weren't these people desperately waiting for that. And I think that in so much as there are people who are out, there's a big audience out there desperately wanting a conservative late night show. I mean, they're probably already watching Jimmy Fallon, right? I mean, it's like they're like, in some sense, the political lines have already been drawn in, in, uh, network late night, right? Like Colbert is going to kind of be more on the liberal, side and Kimmel too. Huh? And Kimmel too. Yeah, yeah. Right. One sort of a satirist and one at times

very poignant, poignantly for liberal causes. But and Kimmel sort of, I mean, sorry, and Jimmy found sort of, you know, the other option. I think there's people watching him. But I mean, that said, I guess the, I mean, the ratings weren't bad for our friend Greg. They were not bad. According to the rap, he got an average. of 1.6 million total viewers, which doubled CNN's 11 p.m. Eastern total viewership, which proves something you and I have said over and over again about Fox News, and it's not our unique insight. It doesn't matter who's on Fox News. Yeah. Fox News is like the Patriots, or at least the Patriots until last season. You just replace the person and they go to the Super Bowl.

Yeah. You know who else was number one on Fox News? Greta Van Sustrin. Yeah. And Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly and all these other people that are gone. And they're still number one. Because it doesn't matter who you put in those slots. It's sort of, I mean, Greg Gutfeld is basically another way of looking at this.

He's basically like the my pillow of late night shows, right? I mean, he's not as good as a real late night show. But for someone who desperately wants to believe in this late night show, they can find cause to believe it. I mean, they will tell you that it's funny or it's just as good, whatever else. But also, there's the replacement level in that aspect of the whole thing, right? Those My Pillow commercials are like the only things that run on Fox because there's nothing else there. It's just like if there is a gap in the commercial order, it's just filler from Mike Lendell pops up on the screen. And that's, you know, the same way.

I mean, it's in some sense everything is on Fox, but particularly this is just sort of like replacement level content, you know? Which a lot of Fox is. That's what I'm saying. The whole thing. It's just like it could be, like, I'm not sure that, I mean. It just needs, what's important is that it's conservative. Yeah. What's important is not that it's good.

It's that it's a Fox News show that is conservative and outlook. Yeah. And that will rate. Well, how much rather, I mean, wouldn't it be better? It would have been way more entertaining if they had someone who wasn't an obvious choice for this, do the late night show? Like, wouldn't you just love, like, like, Britt Hume with a whiskey doing like the Fox News Tonight show? that I'd watch. Absolutely.

But even if it was someone who was just deeply like really interested in doing a good job, right? If it was like Megan Kelly doing the late night show or something. Like it could potentially be a lot just significantly better. It just seems like such a train wreck. But I guess the point is it doesn't matter. So you think Brigham would come out and he would be not trying to do, you know, I don't know, Jimmy Kimmel or Bill Barr, but he'd come out trying to do Steve Allen or Tom Snyder?

Exactly. grab a color grab a color teeny and watch the pictures as they go flying through the air they should put us in charge that'd be fantastic the Stephen Roderick had a good tweet because they showed the lineup of the first episode

of Gutfeld and it was Eric Trump Fox personalities Tyrus and Cat Tymph and and off the top rope Walter Kern Oh my God

Roderick tweets Every generation gets the Algonquin roundtable they deserve. Oh my gosh. Also, I would like to take issue with one line in Alex Shepard's New Republic Review. He called this undoubtedly the worst late night comedy show in television history. I don't know. I don't know.

Did you ever see The Magic Hour with Magic Johnson? Yeah. This is when we start rifling through all the failed late night shows of our youths and even our young adulthoods. Remember when Alan Thick had the late at late? night show where he like played guitar in the commercials yeah i mean that listen pat say jack oh yeah he went against johnny i mean i don't know the lesson with late night shows is that one it's really easy to hand them out because there's an endless as there's more and more channels uh there's a lot of open slots at 11 p.m right um but it's really hard to pull off you know it's like

it's probably it's a lot easier to get a late night show based on some concept of celebrity than it is to do a lot of other things but it's not for everybody. It's a really high degree of difficulty. If your device, whatever device you have, your phone, your television could only play one show

for the rest of your life and it was Gutfeld or Watersworld, which would you have it play? Oh, that's so hard. I guess Gutfeld just on the, you know, just because there's going to be some guests. It's daily.

More variance, I guess, not with the format, but you know, you get to hear some different voices. I don't know. It's just too hard. It's daily instead of weekly. Yeah. So at least you get more content than you would from Watersworld. And listen, I do believe that once,

if all you had to watch this Fox News, you'd probably, you'd probably by 11 o'clock PM on any given. I think that Greg Gutfeld is a pretty funny guy. Yeah, maybe so. thanks to listeners Andrew Graning and Zach Brooks for those questions. Ross Keith asked us, do you see CNN or MSNBC attempting to put some type of comedy show late night like Fox News has done with Gutfeld?

Yeah, it was called Countdown with Keith Olberman. And it was funny. Yeah. It rocked. It should still be on the air. David, we got another edition of Mike Pence watch because we have some actual news this time. the former vice president has signed a deal to write two books for Simon and Schuster.

Simon is paying Pence between three and four million dollars according to CNN's Brian Stelter. What do you make of the Pence book deal? Oh, man. Well, I mean, obviously, there's some logic behind signing, you know, if you're signing up Stephen King, because if Stephen King's a free agent, you're signing him up, sure, sign me as many books as possible. but for the most part in publishing two book deals come in two varieties. One is like the first time writer, the first time novelist who you're kind of just bidding on as a prospect and the first book will be a collection of short stories that never sells,

I mean, 99 times out of 100. And you're just really bidding on the concept of the future novel that who knows what it'll ever be. Or it's the balancing the books two book deal where it's like, who knows of Mike. Mike Pence is certainly not worth $4 million. dollars, but if we can make it look like we're spreading it out over two books and we don't have to answer for two million of those dollars for five years, then it's a lot easier to justify. It's a lot easier to make the P&L work for a two book deal.

Now, if he is somehow relevant in two years, three years, four years, that second book may end up being well worth the imaginary money you're paying for it. I think more likely than not on a contract like this, the second book will either A, never happen or be turned out to be something really inconsequential, like, or something that not into consequential so much is not worth millions of dollars, you know, I think I said to you could be like, Mike Pence does like, you know, meditations on the Psalms or like, whatever. I mean, it could just be like any kind of personal small thing. And, you know, it doesn't actually have to be a gigantic thing. I think all that people really care about is his memoir. I mean,

his like, whatever he might say about the, about the Trump years. And then you're hedging your bet by kind of shoving some of that advanced money or some of that contract money off into the future. What he says about the Trump years and especially what he says about the last couple of weeks of the Trump administration, that's what we really want to know, right? I mean, Mike Pence was the most loyal soldier in the world.

I mean, the single most loyal soldier to Donald Trump outside of like Sebastian Gorka or something like that. And yet he had this deviation from the last couple of, the weeks where he said, I will help you try to steal the election. But I'm not going to help you try to steal the election in this particular way. Yeah. So we want to know, and we have not yet heard, why Mike Pence did that. Well, I'm glad you brought up Sebastian Gorka. I'm just kidding. I have nothing to say about him. But Mike Pence, I mean, the problem with this is the same

thing as the problem with basically every political book, which is we desperately want to know this. And we will get our answer in the New York Times story that's written two weeks before the book comes out. Like, we don't actually need to buy the book to get the answer to the question that we're all thirsting for. And yet, this is how book publishing works. It's how, I mean, people will buy the book. People will buy the book because it pops up on their, you know, as an Amazon suggestion. They'll buy it because you always, why do we buy these books? Because we like to, because we're interested to see if there's maybe more details than we're getting in the news stories about it.

We want to, you know, scour it for something else. And also, it's a Donald Trump book. Yep. And this book is. And we buy Donald Trump books. This is not a Pence book. It's a Trump book. Yeah.

And I would think conservatives, if they're not totally mad at Mike Pence, would buy it because buying it is the way you show that you like Donald Trump. And liberals might buy it because there's some idea that they either want to understand Mike Pence more or they want to understand this small, tiny deviation that the two of them had in the White House. Yeah. I mean, listen, I'm sure if you ask Mike Pence, he would probably, you know, tell you. that the first book is going to be the memoir of the Trump years, and the second book is going to be basically his campaign book for the next election, right? Everybody has to have a campaign.

But those campaign books are more of just sort of a functional thing at this point than having any real meaning. I mean, I don't think there's anything that any candidate, especially Mike Pence could say in a campaign book that would shift the public perception of him. So it's a matter of just what do you do outside of the book that makes you or keeps you relevant, that puts you in position to be, you know,

a significant player on the national scene. And at that point, you know, Mike Pence's book with a one-word title, you know, in his face like he really saw him on the front. And then it becomes an interesting, not an interesting book, but a sellable book, you know. But it's those, you know, no one reads those books. Even the ones that are good, we're way past the,

I mean, people read the Obama books, but that wasn't even really along those lines. They're just so functional. Anyway, kudos to Mike Pence for, making $4 million. You're right that this is absolutely going to have a one-word title. Absolutely. I can't quite think of the word, but it's going to be a word that's also a value, like loyalty, or something like that.

You know, maybe some other illusion, but it's going to be a one-word title that will nod at a greater value that Mike Pence thinks he and by extension Donald Trump have. It could do, you can go to two words. It could be, you just said them. greater values or values or something like that. Or how about this? You want to go for one word one. How about just constitution? Oh, and it's a double meaning there. Yeah, it's double meaning. Like the constitution that I upheld in not helping Trump steal the presidency and then also my, the constitution of me. Yeah. My commitment. Yeah. Yeah. I really like that. What if his second book, uh, he returns to his collegiate interest in cartooning?

and it's released horizontally like a Garfield book. Oh my God. I would love it. I would buy that book. I would be first in line to buy that book. What if that was the memoir? What if the Trump year's memoir was just like a visual, a sequential memoir by Mike Pence or the whole thing was drawn in panels?

Or grabbing up on Mike Pence? I would, if that happens, he gets the whole episode of Press Box talking to you. Forget, forget Al Michaels. I want to hear Mike Prince and David Schumacher. is there with that i mean wouldn't that book just sell 10 times more copies just because of the just

like holy shit factor of the whole thing absolutely i will commit to buying mike pence's graphic novel right now who do we know it's simon schuster let's get him on the phone this could be a great we could be the packages for this book i will help i will help ink the drawings and draw the square draw the panels for him this could be the best thing since teenage mutant senate turtle really good sometimes David we get questions from famous media members who do not want to be named on the press box so this one is from Mr Media X I think Mr. Media X has appeared in this mailbag before Mr. Media X asks what do you make of the phenomenon of newspapers and magazines showing

and people reacting to print front pages and covers on social media there is symbolism in what publications choose to put out front for sure, but it seems kind of quaint in the smartphone tablet era that a bunch of people with no intention of reading a print copy of the newspaper are still loudly arguing over print headlines and photos and placement decisions that many times have no bearing on the digital product. Is this a lot of fighting over nothing? Or does the old page still got it? I think the old page still got it. Gats it. Still has it. I mean, I think everybody, even if they don't pay attention to this stuff, probably noticed at some point in the past, what, three years or something like that, maybe longer five years when kind of everybody started just putting random, attaching random photos to tweets to try to get better, you know, interaction, people go to, I mean, they respond to tweets with photos more than just the tweets with words, right? And I think that that this is sort of taking that one step further. It's like making the whole premise of the tweet, in a graphic, and so it draws people in.

And it also has that, like, listen, how many, we spent our whole lives looking at newspaper front pages and headlines and stuff and not really having any venue or any forum for commenting on them. You know, you always talk to your wife or your friends or you come up with,

you joke about it in your head. This really feels like your chance to engage and to sort of like top edit a real newspaper or magazine, whatever, in real time. It's sort of irresistible. I will say, that the New Yorker cover in the Twitter era started to feel a little like the Colbert monologue.

Like it was very Orange Man bad and chasing Twitter clout every week. I didn't need to go back to the Mr. Sean thing where you just opened the New Yorker and it was a field of wildflowers in March. Yeah. We're probably beyond that. It probably has to grab you in some way. But it felt a little similar week to week. when we saw it, yeah, I'm sure that that was definitely true. I do find it interesting, as Mr. Media X notes, that we are all applauding these things on Twitter,

but we're not necessarily to subscribing to these things. So like I see all the time, we had the LA Times one, I think in the last episode of the podcast. Oh my gosh, great headline by the LA Times. Oh, excuse me, sir, do you subscribe to the LA Times? because the way you could reward them for those funny headlines is to actually pay for the newspaper and make sure that those editors and copy editors still have jobs in a couple of years.

I see the same thing with Time Magazine covers all the time, which are also, by the way, chasing Twitter applause. It is a little weird to see those held up as kitsch items and then people don't actually pay for the thing. Yeah, it's true. I mean, I think when you, part of the goal, regardless of how many people are paying, is just if you put,

if you get the name of your periodical out in front of a bunch of people, and like two of them are like, oh yeah, I've been meaning to subscribe to the LA Times, then that's a win, right? I mean, if just like a tiny amount are like reminded to subscribe, even if you're not gaining a whole bunch of new audience, you know,

I think that's got to be helpful on some level. But yeah, I don't know. One more from Mr. MediaX. for a hit of warm nostalgia, can you tell us about the craziest media party you went to and why it was great?

Bonus points if you got kicked out of one or barred at the door. You and I were regulars at the Paris Review party? I was gonna say, the Paris Review parties were like the only, were the closest thing to like a movie literary party, right?

I mean, it was just sort of like in a office loft space and kind of people all up and down the food chain of the publishing, world, everybody, you know, imbibing gratuitously and, you know, generally having a good time finding places. Who's the most famous person that was at those parties now? Oh, I don't even remember. I mean, book famous, you know, literary famous made, you made it seem like a really

big deal back then. I'm trying to, I don't know. Do you remember anybody? Well, at least one of has been canceled. So I'm not going to mention that one. Ben Moser was at those parties? Biographer of Susan Sontag? Sure. Is that book famous? Yeah, but I mean, to me at the time, it was like whoever the new novelist of note was, always seemed like the most famous.

So I don't know. I honestly don't remember the most longstanding one. But yeah, those parties were memorable, if not too, you know, the specifics aren't too memorable. You know, the early days of N plus one parties. I remember, I don't know if fondly is the right word, but I do dimly remember them. Yeah.

No commentary on those guys were there. But they were just sort of like the, you know, like the Bushwick counterpoint to the parish review parties. And, um, but yeah, I mean, I don't know. I never got, we never got kicked out of anything. Never got barred at the door, I don't think.

I don't know. I don't know. I mean, it's, I'm not, I don't want to sit here and act like it wasn't fun. It wasn't like a cool phase of life. but I don't have any lasting memories, I don't think, to you. The one I remember was 2008.

I had to look this up. I got invited to the 10th anniversary ESPN magazine party. Yes. I remember this a little bit. Go on. You didn't come for some reason. I don't know if you were busy that night or what, but it was in Manhattan.

And it was at one of those clubs that has like three levels on top of one another. But there's like a hole. And so you can see all the levels. levels and then there's a band at the bottom. Uh-huh. And the band ESPN the magazine paid to come was third-eye blind. It's amazing. Talk about another era of media.

Tenth anniversary of ESP in the magazine, they paid for third-eye blind to come. And I just remember me and Tommy Craig sitting on like the third level leaning over going, play semi-charm kind of life. Come on. Let's do it. And ESPN leadership kind of wandering around. somewhere somewhere that will be written as like one of the last moments of magazines

as we knew them. Those magazines even when we were coming out the magazines were still the ones thrown around like the crazy mind. I remember going to like, you know, coming as like a tag along to whatever, GQ or whoever's like a holiday party.

They would like rent out like piano, like the entire bar like a notable bar in the lower east side and put on somebody on the stage that was like an actual band you would want to see and that kind of thing. I guess if you want to do publishing broadly defined, like in talking about the bands playing and stuff,

there's like, you used to have these like epic closing night parties at the book expo week that were just like they would just run out the, run out a giant venue and just like have just a bash. But that's, I don't know. I mean, that's a whole different thing.

By the way, ESPN magazine 10th anniversary, the closing bash at book, book expo. How crazy does David Nye's 20 sound? Let me tell you. wasn't exactly hate Ashbury, was it? Where were we that you and I were at some reception?

Was it like a book part? Oh, was it like for those guys have all the fun? I usually remember you and I awkwardly talking to Bob Lee for about 10 minutes. That was those guys have all the fun. God, this is already sounding so pathetic. I'm going to change the subject. All right, David, time for the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media, Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box.

pod, where they are always gratefully received, David, I regret to inform you that Dr. Drew is at it again. Oh, no. On Monday, he tweeted about vaccine passports. Vaccinations are important, and I encourage everyone to get a COVID vaccine, but how would you feel if international travel also required other vaccinations? Note to Dr. Drew, have you ever traveled international? Have you ever been required to get a vaccination?

or seen people showing proof that they've had vaccines when they go through customs. This actually happens. That prompted someone to tweet, David, name a doctor you respect more than Dr. Drew. Would you like to hear some of the answers? Please, please. Dr. Beverly Crusher from Star Trek the next generation. Dr. Teeth from the Muppets.

Love Dr. Teeth. Doc McStuffins for all you young parents. there. The Doctor of Thuganomics. That's a WrestleMania reference. And someone also tweeted Dr. Drew is the fifth out of five doctors. Thanks to our pal Andrew 3,000 for that. A lot of people weighing on the aforementioned Mike Pence book deal. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, this book won't have a spine. Thanks to

Andrew Brennan. And finally, David, it is genuinely infrastructure week in America. Not just a bit, this time on Twitter, really infrastructure week. Joe Biden has proposed a $2 trillion plan. And already there's a big battle over what exactly infrastructure means. Do you want to hear some of the best jokes about what it might mean? Oh my God, please, yes. My tweets are infrastructure.

Nachos are infrastructure. Ranch dressing is infrastructure. The pre-Disney Star Wars movies are infrastructure. And finally, m-dashes are infrastructure. If you think recurring podcast bits are also infrastructure, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, a little more listener mail on the notebook dump. Nephew Kyle, the one and only nephew, Kyle, one of our biggest supporters here at the press box,

wants us to talk about Paul Pierce. Paul Pierce, if you are not a sportsperson, former Boston Celtic NBA champion and for our purposes here, ESPN analyst. Put out an Instagram live video over the weekend. it showed Pierce and his pals I was struggling for the verb here cavorting with women in swimsuits

would you accept cavorting is that's another one that only has one I mean you never use cavorting you never say you're like cavorting with a bag of chips or like I saw Brian cavorting to the park today it's the embattled of verbs it really is on the video which I watched about 13 minutes of Pierce was asking for massages

he was doing shots, he was playing cards, he was holding forth on subjects ranging from Shabbat to the COVID vaccine, and remarking at one point, quote, women are amazing. On Monday, Ryan Glasspegel broke the news that Paul Pierce is not an ESPN analyst anymore. What was your take on all this stuff? I had a really weird, well, I mean, I wasn't terribly shocked when he was fired. But after he was announced to be fired,

I was listening to, like, at that point, like a 24 hours old episode of Bill Simmons, the Bill Simmons podcast with Ryan Rosillo, where they discussed it and kind of agreed that he would be punished but not fired based on their, you know, experience there. And they both have pertinent experience at the worldwide leader.

So it was very weird to hear them kind of rationalize why he would not be fired after he had already been fired. Because what they said made a lot of sense, you know, Ryan's main point was, generally when you're when you get fired from them it has less to do with the with the issue at hand than it does some sort of built up feeling and the issue at hand is sort of the the scapegoat or whatever else which is kind of true in many walks of life you know i mean i don't think that's a terribly shocking thing to hear say and and of course it's it's significant that the specifics of

what pierce was doing as an employee of you know disney as the parent company you know i mean there's always going to be there i mean you always have to be prepared for edicts coming down from the top when you're working for a mega company like disney where someone's just like yeah it's a bad look you has to go and you can't and your boss or your boss's boss's boss's boss none of them can do anything about it who knows if that happened here i guess to me my biggest thing is being an an NBA analyst who occasionally appears in the jump and some like game shows like or some you know some halftime shows or whatever that doesn't feel like, like, it's, it's hard for me to really put that, those sorts of employees

in the same class as like a quote unquote full-time employee, you know? I mean, like, like, I know, I know it doesn't work this way, but like, is if you're not, if you're not working for the company for 40 or 50 or 60 hours a week, then you were almost necessarily doing things that your, your boss has no control over, right? So, I mean, I guess you, I mean, everybody signed a way of morality clause and has agreed to be fired for whatever reason or whatever else, but it's like, at the end of the day, you're getting fired to me for a bad look. And because it's not like, I guarantee none of his employers, no one that he worked with were shocked.

You know, might have been shocked that it came, that the video came out. But, you know, you wouldn't be like absolutely floored by the occurrence of these events. And so, you know, it's either a bad look or it's an accumulation of events. It's, you know, it's, it's one of those things. You shouldn't be, listen, it's not, it's not unthinkable. that he got fired for what happened. You or I would get fired probably for that. Or, you know,

it would be a very awkward situation regardless. But it also seems it is a little bit surprising. To the point about him being on there. I mean, he is essentially, even though it's, you're right, he's not on that network all the time. But he is,

I think, it's probably fair to say, a cast member in a TV show. Is that fair? Yeah. Cast member in a TV show. So if somebody who was on young Sheldon, I'm struggling to name a network sitcom here, had put out a video like that, wouldn't the same thing have happened? Like, you're the cast member of a TV show.

And therefore, when you put something like that from your private life into public, there's going to be some ramifications from the company that owns you. Yeah. I don't see that. It does feel like, it does feel like in, and I, to take what Bill and Ryan said, I would absolutely, I could have absolutely seen them, him coming out and apologizing and then them just moving on from this. But at the same time, it's kind of one of those 50, 50 things. I can also see them saying, you know what? That's it. Okay.

We're good here. This made potentially made some of your coworkers feel uncomfortable. This made viewers feel uncomfortable. Whatever it is. And we're, that's it. You're not on the network anymore. I also agree with Ryan's other point. And you and I have talked about this in many different contexts from the New York Times stuff to whatever.

Is that whenever someone leaves a media institution, there's the thing that you see and there's all the things you didn't see. And the things you didn't see may have nothing to do with off the court incidents or behavior. They just may be as simple as, hey, you know, you were nice to have a. around, but we didn't really, we weren't digging your NBA analysis anymore. So you're just like, we didn't want to, we didn't want to fight to keep you, or we didn't want to have to deal with the ramifications of keeping you around. That is, I do not know that to be the case here, but that is a totally believable situation, scenario here.

Yeah. That they like Paul Pierce just fine, but they weren't absolutely in love with Paul Pierce. And so there you go. That's the thing. James Fraser asks us this what right wing politician is most likely

to stand up for Paul Pierce in light of his cancellation by ESPN I think we had the answer to this question which is Dave Portnoy yeah

he went on and said he is now trying to hire Paul Pierce yeah I mean I saw people making that joke is not even a joke like the moment that the firing went down

it is a sort of interesting world that we're living in we're like getting fired by a major media institution is your entire is the only resume necessary for getting hired by an outlet like barstool. But, and you know what? Did she, maybe should that give ESPN pause?

We're just like we are, we are relinquishing. We are, we are relinquishing Paul Pierce to the dark side if we fire. I don't know. I don't know. But yeah, I mean, Dave Portnoy is the answer to that question. From our pal Ronnie Ronnerson, how come podcasters all seemingly think news is always going to break during the time they are working? I'm about to record this NFL podcast, so I expect a trade to break now. It's becoming a bit across industries.

Well, I mean, it's just like an Occam Schrazer thing or whatever, right? No, what's the right turn of phrase there? I don't even know. But it's, yeah, I mean, it's, that's normal human reaction. Stuff always happens when I'm not ready for it or when I'm, you know, as soon as you, as soon as you make one plan, then the opposite will happen or whatever. Oh, man, whatever. It is, it does get a little bit grading.

And I'm sure you and I have said it a million times. We have. Because there's just the sort of implication of self-importance if you listen to it that way. But if we weren't so self-important, you probably wouldn't be making this podcast. I think journalists always feel, and usually correctly, that whenever they're working on a feature that's taken them six months and they're polishing the final sentences of that day is the day they will be required to slam a piece home on something that just happened. So that's always kind of in the back of your mind. the cool part about podcasting is when something else happens, you can just turn on the mics and make more podcast. Yeah.

It's not hard. And in fact, you're rewarded actually as a podcast because guess what? We get to do an emergency podcast. Oh, yeah. Ooh, doesn't that sound more exciting than the podcast we were going to do today anyway? Yeah. So yes, it is. You've done like 45 minutes of stuff.

I mean, the worst one is when you talk about a subject and then that subject news happens within that zone. zone before you post the podcast. That's the worst. Like if you and I had the Matt Gates conversation and then he had actually been charged with something after we'd like 45 minutes after we finished, we would have had to go and redo that whole thing or at least record a top to the podcast. Yeah. Which again, in the grand scheme of things, is really not that bad.

Yeah, the lag time is a real thing where it's just like we just put a bow on this and we really don't have any control over editing it or anything once we send it into the production apartment. But there's also just a regular human anxiety of, especially amongst the media class people who are probably the subject of this conversation who spend almost 100% of their waking hours paying attention to Twitter and everything else to some degree. And even if you still have the screen up when you're podcasting, you kind of have to just wall yourself off a little bit to really to perform. And that's, and so you're just, it's, it gives you, I mean, you know, a pretty profound sense of anxiety to be away from the constant flow of information having to actually react to.

it. It's one weird thing about podcasting, which outflanked radio in so many respects, is that it is recorded. You are recording something and releasing it at a later time. Yeah. Which seems like old technology. Anyway, that's just funny. Another great cliche pointed out by Adam Johnson,

what's the minimum amount of time that has to pass before you can say someone broke their silence with a response to news events? I don't know. I mean, any more, it seems like it could be as short as like three days or something, you know,

if people are actively pursuing, pursuing you know, for, you know, for a comment. But, I mean, I would assume, I mean, logically the minimum has to be a week or two. Or you think a week or two to break your silence? Couldn't be like four or five days. I mean, that's why I would like to draw the line there. But I think practice, I think that we will see it after just several days and, you know, 2021. What do you think?

It feels very misused. Like I saw, I saw a couple, I looked this up like, recent uses of it. Andrew Cuomo's daughters broke their silence on the allegations against their dad. That seems like a legitimate break their silence. You would like to know what they have to say, even if the answer is perhaps not that surprising. But like companies that spoke out against the Georgia law broke their silence when they spoke

out. I'm not sure that's a break their silence thing. The other one that's always misused is opens up. Have you noticed this? So and so opens up about something. Right. And it implies that they've been holding something back all this time. But there's also an interesting thing in modern media with all the aggregation and just general like think pieceiness of, you know, in major outlets.

People just writing on a subject without necessarily having interviewed the subject. And this also goes back to the conversation we've had about kind of media availability and how kind of prearranged all that kind of stuff is. there's a certain vocabulary of words, there's a certain vocabulary that editors and writers used to convey, hey, this is an interview, or hey, I actually spoke to this subject without hitting you over the head with it and that this is kind of like, you know,

exclusive or like new content. And opens up is one of those things. Opens up conveys that you had a personal interaction with the subject. Whereas, you know, the whatever blog aggregated, and pulling the quotes from this can't really lay claim to open up in the same way that the original writer can. That's really good.

Yeah. It's also like the tweet, I talked to so-and-so. Whereas probably in the newspaper era, you would just assume that the person talked to so-and-so. Yeah. But now it's a get, even if so-and-so isn't very famous.

I've been sensitive to opens up lately because I somehow got on the People magazine mailing list and I can't get off. I just have never, and it's not even good. It doesn't even go to my word. work email. It goes to one of my personal addresses. So it's like an email from my mom asking me to read an article

on the Fort Worth Star Telegram and then a People magazine update. And one the other day said, Tofer Grace opens up about welcoming baby number two. Now was Tofer Grace holding back his thoughts about how much he loved baby number two? Is that?

And we've been all waiting to find out what Tofer Grace. And you don't have anything surprising to say. That is a little, it feels like a little bit of a stretch. But it's like he opened up, meaning he gave a comment about having a child. And David, it turns out, I'm going to be crazy. He was happy to have another child, as most people are. This is from Gavin Noctagall, who has a question about pro wrestling newsletter writer Dave Meltzer.

Who is the Dave Meltzer of other medias, political sports, etc? Can I ask you a question about Dave Meltzer since you're a pro wrestling writer? Did Dave Meltzer kind of invent substack like 30 years ago? Yeah, and he should be on substack now. I mean, he sells a booming newsletter business. I don't think he has a substack, though. He invented both blogging and substack, I think, at the same time. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And also the distinction between sort of my substack voice and my Twitter voice or my podcast voice. These are different things, and people have a really hard time differentiating those things with Meltzer. And, you know, some of the criticism he gets is justified, I guess, but that one is kind of hilarious to me. But like people get on him for having, for expressing an opinion when he's known as a hard news guy, you know, it's just like, this is wild the year that we're in right now. I don't know that there's, it's really hard to say who the guy or girl, you know, who the person is in other genres because what he has is a space he's going to stay to claim to decades ago

and has been, and forever was one of, was the only or one of the very small group of people who are actually trying to report and kind of catalog, professional. as it was happening. And the field is a very weird one, too, because you're both dealing with, there's a part of this kind of history recording, which is just like, who won and lost these pre-arranged matches

that someone needs to be writing this stuff down. And there's part of it where it's like, oh, there's like steroid allegations and I'm covering this is real news. It's all over the places. There's not very many things that are like it. I don't, I mean, is this maybe like a, maybe media is the place to look?

I mean, the people that are like, that are just keeping a really close eye on television media Brian Stettlers or like the people that are writing about Fox News that sort of thing

maybe but it's I don't know who the I don't know I don't even know what a parallel would be. It's funny to me how whenever we have a new media invention it's actually just pushing us back to an old media

invention. Like if I had told you 20 years ago we're going to invent something where you can pay someone to send them a newsletter. Yeah. You'd be like,

wait, we're inventing something that was around in 1985. Yes. You give me money. Wasn't that a joke on like on early Twitter? I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. Yes. And now I would like to subscribe to your newsletter is the new billion dollar idea.

I mean, that's just weird to me how that happens. Yeah, well, these things happen. We got a few calls for David's Texas literary power rankings. Oh. The idea of which came up in our discussion of Larry McMurtry the other day. do we want to throw out some of Texas's best novelist? Or I guess the bigger question is, does Texas have enough of a literary culture to assemble a power rank?

Well, Texas has a, I mean, does have a literary culture. I mean, I think that when you were doing these power rankings, you get, even if you're not doing sort of nonfiction or journalism, like, and that was my attempt. Like, you know, I mean, how many times, I'm sure you did the same thing. Like, how many times did you scratch everything out and put like Skip Holland's worth on the list and then like say, no, no, no, I'm not doing that, you know? Like it's not the point of this.

I would just say like literary with a capital L. Yeah. Like a like a longstanding culture that values the literary novel. Texas has plenty of good writers, plenty of good book writers, plenty of good book writers, plenty of great journals, plenty of all that stuff. I just mean more of like a self-conscious turning out the great literary. novel, which certainly exists in New York, Boston, other places in the country. Does that exist as much in Texas? So the difficulty is, do you have to mean, is there are a lot of these writers that either

were born in Texas and left or came to Texas, were not born in Texas and came there or spent a period of their career in Texas that was formative in some sort of, in some sense. So there's not a lot of people that are on the list that just are like purely Texan, you know, in any way that I think normal Texans would define it. it like Larry McMurtry. Born there, wrote about Texas, lived there for huge chunks of his life. Exactly.

So it gets kind of, I mean, one of the names that it'll come up, I mean, maybe not on anybody's list of like greatest writers of all time, but James Mishner, I don't know that he lived in Texas until he was relatively old, I mean, relatively advanced in years, but then put his name on the University of Texas, what is it, just the creative writing department or the archive or whatever it is. I mean, his name is a part of Texas literature, regardless of whether or not he is a Texas writer, despite also having written a novel called Texas. He belongs to the world, I think. So I agree.

So when you look at these lists, you get, you know, Cormont McCarthy comes up a lot, and he's definitely on my, like, top five list of just writers of novelists in general. But I never think of him as a Texas writer. I mean, some of his stuff took place in Texas. And, yeah, that's a stretch. You know, he reinvented sort of the Western in his way. And he lived there for some period of time. I don't know if he's writing the Orchery Keepers or he wrote one or two novels there. But I don't think, I don't know that he counts.

I mentioned Joe Lansdale on the last one. He's a fun, like, mystery writer. The other one, it's from the mystery department who definitely has to be mentioned. And, you know, consider this literary if you want, too, is James Lee Burke. I mean, he's, he is just a master. who else? Catherine Am Porter is a god. I don't think of a lot of her output as like Texan

in some kind of cliched way, but maybe that's the point. Horton Foot is one of the great playwrights and actually really novelistic playwriting is really the way you describe it, but he did some stuff with characterization that I think all writers, all fiction writers have learned a lot from. But I mean, it's a really,

it's a hard list. I honestly don't know. I mean, of course, McMurtry is the list. Did you have anybody whose name I didn't mention? You know, Sandra Cisneros is somebody who has like a lot of connections to Texas in San Antonio in particular. She would certainly be on the list. Billy Lee Brammer who wrote The Gay Place. You know, that's one of those books that's in the Texas. If you look at the the pantheon of great Texas novels, I read it many, many years ago. I'm not sure I could tell you a ton about it other than it's sort of about an LBJ like character and I remember liking it when I read it.

I just, it feels more like there's a much bigger category and a much richer category of Texas journalist slash literary rank and tours. Oh, rank and tours. Okay, I like that. So go on.

So let me put in that category, Dan Jenkins, Molly Evans, Larry L. King, who wrote the best little whorehouse in Texas. Kinky Friedman. Of course, yeah. Jim Hightower,

also will held elected office there. Ronnie Dugger, we could go on and on. That feels like a big, bustling, wonderful category to me. Yeah.

And when I said earlier about the literary culture, I am not, I would, I would not demean Texas on this podcast. All I mean was that when I was growing up,

I feel there were two sort of genres of writing that were really, really big in the 22 years I spent there. The two genres were number one sports writing. And number two, true crime.

True crime at that point being like Tommy Thompson and, you know, the people, essentially the people that came before Skip Hollins were. Yeah. And if you told somebody like, I want to write what Skip has wonderfully titled Trashy Murder Stories, or I want to be a sports writer as I declared, people would say, that's really cool. Yeah. That sounds awesome. if you said, I want to write a great novel, I think people would just be like, okay, that's interesting. It just wouldn't, it just didn't land quite as well as those other two. That's true. In doing all this research, I just wanted to throw one more out there because I got,

went down a deep rabbit hole because I was like, who am I forgetting? Like there has to be somebody. I came across a name I had actually never heard before, never in my years in Texas. And more significantly, never in my years in New York when I was like re-engaging with. Texas and Southern literature, like arts broadly defined in a way that I never really did when I lived there. There is a book called The Inheritors by, well, the author actually has like a number

of different versions of his name. The one I'm holding, he's Philip Attlee. I think it's Jay Philip Atley on some of these or whatever. And this book was published in 1940 and is supposedly just like a great Gatsby of like the Fort Worth Country Club scene in 1940. What? which is crazy.

You and I both grew up in Fort Worth. I never heard of this. And I found, I mean, just message board lip postings that were just years and years old. And people kept saying, the book is almost impossible to find. Well, I found a copy, literally one copy available in a physical form online.

By the way, this guy has some crime novels, which are available in e-book form. But this book, The Inheritors, I found in a lion paperback edition, retitled The Naked Year, that came out in 54 and I just got it in my hands I paid way too much money for it

and I will read it and report back this is here we go this is let you know if the great Gatsby of Fort Worth is worth its salt by the way I just thought of Gary Cartwright Oscar Casares we could go on and on this is the beginning of a list

so please at the press box pod with other ideas all right it's time for David Chewmaker guesses the strained pun headline Yeah. Monday's headline about George W. Bush's book of paintings of immigrants was the Ice Man painted. Today's pun comes from Reed Darcy, the deputy sports editor of the Revely, the student newspaper at LSU. He would like to credit his colleague Evan Sacks with this headline or give him partial credit anyway.

The story, David, involves former LSU president F. King Alexander. Oh my gosh. the story. The LSU Board of Supervisors went behind the back of former President F. King Alexander negotiated a contract with current athletic director Scott Woodward and forced Alexander to hire him. The Chronicle of Higher Ed reported Friday. I could go on. But essentially, all kinds of crazy shenanigans involving former president F. King Alexander. What was the Revely's strained pun headline? I mean, is it, Is it what I think it's going to be?

I mean, is it going to be like no F King way or something to that genre? You're right there. Just just, just. F King, no. It's a disaster. What? Absopheing Lutley is, I think, when F King got hired probably. Yeah, this is a disaster.

Exactly. A problem. So it's a. What a F King mess? A. F. King Mess. Okay. There we go. A. F. King mess. Fantastic work down there at LSU. He is David Shoemaker.

I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. We are back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.