The Press Box - Mina Kimes on How We Cover Aaron Rodgers

Episode Date: January 8, 2022

Bryan touches on the news that The New York Times has bought The Athletic before then being joined by Mina Kimes to discuss the Aaron Rodgers discourse. They talk about her 2017 piece featuring Rodgers, discuss his relationship with the media, weigh in on past comments about both potentially leaving his team and his stance on the vaccine, and eventually parse through the ongoing discourse involving his run at MVP.  Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Mina Kimes Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Listen up all you New York fans. Veteran New York sports talk host, John Dostrompsky gives his unique take on all the big stories in the Big Apple and beyond, including guest conversations, gambling picks, and reactions from you, the listener. Check out New York, New York with John Dostromsky on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Press Box Friday. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here along with producer Erica Servantes. We're going to bring on ESPN's Mean at Times here in five seconds. But I want to say a couple of quick things. about the big media story of the week, which was the New York Times buying the sports website, The Athletic, for $550 million in cash. And thought number one, I still can't believe it.

This was kind of the worst kept secret in media over the last couple of weeks. I remember calling people at the Athletic, and they all said, I think this is going to happen. I think this is going to happen. But it's fair to say that I am still really, really, shocked that not only did the athletic sold for that fantastically large price, but also that it wound up at the New York Times. It is pretty amazing. Thought number two is you may have

seen this quote from one of the founders of the athletic, Alex Mather kicking around on Twitter yesterday. The athletic was founded in 2016. There was a lot of goodwill because they were hiring good sports writers. They were paying them well. And then Alex Mather, the co-founder, gave an interview to the New York Times where he said this of the local newspapers the athletic was competing with, we will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed

until we are the last one standing. I can't tell you how important that one quote was in sports mediadom. I thought Kevin Draper did a really good job with that story, but it had this effect of turning people

in this industry who wanted to root for the athletic, who wanted to root for Kenny Rosenthal and Nicole Auerbach and my old ringer and Granland teammate Robert Mays later on, who wanted to root for the thing against the athletic, against the founders. And I said this in the piece I wrote for the ringer yesterday, but it really took the diligence and the great writing and great reporting that all those people did over there to just sort of win people back and sort of remind people that this website, which employed reams and reams of sports writers, was not one person or two people. It was all of them. And I think it's a great credit to them that they got to a point where they made us root for the athletic or made a lot of people root for its success or at least their success.

Thought number three is, here's another thing I can't believe. About every six months, I would get a note from somebody in sports writing and say, Can you look into the athletic suspiciously optimistic comment section? Because if you look at the comments under an athletic article, it'd often be like, I love this site. I love it. This is wonderful. This is the kind of content I'm paying for. And I didn't know if it was kind of a mental thing that once you swiped your credit card,

you were happy to, you know, you were so happy that you were in the athletic. You were like, I'm just happy to be here. This is fantastic. Or what it was. But people outside the athletic were absolutely fascinated with that. And thought number four is about yesterday's sale. I also cannot tell you how many dire predictions I heard off the record about the athletic. Oh my gosh, what if the site goes under?

What if they have to lay off everybody? What if it's stripped for parts? I mean, that was something that I had been fielding in one form or another for years before yesterday's announcement. Now, we don't know what's going to happen at the New York Times. We don't know what the athletics going to look like in a couple of years, whether they'll keep all those riders, whether the site will be downsized in some way or another. But I think it is very fair to say that Mather and his co-founder, Adam Hansman, proved a lot of people wrong yesterday. And a lot of people whom you'll never hear say this are very privately taking the L right now because they predicted the athletics demise. And at least as we sit right now, it is now a subsidiary of the New York Times.

What a world. What a moment for sports writing. The other big media story of the week besides the athletic was the Aaron Rogers discourse. Aaron Rogers, of course, is the all-world quarterback of the Green Bay Packers. He has 35 touchdowns and only four interceptions this year. But Aaron Rogers is also the guy who spent part of the offseason, we heard, lobbying for the Packers to trade him. He's the guy who refused to take the COVID vaccine and misled people about it. And then after he got COVID, he had to miss. a game that the Packers lost.

Aaron Rogers is the guy who's off the field stuff led one NFL MVP voter this week to declare he wasn't voting for Aaron Rogers because he was, quote, a jerk. And even as we were about to go on the air here, a New York sports radio station aired an unconfirmed report that Aaron Rogers might boycott this year's Super Bowl or threatened to, at least, to force the NFL to change its COVID testing rules, which Rogers has already laughed at on Twitter. all of which shows just how tricky a subject Aaron Rogers is for a sports media types in 2021. And there was one person who can help us understand the Aaron Rogers discourse. That is ESPN's Mina Kimes, who you can see on NFL Live, you can hear her on her podcast. And in her other job as a writer wrote a fantastic story for ESPN magazine about Aaron Rogers in 2017. It's really, really good. It contains a lot of breadcrums about how we got where we are with Aaron Rogers today.

here's Mina Kimes on how we cover Aaron Rogers. All right, Mina, when you wrote about Aaron Rogers in 2017, he was already a great quarterback, he'd already won a Super Bowl. Beyond that, why was he an interesting subject to you? Well, at the time, I think it had been many years, at least five years, since he had sat down for like a magazine interviews. So as a magazine writer, which is what I was back then, that's sort of the dream, right, is to profile a famous athlete who hasn't been interviewed a lot.

And so I was really excited about it. I remember pitching him and his people on it and sending a very, very long email explaining why I wanted to do it, why I thought I was the person to do it, not hearing from them for months. And then it came together super quickly to the point where I actually ended up like texting with him the night before he came up. house and that was when it was a green light he we now think of Aaron rogers is a very opened up person to use these people magazine term doing an hour of content a week on the pat maccalfi show he was not a very opened up person then he was guarded still figuring out how much he wanted to tell all of us yeah i yes i'd say that's fair um uh he was very i don't want to say suspicious

I think suspicious is fair, suspicious of the media. And he said so. This is not my interpretation. And, you know, I remember a thing, I actually ended up writing this into the article. When he sat down, he put out in his own recorder to tape our interview, which is not something that has ever happened to me. You know, I've interviewed a fair amount of high profile athletes. That's the first time that that had ever happened.

And hedge funders, by the way, and they've never done it either. So I used to be business journalists, yeah. Right. that's usually the publicist sitting next to the famous person move. I'm just going to record this for all of us. But a superstar quarterback actually pulling out the phone. Yeah. Yeah, putting on the coffee table.

Yeah, so that I feel like was pretty telling. Do you have a theory about why he talked to you? You know, the email I wrote, so before I wrote it, I listened to every interview he had done, including he had done a long podcast with the comedian Pete. I am forgetting his name. He had that show crashing on HBO. Super funny, nice guy whose name I am now forgetting. And that interview, he ended up getting into a lot of kind of like, you know,

quirky stuff he likes, like science and histories and various theories about science. And so anyways, I made it very clear in my email that I had, consumed all of this and thought about it and would be interested in having conversations about his interests outside of football. And I think that's probably what spoke to him. When we write about celebrities, it's always this question of what stage thing are we going to do with a celebrity? We're going to go bowling. Are we going to do something like that? What happens with Aaron Rogers? We didn't do anything. He just came to my house. Well, actually, I met him at a coffee shop in Los Fila, which is where I used to live. I don't know if this place is still open, but he was

sitting there and nobody, I don't know if no one knew who he was or approached him, which is pretty people who live in L.A., pretty unsurprising, given the location. And not a lot of football fans at coffee shops and Losios in the middle of the day, I think. But anyways, he was just hanging out having like a, I don't know, Corto or something. And then we walked to my house from there, and then I just interviewed him for like a couple hours at my house. So it was not an activity. Yeah, right. There you are usually goofy activities. I went fishing with Von Miller the year before that, I think. Super sweet guy.

But yeah, it was, but the location, I think, kind of made it turned into an activity in and of itself because he was like looking at my shit. It's bizarre. And you said, this is the reversal of what we as journalists usually do because we get to go to their house for like an hour. And we're just like scribbling down everything we can. Again, I think he is pretty telling because it was, you know, his decision. mentally speaking how did you find erin rogers in 2017 um very nice very nice to me which i never take for granted with with uh interviews um very excited to talk about things like tv shows that we were both watching at the time books that he was reading uh crosswords i remember we were both into crosswords

um and you know like some of the things he was passionate about um you know we had a lot of we had a talked for a while about religion and him kind of going away from organized religion. I think that was in the story. I should have read the story before we talked. And, you know, some things about his career. Yeah, I found him to be like a good conversationalist. And, you know, that's, again, also not something you take for granted in MySpace. And he's also in the questioning things mode.

what we would later call the doing my own research mode. In this case, you mentioned it's organized religion, right? Like, I've read some books. I've talked to people and I'm rethinking things that I might have thought I knew about. This is all out there, but he was really into like, you know, ancient aliens and like kind of like those sorts of books and shows and stuff. So yeah, there were definitely some interests at the time that probably aligned with some of the things we're hearing now. Do we think Aaron Rogers likes the media? No.

come on is he interested in the media yes uh-huh I just did I'm not a writer anymore but I did write a story this summer about Justin Herbert

who does not like the media but also is completely uninterested in the media and I would hold that up as a contrast to Aaron Rodd like I don't think I think Justin Herbert probably read the story

but I don't think he consumes media about himself or is dialed into the discourse, so to speak. And I think Aaron Rogers very much so is. Yeah, his comp to me is like Kevin Durant. Yes. Where it's like they're both eternally disappointed in how people are talking about them, but very, very interested in how people are talking about them.

And they never stop talking to people exactly like us. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I think I actually thought that at the time that he reminded me a lot of KD. And so I think that's super accurate, not just because of how he interface with the media, but I think, you know, just the, obviously the extent of their talent and kind of the guardedness generally that goes beyond. I think interactions with the media. But, yeah, I, that dude did not like the media. I don't think he just liked being interviewed, by the way, which, again, is different from not liking the media. Doesn't hurt does not like being interviewed by comparison.

But yeah, I think he expressed a lot of, you know, anti-media sentiments talking about clickbait and that kind of thing. Yeah, the hour we spend together. I'm going to enjoy that. I'm just not necessarily going to enjoy how the piece comes out when you get to pick which quotes to use and interpret me and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. That's kind of an interesting lane for an athlete.

Yeah. And I think you can kind of theorize as to why. I mean, at the time, you know, we'd been coming off of years of speculation about his relationships. His relationship with his family was something that was out there. And, you know, it kind of stands to figure that those are the sorts of events that might make someone develop a bit of an antipathy for the fourth estate. For the fourth estate.

I like that. It's funny because reading your pieces almost seems like he changed. his course. So at that time, he's very conscious of what people are thinking about him and what they're going to say about him. So he says very, very little comparatively. He's still very conscious of what people say about him. But now it's like he's just going to pump so much into the universe in an attempt to explain himself or just because he's gotten more comfortable with it. Do you have a theory about that? Well, I actually would push back on that a little bit. I don't think until the vaccine stuff that he was putting out that much into the universe.

I mean, he was having conversations on the Pat Mackey show. And, um, but if you kind of, I mean, I don't think he said anything controversial before this, right, unless I'm missing something. I mean, the controversy was, uh, reported about him and, and what was happening in Green Bay with pro football perspective. But I can't think of anything Roger said before this vaccine stuff on that platform or elsewhere that, I don't know, um, is not something that I already knew or about him or would have expected. Maybe there is. I don't know. So talking a lot without necessarily,

you know, putting, planting his foot in the ground and saying something, you know, that is going to make us rear up and really learn something about him? I guess I just mean, yeah, I don't, I don't mean to imply that like, I think there were a lot of really fun interviews and probably people did learn a bit about him and his interests and that kind of thing. I guess I just meant this was the first thing that really struck people the wrong way. Yeah. I I think what's one thing that's so interesting about him and maybe makes him an interesting media figure is if we just compare him to Brand X quarterback and Justin Herbert's a good one, you know, who's on the same level talent-wise. He just talks a lot, you know, and again, we may agree that a lot of that's about fun movies and stuff like that. But he's just putting a lot more material out into the universe than a lot of other people are, or at least, let's say, material that you can tweet about or a funny t-shirt that I'm going to wear on the band-magery show, you know?

Yeah. certainly a lot of that with athletes, but I just think he's probably on a different, you know, scale than a lot of very famous quarterbacks. Yeah, like most of Tom Brady's content is self-made and self-produced and,

you know, he's revealed bits and pieces of himself. But yeah, it's also, it's a lot smaller, like, right? Like,

just the format of long-form interviewing or hanging out, whatever, you know, is pretty unique in itself. And for any athlete who, doesn't have their own podcast. So if Aaron Rogers really cares about what reporters say about him, what was his reaction when you publish your story?

He was fine with it. Yeah. There's a weird thing that happened afterwards where I guess it was because there had been so many, so few interviews with him. People kind of treated me like I was Aaron Rogers whisper. You know, I can't even tell you for like for a while. Every time I do an interview, people said people, you know, I guess going on in our shows or other shows, people, I would get asked, you know.

know Aaron Rogers really well. What do you think of X, Y, Z? And I'd have to reply. I mean, I spent, like, one day with the guy. We had some follow-up phone calls. But, you know, I don't really know him. And, but, yeah, so I didn't have, like, a correspondence with him. I really don't with anyone I write about.

It's kind of, or when I was a features writer. But I suspect, you know, if he was angry about it, I would have, no. Yeah, no, I remember he was fine with it. Yeah, you didn't track down all those questions. The sports radio hosts wanted to know about Aaron Rogers, some follow-ups six months later. I did ask him about his family and the things I felt like I had to that were important. But as I remember, it was a pretty flattering story. One really funny thing about it, and I just noticed this when I reread it today,

is that the headline or one of the headline dreams is Aaron Rogers unmassed? Truly, truly did not. Well, I guess no aged perfectly. So old taste is confirmed. Yeah, that was remarkable. Yeah, whoever worked at ESPN the magazine and wrote that is the true swami of ESPN. It's not Chris Berman. You were trying to capture Aaron Rogers in 2017, so you're not responsible for anything that happened in the next five years.

But is there anything when you think about that story that you would do differently, write differently, if you had another crack at it? I think at the time, you. you know, most of the things that could be potentially controversial were not things actually involving Aaron Rocks at the time, but he was happy with his, essentially happy with his football team. And, you know, so there weren't, like I mentioned asking him about his family, but there was no in terms like other quote unquote potentially, I don't know, controversial things. There really weren't things like that to ask him about, I do think, you know, we had conversations about Colin Kaepernick and I remember a teammate of his that had come out.

And I think I probably could have gone deeper into some of those conversations with him, especially. But I was very, I was apprehensive. I'm trying to go back into my mind state at the time, God, of mindset, of pushing too much because I don't know if you remember this, but like white athletes at the time were not talking about Colin Kaepernick outside of like maybe Chris Long or a few other guys. And so even the fact that he acknowledged that he should be in the league and had been pushed out was I remember like a headline to people, which is wild in retrospect.

And so obvious, it's like an obvious truth. And I think people have come around to it. But at the moment, I remember handling that a bit gingerly. Yeah. And I do remember that it was remarkable that he said that. And then two years before that, he'd had that amazing moment after a Packers game. Was that at Lambeau Field, I think? Yeah, where they had a moment of silence.

Somebody made an anti-Islamic comment and he comes out after the game. I was like, I thought that was really inappropriate. And I think that kind of thinking is why the world is where it is today. Yes. At the time was so remarkable and you pointed this out on the piece that Barack Obama thanked him. Yeah, yeah. Yes, yeah. The bar at that time was very low.

Yeah, I think it's safe to say, which is not a ding on riders at all. It's just that's where we wear is. society. A very different place for athletes and political views and that kind of stuff. So now your job is to think about Aaron Rogers on a daily basis, if not a many times a day basis. How have you been processing his 20-21 season? Well, on the show that I'm on three days a week, NFL live, the vast majority of our show is talking about exos and oath, which has been a bit of a reprieve for the Rogers stuff because, you know, we do mostly talk about Aaron Rogers football player. He's at a very good season.

That's why he is my choice for MVP at the moment. But I guess we'll be after we 182 probably. But yeah, but there have been a few moments where we have had, we have had not had, but we have commented on either the vaccine story, which we can talk about or during the offseason when, you know, there were. reports. Actually, I remember I was on set at the draft in Cleveland when Adam Schaefter broke the story about Rogers wanting out, which completely blew up our show. And we just talked about that for the whole hour. So that's also, especially during the off season, obviously less so during the season, that was something we had to talk about a lot, which, you know, that's a conversation that involves analysis.

of the team, other teams, his incentives. I really try to avoid psychoanalysis or speculating, but that unfortunately is what that invited a lot of. You'll get nowhere with putting aside psychoanalysis. I know. It's endless, especially with this new world where quarterbacks want out, but they won't say they want out, but you hear they want out, and then you have to talk about why they want out,

but maybe they don't want out, and it's like an endless thing. So I have spent a lot of time talking about that, but most of the time on our show it's been about him as a football player. Okay, so can we take those two different stories in turn? As you say, draft day, report comes out, not from Aaron Rogers's mouth, but from Adam Schefter's mouth, which is close to gold in this industry as we can get, that he does not want to play for the Green Bay Packers anymore.

And this intersects with a couple of things. One, it's a huge story because Aaron Rogers just had a great season. He was the NFL MVP. he's going to leave the Packers. There's a lot of football implications to that. But two, it also intersects with this whole idea of there are lots of athletes who are doing this around in multiple sports saying, I just don't want to be here anymore and I would like to be somewhere else. And so he enters that sort of conversation about how do we think about that?

What was interesting to you about that whole story? But it was, God, I mean, what's not interesting? It's a Hall of Fame quarterback still playing incredibly good football. reportedly wanting to play for a new team like quarterbacks like that aren't available you know ever and so just from the perspective of 31 other teams it's instantly fascinating because it's it's um the opportunity to change your fortunes it's the equivalent of a number one draft pick but better because you know he's good you know and so i think just having that uh become an option for most of the league made the off season interesting for other teams.

And then, of course, obviously interesting for the Packers, given that they were, you know, potential Super Bowl contender that could be, they could lose him. But it was hard to gauge because while, as you said, what Adam Schepster reports is as good as gold, there was no indication at the time as to whether Rogers was willing to

hold out, retire, like, how far would he go? And that's always, that's kind of where the speculation comes in because what would it take for him to change his mind? Again, these are all things that we didn't know. All we knew was what Schaefter reported. And there was more reporting after that. But it's like you have one piece of the story, but you're still missing all these other things that make it difficult to analyze it from a football standpoint, right?

Like even now when I'm asked about the Seahawks off season, I'm constantly, asked on wherever, you know, well, what's going to happen? I don't know what's going to freaking happen. I don't know what it's going to take for Russell Wilson to stay or push him out or will he hold out or will he waves? It's just, it's difficult in my job, which is no longer a reporter, but as an analyst, to do analysis when you don't have all of the facts. Yeah.

And it's the question sports fans want to know about everything. What's going to happen? Right. Who is going to win the game? Where is Russell Wilson going to play next year? Who is Aaron Rogers going to get traded to if it gets traded in the outside? Exactly. So you try to turn it into the realm of what you do know, which is what we spent most of the summer doing, which is, okay, well, we can look at this football team and ask, okay, well, what might Aaron Rogers want?

What are the things where the, how are they, how are they compared to places he might go to? Where are places that he might go to because they're attractive from a football perspective? You know, you kind of kind of try to live in the space where, I guess reality is one of me. I said, Jaileneer reality. On television, that's always important. And not all of television focuses on the same thing. So he does show up to play for the Packers. He shows up in training camp.

And he has, if I remember, right, a fairly remarkable press conference in terms of just like, oh, we're going to address all these things that you've heard, but not necessarily heard from me, at least to up to a point. You're shaking your head like maybe. Yeah. No, no, I was trying to remember exactly how much he did address. I you know he what I do remember from that

is he communicated that the thing he did have a problem with was communication between him and the franchise and I think I'm right you know he wanted to make it very clear it wasn't opposed to the drafting of Jordan Love well you know what that's not true he he he made it clear he was cool with Jordan Love

which is very different from objecting to the fact that the Packers drafted Jordan Love this is the kind of parsing we end up doing right and I think he's very very careful with his words, except when he's not. But, well, I guess he is careful, right? If you go back to the whole immunized thing, he's pretty deliberate about his word choice. And, yeah, you end up parsing everything a little bit as a result.

Yeah, people don't remember that. So when he was asked if he had taken the COVID vaccine, he said, I'm immunized fairly memorably. It turns out he was not vaccinated. That was to be very, very, very charitable, a misleading comment. then after it gets COVID, he winds up missing a game and hurting his team, right? They can't play. So what's funny to me from a media perspective, getting our minds around this is both of these concepts are intersecting with the idea of most valuable player, which we can

rate on a, Aaron Rogers is really good at football. He may be the best player in football this year. But then we also attach, whether we tried to or not, sentiments to that, right? How do you process that question? As like, like, would I give him? like MVP or sure just how do you think those things inter you know should or shouldn't interact when we're thinking about somebody like erin rogers in 2021 it's a the reason i have said he's my pick although i do think you can make a case for tom brady from a football perspective um is i think he's had the best season of any quarterback and i i think um the value he provides to that football team

even having missed a game there's a lot of players who miss games this year um is pretty undeniable uh he i think he's been extremely efficient, you know, think of the football. You've had some pretty big splash plays and moments, tends to be a narrative award, I think. But yeah, it's, I guess I don't view off the field. You know what? Actually, it's worth putting a pin on that because obviously there are lines that people would draw, right?

And maybe that this is just me. saying this is not a line and I would draw versus if he committed a crime or something. Maybe I would say off the field stuff factors in. But, you know, I just think he was the best football player, the most valuable football player in 2021. So it seems pretty clear. And I think, and by the way, I want to say, I think the vast majority of people feel the same with me in the space.

Yeah. Yeah. We had one very notable exception this week in the media. But no, I think that's interesting. I just find it fun to find it because it just feels like it's. forcing sports media people to hold multiple ideas in their heads at the same time. Do a lot of yes but, right? Okay, this happened with the vaccine.

It led to him missing a game. This happened with the team in the beginning, whether you're putting stock to that, but he's also the best quarterback in the league. So, okay, he can win the MVP. I don't know that we're always great at yes, budding our way through, through arguments like that. We sports media and, but I would say reporters, certainly analysts do this constantly with football players.

I mean, I am constantly talking about football players who have done things off to field, not constantly, but a fair amount. And by a fair amount, I don't mean the majority at all, but I mean, there are prominent athletes who I talk about and I talk about their play. And I compartmentalize things off the field all the time. I find in the past, and I'm not comparing what Aaron Rogers did to, you know, athletes who have either been accused or pleaded guilty to, you know, criminal things or whatever, whatever, I find I just have to be very specific with my words. You know, I end talk about when I praise an athlete who I don't, who I feel like has violated some sort of moral. thing code. I make sure to talk about them as a football player. And I guess that comes back to everything about MVP.

I feel the same way. Now, I think that gets blurred a lot. Like, you know, I think that there's a lot of, a lot of times that doesn't happen. But, and I don't mean negatively, by the way, I don't mean people turning against the likes of Aaron Rogers. I think, you know, it's like when you talk about athletes who have done bad things,

when you watch a game, it's phrases, overcoming adversity, that kind of thing. I think that still happens a lot. And that's sort of what I'm talking about. But I'm just speaking for myself personally, I just always try to make sure to separate the two. You did one segment on ESPN where you criticized Rogers, who were putting a lot of misinformation out into the world after he, when he was explaining his stance on the vaccine. How do you, when you're doing a segment like that, I just think, whatever we do, whenever we're trying to do anything on the podcast, I'm always like, how much of this should I write out so that I can refer to this and make sure I'm not getting anything. wrong. And obviously that's a podcast rather than television. How do you prepare for a segment like that? I was really unprepared for that because it was the day that it happened.

And I don't think we've actually talked about it very much since. I mean, we've talked about, we talked about, I think we talked about it when he came out and apologized or whatever happened next. But in the moment, that McAfee interview was in the afternoon. I remember and our show and if the live was on like a couple hours later, an hour later. And all I knew was I wanted to, I wish I'd watch this too. I wish, all I knew is I wanted to say that it was wrong because I don't view the, I don't think of what he did as a two sides issue. I think it's one of the things where I feel passionately that perpetuating misinformation

about this vaccine is wrong. And so I wanted to say that, but I didn't know exactly. I remember I wrote down kind of what he said, you know, just so that I had that in front of me, just so I knew I wasn't misrepresenting it.

I'm not a misrepresentation. But the other thing I do remember happening is we played some of the video of him and the video at the top of the show he talked about the Johnson Johnson vaccine being pulled. And so, So right when I was giving the opportunity to speak, I just wanted to rebut that immediately

because I didn't want him to go unchallenged on our show. And yeah, and then I just said kind of what I believed after that. Yeah, that's a tricky moment. It's an interesting moment. You know, I mean, it's, and it was great. I would be watched it today. I thought it was wonderful. But it's, it's funny because you're sitting there trying to.

I mean, it's, you're talking about misinformation, but you're trying to obviously make sure that the things you're saying are right at the same time and not giving an opening for any rebinding to that. I wrote you on, I think, Wednesday because we were in the middle of a strange Aaron Rogers discourse here in America. That's every day, man. When are we not? Oh, I know. Another guy who I've profiled, by the way, and spent time with giving him a run for his money. And then today, I said a very, let us say, unconfirmed report on New York radio that Aaron If he made the Super Bowl was going to boycott all the way up,

something Aaron Rogers, by the way, he was already laughed at on Twitter. That makes no sense. How much more is there, do you think, for Aaron Rogers discourse? How much potential do we have while you're doing your ex as an O show, let's say? Well, so the latest thing was the MVP voter, right? Yeah, that was Wednesday. That ate up a lot of sports TV. Really stupid story.

I guess for those you know, you probably already talked about it. Sorry, I was going to recap. My thought on that, seeing that and then seeing Rogers' reaction to it was everybody involved got what they wanted out of this. But. Aaron Rogers called the reporter a bum. Yeah. He finally got the cancelation there in the form of the one MVP vote. By the way, I might be wrong.

Maybe he'll wait and then have me back on to apologize because I could be. wrong about him being canceled by MVP voters. But I don't know. I think if they make it to the Super Bowl, which is very possible, even that they've got the one seed, he's probably going to do a fair amount of press. And that obviously creates a lot more opportunities.

There will probably be more reporting around his future, which I think also creates some opportunities for quote-unquote fake news. but I think that day probably where you know you really spoke out about the facts I don't know I was just like trying to catch a falling knife but it feels like that that probably you know I can't imagine

he foresaw that level he said that he didn't foresee that level of backlash because like I said to you nothing he had said before on the show had really incited that kind of thing so I think I can't imagine it'll be worse than that or more controversial than that.

Yeah, I'm putting it back in the prediction business. I apologize. Mina Kimes. Thanks for coming on the press box. Thanks for having me. And my apologies. Thanks again to Mina Kimes for coming on the show. I'm Brian Curtis.

Production Magic by Erica Servantes. A couple of notes for you, David Shoemaker and I are back Monday. And then next week, where you're going to do the latest installment of our press box, nonfiction, use book. bookstore pantheon. I'm still working on the title, even though I love the concept. And this time it is John Lee Anderson, the great New Yorker reporter talking about his book, Che Guevara, A Revolutionary Life. I am rereading it right now and enjoying every moment. I hope you reread and I hope you do too. Shoemaker and I back with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you

soon.