The Press Box - MSNBC’s Rebrand, ESPN’s Solitaire Scandal, and James Talarico’s Friends. Plus: The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

Hello, media consumers! Bryan and David discuss Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico’s social media scandal and how the public reaction to this type of news has changed over time. Next, Bryan and David dive into MSNBC’s rebrand as MSNOW and how effective the rebrand rollout has been (10:18). Then, Bryan and David talk about the ESPN Solitaire debacle (13:53) before discussing the layoffs at Conde Nast following a confrontation with the company’s head of human resources (20:04). Lastly, the show ends with the next installment of 25 for 25, as the Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel joins to talk about Elon Musk, public media trust, and his new podcast, Galaxy Brain (32:54). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week, and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline! Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Charlie Warzel Producer: Bruce Baldwin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Damn it? Yes. We need to talk about this story about James Tala Rico. Oh, yeah. For the uninitiated, James Tala Rico is the latest nice young man who's running for U.S. Senate in Texas. He's running an extremely uphill battle in a state

where a Democrat hasn't won a U.S. Senate race in 36 years. James Tala Rico is Beto 2.0. Unless that was Colin Allred, in which case he is Beto 3.0. Very much doing the Graham Platner, I'll do every interview campaign strategy. Well, over at Axios, Alexe Thompson reports that Tala Rico, who has put his faith at the forefront of his campaign, follows several adult film performers, escorts, and only fans models on Instagram, according to an Axios review. Yeah.

Telerico spokesman adds this. The social media team, including James, follows back and engages with supporters who have large followings and does not investigate their backgrounds. He adds, James has never subscribed to only fans or an escort service, dot, dot, dot. While James was unaware of how these women make money, he does not judge them for it

and will not play into an effort to smear them for clickbait articles. That's exactly what his Christian faith calls him to do. What do we make of Axios, James Talarico, and his follows? Is it weird that it makes me like him better? I mean, it's weird. The sort of like, I don't know if we want to just say cancel culture, if it's just too problematic to even use the frills. but the whole like preemptive canceling thing like oh we noticed a thing or like you know we have an expose

that people may or may not care about but now we're going to be offended because the article exists as if like it just it all just seems so empty to me you know it's sort it's not i mean i guess the grand platinum thing is different because you know a nazi tattoo is is maybe a little bit less uh uh you know identifiable than looking at some sexy ladies on the internet or whatever, but it still feels like, like it's a controversy in search of an audience, sort of, you know, like an actual audience, not just a retweeter, not just an audience of retweeter. I don't know.

What's your take on this? I think it feels like 90s morality laid atop the 2025 internet. Yes, that's right. Do you know who this state rep's friends are? Yeah. Well, what if friends mean something very different than it did in another time and place of the culture? Because if you read through the story, they only have a few times where he's ever interacted with these people. Earlier this year, he liked separate photos of an Austin-based Instagram account holder who has an only fan's account on a page on escortbook.com.

another time he wrote a thank you to somebody who had an Instagram story promoting the campaign so I mean even even if you think this is a story at all he's following them online they are his digital friends and from there I was like wait a second

would anybody care of some of these people were his real life friends as opposed to his digital friends yeah would that be a story yeah I'm friends with an only fans model. Yeah. Friends with somebody that has an only fan's account? Yeah, that would certainly make a big difference, right?

But no one really... But would it make a big deal? Like, would it matter? Like, I'm their friend. Is that... I'm sorry, is that... Well, that would be like putting, like, the 80s ethic on top of 2025, right? It's just like, Tala Rico, seen it at local cafe with problematic person, you know?

But, yeah, I mean, it's... I don't know. I think you're absolutely right. So it's just like it's honestly, if you weren't following, and listen, there's a lot of, there's, there's, there's, we got a fair share of saints out there. I'm not going to say that no one is, no one has, uh, uh, I don't want to say a dark side. No one has, you know, part of their personality that they don't put out in public. But my guess would be that if you weren't liking or responding to or following, so, you know, certain sort of those sorts of people online, then it just means that you have a private. account or some other system for doing it, which doesn't necessarily make you a better person at all. It just makes you sneakier, you know? Right.

I don't, I'm not, you know, I, unless, yeah, I don't know. I mean, to me, it's just not, this, this feels like we're just like a very strange. You're right. It's, it's, it's like listening to, listening to, you know, your mom complain about people's blue hair or something, you know, it's just like, it's just, it's just seems so like out of touch. I always start with the idea that we want reporters to tell us everything they can about people running for office now before they get elected, even if the reporter tells us too much. Because otherwise you get into a situation where George Santos gets elected to Congress and everybody's like, where was the media? Why didn't you look into this guy?

Yeah. And if we have candidates that don't have a long political track record that don't have a, you know, a clip. file from the Houston Chronicle in the Dallas Morning News. And I think that is, if anything, more important. Yeah, but there's got to be a line somewhere. And you, you know, spent a lot more time in newsrooms than I have. Maybe you have an answer for this. I mean, there's got to be some point where you're like, do a deep dive on candidate X, find out if there's anything that we should be reporting on him. But there has to be a possibility of the answer is no. Right. But even though you just spent six months on this, the best you could do is like follows one, two,

only fans models. You know, there's got to be a line where you're like, hey, good work there, but I don't think that's a story. Yeah. I mean, it's, you and I talked about this with Mom Dani and his Columbia application. Oh, yeah. And, you know,

where it's like this feels like maybe a data point in a story, like if you're writing a larger story. And I don't guess Axios does data points. No, that's the thing, though. Axios is data points. You know, that's the business model.

Like we, you know, we're going to make this into a chicken, McNugget, not a value meal. But even the Mom Dani story, that was him writing on a college application, even if it was just to get into college, this is who I am. So it seems like a logical follow up to say, is this who you are? Is this who you think you are? You mentioned Graham Plannner. Forget the tattoo. He had a lot of Reddit post where he was saying, in effect, this is what I believe. So it's a very valid question to come to him and say, is this still what you

believe? Is this what you believed at the time? Were you just being, you know, a jerk online? Like, what is, those all sort of beg questions or at least sort of allow you to ask a follow-up question. I'm not sure what the question is here. Yeah. I really don't. No, it sort of, more than anything, it bothers me that his campaign had to spend time, like, explaining some of them away, you know, but it's just like, just, I think, feel like, like, L-O-L-L-no-com. comment sort of works here, you know, or your mom, you know, take a page from the way down. See, this is the thing. Democrats don't do your mom.

No, and they should. They really could. So, by the way, we mentioned earlier that he is a seminarian, put faith at the forefront of his campaign. Tala Rico enrolled in the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in 2022, according to a Politico feature from Adam Wren. he is seeking to get his master of divinity. He is an interesting combination of you and me. His grandfather was a Baptist minister,

and then Tala Rico majored in government at UT. Yeah. A little Brian, a little David in there. That's great. Love the guy. There you go. David,

David is completely forgiven and forgotten this alleged political scandal already. Well, can I just interject for one second? I know that this is, because this has been the. crux of a lot of the reporting on them. It's like it put his faith front and center and now look at this stuff. Like that's not a dichotomy, right? There's no, there's no problem there. Like every major figure, Jesus aside in the Bible was a sinner. That's sort of the point. Like look up King David.

Just like you don't have to read the Bible. Read the Wicip. Read the Axios article. Like, yeah. Are they covering the Bible too? Shorter brevity, the New Testament? humans are imperfect. That should not come as a shock. We can move on. Yes, but if you read, if you read Rens profile, I wouldn't encourage people to do this in Politico. They were talking in Texas about posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms.

And he's like, here is why my faith tells me that we should not do things like this. So, yes, the dichotomy you talk about. Again, it all feels very 90s. It feels like from a different time. All right, coming up on today's podcast, David, the MSNBC rebrand is here. We've got trouble in the hallways of Conday Nast. ESPN's solitaire scandal plus football audio from Tony Romo and Donald Trump. Politics is still like professional wrestling.

Farewell to one of my favorite podcast hosts. And in the latest installment of 25 for 25, the Atlantic's Charlie Worsall joins us to talk about Twitter, the internet, politicians being influencers and trolls, everything. All that and much more on the press. Box, a part of the ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, and producer Bruce Baldwin here. David, this Saturday, November 15th, is going to be a very special day because the 29-year-old cable network known as MSNBC will become MS now. Which, as you know, stands for my source for news opinion and the way. world. I was watching some MSNBC over the weekend and saw a, you know, a PSA, internal PSA. I don't know what

it's called with Rachel Maddow explaining the name was changing, but nothing else was changing. They were not leaning into the acronym or, you know, to the words behind the acronym. It's just MS now. Did you watch them on election night and see Maddow and Chris Hayes having to turn to the camera and being like, now that we've had a little election analysis, you might know that we're changing. our name around here. I did not. And they were thrown to these commercials, one of which is Maddow reading the preamble to the U.S. Constitution.

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense. promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. If you watch it on YouTube, you'll see that those words are accompanied by images of Jacob Soberoff looking in his notebook and Stephanie Rule giving the once over to a script.

I'm really not kidding about that. There's another ad also on YouTube that has Maya Angelou reciting her poem, Human Family. These all look like the campaign commercials of a Democrat who's about to lose the presidential election. I was about to say it seems so sad. We've got the short order cook and the kid on a bicycle and then the space shuttle taking off and protests in the streets. Oh my God. Yeah. Michael Grinbobb in the New York Times notes that this is part of a $20 million ad campaign that will be splashed across billboards from Times Square to Los Angeles International Airport.

Speaking, David of acronyms. When we learned about MS now, we started the Hayes Challenge, name for Chris, which stands for horrible acronyms you encounter sucker. Thank you. An alert listener, Alex Cartini, has found one. He says, just saw a story about the Philadelphia Museum of Art and its rebrand to the Philadelphia Art Museum. This was in the Philadelphia Inquirer. And Alex writes something that stuck out to me was,

some board members are concerned that the rebrand is bringing the museum the wrong kind of attention. Changing Philadelphia Museum of Art to Philadelphia Art Museum has elicited an unfortunate moniker from social media wags, Fart. P-H-A-R-T. Got to watch those acronyms, folks. The ESPN Solitaire scandal. You and I talk about ESPN scandals here all the time,

something Pat McAfee said on the air, something the front office did. This felt like an old-school deadspin era ESPN scandal. Yes. Where it was so strange that you just couldn't believe what you were seeing was real. Yeah. If you didn't follow this, Stephen A. Smith,

got an endorsement deal with a solitaire app. Yeah. This was after this year's NBA finals where he was caught playing solitaire during the game. A bunch of fellow ESPN personalities got in on the deal too, Mina Kimes, Laura Rutledge, Kendrick Perkins, and they were tweeting at Stephen A

or about Stephen A with the trademark hashtag ad in their tweet, pretending like they were facing off against him in solitaire have we by the way reached a time in history where hashtag ad does not work anymore I mean is that still a thing if you see that do you just you're like oh I'm interested in what you're peddling here

I certainly think it has less less power now than it did maybe the first you know in the first times that it was employed because that was at a time we were transitioning from long full-length articles to tweets and we read the whole tweet, but now we're in an era where we don't actually read the tweet. You kind of read like the first two words. You know, as our attention spans shrink, the hashtags seem to have less and less meaning. And every four tweets is an ad now. Yeah. So we're already. Well, yeah. And even the ads, even the ones that aren't technically ads are

ads, right? I mean, why are we like the vast majority of people on Twitter are promoting the thing that they do, you know? So first this just seemed kind of cheap. but as awful announcing as Drew Lerner noted, we're talking about endorsing a company that is currently facing a lawsuit that alleges it defrauded customers by placing them in real money games

with bots instead of human players as it advertised. Oh my God, this is a great, this is like, though, you had one job department. So, Kimes and Relage deleted the tweets and then on Saturday,

Mena quote tweeted one of the critical notes she got from Twitter and wrote this Mea culpa. The truth is, Kimes wrote, I didn't spend any time looking into the whole thing, and that's 100% on me, thought it was just typical marketing work, and I'm deeply embarrassed I didn't vet it. A colossal F up on my part.

Good for Mina. Yeah, that's exactly how you should respond. It's so much easier than coming up with the lie. Yeah, and you notice in her mea culpa, it's nobody else's fault. Yeah. I wish more journalists talk like that because everybody makes mistakes. Yeah.

And it's just great to say, I didn't do what I was supposed to do. There it goes. And by the way, hashtag Mayacopa. By the way, mean is the reason that people cared about this at all? Yeah. Because they respect her and they see her as something bigger than your basic ESPN take artist, which she is. Like a big curve. Or the inverse, they hate her because she is who she is.

Yeah, well, there is that too. You're right. There's a lot of piling on. But like a big perk, solitaire scandal, that doesn't move the needle. Nobody's worried about that. Anyway, good stuff from Meena Kimes. Politics is still like professional wrestling. Thank God. Mom Donnie's victory speech the other night had a lot going for it. David, we've explored this man's rap career. We've explored his Columbia application. But did we explore his appreciation of the wrestling promo.

No, we have not talked about it. And it's 100% on me because I watched the speech live, as the most people did. I thought it was fantastic. It was definitely like a, you know, a deliberate choice. And then went to, I think I was watching CNN and the panel that was covering it were mostly clutching their furrows, right? They're just like, yeah, what a way to just like ruin everything you've just worked for? And I was like, what were they listening to?

It was, but it's on me because I've just listened to too many wrestling promos in my life, I think. I just didn't seem like that big of a deal. Doesn't it seem like we get a lot of political panels that will watch a politician give a speech and say, by the way, the things I campaigned on are the things I'm going to do? Yeah. And they go, wait, what? Yeah. We saw this with Trump twice.

Well, it's, I mean, listen, I don't want to be overly skeptical about it, but it is this sort of philosophy of like, you know, you campaign to win, but nothing you said on the campaign really matters. Like, it's the emptiness of politics, right? It's the sort of impidity of like, well, why should you still be talking about that stuff? You've won now. Now you extend an olive branch. It's like, what? Yeah.

Like it's all a big game that you're supposed to be winning rather than... You can get into the club and have, you know, go to like the cocktail party later or whatever. Yeah. Anyway, here is Mom Donnie sounding like he's holding a microphone in a ring on Monday Night Raw. So Donald Trump, since I know you're watching, I have four words for you. Volume up. To get the true wrestling promo effect, he really would have had to say, I've got a message

for you, President of the United States, Donald Trump. Oh, man. Yeah, I've got four words for you. Yeah. I mean, that crowd was really engaged. I think if he had said, I have two words for you that they would have gotten the response. You think they would have filled in the blank? There might have been some crossover.

I honestly do. Yeah. Anyway, thanks to listener Jake Madtown for alerting us to that. Thank you so much. The hallway story at Condé Nast, David. Mm-hmm. Max Taney reports that Conday Nast, which is, of course, the publisher of the New Yorker Vanity Fair and other magazines, abruptly fired four staffers who were among a group of more than a dozen employees who confronted

of the company's head of human resources on Wednesday, an unsubtle message to its employee union that the publisher was taking a harder line in its dealings with employees. This story begins with Condon asked deciding that Teen Vogue was going to get absorbed by Vogue original recipe. Six people lost their jobs because of that. And, you know, and again, you and I do there are so many journalism job loss stories that it gets easy to just glide over them. Yeah.

To mention them and not think about what's actually happening when someone loses their job. But we're in a state of the industry where you may not get back to the level you were at before you got laid off. You may not get back at all given the state of the industry. Yeah. The big deal when somebody loses their jobs. So what happened here was Condon asked employers.

were massing outside the office of HR chief Stan Duncan asking to meet with him either now or later. We got a video from the Raps Corbin Bollies showing Duncan directing them back to their workplace sort of walking away

from his office and saying please go this way and he's walking back to where he wanted them to be. It was like an Indiana Jones being chased by the Boulder situation. Yes. Like, if I duck under this thing, then the boulder will keep going. And I'll get back to what I wanted to. Well, and what if Indiana Jones and the boulder were dictated by HR policy where I have to formally tell you something?

Yeah. Like, you know, David, I'm putting this in writing so that we both understand. You know, like, I am directing you to your workplace. Yes. And if you choose not to go. I watched this video. And again, I think I think Kondi Ness and some of the articles has said, you know, the video is not. complete. There's there are things that are not in what you're seeing there. And we can say that.

I am just stunned that this ended with the firing of four employees. Yes. Like, firing was the answer to this. Really? And I understand, you know, you talk about what Tanny, Tanny references there about, you know, pushing back on a union, taking harder lines and saying, okay, the rules aren't what the rules were from 2020 to early 2025. But like these people are fired for that? Yeah. I just I just, it feels like something

something could have been done that was not that. Like that just that feels again to go back to what I said about what it means to lose your journalism job right now. Mm-hmm. I mean, what could have been that bad that you would get fired for doing something like that?

I don't know. It just shock me. All right. Unnamed. football audio segment. Still working on the name. I like it. First off, I'd like to say this. You know, whenever people complain about how hard it is to watch football and, oh, my God,

the games are on all the apps and stuff like that, I'm usually pretty dismissive. I usually say, you know what, this is the best time there has ever been to watch sports. Stop your complaining. Stop your cheap clout chasing by, you know, being mad at the apps. on this weekend when YouTube Disney and that dispute still dragging on through yet another weekend of college football, I was finally radicalized. I was like, this is annoying.

I bought the ESPN app primarily for Cowboys Cardinals, but I'm like, okay, so now I have all the college football on Saturday. I'm good to go. And I'm watching college game day, okay, we're going to see what antics old Pat McAfee's going to get into,

get up to. and then I sort of walked away as the show was ending and I'm like okay they got me all fired up for the Texas Tech BYU game all right this is cool here we go and you know this is going to be roll game day is going to roll right into this well I walk away and I come back and the TV says your event has ended and has a picture of the ESPN campus in Bristol I believe yeah and I'm like oh because this isn't

app and everything is all a cart. Yeah. So I selected college game day all a cart, and that doesn't mean I got the main course of college football. I need to actually select that separately, which then required, at least on my phone, another 90 second ad for me to watch that wasn't part of the broadcast. Yeah. Now I'm getting annoyed.

Now I'm pissed off. And I was able to actually sign into the ESPN app, which I noticed a lot of people had trouble doing. Yeah. we got it we got to we got to finish this day but it's it's all over that yeah that there has to be a better way to do the ads i'm not going to sit here and act like i have but there's got there's got to be a way to bank the ads when just for for the app to know that if you're running in within the first three minutes of a live sporting event and they should just let you watch it you know it's sure yeah it's it's it's annoying who are the democrats that can cave to end the youtube disney dispute what side of the island quite sure what party that is audio we got gus johnson's voice cracking again yes this is the winning touchdown from saturday's indiana penn state game on fox fernando mandoza finds omar cooper with 36 seconds left is that voice cracking or is jim hinson and frank

oz doing play by play now i almost said it up top it's not cracking i mean it just feels like his entire like his vocal cords have been ripped out of his body and he's still being forced to do the call. Great credit to him. I mean, just screaming, you know, it's like he's falling off a cliff and his microphone is still on the top of the

cliff and he's just screaming to get the audio, you know, across over. It is exactly what it sounds like. Like he's falling away from us. And we're hearing the long tail of his scream. Yeah, it was fantastic.

I really liked it. Great kudos to him for just like toughing it out or whatever. But it was, it was so wild. It almost sounded fake. Let's see what else we got here. Tony Romo talking like the kids. CBS, Patriots, Bucks, take it away Tony. He's mentally sound.

This team is DTF, Jim. Patriots details toughness and they finish. That's my moniker. That sounds very close to what Brable tells him. He says that. I think the team might be technical. for him, but it's all good. Did Jim Nance know the other meaning of DTF?

I think so, right? That was his implication when he says that's what Vribal tells them. He's leaning in, well, no, that doesn't make any sense. He said he is for technique, right? Yeah, he knows that it's something naughty, but doesn't know exactly what it means. Okay. That way, I don't know. Yeah, that's very weird.

Another time during the game, Jim Nance, he was talking about Bill's Dolphins because they just gone to an update. And it's called Florida the Sunshine State. Yeah. And I got me to thinking sitting there on the couch, is there ever a good time to call a state by its nickname? Does that ever not make the audience wince? No, no. But I tell you, you know, it's just like writing an article.

You got to find 10 different ways to say the same thing or else you sound repetitive. But you actually don't, right? An inning can just be an inning. It doesn't have to be a stanza. Oh, yeah. That's true. And I feel on election night, you know, Rachel, Matt out looking at the camera. Look at the returns coming in from the show me state. It's like it's

still just Missouri. You can just say Missouri one more time. Yeah. We understand that you're going to have to say some words over and over again. The big audio of the weekend, David, Donald Trump was in the booth with Kenny Albert and Jonathan Vilma of Fox during the Lions Commanders game. Anyone in search of some history should know that there was one of these during our childhoods that I remember, Ronald Reagan, who was just newly out of office going into the booth with Vince Scully. Yeah. The 89 baseball All-Star game.

You can find some really cool pictures of that online, too. One of my favorite parts about a Donald Trump interview or a interview with any politician is the point when they try to show America that they really are a sports fan. So we'll take you back to the 60s. You got the Jets. Got Joe Namath. You got the Cowlick. Right.

We had a lot of things, a lot of interesting things. Who was your team? So I love the Jets and I love the Giants. I had a lot of friends, Bob Tish and some people that owned the Giants at the time as we're going along and progressing. And, you know, look, we had a couple of Super Bowls with the Giants. The Jets have been having a little bit of a hard time. Woody's a great guy. He's a great friend of mine.

They'll get it together. Take it a little time. You're a Joe Namath fan. Well, I love Joe Namath. Yeah. And he was a great talent. He had that arm. His legs weren't so good, but his arm made up for it, right?

That's all you need that quarterback. When you talk about a quick release, he had it. Yes, he did. So Donald Trump knows who owns the sports teams. Mm-hmm. He didn't know that Joe Namas' knees were shot. That was something. Yeah, I feel like he probably has, you know,

a number of sports facts that are, like, from 40 years ago, right? And that's just sort of where it ends. Everything else is just, we had to have very interesting things. Some very interesting things. Very interesting things. As the segment went along, Kenny Albert invited Donald Trump to call a play. Here's how that went.

And let's see, we have a very important, I think it's a very important couple of plays. Here we go. Second and seven. Yeah, second and seven. Let's see what happens. Whoa. All right.

Crosky Merritt. Not bad. Takes it down for the five-yard line. That's right. That's right. Good runner. There we go. It's a very interesting plays.

The very interesting runs from that football man who is to Corey Kroski Merritt. Trump continued to cosplay as an announcer, David, when Debo Samuel caught a touchdown pass. And I'll tell you, our country has over $17 trillion being invested in it, which is a record. So we're doing great, just like they have to do great right now. Let's see what happens. On fourth down, Mariotta throws to the end. That was very important. Got a little ways to go yet, but still, that was very important.

Now your ratings have gone up because there's hope. Trump tying in the state of the country to the state of the play or the commanders was just masterful stuff. Later on, Trump also drew a metaphor for life out of the sports world. But you can't equate sports with. life, you know, you have the triumph and you have the problems and you got to get through the problems to hit the triumphs and you can never quit, you can never give up. See, David, sometimes you win an election and sometimes you lose an election. Oh, no, it doesn't quite hold up there.

Anyway, thanks to awful announcing for those clips. Coming up in 30 seconds, Charlie Warzel explains it all. But first, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same. same time. Send your nominees to at the Pressbox pod where they are always

always gratefully received. Carly Ray Jepson, David. I know a subject you spend a lot of your day thinking about.

Carly Ray Jepson has announced that she is pregnant. Wow. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write Call me baby. Thanks to

listener Jackson Marmalade. If you think that's the only thing I could dredge up this week, you're right. And congrats. You may

the Overward Twitter joke of the week. David, it has been way, way, way too long since we had the Atlantic's Charlie Warzel on this podcast. That's because Charlie has been busy reading the internet. It's also been busy with a new podcast called Galaxy Brain, which debuts this Friday. Charlie, welcome back to the press box. Thank you for having me.

Appreciate it. All right. So many things to discuss with you, but let's start here. politicians you have noted are influencers now, or at least they think they're influencers. We have a vice president that is a Twitter troll. Now, we see things like this. We might write a column.

We cry foul. What does this do to our collective understanding of the world? Wow, that's a big one. What does it do? I think, you know, in a way, having politicians who, having the job of politician now, be so inextricably linked with like the attention economy and the influencer incentives, right? Which is the idea of just attracting attention is a universal good in that realm of thinking, right? And, you know, as we all know, the ways to attract attention on the internet is through conflict and division and things that outrage people.

I think what it does, though, more than anything else is I really do think that there is like, And this sounds like, you know, old, old guy or pearl clutching or whatever, or whatever you want to say. I think there's a way that it's just like, it just sort of cheapens things. Like, I think when you see J.D. Vance going on, like, hosting Charlie Kirk's show after his assassination, and I understand that that was, that was supposed to be like, you know, a symbol of, you know, unity for them and how grave and serious this was. but he has like continued to show up on that show and hosted and just like this idea that the vice president is super available like there's this like cheapening right and this idea that like when you see when you see you know politicians especially like during you know the shutdown or

whatever posting memes and and just sort of like essentially looking for engagement in the way that like a content creator whose job that is when they're doing that it there's this way that i think it really does kind of cheapen the office a little bit or also just like i've seen a lot of people even people who may be sympathetic to the politics of you know say whatever you know lawmaker just say like this is this is kind of sad like it makes me kind of sad that like there's no place in modern society where you can ascend to where there is like enough sort of dignity and enough, you know, like, I don't even know the right word for it, but that you don't have to go and chase these types of incentives, that you don't have to also be a creator and pile that on as well.

And I think that that starts to, I think it starts to get at people, honestly. That's interesting. And now I'm torn between the question I was going to ask and going further on that. What is the, I think it's maybe pretty self-evident, but what's the incentive of the vice president to chase internet clout? Is that, is it, I agree that it belittles the role, but isn't that self-defeating? I mean, I really think in Vance's case, well, I think in the entirety of, like, when you look at the Trump administration, I think they're, you know, this is sort of administration-wide, this is a government that essentially, governs via trolling, via this type of outrage. Like, they don't really have policies other than immigration enforcement, let's say. But even that is done through this, like, influencer lens, right? It's, okay, we're going to embed a bunch of cameras with ice.

Or a guy throws a sandwich at, you know, a, at a cop. And we are going to go in the middle of the night and arrest them with 15 HD cameras and cut up together this video using like the Sicario soundtrack that makes us look like super hard, like we're coming for you type people. There's this way in which they don't have tons to offer people as as a actual government. And there's this notion, I think, that like what they do have to offer is this sort of content creation, is this idea at all times of, you know, like look at us. We're pissing off the right people.

everyone is so enraged. This is like this is exciting because we are trolling your enemies. And that is, I really think that that is like a form of what they are trying to offer to people. And in the case of someone like Vance, going on some of these shows, I think, and just being so available and trolling, you know, whomever on the Positive America guys or whatever, you know, on Twitter, I think in some ways, it's it's grasping at the at like the Trumpian strategy, right? Like like Vance needs to continually raise his, you know, approval with the people if he wants to, you know, take over at some point or, you know, get the nomination for his party. And there's this notion that like the only way to do that within the sort of mega structure and information ecosystem is to do this like influencing job. So I think

that's what's in it for them. And I also think that it is a way to paper over the fact that, like, as a government, other than deporting brown people, they don't have any other thing that they're trying to offer anyone. Charlie, there was a Gallup poll last month that had trust in the media at 28 percent, an all-time low. I think you see the causes and the consequences of that distrust as clearly as anyone while you're doing your day job. Is there a scenario where you see that number ever going back up? It's interesting. Not to plug my podcast, but the first conversation I had was with Hank Green, who's a famous YouTuber, sort of one of the original, like, creator-type people. And one of the questions that I was trying to ask him, and we've actually had conversations

about this, you know, like offline, is like he's someone who basically has built this massive store of trust, like a lot of influencers over time with people. And people trust, you know, trust Hank Green's level of approval and trust is so much higher than the media. So I asked, I was asking him about this. And what I thought was really interesting is he really does believe that it's a, that it's a pendulum swing. I don't know if I fully believe in that, but it's this notion that basically things get so bad, so chaotic. So sort of what I was saying to you about this idea that's like, oh, man, like, you know, like the politicians are basically doing like TikTok. dances like you know come on like we want we want something here and this idea that that you know

over a certain amount of time we we could ping pong back i i really don't know because i think i don't know if i agree with that because i think that there's no hack right now on line for attention and for approval like shitting on the media there's just nothing that there's nothing to it, whether it's like the media is not covering X thing, right? Which, you know, they are. You learned about it because the media is covering it, but you say that and it, you know, heaps a bunch of attention on it. Or simply just like picking, picking fights with, you know, with big news organizations who are, you know, probably falling down in some respects, but are also, you know, maybe they're on the ground in the Middle East, you know, like reporting and, and they have

journalists who are, you know, risking their lives to get information. It's, it's really been very interesting to see that as a, as sort of like an attentional trick, like picking, picking these fights. And, and, and I think that what that does is it, you know, it just creates this vicious cycle, right? Because journalists will sometimes respond defensively. And it's, it's, it's, I don't know, it's, it's very, I don't see that, that ending any, any, any soon. Yeah, I mean, I think there's nothing, no matter what your opinion in the situation is, there's nothing less appealing than journalists arguing, like, the merits of journalism or coming defense of a specific journalistic institution. And I've always kind of, I guess,

seen it as a like institution versus person situation. Like, it's a lot easier to hate journalism. It's a lot easier to hate Congress. It's a lot easier to hate whatever than the individual people that affect your lot or that you engage with, right? I mean, like, you know, congressmen keep getting reelected, even though they're at historic lows and approval ratings. But is there a, is there a, is there a correlation there, do you think? I mean, do you think that it's, do you think that, that we're in a world now or we just like, we, we just enjoy hating institutions?

Well, I think, I think in some, yes. I, I, I do. I think that it, that it's pretty. easy to do that. Like I think it's so much easier, you know, one thing that Hank was telling me was like when he messes up, right? He can come out and just say, hey, I messed up and I'm really sorry about that. And people say, man, it's just you out there, right?

It's just you. But when people see a news organization mess up or something like that, there's this notion of you have all this money, you are funded by, you know, X, Y, or Z billionaire, you have all these standards you're supposed to be, you know, the idea that you're like supposed to be infallible. And, you know, a lot of people don't, to be very fair, they don't see corrections, right? They, like, it's just not something that is, it's not like the news organizations are hiding them necessarily, but there's this, this notion of that. And so I think that there's this way, something that I've been thinking about a lot for the past year or so is the way to, that so

many of the things that are meant to create trust with the media, right? Like the idea that when I write something for the Atlantic, it has editors who are spending time over that, right? It has copy editors who are spending time trying to help me organize my ideas, make sure there's not typos, and we have fact checkers, right? Who are actually just basically making me debate every point to make sure that there's this huge apparatus. But editing, fact checking, all those things have been actually weaponized, like turned around against the press as these ideas of what are, like, what are you hiding, right? Like there's this, there's been all these controversies for, you know, over what did you edit out of that, right? What was, I wanted to see the full conversation

with the source because maybe they said something like, I need access to all of that information. What, like, you are controlling the narrative. So these tools that are used to build that kind of trust end up becoming these things. I noticed at first. in like 2017 with the rise of the pro-Trump media type thing like all of the guys who were making content for that would do these massive long live streams like 11 hours long and people and I'd be like who's going to watch that and they said doesn't matter it's the fact that we are showing them everything because that is how we tell them we're not hiding a single thing from you and of course they're hiding things from them right like it's it's they're you know it's just the aperture

they're choosing to show you of all of the things that they're that they're doing. But there is this notion that these, it's just like it's a very difficult thing to wrap your head around that all of these parts of these institutions that are actually meant to create this trust are actually the things that are being used against. And if you're just a lone influencer who's out there in the wild, you know, you can say, hey, you know, we're going to put out a of stuff. We're probably going to make a lot of mistakes. But hey, it's just, it's two guys, you know, in a van. Sorry. You wrote a piece last month in the Atlantic with fact checkers and copy editors and all that stuff called YouTube bends the knee. And you noted that YouTube had

given a $24.5 million gift to extreme White House makeover because Trump had sued YouTube for suspending his account after January 6th or suspending his channel. I think it's worth stepping back and asking why are all these big, rich tech companies bending the knee to Trump? I think there's two things. I think one is the same reason that a lot of people are doing it, which is that they're a little bit afraid, right? I mean, I don't think we can, I don't think it's a coincidence, let's say, that in the summer of 2024, Donald Trump wrote in this weird coffee table book that he put out that he, you know, if Mark Zuckerberg interferes in the election again,

I'm going to put him in jail for life, right? So I think that there's like a general, like we don't know what this guy's going to do with his power kind of thing. And Andy also a general, like, a truism of 2025 is that people, if they have a lot of power already and have an ability to buy access to Donald Trump,

they're probably going to try to do that because it's helpful. Like hire, put a lawyer on retainer who has worked with Donald Trump, That's a, that's a, you know, a successful strategy for people with a lot of power in 2025. The other reason, though, and this was sort of the reason why I wrote the column, was that especially for the platforms, for the social networks, buying into the Trump thing, bending the need to Trump in some ways, it, it accomplishes something they wanted to do for a really long time along content moderation lines, which is to basically say, we don't want to do. this, right? This is, we do not want to be the editors, the arbiters. We don't want to have any, you know, every rule that we make ends up being an editorial choice, right? When we make rules about what people are allowed to post on there. And it only, you know, it only creates problems

for us, whether people say it's censorship or whether we have to spend a ton of money to try to enforce those rules. Or we piss the wrong people off and we get dragged in front of Congress, all this stuff. The tech companies for decades have not wanted to be involved in any of this and have their cake and eat it too, right? Have all the engagement, all this stuff, but not have to deal with any of the problems that their products cause. Because Donald Trump is so, and, you know, the Republicans are so boisterous about the, you know, the shadow banning and the censorship and think that that is happening to them on these platforms. Bending the need to Trump is also a way to say, all right, we're getting rid of our content moderation systems.

We're going to, you know, a different sort of low touch thing here. And it are, you know, our platforms are going to be free for all. And that's easiest for them. That's sort of what they have wanted for a long time. And this is just like an opportunity to do to do that. It also changes the discourse sort of, or at least the sorts of vitriol that are being directed at them, right? I mean, it almost just like it's, I feel like if I'm Mark Zuckerberg, it's really easy

to ignore hate, like just. straight up like you suck, but it's harder to ignore, like, you don't, you're running your website bad, you know, and it just, and it just sort of directs it the, into, into a more psychologically manageable way. But speaking of psychological management, this is a little bit off subject, or not off subject, it's different than what we were talking about. When I want to get any real work done, I have to log off, Charlie. How do you get anything done when your job is logging on?

Yeah, yeah. I think there's like a healthy, a healthy hatred of it. Like, I, like, truly, like, I, I started writing about technology and those things a long, long, long time ago because I loved the internet and I enjoyed it. And then, you know, it's like, I don't know. I don't, I feel like I hear this sometimes from, from folks who end up, you know, they go, they cover sports because, like, all they wanted to do is, you know, be in the locker room. And then you get in the locker room and you're like, what, this is not a. great place. I don't like, you know, or like, like, so I think anyone who gets sort of too close to the sun feels this way. But I, I think really and truly, like, I, I struggle a little with it,

but less and less because I think these places have become genuinely not great places to spend time. Like I, you know, along, and this has less even to do with like the, Elon Musk takeover of Twitter slash X or things like that has almost less to do like the political valence of them. But I think like the mature social media experiences and like the social networks have matured, it's just it's pretty deadening. I think for like for for everyone. Like it is not it is not a great place to be. It is a like the you constantly are feeling. And this is where I have like a little shred of optimism, I think, in all this. I think that a lot of people are really tired of the feeling of being algorithmically

manipulated. I genuinely, genuinely do. I think you see the sort of the purest version of this with, you know, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, younger people who have just, like, grown up in this environment. And they are like, they're kind of exhausted by it. And I see them disconnecting from it with a little more ease just because, does they feel this sense of, like, it's table stakes for them that you're going to be manipulated. And I feel as you go up the generational chain, it gets harder and harder to see that.

Like, I can feel it, but there is this sense of almost like duty, even outside of my job that I need to be in these spaces. This is where culture happens. This is sort of like, you know, a place. I go up to, you know, like my parents and the boomers. And I feel like there's even less of an understanding of how they're being manipulated. Not to say that they're terrible at media literature. or whatnot, but there's this, a little less of this feeling and more of this kind of general

confusion about what you're seeing sometimes. But I think that the universal experience here is that everyone has come to this understanding in some ways that they are being shown things to provoke reactions inside of them, whatever they are. It doesn't have to be rage bait, right? But it's just, it's that notion of, you know, I stayed too long on a, TikTok and now my feed just looks like one thing or I clicked on yeah you know Instagram ad and now I cannot stop getting ads for phone cases right like two years on or whatever it is

it's these these little signals and I think that people just feel it's it's almost akin to being you know in like a like a street market or something like that and having you know all the vendors you know like pushing in your face or whatnot and after a while you're just like yeah I need to go be quiet. And so this is a really long winded way to answer the question. But like I'm, I genuinely feel like it's easy to get work done because I don't want to be in these places that much anymore. And they used to be great and vibrant and exciting. And, and I think now that they feel like you're just like in Times Square all the time. The thing I get served up all the time is here is yet another middle age button down shirt that you could buy. I'm like, how wow,

the internet really knows me well. As you guys can see through the, uh, the Zoom people. camera right now. Charlie, since you mentioned Elon, let's end here. I think people like David and I paid a ton of attention to him and Twitter slash X when he bought the company, when he used it to help reelect Donald Trump last year, when he was in full on doge mode earlier this year. It's been kind of quiet, at least from people like our perspective since then. What do you make of Twitter in late 2025? Well, Elon Musk is a trillioner now, I guess, or like the world's first trillionator. It technically. So it's been,

it's been, it was a good week for him last week. And then at the same, at the same time, apparently over the, over the weekend, he was, he was posting videos of,

of an AI, bought like a, you know, a nice looking lady, saying, I will always love you. On X. So I don't,

it's hard to know where he is at any moment, right? There's like the most desperate stuff in the world. And also like the richest man in the world. It's very interesting.

What is Twitter X in 2025? I really genuinely think it is, and there's a way in which this sounds pearl clutchy or, you know, like a blue sky liberal or like whatever. But I genuinely think that like it is a, it is a platform that is like causing people who spend too much time on it. Like, I think it's causing them to be very gently radicalized, right? Like it just, it feels I spent, I've spent a lot of time in 4chan and some of these, these like, like places that, that burst a lot of these, like, for work, I've spent a lot of time in these places. There are mainstream parts, like when you click the 4U tab, when I click the 4U tab on X, it resembles in very real ways exactly what like 4chan look like in 2017. Like the same kind of like we're making, you know, these like winking anti-Semitic, you know, jokes. We're posting, you know, footage of Adolf Hitler.

We're, you know, like I've seen people who I used to interact with, like either sources or, you know, like just kind of chronic posters who are, you know, very sort of like left of center type people. having long-threaded conversations with eugenicists on Twitter. Like, I've seen that. And I'm like, what happened to you? You know, like, what is going on? And there's this kind of like wink, wink, you know, thing there that it's like, oh, yeah, the libs over on blue sky would hate this. And it's like, well, this is, I mean, do you know who you're talking to?

So I think that there's a strange quality with that. But as for Musk, the thing that I think, whatever happens to him down the line, his purchase of Twitter, about three years ago now, I think is one of the, is one of the, you know, the seminal moments of the 2020s. I think it will go down as because it became a playbook for all the Doge stuff. It was how do we take over an organization that exists and bend every single part of it, kind of like gut it of anyone who can protest, and then bend the will of it towards our political ideology. It is a blueprint in turning something into a political weapon. And I think that right now we're seeing with, you know, the deal to buy with the Ellisons and such to buy TikTok. I think we're seeing, you know, people are trying to run that again. And I think that for, I would argue worse, but I think that that is that is just this, it was this light bulb moment for a lot of people with power. And I also think even if it's not a takeover a company, it was a real learning moment for a lot of tech executives in Silicon Valley who were kind of frustrated with their workforces, which had exercised a lot of political power and organizational power in the, in the workforces during the pandemic. And it was this moment of, all right, like, we are going to put the hammer down. We are going to exert our power and our authority and bend these platforms towards what we want to do.

And everyone is just going to have to deal with that. So I think that it, you know, Elon's influence in that regard, more than even the money or anything else, I think that is going to have like a long-term ripple effect for the, you know, the tech and media and political sphere. All right, Charlie Warzel's new podcast is Galaxy Brain. It debuts this Friday, November 14th. It will be running 11 hours in tribute to some of the content creators. Charlie has been covering over the years, Charlie, thanks for coming on the press box. Thank you for having me.

I appreciate it. All right, David, a couple quick things before we get out of here. I want to take you back to the year 2007. when I believe I listened to my very first podcast. Were we living together in 2007 or we were not living together in 2007? It was a kind of a year plus stint where, yeah. Okay, just making sure. All right.

We were between stents. We'll just leave it at that. So I learned about this podcast from, and how 2007 does this sound, a blog. Mm-hmm. And it wasn't even really a podcast. It was a BBC 4 radio show called In Our Time. Oh, yeah. Have you ever listened to In Our Time?

I don't, I think so. I feel like, like, I don't, I honestly don't know the answer, but I feel like I definitely subscribed to NR Time when I was like making my first RSS feed lists of like what podcasts I should listen to. Definitely that era. It's been around on the radio since 1998. And from the very beginning, it was hosted by an 86 year old man, now 86 year old man, Melvin Bragg, who is your classic.

British polymath. TV and radio host, novelist, also member of the House of Lords, just to throw something else into that career. And every week, Melvin Bragg would gather

three academics to talk about big topics from, I kid you not, the entire span of human knowledge. I'm going to give you some episode titles

just to give people a sense of what in our time is about. Hannah Arendt, the moon, hormones, dragons, Nefertiti, the time machine as in H.G. Wells, Moliere, the Vienna secession. I'm not really sure what that is. Karma as in the doctrine. You'll listen to the episode. Yeah. Kali as in the Hindu goddess, slime molds, the Knights Templar, the Federalist Papers, Citizen Kane, Jupiter. That is an incomplete sampling that trust me does not do justice to the scope of in our time. Bragg recorded more than a thousand episodes of the show. I have probably listened to part or all of a hundred of them.

It's impossible to pick a favorite because they're basically all the same. He brings these academics into the studio. He impatiently shepherds them through a discussion so that people like you and me understand and the basics of Jupiter. It ends about 45 minutes later, and then everyone has tea. This really happens. Everyone has tea

and sluffs off a few more smart things about the topic at hand that they didn't get into the show. He did an episode on Jane Austen's Persuasion. Here is Melvin, at his best, introducing the topic. Hello, Persuasion. Jane Austen's last complete novel

was published just before Christmas, 1817, five months after her death. It's the story of Anne Elliot, now 27, and losing her bloom, we're told, and have her feelings for the man she was engaged to eight years before, an engagement she broke off under family pressure. This first great love is Captain Wentworth, and when, by chance, she comes back into her life, still angry with her, she and we cannot know whether it's now too late for their love to have a second chance.

With me to discuss persuasion of Fiona Stafford, Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. Paddy Bullard, Associate Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Reading, and Karen O'Brien, Vice-Chancellor of Durham University. Karen, one of Jane Austen's brothers, Henry, wrote a short biographical note of his sister. So there you go. I'm all in. He would go on to Asset Academic, can you just please summarize Jane Austen's life in a few minutes?

Which she was able to do. wonderfully so. So aerodyte, you notice there's not a moment of wasted time there. And Bragg did this thing that I love and that I aspire to on this podcast all the time, which is that he could talk intelligently about just about anything. He would either know things or he would at least know the right questions to ask. Anyway, I praise in our time because in September, Melvin Bragg announced, that he would be stepping down from the show,

which is a sad occasion, but, hey, all of those episodes, as you can see, are extremely evergreen. Yeah. So if you've never heard of it, if you listen to it for a while and found some other Ringer podcast to occupy your life, go back. There's been no new news that I know about, about, you know, the Vienna secession. Maybe I'm wrong. He's like, what he's done the Jane Austen episode three times? It's time to retire. That's it.

Trust me, there were more than three Jay Nounston episodes. Also, Sarah Viren had a great piece about bragging in our time in the New York Times Sunday magazine this weekend. And she talked about using In Our Time as a sleep aide. Oh, yeah. Have you ever used a podcast to fall asleep? 100%. I don't know if I've used one to fall asleep. But there's definitely a mode where like it's for napping.

Not so much for like into the day. But like for taking a nap, yeah, I'll throw on something like a comfortable podcast. I think it's in my mind is so revved up that I can't just go cold turkey and get any sleep. So I need to have some level of engagement, but one to engage as minimally as possible. I'll throw on certain podcasts. Spotify, though, well, you know, sometimes we'll just go to the next episode if there's one in the queue. But then sometimes we'll just sort of arbitrarily pick from your library or from, you know, the podcast that you follow. And that can mess up the whole nap, right?

Like suddenly you're just listening to an episode of something where people are yelling or just talking in a different octave, you know, whatever, just in a different tone. But certainly, yeah, podcast and nap eight is pretty clutch. I'll tell you what happened with me. I had just a couple years ago, I just started having trouble going to sleep. Again, I've never felt more middle age than, you know, I'm trouble sleeping these days. So I put a pair of earbuds in, turn a podcast down to the lowest possible level. and I started falling sleep instantly and I sleep every night like that

and the thing that jars me is not people yelling it's when it skips to an episode of the press box and I hear my own voice in my sleep and I just do the undertaker sit up like what's that? Like yeah it's go to something else it's not what you want to be dreaming about having a conversation with your podcast self

imagine how it is for me if I'm like half asleep and all of a sudden I just hear, David? I'm like, I'm late for work. I hear your voice. It's just, you know, that's comforting me. Always has been.

Only in journalism, David. These are words. You always read news articles, but never encounter in human speech. And we got one that, in fact, I had never seen before. And our correspondent felt the same way. This comes to us from Joe Dorowski. and I'll read his email here. Brian, I'm an English professor at BYU. And when reading Blake Topmire's USA Today article about BYU football, I saw a word I've never seen before.

Paramount C. Paramount C. Are you familiar with that word? The act of being paramount? Is that what it means? I mean, the state of being paramount? Yes, the state or fact of being of greater importance than anything else. And here's the sentence from the article, talk to any coach or a judge. administrator for long, and they'll reference the paramountcy of fit and alignment between a coach, athletic director, and university president. Easy to figure out or easy enough, but I don't think I've ever seen paramountcy before my life. Why would you not just say importance or like an ad adjective if you need it?

Like, I don't, like it's the paramountcy. Paramountcy. Yeah. Speaking of why wouldn't you say, we saw the word exacerbated in this. feature. Mm-hmm. The other day, an NBA team's injury woes were exacerbated. Well, Teague Dwyer sent us the opening scene from the movie Sean of the Dead.

Mm-hmm. It also includes this word. Here are a man and a woman talking about their relationship troubles. Yeah, it's no wonder I was bringing my flat mates out and then that and exacerbates things. What do you mean? Well, you guys hardly get on, do you? No, what does exacerbate me? It means to make things worse.

means to make things worse. Feel free to say that anytime. All right, it's time for a feature that only gets better, not worse. It's time for David's Shoemaker guesses the Strain Punt headline. Yeah. Last Tuesday's headline about students that were prepared for a test about the wrong historical subject was Fail Caesar. Today's headline comes to us from Eric Raskin, who self-reports, I always like it when somebody self-reports

we don't have to go find them turn yourself in he wrote this headline for boxing scene did you see this new movie Christie that came out or at least in wide release over the weekend in which Sidney Sweeney plays a boxer

yes absolutely Christy Martin apparently had very very low box office but we don't do box office stories around here all right the movie's called Christy I want you to think of classic Clint Eastwood as you ponder

what was boxing scenes, strain pun headline. Wait, I'm looking, Clint Eastwood lines is what I've been given. Clint Eastwood movie titles. Oh, movie titles. It's also in the movie, though, this line.

The bad and the ugly, the, for them. How about Clint Eastwood is a radio host? Or actually, it's after. Oh, yeah, yeah. What's it called? Play. God, what's that? What is that?

Play. Play something for me. Play. Play Misty for me. Oh, oh, oh. Wait, what's the movie called? I totally botched this one. Christy.

Play Christie for me. Okay, that's great. David, you're correct. Play Christy for me. God. He's a right answer. Should have had the dock up in front of me. At least would have gotten Christy right.

Yeah, well, it's, you don't always have IMDB pages up on this podcast. That's some of the other offerings here at the Ringer podcast network. He's David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Pidexie Magic by Bruce Baldwin. Coming up on the podcast Thursday, Joel's here, and we're going to talk to NBC's Chris Collinsworth about a big Lions Eagles game and much more. That's coming Thursday. Shoemaker, you and I tee it up Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media.

See you then, David. See you later, Brian.