The Press Box - “Obamagate” Explainer, 'Call Her Daddy', and Listener Mail

Episode Date: May 21, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker break down Trump’s claims against Obama and what he refers to as “Obamagate” (1:30) as well as the 'Call Her Daddy' podcast feud that has Dave Portnoy taking over the show, social media, and merch (including a “Cancel Suitman” hoodie) (23:00). Next is Listener Mail, where Bryan and David answer the question “If you could buy one media outlet, which would you buy and why?” and more (37:45). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David guesses the strained-pun headline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. This week, the Ringer is launching a new podcast feed called BoomBust, a new hub for narrative podcasts documenting the rise and fall of companies, celebrities, and trends. Season one, hosted by our own Alyssa Boresnack, takes you through this spectacular journey of HQ trivia. The once $100 million industry-altering company turned disaster. Alyssa interviewed dozens of former employees, investors, journalists, and fans bringing you the behind-the-scenes story of how HQ crumbled from within. Subscribe to Boom, bust, HQ, trivia,

and check out the first two episodes out now on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the ringer here. This is a press box. On today's agenda, the segment everybody's been waiting for, Brian and David talk about the Call Her Daddy podcast drama.

Yep, it's come to this. What does the latest bar to Contra Tempts Oda Howard Stern, we will discuss. We'll also answer your listener mail, including the question, which NBA insider will be granted access inside the NBA bubble? Plus, David guesses a strain pun headline and the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, let's begin with the topic that I'm hoping we can kind of explain to each other, Obamagate or the quote unquote Obama gate, quote unquote scandal.

You can't have enough air quotes. when talking about Obamagate. The whole thing unfolded thusly. Last Monday, Donald Trump quote tweeted an article from the far right website, The Federalist,

which was headlined, why did Obama tell the FBI to hide its activities from Trump? Trump himself offered an answer because it was Obamagate and he and Sleepy Joe led the charge, the most corrupt administration in U.S. history.

What is Obamagate exactly? Well, here's what Trump said at his press conference last Monday when asked by the Washington Post, Philip Rucker. Mr. President, in one of your Mother's Day tweets, you appear to accuse President Obama of the biggest political crime in American history. I'm sorry, can we just stop right there, Erica? David, is there any better sign of our times than when a reporter begins a question in one of your Mother's Day tweets?

Oh, my gosh. He's a trained journalist Just trying to do that beautiful The time Warner tradition Of kind of setting the background there Setting the stage Let's see what comes after that It's a real newspaper trick too, right?

Because it's totally deadpan In a Mother's Day Twitter rampage Comma President Donald J. Trump All right. Let us continue with Philip Rucker The biggest political crime In American history by far

Those were your words. What crime exactly Are you accusing President Obama Of committing And do you believe The Justice Department should prosecute him? Obama game. It's been going on for a long time. It's been going on from before I even got elected,

and it's a disgrace that it happened, and if you look at what's gone on, and if you look at now, all of this information that's being released, and from what I understand, that's only the beginning. Some terrible things happened, and it should never be allowed to happen on our country again. And you'll be seeing what's going on over the next, over the coming weeks, and I wish you'd write honestly about it, but unfortunately, you'd choose. not to do so. Yeah, John, please. What is the crime exactly that you're accusing him? You know what the crime is. The crime is very

obvious to everybody. What you have to do is read the newspapers except yours. Well, I feel like that's the end of the segment right there, right? We've just had Obamagate explain to us in full. Oh, man. I mean, it's been an easy laugh line, I think, for, you know, liberal Twitter or just Twitter in general and anyone watching that,

I think immediately sort of turned to whoever else was in the room with them and just you know, with Malthy Gap, wondered if that's, if they had just heard what they thought they heard. But, I mean, honestly, if someone asks you a question, we both have children. If you ask your child a question and the answer is, you know what it is, you know what I'm talking about. And then they like turn their head and run away. You know they're making something up, right? I mean, every human being knows this.

But that's exactly the point of Obamagate, right? At the same time, it's like, this is what we've been talking about about Donald Trump from the very beginning. And we'll get into trying to define Obama Gate in just a second. I think it's the most central tenet, the most central aspect of it, is that it's meaningless. And whether or not the people who, the Trump voters, Trump's audience, whatever, are aware, or believe what he says in all of his nonsense, or are in on the joke and like the idea that he's fighting back or doing whatever, that is the real question, right? I mean, that is the great unknown.

But let's get back to the basics here and talk Obamagate. Let's take it. I hate to say this. Let's take it seriously for one second. What do you think? You got it. Because the next day, in an attempt to add a little more definition, the White House released an ad, a video thing on its social media platforms with the caption, Obamagate.

Turns out it was just a mad libs of boogey man and boogie women, including James Comey, Sally Yates, Susan Rice. That whole lineup we've seen trotted out by Trump time and time again. But the basic gist, David, if I understand this, is something that Trump's been peddling for a really long time, which is a bunch of Democrats and deep state people made up the Russia scandal in an attempt to undermine the Trump administration. They didn't necessarily know he was going to win the presidency. In fact, very few people thought he would win the presidency, but they preemptively made this up to undermine his future presidents. right that's the just now functionally what is this it's a strategy Steve Bannon famously dubbed flooding the zone with shit Sean Elling writes this at Vox this is a new form of propaganda tailored to the digital age and it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by mudding the water so that consensus

isn't possible yeah which is I think what you're saying a second ago about it's debunkability being key to its power in the Trump universe. Yeah, that's right. There's a, there is an early, I think early on in this whole Obama case, such as it is, Jack Holmes wrote a piece for Esquire that when, when he's trying to break down what the actual crime at the heart of this is, and he semi-seriously writes, he says that they wanted Flynn to lie about him and then something about KT. McFarland, knock-knock FBI, and then unmasking.

and then he goes back to the end of the FBI lover's routine. The point is, I think what sets this moment, this accusation, whatever, this conspiracy theory apart from what has come before is, well, the one and only thing that sets us apart from what's come before is the term Obama gate, right? And that might be the most compelling part of the entire thing, right? I mean, we've, and it's not, it's not that they've drawn all of these things together under one umbrella and composed some sort of narrative, be it conspiratorial or real, it's just by presenting this, this name Obamagate, there is the implication that we have brought everything into one

narrative, right? There is the implication that it all fits together like some, like the last page of a Dashel Hammett novel, right? Where you're just like pulling things from the ether from from chapters 1, 8, and 9 and oh my God, how did I not see that all along? That's not actually happened in reality. Yeah, it sort of makes Trump into like the JJ Abrams of the right where we got all these elements that everybody loves, right? These elements that have been playing on Fox News, but they need to be remixed under a new banner, right?

They need to be sold to you anew. So essentially, we're going to take the Hillary Clinton server thing, which is really what Obamagate is just with slightly different villains and occasionally the same villains. put a new label on it, like you said. We're even going to overlap with the old things because he has suggested in at least one round of this that Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win the election in 2016 and not him.

So we're just going to go fully around the bend on that thing and repackage it. Just one more clip. And again, this may be at the risk of taking this all too seriously. Here is Trump riffing with Maria Bartaromo on Fox business. Oh, my God. Yeah. about what Obamagate might be.

It was the greatest political crime in the history of our country. If I were a Democrat instead of a Republican, I think everybody would have been in jail a long time ago. And I'm talking with 50-year sentences. It is a disgrace what's happened. This is the greatest political scam, hoax, in the history of our country. It is the biggest political scandal. People should be going to jail for this stuff.

And hopefully, a lot of people are going to have to pay. No other president should have to go through. And I'll tell you, General Flynn and others are heroes. Heroes because what's happened to them, they weren't after General Flynn. They wanted him to lie about me. Make up a story. And with few exceptions, nobody did that. There were many people.

I watched K.T. McFarland the other day. I watched where she was. knock, knock, FBI, you know, the FBI, okay? This was all Obama. This was all Biden. These people were corrupt. The whole thing was corrupt, and we caught them. We caught them.

And what you saw just now, I watched Biden yesterday. He could barely speak. He was on Good Morning America, right? And he said he didn't know anything about it. And now it just gets released. Right after he said that, it gets released that he was one of the unmaskers, meaning, He knew everything about it.

So he lied to your friend, George Stephanopoulos. The fact of the matter and documents that either, I don't know if the ones he was referencing, but certainly documents that came out, they've come out in either then or since, is that Joe Biden was not actually one of the unmaskers, on any of the FBI documents that are actually significant to what's going on here.

I'm not sure that that that matters. I'm not sure that there, I mean, there's certainly not going to be, you know, an addendum to any of Trump's charges. Just the release of new documents, even if they're exculpatory for Joe Biden or Barack Obama or whoever else, it will just be used exactly the same way as a as as further ambiguous proof that this has taken place, right? I mean, you'll just, they just point and say, look, new documents say, uh, whatever. But, you know, to be, to be given a, I mean, that Maria Bardoombo interview was a backscratch session, right? I mean, there was like so there, that was the most comfortable interview. You know, that was the most comfortable interview. that our president may ever get. The most like, I mean, there's,

that was the friendliest, the friendliest place he could possibly be. Do you hear her interject there? Yes, it is the biggest scandal. Exactly. That's not exactly a great follow-up, students of journalism.

Yeah, for that to be the best answer that he could formulate in such a friendly setting is, is telling. I mean, the whole thing is telling. Every answer he's given is telling.

But like, come on. I mean, that was the place for him to just lay out the inanity and all his glory. I think a really fascinating question here is why is Trump doing this? You know, if he has lots of diversionary tactics available to him.

I mean, on the one hand, if Americans think you've screwed up the government response to coronavirus saying, hey, look over there, has potential merit as a strategy. But as a bunch of people have pointed out, labeling this with Obama's name is kind of weird because Biden and Hillary before him were. semi-popular, semi-unpopular politicians. Obama, at least by the standards of our very hyper-partisan era, still polls, his approval ratings are still in the mid-50s to low 60s. So you've sort of replaced Joe Biden, who seems like an eminently criticizeable politician with somebody who's more popular than Joe Biden.

Yeah. Well, I mean, that's a good question. I don't think that it's, you know, the answer is necessarily deep. I think that frankly, Trump probably can't separate his own aversion, distaste, hatred. Pick your word for former President Obama

from that of the rest of the world, right? I mean, he probably assumes that everybody hates him as much as he does, despite what the polls say, because we all know that he doesn't believe in the polls. And I think probably if you want to get scientific or give it the benefit of the doubt, you know, the real move here

is to try to, try to animate the base. And I think his base probably does hate Obama as much as he does, right? So, I mean, just if he can, if this is a useful tool in getting Trump, pro-Trump, anti-O-Obama voters to the polls in November, then it could be a success. Yeah. I mean, there's the other theory would be that we had that Obama had that call with former staffers where he called the, he's been very reluctant to say anything of President Obama, former President Obama about anything since he left office. He called it on this call to the White House response to coronavirus, a quote, an absolute chaotic disaster. As NBC notes, two days later, on May 8th, Trump tweeted Obamagate and devised a conspiracy theory.

Yeah. So maybe the answer is just the most obvious one. Like, I was mad at Obama. Yeah. And so I chose to sort of go off. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, you know, the coronavirus response, I mean, this is slightly, is a little bit of a sidebar.

And all the big pieces from the Times, the Post, or the Wall Street Journal or wherever about the Trump administration's failure on the coronavirus front, there's always, you know, there's a little bit of a lack of a coherent central narrative, not, I don't mean in the same way that Obamagate doesn't have a central narrative because that one's made up and this one's real.

But you do kind of get the impression reading, you know, New York Times piece about Jared's, you know, wacky group of volunteers or whatever. whatever, that like, there is a certain, we actually, this reminds me what we talk about all the time. There's a certain level of just like straightforwardness that all these papers have to skirt, right?

Like, in your Times is not just going to say this was a bunch of fucking crazy bullshit, you know? Like, they can't, like, the way that any of us would talk about a normal thing is that. And so. Not in so many words, yeah. But we're left sort of wondering to what degree this bullshit is crazy.

It's clear that if anyone is reading this and can, and immediately, like, intuit, it's immediately understood. the depths of just the wrongheadedness, it is a former president like Barack Obama, right? And so, of course, when he actually has to speak about this amongst friends or, or even, you know, in semi-public settings, because this is a huge, huge international tragedy, he's going to say, he's going to be that this would be what would animate him, right? And then from what, everything we know about the current president, the one thing that's going to animate him is

hearing that somebody talk bad about him. The other question, and it sort of goes to what you just said about the media is the should we cover this question. Right. And I'm happy to include the two of us doing this segment in it. Because there's this idea that when Trump comes up with something that is so obviously not real, that just by mentioning it, even if you're debunking it, even if you're treating it with the kind of skepticism you and I are trying to do right now, that you are just unintentionally doing Trump's bidding by putting the word Obamagate, even with. air quotes out into the universe. So, I mean, my take on all this, and this has come up again and again in the Trump during the Trump years, my take and all this has been, it is a tough question, right? Because there is a certain sense that as soon as you mention this, you're just making this a little more real, even if you're saying it's not real.

But the flip side of it is, if you don't say anything, you leave it to bandana wearing Glenn Beck at his chalkboard or Judge Janine. to just talk about it all the time. And they are on Fox News, by the way, leaning into Obamagate. Media Matters says that they are now talking about it to the exclusion of coronavirus. Coronavirus now stories they said,

Media Matter says account for only 56% of the output from the network down from 95% the month before of stories on Fox News. So not only has Trump changed the subject, they've changed the subject, and if you don't say anything about it, it just sits out there and cycles around. That's true.

I think of all of the times that this do we cover it conversation has come up and maybe it's because of the lunacy of this one, of this Obamagate issue. I feel like we're closer now to an answer to the question than we have been in some of the previous ones. And I think that the answer is,

and this has been another conversation that's been going on since the beginning of Trump's campaign four plus years ago, which is like what words are we are major media outlets allowed to use to call something untrue right? I mean, and, and I think that there's, I think that whatever your editorial board describes, uh, it is fair in this case to just refer to something as Trump's Obamagate lunacy or, you know, whatever word you, whatever word you want to put after that. I also think that, I mean,

there are a lot of good Obamagate explainers that are not from right wing media sources that are out there. I mean, if you type Obamagate into Google, um, you will probably at least at this point come across something that is more helpful, uh, than not. Um, But that said, this is, you know, this is a media podcast. This is what new media, this is what the hyperlink was born for. You know, like to be able to use the word Obamagate in passing in a piece and link it to a helpful explanation of what it is, which is to say there's no there there. That might be the best way to handle it.

I don't know. I mean, you do have to identify it as some as being untrue in the actual text. You can't rely on the hyperlink to explain everything because that's the opposite of what would be useful. But you, but to give it words on the page is almost as much of the problem as to be wishy-washy about its veracity. Yeah, well, I love all the solutions we have way. The big one is air quotes. Because every, every explainer I looked at, looked up, by the way, Tim Miller's and the bulwark is really good. Susan Glasser on the New Yorker's website, Vox had several of them. It was always Obamagate with quotes in the headline. Right. As if that was kind of enough to like,

okay, you know, it's not real folks, right? It's Obama Gate. It's not Obama Gate. It's Obama Gate. I don't have an annoying way. If only there were a punctuation that you could type in for sad trombone that might, or just like slide whistle or something. Like, I don't even know exactly what this right sound would be. But yeah, I mean, obviously you're trying to evoke something there that's not, I mean, yeah, the air quotes or the quotes in that case, their actual quotes do serve a purpose. but the problem here is that even though the you know the accusations are fake Obamagate is not fake right it is a real it the substance doesn't exist

it's a real hoax it is a real hoax right so the quotes are in some ways inaccurate right I mean the quotes almost don't do justice to the depths of the hoax to to the the degree to which the hoax is going to spread you know and so we have to take it seriously somehow even as we're, you know, we laugh it off. David, let's move to something

that never needs ironic distancing. The, oh, segue way, the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag

that was so obvious that all of media, Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Please send your nominees to at the press box pod. David, a couple more gags

from the last dance because we haven't squeezed every drop of juice from that orange yet. Remember that scene in the 10th episode where Michael Jordan and the Bulls

have won their final title in 1998. You know exactly where this is going. I do. I see you nodding. And Leonardo DiCaprio and friends congratulated him in the locker room. It was an overworked Twitter joke to post that picture of Rick Dalton from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood pointing at the TV. Thanks to Hannah, Andrew Berk Stoller and Ken Barrett.

David, this one's a little closer to home. Director Jason Hare ended the 10-part documentary with the Pearl Jam song present. tense. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write the end of the last dance, but first, Pearl Jam. Thanks to Andrew Stetka. I saw that a couple of times. And finally, David, Russia has a coronavirus information chief. Now, given the horrors of this pandemic, you might expect such a person to have a certain bedside manner, a certain grace. Here's what Russia's coronavirus information chief actually said this week. Those meant to die will die.

Everyone dies. Oh, man. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write. Congrats to Ivan Drago on his continued rise through the ranks of Russian government. Thanks to Eric Corrine. If you found a government official with less empathy than Trump, congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week.

David, let's talk about the Call Her Daddy podcast affair. But first, this message from a new podcast, Wind of Change, with Patrick Radden Keefe. Hi, I'm Patrick Radden Keefe, a reporter at the New Yorker magazine. On my new podcast, Wind of Change, I investigate a rumor I haven't been able to shake since I first heard it years ago. It came from someone inside the CIA,

and the story was that the agency had written one of the best-selling rock songs of all time, a song that changed the world. So that was the tip that started me on this story, and it only got crazier from there. Listen to Wind of Change, a new original series from Pineapple Street Studio, Crooked Media and Spotify.

All right in the notebook dump. Kyle Koster, who works over there at the big lead, tweeted this, wondering if the press box gang could describe the level of passion and vigor with which they've researched the Call Her Daddy situation. Ha ha, real funny. We did it. Here it is. I'm not sure we're going to be able to top the cut headline,

which was, what is Call Her Daddy and Why Is It Fighting? But here we go. Caller Daddy was your typical overnight podcast sensation, which I feel is a genre now, right? Sophia Franklin and Alexandra Cooper, both in their 20s, met at South by Southwest. Their origin story is that they started talking to each other about sex in a bar in Austin. People liked how frank their conversation was. And as Cooper later said, people came up to us and said, you need a show because I would listen to this every day. day. Now that sounds awfully pat.

This is like the day that John Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora met in the bar and started jamming. Exactly. Okay. Franklin and Cooper start their pot in 2018. The Barstool Empire gobbles it up within weeks and gives it a turbo boost. According to New York Times is Taylor Lorenz. Call her Daddy jumped from 12,000 downloads to 2 million downloads. in just two months. It's now a top 20 podcast. And I don't know if you had this experience when you were talking to somebody about Barstool,

but I feel I did where people would sort of lower their voice and go, you know who's an even bigger star in the Barstool universe than PFT and Big Cat? It's the caller daddy host. They're the true power. I feel like I had that conversation three or four times. Alexander Cooper described the pods appeal thusly. Quote, uncensored real female locker room talk,

which quite frankly is just as nays, nasty as guy locker room talk. And we had no problem exploiting our experiences as well as ourselves for our listeners entertainment. Now, all that said on April 8th, Franklin and Cooper vanished. They just stopped making pods,

David. And barstool leader Dave Portnoy offered a typically statesman-like response. I actually sent Alex a text after. we had that conference call with the lawyer the first time that in my 17 years of doing this I had never dealt with anybody as unprofessional and disloyal and greedy as those two. I'm paraphrasing. That was essentially it. I didn't talk to call her daddy girls who prior to that I thought I had a good relationship with I don't know for four or five months and as everybody knows they just stopped coming into the office. Yeah, I mean,

Dave Portnoy, hijacking the Twitter feed is a, in some ways, a totally understandable, reasonable thing to do. There are a lot of people directing questions at him, but is also just a perfect Dave Portnoy and Barstool way to handle the whole situation, right? I mean, it's sort of break down everything, including conference calls and lawyers and text messages that you probably shouldn't have sent if you were just talking, you know, with lawyers and the professionalism and unprofessionalism. I mean, obviously we're airing dirty laundry here, but there's also a degree of, you know, ass covering. A couple of points order really quickly. One, they did vanish on April 8th, but I believe that this is only from scanning, like,

Barstool Reddit pages and stuff. I believe that, like, the questions about what was going on with this podcast predated that a good bit. That they were sneaking, you know, unexplained, but telling names of podcast episodes through. were, you know, sort of avoiding conversations about certain subjects. So it's been a long simmering sort of situation.

The whole issue of like, whether it was demeaning, I mean, the podcast kind of being demeaning to both sexes. And also, I guess, that versus the notion of empowerment. There's certainly a degree to which the association with Barstool didn't help the accusations of it being demeaning, right? I mean, you can say whatever you want to about Barstool, but to take a company that's by and large, like, you know, created by men has a very, like, bro kind of point of view.

And to have this as this sort of bangle, you know, those two, that certainly exploded the audience and it helped their fame and fortune and everything else. But, you know, there was a certain tension kind of inherent in that whole thing. And that's part of what made it work, but that's also part of what made it difficult in the end. Now, going back to the details of the split, the fame and fortune, that I just mentioned are sort of what's at stake here, right? Because you have this podcast that's making, I mean, it's just doing incredibly well. I mean, it's just reaching the top of the podcast charts. Like you said, millions of downloads. Um, incredibly huge social media

presences. I mean, for the hosts, as I understand it, uh, you know, somebody pointed out that, like, they could probably make, at some point, based on their original contract, they could probably make more money with one like Instagram post where they endorse a product than they could and they're like annual salary, right? To the level, at the level they had reached. And we kind of, we find ourselves, and it's, you know, it's as kind of salacious as the podcast itself is, it lends itself to the salacious reading of the story. And it's certainly with Barstool involved in the content of the podcast, the hosts, it makes it seem like it's a perfect page six story, which indeed it was a page six story, right? But it kind of gets, it kind of,

it gets it a story that's actually not that unusual in this day and age, right? I mean, it's a, it is a very, it's a very pat sort of modern media story. where a media company can create, basically create a media figure or figures can make a podcast, can take a podcast from anonymity to the top of the charts. And then both because of the way that business works and because of the way that no one knows how to monetize podcast exactly right and everything else, you can feel like you've outgrown your original agreement or contract in like minutes. You know, I mean, it's just like it takes like a second for you to feel like you're being

undervalued. This used to take years, right? This used to take three years of a football contract to feel like you were undervalued enough to sit out, right? And now it's like, and that's to say nothing of like people who are just doing regular jobs that feel like they're undervalued, but they don't even know how to bring it up. Now, not only is it clear within seconds that you're being underpaid or undervalued or whatever else are clear to you, but you have a recourse, right? And you're not just sitting in your cubicle, shrugging your shoulders and complaining to your wife or husband when you get home. All you have to do is, like, go online. and you see a million people telling you how great you are

and how you deserve something better, you know? And you can just go on Twitter and just be like, man, wouldn't it be fun to do a podcast somewhere else? And there's nothing, that's not illegal. And then suddenly you have like, you know, offers pouring in. I completely agree. My sort of companion theory of that is that almost everything in modern podcasting media world is traceable to Howard Stern in somewhere or another.

Oh, okay. Okay. So let's follow this for a second. The whole idea of what you just said is a sped up version of what Howard Stern did for years on the show. I'm under contract to these people. I hate it here. I don't like it. I feel confined.

They're not letting me do what I want to do. I'm underpaid, given how much money I've brought to this company. Let me out, right? And here it happens in this world more on social media. Howard just said it on the show. by the way, it was actually just a constant sort of topic on the show. The other part of this that's very stern-like is evidence that listeners were turning on the host of the show because they found out how much money they were making or how much money they could make

because call or daddy like Stern and a lot of things before it is based on this idea that these people are just like me, right? They're a funnier, they're kind of like what I wish I could as funny as I wish I could be as frank as I wish I could be. I saw BuzzFeed quoted Brittany Danielle, 28 year old fan of the show saying Daddy Gang is feeling really betrayed right now. Howard Stern's own daddy gang felt very betrayed when he was making bazillions of dollars and seemed to become a different person, right, than the Howard they grew up with. And then the final part of this is the barstool part about the dirty laundry that you just mentioned, which is a total tactic from the Howard Stern thing,

right any backstage contra tempts we are going to have on mic because it's all content and something that seems genuinely like terrible and awful all that redounds to us in a good way and that to me is the depressing part about this this makes me queasier to talk about than obamagate because we are giving we are giving Dave Portnoy a W right here just by talking about it because he loves this. Yeah. Right? Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's a, you know,

there's the old wrestling adage, pro wrestling adage that we all know, that like the best characters, they Stone Cold Steve Austin's, whatever, or the people's real personalities with the volume turned up to 11, right? And that's sort of like the ethos,

one of probably every successful podcast that everybody is just sort of turning the volume up on themselves a little bit to, you know, become, just like you said, so the viewers or the listeners will say, that's just like me. If I could only, if only I fill in the blank, you know, that's the volume being turned up.

But that's also the ethos of barstool sports by and large, right? I mean, that Portnoy will, you know, and everybody else just sort of amp up the silliness or the inanity or whatever else, just turn the volume up on these backstage contradempts. And to go to, and certainly that's what Howard Stern did for a lot of these issues. But the other interesting thing that, I think that's exactly right what you said about Howard Stern. But one interesting tidbit of that is the sort of, is that he would, he started these fights on the air before they were actual problems. To the point that like when he actually left to go to satellite or whatever, when he would actually, you know, get in these contract disputes,

you were a little bit surprised to find out that the, that the issues were real, right? Totally. It's like, this, this wasn't a bit, you know? Yeah. And but you start the bit so early that the bit sort of, the, the prophecy is self-fulfilling, right? I mean, you, you sort of, you start, and that's an aspect of all media, like you said for so long. If you're like, if you're making, if, since Howard Stern started, if you, you start these fights on air, the fight the fights sort of become legitimate. But it's also sort of an element of social media, right? That if, like, you let the little voice inside your head out to the world,

then you have to actually, then you actually have to recognize it as real, right? I mean, what normally would have been something that you would just hopefully sleep off is now, like, the devil on your shoulder screaming in your ear. And that, you know, it makes everything hard. But you're right. We're giving this oxygen. because it is, I think, I mean, I think that people are going to point to it, right, in the future. There's always going to be a new number one podcast or like top 10 podcasts where the people feel like they're not being properly compensated.

And I think that people are incredibly interested right now in the podcast economy, right? And they're very interested in, you know, they're always going to be interested in workers' rights and everything else, especially in terms of new media. and, you know, it's a pretty interesting story. Yeah, and it's one of the roads to overnight startup, right? I mean, and maybe, you know, other than like, you know, influencer, you know, it's a direct path, right? And so you're right. I mean, like, this just feels like such a template.

My podcast has gotten so big that my employer and my employer doesn't treat me with the respect I'd insert. It feels like we could just cut paste that for like nine billion things. Should we talk? I mean, obviously there's going to be more to the story. Did we, have we talked about the HBO component of this? yeah. Yeah.

So, according to Taylor the Wrens, Portnoye guaranteed both hosts $500,000 a year to come back, plus bonuses. Cooper was in. By the way, and also reduced the length of their contract

by six months and thought that they could, and made a deal, this is a really hugely important that would help them get the IP for the show after the contractors up, which really,

if you do the math, there's not much more of the show left if you take the amount of time it's existed and then subtract six months from what was not supposed to be a three-year contract. But anyway, half a million dollars a year with bonuses that could put it over a million and the hosts, well, go on. You tell the rest. Well, Cooper in on that deal. Franklin allegedly out. And Portnoy said this was because Franklin was dating an HBO executive name Peter Nelson, who was known on the show as Suitman. That happened.

Here is also a little audio of Sophia. That would be Franklin, Sophia Franklin, telling her side of the story. And after the meeting with Dave, that's when negotiation started with both Alex and I to get a deal done. This is where the story gets extremely fucked up. I found out that Alex had gone behind my back and done something. And I found out it wasn't the first time. And that's why we're here. I trusted Alex.

I feel betrayed. But ultimately, she was my best friend, and that doesn't change overnight. And I'm willing to do call her daddy. I really am. I just can't do it under the circumstances that she wants. I can't do it while she's demanding that she controls the show. I don't want to be like her employee. We are partners.

we've always been that way. We've always been 50-50. And so it's putting me in like an extremely tough position. According to Lorenz, this is not exactly going to be like Jay Leno and David Letterman. They may both wind up with pods on barstool. So instead of one big show, you now have two big shows on the same network. I have a feeling Barcelona's going to come out just fine in this whole thing. David, let's do some list or mail.

We do this every Thursday. First question from Matt Williams. Did David Sack the Masked Man Show because we're all masked men now? I know that is not actually true, but I did like the idea that you had given up the Masked Man program because you saw that literally everyone had taken your bit out on the street during 400 hours. That's fantastic. The Masked Man Show, the answer, I'm glad you. you asked because the Masked Man Show is back. We have a new episode up as you're listening to this,

assuming our heel producer, Jim, has Zach together. And I apologize for my distance. It is, you know, this is in some strange way, the Masked Man Show is like this whole, I mean, there's a little symptom or microcosm of everything we've been going through. I really push pause on it because I was like,

I don't want to talk about wrestlers, wrestling in an audience free arena every week for the next month without really thinking that it was going to to be months and months and months. And so, you know, and I just, you know, had to figure out exactly how I wanted to talk about it. So we're back. We're back with a vengeance. And just the fact that everybody's wearing masks, you know, it makes me happy. I feel like everybody's part of the whatever the Maskman equivalent of the Daddy Gang is.

This is from Michael F. David and Brian, what's your power ranking of new streaming services that you definitely won't have time for while in family. quarantine. Ooh. Wait, the ones that I'm not watching now? Yeah, you definitely won't have time for. Man, listen, I hate to say it, the

WW Network has taken a huge hit in the quarantine era. It's a lot harder just to be like, hey, family gather round. I have some top rope high spots I want to show you. But I don't know. I mean, I feel like everything is taking a hit now. News is

taking a big hit. I mean, honestly, it's just like the entire world is a negotiation between the baby watching the Disney app and the 11-year-old playing, you know, call of duty or whatever on the TV. So it's, there's, everything's taking a hit. Amen. This is from Megan. Hypothetically, David and Brian become Bezos rich, like Bezos-level rich. if you could buy one media outlet to run, which would it be and why?

Now, that's an interesting question. God, that became a lot more interesting with the horrible news out of the Atlantic today, where it turns out being Bezos Rich or at least Lorraine Powell Jobs Rich doesn't guarantee that your magazine website media company isn't going to have a ton of layoffs, despite the fact that the Atlantic has been kicking ass during the pandemic, I think is universally agreed. Boy, that's sobering. Yeah, it is.

I mean, they've been so, I mean, and I think as co-worker Tyler Times pointed out, they're doing really well right now, but they're still losing money and events and ad sales are obviously going way down. And there's, there's, you know, they say, the Atlantic says they're making themselves, you know, more streamlined for the future. I know, Brian, I mean, this is far afield from the question, I'm sure. But you've pointed out before we're talking about sports media that maybe some of the downsizing we're seeing now as as as catastrophic and immediate as it seems is sort of like charting

the course for the future in a really sad way. But this is a it's really so it's really painful particularly to see the Atlantic do it after as well as they've been doing for the past couple of months. Yeah. I feel the answer to the to the original question by the way posed by Megan is at least in our lane. There is an absolute hero white night of Sports Illustrated out there somewhere. Even now. Right. Like I cannot tell you. the goodwill that would accrue to a rich person who came, said, you know what, I'm just going to deal. Let me go get Sports Illustrated.

And just try at this point. Maybe there's nothing left. Maybe it's been taken to such a bad place. But that is like the easiest way to being, you know, Time Magazine's man of the year, at least in our world. Do you, is there any part of you that like we'd just love to take your hypothetical billions of dollars and just reboot a dead paper? like not even not like sports illustrated dead but like i'm going to bring back the new york herald

tribune or i'm going to bring back like the what's the what's the no longer with the no longer in existence dallas palace paper like the news dispatch or whatever yeah the times harold the times harold and just run it like a pirate ship like a lovely literary like news gathering pirate ship for into the future i mean that would be so much that is my exact fantasy in fact no joke and that would be it would be you you really would have to have the beos money and to just endure the newspaper business at this point. But that would be so fun. And it could be the Fort Worth Star Telegram,

be anything. And just pump it up. This is from Jay Malone. Was it odd that the last dance didn't even mention Michael Jordan's run with the Wizards? I'm 25. So that's literally all I remember of MJ and would have loved to know his thoughts on how all that went down. Also, what was the media consensus at the time re his play? do you want to start with the end first?

Yeah, do we think MJ would have been honest about the Wizards stuff? That's interesting. Honestly, like, a lot, there are some kind of political, inter-NBA political issues that are actually, they're even touchier than the stuff

they dealt with in the last dance when it comes to Wizards ownership and what Jordan says he was promised and everything else. I mean, I think that the practical reason is that this was supposed to be, I think initially conceived as just a documentary

about that last season and it sort of grew and grew and grew and grew and it made a lot more sense to grow it in, you know, backwards than to grow forward. I don't,

it was interesting. But I think, you know, if you conceptualize it, like you did last time as Jordan's memoir, whether or not he would have been honest about questions from the Wizards,

I'm sure he would rather his story have ended at the end of 90s. the 97-98 season, right? I mean, that's for him where the important part of his legacy, that story ends. Yeah, it's like Tiger did a memoir a couple years back where he just talked about a very specific part of his career instead of having to do the life of Tiger, which would have taken us into some bad places.

To your point, I'm sorry, I catch you off a second ago about media consensus, re-Michael Jordan the Wizards. I feel that's now had an uptick, right? That was one of the things that actually got reevaluated during the last dance. content bonanza where people was like, you know, actually he was pretty good as a wizard. Even if we were all kind of disappointed at the time and there was a Kwame Brown stuff. Anyway, there is a book about that, right? Washington Post guy read at the time, but probably not going to be a standalone ESPN documentary.

This is from BPM Twitter. Are we looking at a future where ESPN is sending live hits to Woge, quote, live within the NBA's campus environment? What would the best media members to serve as insider men and chronicle life inside the bubble? I think we talked about a version of this before, but I wanted to bring it up again because this is absolutely going to be how we determine the status of insiders in all these different sports. Are you bubble worthy? Do you have bubble status? Because media is going to be very limited. We've seen.

There was a NASCAR race. I think there are four reporters were in the press box, the NASCAR last week. So they're only going to let some people in. If you work for a rights holder, that is probably an advantage to you. But the old sort of sign of, you know, status among insiders was, do the players let me sidle with them, right? Are the players granting me a private interview? I think bubble status, bubble worthiness is the next true status symbol among sports

weather. It's going to be huge. That is definitely true. but I also think that you know something that has been a little bit under discussed is that if we do go to a bubble if the NBA or any other

sport does move to a literal bubble situation right or some sort of like league wide I don't know literal bubble is the right word here by the way well not a literal bubble but literally blowing a bubble that that would be really cool if they did you're right not exactly they're not all like living inside the

Epcot dome but but if they But if they are effectively quarantined to league hotels and playing at the same places and everything else, talking about insider, you know, insider news, the biggest news coming out of this place is not going to be what happens on the court. It's going to be what happens at the hotel bar after the games, right? So, like, people are, and people are going to be much more interested in that. And, like, I mean, did players get into arguments or players you wouldn't expect to be, you know, they're playing each other tonight or tomorrow night, you know, surprisingly chummy the night. before like whatever playing cards if this is in Vegas exactly where I was going if it's in and

and so as much as we sort of joked during the last dance about the sort of you know a mad rashad element and and you know I talked about magic Johnson saying he was playing cards with michael Jordan every night before he went and did the color for the for the games the next night you're going to want a mod or a shot right amad rashad at the disney or las Vegas dome is going to be like the most like the the the best insider you could possibly have even if he can't be honest. And even if he's, you know, skewing the evidence, skewing the, the reportage in, in favor of, you know, whoever's best friends are, I would much rather hear, not rather, but I definitely want to hear from somebody who was, like, at the card table the night before, right? I mean,

isn't that, isn't that, like, the most captivating part of the whole thing? Absolutely. Oh, my God. I can't wait for this. I honestly, this is, this is, your, your guy, Kendrick Perkins would be perfect for this. Put, just put somebody, put the ex player in there, you know, just give Charles Oakley like a million dollars to be just like to be a backstead to be a you know on the scene reporter and uh and just you know see where it goes i'll be excited to have basketball back but i'll be really excited to have questing media members back one more note richard marshall has an overworked headline issue why are there so many curious cases outlets love this trope and the ringer is a habitual offender here's some here's the curious case of brian colangelo and the secret

Twitter account, the curious case of Molly's game and Netflix, of Elon Musk and his Twitter account, of Paul Pierce in the wheelchair. And I believe we did the curious case of a moderate shot, at least on Twitter a couple weeks ago. Curious case up, headline writers.

We're all done, right? I remember at Granlin, it was the ballot of I think we did, like half a dozen times, the ballot of blank. The curious case. First of all, now that it's been pointed out, this will be a message, a staff-wide message in like, you know, copy-editing Slack later today, and we will never see it again. But yeah, I think it actually is very similar to the ballot of. It's a sort of like,

it's a slightly more literary-tinged way to say what another, to do what another, you know, another website or a blog where they would do, that's weird colon, and then this, you know, the same second half, you know, or like, what's up with Elon Musk and his Twitter account, you know? I mean, And it's just a way of framing it as a slightly more thoughtful piece. But it is, you know, those are a lot. That is a lot of examples. Speaking of Strain headlines, it is time for David Shoemaker. Guess is the Strain pun headline.

Monday's headline about Australian politician Dan Andrews reopening the economy was one small step for Dan. Today's headline comes for Victor Flores. It's from Eater. The story is about the cancellation of celebrity food person Alison Roman, David. Roman, you'll remember, gave an interview in which she blasted Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen. There was an uproar. The New York Times has put her column on pause.

Eater notes, there was a whiff of inevitability to the suddenness and vociferousness of the anger directed at Roman, who had become ubiquitous thanks in part to her knack for proselytizing ostensibly ethnic ingredients like Tahini, turmeric, and Yuzu Kosho to a broader American audience. Roman's critics charge, she was not only a hypocrite, but a racist. racist, one who had moreover very successfully capitalized on the ingredients of other cultures. Okay. The key word here, David, is awakening. Awakening. Alison Roman had a particular kind of awakening.

What was Eater's strained pun headline? Oh, my God. I feel like this should be obvious. I'm totally blanking here. The normal kind of awakening would be a rude awakening. Right. This would be a, not food, too easy. Oh, it's too easy.

This is a strain pun headline here. Come on, man. Root, um, uh, root, um, something you might make on a cold winter's night would be a, um, uh, uh, I'm stirring the pot here. I know. I know. I know. And not a soup, but a stew.

Stood. Stewed. Stood Awakening. Oh my God. Stewed awakening. That's terrible. Almost in a little richer territory there. He is David Shoemaker.

I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Chris Almeida production magic by Erica Servantis. We got some log rolling here. You're going to want to listen to Alyssa Bresnex, new pod boom bust about the rise and fall of HQ trivia, which is awesome. Awesome. Check that out when you have a chance. We're back Monday. Our interview is with the Daily Beast, Will Summer, who's on the right wing media Q&On beat. That should be awesome. I joked on Twitter, David, that our Joe Biden digital divide segment is becoming to the press box, what Matt Damon is becoming to Jimmy Kimmel or has become to Jimmy Kennel. We're out of time. So next week, Joe Biden's digital divide, probably. Plus more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David.

See you later, Brian.