The Press Box - Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr., the Candidate Who Couldn’t Stop Posting, and the 'Megalopolis' Scandal

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

Hello, media consumers! Bryan and David have a scandalous episode coming up. They discuss the following: Mark Robinson’s post on an adult website (0:35) Oliva Nuzzi being placed on leave after a relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (7:12) The controversy surrounding 'Megalopolis' (22:46) Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week, Only in Journalism, and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey y'all. Sirot Sohi from The Ringer here, and I wanted to let you guys know about a new show that I'm hosting. The Ringer WNBA show. We're going to be talking about all the biggest personalities, breaking down and analyzing the latest happenings that make the W so fascinating, featuring some of the best guests and experts from around the league. Tap in with us on the brand new Ringer WNBA show feed on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. David? Yes. Anything going on on the media? beat this week? Oh, that's why we do this podcast, man.

There's always some exciting behind the scenes, uh, uh, you know, page 60 sort of relationship news. And that's why people listen. It sounded like you were going out of your way to avoid the phrase, how the sausage gets made. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I'd use it enough in my day-to-day life. I don't even use it on this podcast.

Before we get to the segment that everybody wants to hear, Can we talk about Mark Robinson? Is that not the segment that everybody wants to see? Maybe the second most sought-after segment. I thought we'd just kind of lower ourselves slowly into the hot tub of scandal this week. Okay, that's good. Mark Robinson is the North Carolina GOP nominee for governor. Never has a major party candidate in a winnable state been so embattled for so long.

You'll remember that Robinson, is the guy that Donald Trump called Martin Luther King on steroids. Yep. Last Thursday, we saw on media Twitter signs that there was going to be a big story about Mark Robinson. Yeah. Was that phenomenon of pre-tweeting the story? Mm-hmm. Guys, I heard it's going to be bad.

I hear this is going to be big. And pre-reacting to the story. I saw, I think it was Beaumani Jones on there. Like, I've never been so excited. I've never been that anticipated a news drop so much as this. I mean, he spoke for a lot of people, but it was just like, what could this possibly be? Then you're gauging it not just on the leaks, but on the reactions to the leaks. It's crazy.

Finally, one of the authors, Mstack of CNN, got on Twitter and said, you know, it's kind of bad form to pre-tweet this stuff. Mm-hmm. And I think in this case, there was a detail that the North Carolina GOP desperately wanted Mark Robinson to drop out of the race. Yeah. So there was sort of reporting about that. But, you know, in general journalists, if you are a reporter, you're welcome to just go try to get the story.

Yeah. And beat the other people rather than tweeting about how much you're anticipating the story and what, in fact, it might contain. But the details are this. Mark Robinson, a stack and Andrew Kaczynski report made several posts between 2008 and 2012 on the website. nude Africa. I'm a stelter,

Darcy, buyer's man myself, but to each their own, Mark Robinson's posts included declaring himself a quote-unquote black Nazi, saying that despite advocating a total ban on abortion,

he posted that he didn't care if a celebrity had one. The report on CNN also contained this sentence. CNN is reporting only a small portion, of Robinson's comments on the website given their graphic nature. So just imagine that in the middle of a campaign, a website has the goods on a well-known candidate but is not reporting them because they are so graphic in nature.

Yep. We have this, but we cannot report it or do not want to report it. I think one of the most fascinating things about that piece was CNN, showing its work. Yeah. About how it figured out that the person posting on the message board under a handle, and the handle was Mini Soldier, was Mark Robinson. Yeah.

Here's one sentence that just jumped out of me. Both Mini Soldier and Robinson often posted about the same topics online, including reviews for remote controlled helicopters, their attraction to specific celebrities and their favorite twice, Twilight Zone episode. So if you find any message board posts about dead wrestlers or sports writers, you'll know who you can connect it to, just based on stuff they talk about other words. No, the key, though, is triangulating it, right?

If it was just like, you know, dead wrestlers and then also, you know, favorite Toby Key song. Lawnmower maintenance. Then you would know it was me. Also, they matched some of the unusual phrases that were used both in the message board, posts and then some of Mark Robinson's public posts. Those unusual phrases include, I don't give a frog's fat ass about dot, dot, dot.

And then Robinson would tell you what he didn't give a frog's fat ass about. He also liked calling people Dunderhead. Oh, yeah. That's a good word. Quote unquote. After the piece came out on CNN, Robinson made a video in which he used the phrase, the news media is at it again. Add it again, David.

He denied he posted that stuff. But then in a twist, all those posts were deleted. Yeah. Which becomes its own story, yes. So mini soldier is not Mark Robinson in this telling. But mini soldier was like, you know what? I see that a lot of my message board posts are getting a lot of run. I don't need this in my life.

So I'm going to go ahead and clean up. Yeah. Some of the things I've done. What an amazing story. And this goes all the way to over the weekend when it was discovered that most of the senior campaign staff in the Mark Robertson campaign had resigned. In reaction to this news breaking? Presumably so, yeah. Kind of a tough one to come back from.

But Mark Robinson is still running for governor of North Carolina. So more big pieces, David, to come. more pieces we can pre-tweet and gossip about before we actually see them where they actually see the light of day. Thank goodness. All right, coming up on the pod, the news media is at it again.

Olivia Nootsie and RFK Jr. We discuss. Plus the Megalopoulos scandal, the Moscow correspondent who didn't come in from the cold and an old country buffet of only in journalism. All that and much more on the press box. of the ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, and producer Brian Waters here.

Thursday was the day that media Twitter became president, David. That's when we learned that New York Magazine's Olivia Nutsi had been placed on leave because she was having a relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Yeah. Story was broken by the press box's very own. Oliver Darcy in his newsletter status. Then over the next couple of days, other media reporters jumped in and fleshed out some of the details. Brian Stelter, now back at CNN, had a source saying, so this wasn't a physical relationship.

Yeah. It was, and I'm quoting directly, a relationship that was emotional and digital in nature. Did that phrase just absolutely stop you in your tracks? on Thursday. Oh, gosh. That's like me and most of my coworkers, I guess. One of my media friends texted me and said, you know, in 2024, a text relationship is more brazen than a physical relationship.

Might actually be the case. Yeah, I think that's right. So what does emotional and digital in nature mean? Well, on Friday, Pucks Dylan Byers reported that Nozzi had sent RFK some photographs to mirror photographs, says Byers. And then we learn from the Daily Beast, Corbyn Bollies, that Nootsey's boss at New York Magazine, David Haskell, heard

that Kennedy was bragging about the relationship. And bragging about having these photos, which leads David Haskell to confront Nozzi on September 13th. That's 10 days ago in his office. Nozzi denied their relationship to Haskell and then eventually came clean about it. Yeah. So you want me to start or do you want to start?

You know what? Go right ahead. The idea I keep coming back to on this is it's not a sex scandal. Mm-hmm. Even a digital one. It's a journalism scandal. Yes.

It is the most basic journalism violation other than don't make stuff up. Yeah. you can't get involved with the people you cover no matter how you're getting involved with them. Yeah. You know me, I hate the phrase there's an appearance of conflict

to borrow something I read in Haskell's memo to the New York Magazine staff. It always seems so weasily to me. Yeah. A weasily way of avoiding saying whether there was actually a conflict or not. Well, here's the conflict. you didn't level with your readers.

Yeah. I clicked on that piece, Knutze wrote in July, that whole conspiracy of silence around Joe Biden. Mesmerized by that piece. But she didn't tell me that she was having a relationship with one of Joe Biden's opponents. Yeah.

And then a few weeks ago, she publishes an interview with Donald Trump from Mara Lago, and she didn't tell me that she had been in a relationship with a man who two weeks before that article came out endorse Donald Trump. Yeah. That's not the appearance of a conflict.

That's a conflict. Yeah, I mean, and it feels, you feel a little grimy for saying that out loud, right? Or there seems to be something a little bit salacious about that request. Oh, I deserve to know. Well, you could also just not do that job, right? If you're the journalist, like, you can remove yourself from the equation. You're not obligated to release your entire personal life into the, into the, into the public sphere, you can just back away from the beat.

You know, that's, that, that's, there's, there's, there's, there's, it's an appropriate way to handle the situation. Absolutely. And if you understand the timeline here, she wrote about RFK last November. Then Haskell and his memo said that the relationships last from December, 20, 23 to August, to last month. Mm-hmm. So if this is the way life happens, sometimes things are unpredictable, you're right.

You can just walk into. Haskell's office and be like, I can't cover this anymore. Yeah. I just can't do it. And maybe an editor's note in the future, you know, if you reread the piece that she, initial pieces that she wrote and felt like there was a bias that came, that was evident there. But yeah, you can just remove yourself.

And put aside the idea of like bias or inaccuracy for just a second. What if when these pieces came out there had been a warning label, like the ones that on a pack of cigarettes when you buy them in New York City at the front of the piece that said the author is and then explain what was going on if that was a link right at the beginning of the piece. That would totally change the way you would read the story. Yeah. I get into these conversations in all of my various design roles and working with the desk at the ringer where you know, there's, we have a style guide, but then you say, but the point here is clarity. And this minor, you know, you can change, this style guide is, is in the pursuit of clarity. But if there's

another thing that makes it clear to the reader, that's important, which is a very oblique way of saying, if it changes your understanding of what you're reading, then you're doing your job wrong. You cannot say, oh, you know, they, the reader has all the information they need. The reader can experience this piece in a vacuum or whatever. It's like, no, this is an important piece of information for just understanding what you're reading. You know, it's as significant as saying, you know, the, the, the source was under the threat of torture when they spoke to me or, you know, or this was, you know, translated from, from Japanese or something.

It's like, no, it affects the way that you read. Totally. And that's why going looking for bias or going looking for, you know, some kind of whatever it is. That's the wrong way to think about it to me. It's about leveling with people. when they're consuming something. This is mixing scandals here,

but I just remember when that whole Mike Daisy monologue thing came out, remember he was doing the monologue about Apple. Yeah. My wife and I had gone to see that before all the revelations. And I was like, besmirized by it in the moment. I was like, this is unbelievable. This is incredible. And then stuff comes out.

And I'm like, oh, if that had been announced at the beginning of the show, I would have experienced this very, very differently. Yeah. To the same point. It's always so funny to me, dude, because whenever I look at our fellow journalists out there on Twitter, they are all trying so hard to create an aura around themselves. Sure. The right jokes.

The right photos on Instagram. The right friends, the right enemies. You post your big piece and then between your big pieces, you have your tweets, right? We want to be like the journalist. read about in the past to have that, to create that feeling in people. Yeah. Olivia had an aura about her. Yeah.

A genuine one. Mm-hmm. And it came from the fact that when you would click on a piece of her writing, you wouldn't know what you were going to read. Yeah. You didn't know the angle. You didn't know what reporting she was going to come up with what quote often directly from Donald Trump's mouth.

Mm-hmm. You didn't know the way she was going to write her sentences. Yeah. I always get frustrated when you read a magazine piece and the writer has like a thimble full of reporting. Yeah. And then they just do jazz hands to get all the way to 3,000 words so it can be a feature. Yeah. Olivia, when she did a story, those jazz hands were about something, right?

They were making an argument. Mm-hmm. Creating a feeling in you. It was so good. And then I read this and I'm like, the spell is broken. Yeah. the aura is gone for that very, very same reason.

No, it's totally true. It's totally true. I mean, it's not on the level of Stephen Glass, but it's a little bit of that same feeling, right? When you're reading the work of a great fabulous, you're just like, how do you get this reported? Like, how do you find these stories? How do you immerse yourself in this world so seamlessly?

And, you know, when you find out the truth, you're just like, oh, okay. that's that's it's just sort of it's not heartbreaking exactly it's our i mean you know there's an element of sadness for the for the medium but it but as a reader you're just like yeah you just feel like what a waste what a waste of time like you're a dupe you know and this whole thing yeah what a bummer right what a disappointment yeah media twitter was such a piranha tank over the weekend yeah because nutsy was engaged and And I think most of us perhaps learned that it was the engagement was no longer a thing to Politico's Ryan Lizza, who full disclosure I worked with many years ago.

Good job on disclosure there. Say how easy that was. Easy that was. And it's funny because when there's a story like this where it seems so one-sided, I start turning it over in my mind. Mm-hmm. Actually, just something else here to think about. Yeah. that would not be, you know, that isn't what it would so obviously seem to be.

And I'm sitting there and then like I said at my computer last night still thinking about this because I knew we were going to do this segment today. And I get the semaphore newsletter from Ben Smith. And God bless Ben Smith. He tried. Yeah. He really, really tried. And he came up with this sentence.

Reporters have all sorts of compromising relationships with sources. Most compromising of all And the most common is a reporter's fealty to someone who gives them information. Okay, fair enough. Let's do segments about those reporters too. Yep. Let's not say that this somehow isn't as bad as we think it is because somebody else also did something

that was also compromising in a different way. Let's let Max Taney cook. Let's write all those pieces. Yeah. I just again, good try, but it just didn't work. You also have to think of this. New York Magazine is going to take crap for this. New York Magazine, which in the post-magine era,

is way, way better than it has to be. Yes, totally. The way those features are edited and written and crafted and how there's an idea behind them, I was almost always impressed. women reporting on politics and on everything else will take craft for this

because it's the oldest liable about women in journalism you're getting involved with your sources that's how we know that's bullshit but people were tweeting about this this comes up again when you see a story like this somebody posted on Reddit they linked to the news

and then they said press box guest Olivia Nutsi say it ain't so I'm sorry I didn't realize this was David Nye's fault. Just want to apologize if anyone was offended. Last question before we move on. What do you think is going to happen to her at New York, Mag? I mean, we don't know the details, or we know, I guess details are emerging.

We don't know the details of her. I mean, we obviously weren't there for her conversations with her editor, whatever denials have been reported the degree to which that relationship is. fractured. I mean, it's, I would imagine that she will be out of a job. Really? You think so? You don't think so? I don't know. I mean, if that, if there's that sort of

fractured relationship with your, with your, with your, editor, I guess it depends on how firmly ensconce the editor is, you know, but, but that, that would seem to that, that wouldn't shock me.

I mean, I don't know that just a, that the relationship in and of itself is is a fireball offense or anything, but It's the, you know, the way that the communication breakdown, it might be hard to proceed with the necessary level of trust. But she is a big star. She's a big name. Writers have done much worse things than her and, you know, pirouetted into a opinion column or a, you know, more of a, maybe she'll leave the politics beat and go into feature writing in another direction or something. I mean, who knows?

There are any number of historical examples of people taking sort of artful paths out of this sort of situation. But, you know, who knows? I mean, and there's also whatever. I mean, if you kind of feels kind of crass to say, but there's, there's a book in it for her, right? I mean, she was got to be writing a book about Trump and now she could just write a book about, you know, her own personal involvement in it. I mean, she could, there's untold roads to, to, you know, reclaiming a piece of a career here. So that's where my mind actually went. New York Magazine is the mothership of the confessional first person essay.

Yeah, to the point of like self-flagellation, yeah. So does, does it take that form within New York's own pages? May well. It might. I really don't know because I don't have a great example when something like this happens. I just really don't. All right, David, coming up in 30 seconds. So are you going to hate Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopoulos in the same way that critics hated the godfather?

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 time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always. Always gratefully received. It is Season 50 of Saturday Night Live, David. Yes. And according to Vulture, part of the New York Magazine Empire, Lorne Michaels, S&L's 79-year-old producer, insists he wants to remain in his job as long as he can.

This is kind of what I do, and as long as I can keep doing it, I'll keep doing it, he says. It was an overword Twitter joke to write, Kenan Thompson's going to go on Morning Joe tomorrow to say that it's up to Lorne to decide if he's going to stay. And we're all encouraging him to make that decision because time is running short. You think SNL has a Biden problem. Congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week.

All right. In the notebook dump, it's Megalopolis week, David. Francis Ford Coppola's movie comes out on Friday. This is exciting because it is a potential. old guy still got it opportunity. It's exciting because, as you and I know, journalists always feel that the golden age of whatever it is they're covering is the thing that happened right

before they got on the beat. So here comes Coppola, a director of the 70s with a movie that has a whiff of the 70s. Personal project, he spent $120 million of his own money. There's just one hitch. Since the movie premiered, at Khan, it has gotten what we might call mixed reviews. 51% on rotten tomatoes.

Yeah. Only in journalism, euphemism. Only in journalism, euphemism. So the folks promoting the movie decided to lean into that idea. Oh, yeah. Coppola has always been divisive. And even the best movie critics may have been wrong about his masterpieces. Yeah.

So they came up with the trailer that flashed these quotes on the screen, and these come from vulture critic Bilga Iberi. Pauline Kale, David, of the New Yorker, said the godfather, the godfather was, quote, diminished by its artsiness. The trailer told us that the late great Andrew Seris, who battled with kale on many things during their lives, also called the godfather, quote, a sloppy self-indulgent movie.

The New York Times is Vincent Camby called Apocalypse Now, another couple of masterpiece, quote, hollow at its core. And even Roger Ebert called Bram Stoker's Dracula a triumph of style over substance. And one of these quotes might be a little

more forgivable than the others. It might be the nicest thing ever said about Brahm Stoker's Dracula. But what was really striking about these quotes is they did not exist. The critics in question never wrote them. A couple of people did some experimenting and found that the quotes may have been generated by AI. Yeah.

If you were prompting it to come up with negative quotes about Coppola masterpieces. Blame the computers. Blame the computers. Ebert's quote about style over substance was actually. written by him about Tim Burton's Batman. But don't you love the approach of this? What do the critics know? Yeah.

Coppola's come up with a strange and difficult and long movie. You should decide for yourself. Yeah. But then you supply fake quotes from the critics. Mm-hmm. Not the real quotes talking about Megaloplas, of which there are many. But it makes the point, Brian. It's thematically correct, right?

There's a larger truth here than conveyed by this trailer. Definitely a deeper truth. Aburi was noted that in the past, people like David Lynch, when they have a movie come out and it gets panned. They have run ads that say two thumbs down, Siskel and Ebert.

Oh, yeah. They take the real pan and put it in the ad. But here we took the fake pan and put it in the ad. Anyway, Lionsgate has pulled the trailer, called it inexcusable, and according to our friend Matt Bellany, stopped working with the trailer consultant.

We put it together. We have a new feature here, David, called the Hall of Departed Journalists. Oh. I want to induct a new member, Dusco Doder, man whose career I was not familiar with, died this month at the age of 87.

Dusco Doder was the Moscow bureau chief for the Washington Post in the early 80s. What a job. and I'm going to read to you just a little bit from Brian Murphy's Wapot Obit, and I want you to tell me if this does not sound like something that came straight out of John LaCarray. Okay. This is all taking place in Moscow. Doder, quote, since something was amiss on a February night in 1984,

when state radio canceled a jazz program and broadcast somber classical music, he noticed also that the lights at the defense ministry and the Soviet Union, secret police, the KGB, were blazing at hours when their offices were often, mostly dark. Like every foreign correspondent in the city, Mr. Doty heard rumors that Soviet leader Yuri Andropov was severely ill. He filed a story that reached the post-foreign desk at 7 p.m. on February 9, reporting that various telltale signs appeared to indicate that the country was being placed on an emergency footing, suggesting strongly that Andropov was dead. The State Department and others dismissed misdemeanor.

Mr. Dota's reporting is overblown. One U.S. Embassy diplomat in Moscow replied to state that Mr. Doder was probably, quote, on pot, according to post accounts. Mr. Doder's story ran on page 28, which sidebar is not where you usually put your big international scoops. Page 28 on February 10, 1984, with added caveats from U.S. authorities. That same day, the Kremlin announced the death of Andropa. Yeah. Dude, lights in the defense ministry at an odd hour, somber music on state radio.

Yep. That is journalism as SpyCraft. It's so great. Unfortunately for Dusko Doder, SpyCraft or something adjacent to SpyCraft is what was implied about it. We continue with the John LaCarray overtones here. There was a KGB Colonel, David, who. who defected to the United States. The colonel told the State Department,

which told the Post, that Doter was taking money from the KGB when he was a correspondent. The idea here being that they were giving him scoops, which looked great for him in exchange for putting what they wanted to put in the Washington Post. FBI in the Post did an investigation, found absolutely no evidence as this was true.

Time Magazine, for some reason, decided to publish the FBI, accusation years later, and Doder sued Time magazine for liable in British court. He comes out on top. Time has to pay him more than $200,000 to settle the claim. But the accusation would totally mess up his life and career. And he would later write, I felt myself being killed, not by an assassin single bullet, but slowly the poison of the falsehood starting to spread throughout my body.

I anticipated the weeks and months of predictable awfulness that would follow. I'd cease to exist for my friends and colleagues. You wound up doing more reporting from Europe. He wrote books, wrote a memoir called the inconvenient journalist, which I would love to read. Ben Bradley of the Washington Post

would later blame the CIA, saying Doder wrote something that embarrassed the CIA and when the agency thought they saw a chance to get even, they took their shot. That is the life of Desco Doder. Wow. farewell to an excellent reporter. All right, David, we haven't done only in journalism in a while.

Okay. Let me tell you, dude, my inbox, our DMs, they overfloweth with only in journalism terms. These are terms you never hear in human speech, but often read in news articles. I'm glad we got some backlog, yeah. This is great. One comes from Tim Creedon, brooked. Oh, yeah. Just hearing you say it made me feel as uncomfortable.

It doesn't quite roll off the human tongue, does it? No. But you would type it. Another one, restive is a New York Times reference to House Speaker Mike Johnson's Restive right flank. It comes from Matt McKenna. Thomas Vogel and Doug Gianboressi sent in Buffeted. New York City's City Hall has been buffeted by four federal investments.

Yeah. Good journalism synonyms there are also rocked or rattled. Mm-hmm. We would accept those as well. Whenever I see Buffett, my mind just goes to buffet, you know, old country, Cece's Pizza. That's what I think. Cici's pizza, geez. Pugilist specialist sent us one hidebound, which is pretty good.

Here's the one that I started reading when I first got. got my, uh, broken the business at the new republic. Manichaean. Oh, yeah. Second person who was involved in a Donald Trump assassination plot was described as having a manichaean worldview. Mm-hmm. Don't you remember being a young writer and reading that and think pieces and being like,

oh, here's a word I should use. Yeah. Because I don't totally know what it means, but other people are using the word. Yes. Manichian. Yeah, so there's some words that, like, Buffett, that you say, and it makes me uncomfortable because I just realize I've never actually, you know, you don't, you're not used to hearing it. Manickeen, I realize I don't even know the correct way to pronounce it.

And that's like that, that's how you know that it's never been used in real life. Yeah. All right. So full disclosure, I did not know how to pronounce it correctly until today. I'd been mispronouncing it in my head all these years. And so I hit the little pronounce button right before this podcast. And that's how I got to, Manichaean. By the way, that's just one of those terms.

Again, early journalism in Washington, D.C., I was like, oh, so we're supposed to call somebody a foreign policy Mandarin. Got it. And finally, this from the Athletics, Eric Corrine, making hay, which is not quite as highbrow as Manichaean, but really appears only in writing. I don't sure you ever say, did you make any hay out of that?

Yeah, I know. Making hay. Speaking of a feature where hay is always made, it's time for David Shoemaker guesses, a strained pun headline. Yeah. Thursday's headline about a shipment of shrimp that was stolen on its way to Costco was shrimp

scammed pee. Shrimp scammed pea. That may be the most tortured and strained headline and strained pun headline history. Today's submission comes to us from listener, Alec McDonald. It's from the East Bay Times. Turns out that there is a young man, David, 14 years old who won a contest in Fremont, California.

It is the USA Mollett Championship. There's a contest for everything. And from the photos, this young gentleman has a fabulous, fabulous mullet. And I like this story because he's also holding a championship belt, which he was given for winning the mullet contest, wrestling style. So maybe keep wrestling in your mind as you ponder. What was the East Bay Times' strained pun headline?

World mullet. Oh, God. Perhaps hair generally. perhaps a nice main oh oh the main event the main event yeah

main event not Saturday night not Saturday night's but just main event he is David Chewaker I'm Brian Curtis production by Brian Waters

couple things to put on your radar here Sean Fennison and I did a pod on Thursday with Best Campaign movies we also discussed whether Kamala Harris should go on Bill's pod that is up right now

for your enjoyment over on the press box feed coming up this Thursday it's a double header Jason Gayer old friend is coming back also going to talk to the New York Times as Kate Conger and Ryan Mack about their new Elon Musk book I'm looking forward to that

and then perhaps most importantly on the calendar this week here at the ringer.com September 25th Wednesday it is the debut of the Netflix documentary Mr. McMahon ooh yeah the man I'm looking at

at right now just may be a consulting producer. And we all know what that means. Actually, I don't know what that means. I watched all six episodes of Mr. McMahon over the weekend. Oh, you did? I did. Man, they turned off the press screeners for a while because there were some leaks. I'm glad to hear you got to see it.

I loved it. And I loved your contributions in particular, which were excellent. and I couldn't help but thinking about the times when we were 24, 25, we're sitting in our Lower East Side apartment and we're watching reality shows as we were want to do. And it would be the Joe Schmo or the real world or whatever it is. And you would always comment that whenever they had those interstitial interview scenes in a reality show.

Oh, like the confessionals, yeah. The confessional that the person was always speaking in the present. tense. He walks up to me and breaks up with me. Yeah. Like what a weird mind fuck that must have been. Just to go through something and then three days later, be like,

no, no, talk about it like it's happening right now. So I'm watching this and I'm sitting there in bed and join the documentary. And here comes David Shoemaker, author of the squared circle. And he's like, WWE buys WCW.

And I'm like, oh my God, you made it, dude. You're talking in the present tense in a documentary. Oh, my God. Practically in the real world. This is fantastic. Little did we know when we were sitting in that Godforsaken living room that we shared that you would have made it all the way here to speak in the present tense with authority.

Listen, a lot of brilliance came out of that. A lot of brilliance came out of that living room. Including like sitting there six beers in saying, you know what? People would pay to hear us have this conversation right now. Anyway, it's so cool. I cannot wait for people to see it on Wednesday. I cannot wait for people to see you on Wednesday. Talk about wrestling.

That's on Netflix. Shoemaker and I return Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.