The Press Box - Parenting During a Quarantine and Coronavirus Corporate Hall of Shame Round 2 | The Press Box

Episode Date: April 6, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss parenting during a quarantine (2:40), the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week (23:00), all the second-class nominees that have made it into the Corporate Hall of Shame (25:20), the future of the 2020 elections (34:00), and more. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Bill Simmons. I just wanted to make sure you were listening to podcasts on Spotify. Here's how you do it. First, search for your favorite podcasts on Spotify's app. They have a library of over 750,000 podcasts at this point. So let's say you're searching for the Bill Simmons podcast or the rewatchables or Dave Chang show or binge mode or the ring or NFL show. Once you find them, click on the follow button.

That's how you subscribe. Then click on those letters near the top of the app that say podcasts. You can't miss it. All the podcasts you're following will pop up separated by episodes, downloads, and shows. Wait, it gets better. On Spotify, you can adjust the speed of the pods to seven different speeds. 0.5 times is the slowest. I actually sound drunk at 0.5.

Listen to this. Today's episode of the Bill Simmons Podcast Network. Yeah, you can get drunk Bill. You can also do 0.8 times, 1.2 times, which is my favorite. Everyone sounds like they had a good cup of coffee. you can do 1.5 times, you can do two times. And if you're completely insane, you can do three times. Here's what that sounds like.

Why would you do that? I think that's how we communicate with aliens. Anyway, Spotify's app connects directly to many of the best automobiles in the world. It even has a car play feature that's pretty cool. It's really, really good. Best of all, it's free. Download Spotify on any device and you are good to go. Look, I don't want to app shame you, but you should actually be embarrassed.

If you're not listening to podcast on Spotify. And if you don't believe me, listen to Drunk Bill at 0.5 speed. Today's episode of the Bill Simmons podcast. Tell him, Drunk Bill, the Bill Simmons podcast. Listen on Spotify. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer here. We got lots and lots of great stuff to get to today. We're going to nominate the second class of malefactors into the coronavirus,

corporate hall of shame. We're going to explore what the presidential campaign could possibly look like in the grip of this pandemic. Plus, David guesses a strain pun headline and the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, I want to begin with a topic that's close to us. We're both the father of two kids. We were tending to those kids literally seconds before we came on air today. So I want to talk to you about parenting during the coronavirus. Jennifer Ketchmark is a TV meteorologist in Cincinnati.

She's been attempting to do the weather from home. And in this clip, she's standing in front of her TV with the forecast behind her. And David, tell me if the negotiation she's having with her kids matches your experience at home. Thanks, Connor. Mommy's trying to do a little bit of work. Can you let me finish my work? Hey, let me open them. Go upstairs so I can finish my work, okay?

I gotta record something real quick, okay? No, he's on the phone. Just give me five, okay? I just, I know, I need five. He is on a call, okay? You cannot, you cannot talk to Daddy right now. Give me a second, guys, okay? Go upstairs.

Three, two, pulling, water ride. Guys, go upstairs. I'm with a critical... Connor, give Mommy a minute, please. I'll be upstairs and one. One minute. Yeah. I mean, that definitely rings true to think the experience that I'm having.

I mean, I got to say, I feel like you and I have said before that we've never felt so different from some of our immediate coworkers who it felt like we had everything in common with just weeks ago. the situation through, I mean, the parenting situation, the living situation for parents, I think, during this time is, you know, for better or worse, it's just a lot different than whatever, than I think what a lot of other people are dealing with. And we can go into more detail on that, but for what it's worth,

I mean, my experience is probably different than a lot of parents too, because I am relocated to a place far away from home, and I don't know, it's just sort of, I'm like doubling down, on the different. It's definitely a whole new world that we're living in right now. The part of that clip that really stuck with me was saying, I can't be with you right at the second. And also, my spouse or partner can't be with you right at the second. You're just in the life raft kid for just like 10 minutes.

Yeah. You know, I don't know how to do this because you can't always set it up, right? You can always set it up that it's something is happening. You know, I mean, I think a lot of, for a lot of parents, it's like how much, how, to what extent do we give up our children for adoption to Anna and Elsa during coronavirus? Yeah. You don't always have Disney Plus like, like, ready to go. In their moments, we're like, I don't know what to tell you. We're just, you just, you just have to go to your room and just do something right now, just 10 minutes.

And then we'll take care of you and we'll give you a big hug and we'll, we'll figure it out. With, you know, I mean, many people in the modern era have lamented, you know, the different life our children lead than the ones that we led at, you know, at their ages, whatever their ages may be. I think the most common version of that is it like, you know, when we were kids, we would just go play outside, you know, and just for hours at a time and your parents could just sort of like open the door and, you know, assume you'd be home by dinner and whatever happened in between those periods of time, those moments in time was up to the gods, you know. But yeah, the very, the most like acute small version of that is like, yeah, you're going to have to do something now. Like you just have to figure it out. And kid, and whether or not this kid is like 11 or 1, which are like the two ages that I'm dealing with. Yeah, it's it's it's not something that we're normally in the position of asking them, or at least I'm not. Some highlights from parenting during coronavirus.

One is, of course, there's no school. We are school, you and me, and our partners. And so there's this really funny thing that's happening is I just remember when you were a kid and you had that thing of like, when I grow up, I'm going to be the cool parent. I'm not going to be the parent who enforces the rules. I'm going to be the nice parent, which turned out to be complete and utter bullshit. But I do feel I'm kind of bringing that back as teacher dad. Because I'm like, well, what would I want to learn if I were.

my seven-year-old son or my four-year-old daughter. So I, like, brought the Swiss family Robinson and called the wild. And I'm like, I'm just going to read them these books. What possible lesson could be better than me reading these books? Or I think I even says it on the pod the other day. We got a globe. My son got a globe for his birthday. So there is like a part of the day that's devoted to point at the globe and we'll look up everything we can about the country.

That's geography, right? That's not really how geography works. that's how geography is working in this house. You have become the dude like the guy in the corner in D.C. who will tell you the population of any country for a dollar. That is. That is my teaching style. The other thing I love about this, and I think you have your own version of this, but is

technology in school and the way these school districts have scrambled to try to teach kids remotely. My son is seven. Again, my daughter's four, so. it's a little bit different for them, but my seven-year-old son, who's in first grade, has a Zoom call with all of his classmates on Thursdays.

Right? You've read all these articles about how the whole world has become a Zoom call in the age of coronavirus. This is literally the case, even for a seven-year-old, in the afternoon,

and can you imagine 20 odd kids on a Zoom call? We can barely get this podcast coordinated with like four of us. Oh, my God. Imagine that, And it's just this like, you know, Hollywood squares from hell of these little kids who, of course, are just, are just, they just want to scream even when they're in their classroom setting. Now, imagine they're all at home. They've commandeered mommy or daddy's phone.

And they see their teacher for the first time all week or the second time all week. And they just go wild. It's pretty incredible. What is this like on, on your end school? Well, our 11-year-old is on Zoom every day with his classroom. It's actually calmed down quite a bit. The last time we talked, I think he had just gotten the system set up, and it was just like, you know, I mean, certainly they're more adept. The 11-year-olds are more adept at just technology in general than, you or I. It did seem a good bit more chaotic than our Spotify onboarding,

but it went a lot more quickly, I think. so um and now and now yeah i mean it's it's a lot of long distance learning i mean listen there's i think we have spent um a fair bit of time sort of imagining a future without classrooms uh both practically and just sort of i mean you know what what would our kids life be like if this was their entire life and just like you know how much longer i mean until this is actually everyone's reality not just homeschoolers or whatever but yeah it's uh it is a it is a very weird form of social, sort of social interaction to watch middle schoolers just, you know, hang out online for an hour. Like I said, not only are they better at it, they're just more

comfortable at it. I mean, my kid doesn't do a lot of like online chatting outside of like Skyping or, you know, FaceTiming with his family. But, but yeah, this is not like, if this had happened to you or me, I mean, literally it would have been like the future is now, you know, but like it's just all very comfortable for them, you know? So, I mean, I'm constantly amazed by, they always say, like, you know, technology's intuitive and we always disagree, but then you see a kid do it with like absolutely no hesitation at all. Just like my one-year-old can operate my iPad, like he's Tom Cruise and Minority Report, just like grabbing boxes and flipping him around and I'm just like, I don't, like, I guess this is intuitive. I just like, I'm just not

the intuition. It's not my intuition that it was targeted at, though. Now your son's a Are you struggling like I am to explain coronavirus to him? No, I mean, he's old enough and he's smart. I mean, there's questions, you know. I think on the front end, his mom and I were a little bit, had a little bit of trepidation about how much to tell and whatever else. But at this point, I think everyone's, you know, I think he's just about as clear as anybody.

we are. So, you know, there's still some, there's, there's, there's, there's still some, you know, difficulty. But I think that, I don't know, I think the broad strokes of it are, uh, are pretty self-evident, you know, there's not a lot of, the, the, the horror, you know, is, is, uh, I think fairly manageable for him, but more importantly than that, I mean, he's experiencing his own version of it just by being, you know, kind of sequestered this whole time. Yeah, I think rules make a lot of sense to kids. So, when you, you know, you know, it's you say, okay, we need you to stay six to ten feet away from people, they go, okay, that's just another rule. You're always giving me rules about what to do. So now we have this new set of rules.

And I think that makes sense. I found, you know, again, I'm in a little bit of the younger tier there from you, but just it's hard to have like the television on, you know? I mean, I don't, honestly don't know if the number 100,000 people make sense to my son at all. Yeah. Because of the number of people that we think are going to die as part of this pandemic. But, you know, I don't want to at this moment in time try to explain that. And I don't even want to, I don't even want to take a shot at that. Yes. You know, so it's kind of, I think, all about rules. I'll tell you what the hardest part is. Are his grandparents, my in-laws are near us. I read the other day that Joe Biden was doing this. He was actually standing on the porch of his house in Delaware. And his

grandchildren would sort of come into the yard at an appropriate distance. And that's how he would interact with them. Well, one of the hardest things to tell your child is you cannot go give your grandparents a hug, right? They're right there. You don't think you're sick. You don't seem sick. But you might be in some way.

And if you just go give them a hug, you might make them sick. So you can't do that. I think I very quickly revert back to your kids' understanding rules point on this. I mean, I feel like I'm not going to call anybody a bad parent or grandparent. It's certainly not an esteemed presidential candidate. But I feel like you can't see grandpa is a lot easier for everyone to handle than like you can stand 12 feet from grandpa. It's true. But we've, we've at least, you know, doing the 12 feet thing just so you don't have completely cut everybody off.

Right. And it's hard, right? It's hard to say the way they express affection for you and they, that you express affection for them is a bad thing at this moment of time. Hopefully in a couple months it won't be anymore or it'll least be in some manageable form. But imagine that. A hug is the worst thing you can do right now. We'll hug you all day, all day long, but you can't do that anymore.

The professional part of this has been challenging, I think. And I guess this is probably the time to have some disclaimers. David and I are privileged. We have great jobs. We're lucky to have jobs we can do from home. right we're not we're not wanting for money or insurance or anything like so many people in this country are but the last three weeks of this have been a really interesting combination at absolute joy at getting to be around the kids all day yes and the trickiness of trying to balance

that with the responsibilities we have at work to the ringer to say the least yeah it's funny because I just think as a parent, like, that's the, that's the tradeoff all the time, right? You and I were programmed. We knew this when we lived together in our 20s. Like, we were programmed to work hard anyway. Work late. Work weekends. Get on the plane to do that extra story, do all that stuff.

As soon as you become a parent, you're like, oh, wow. Every second that I do my job well in that way is a second I'm taking away from being a parent. Yeah. It's pretty much a. one-to-one trade-off, right? And you say, well, you put the kids to bed, and then you can work late on that story you want to do. Yeah, guess what? And then you're going to be a zombie the next day. And you're going to be 70% of yourself for your kids. And that sucks. Well, guess what happens when the kids come home all day? That trade-off that is so stark

becomes even starker. Because like, right now I'm in here recording a podcast with you rather than like making lunch or or doing that dumb geography lesson or just helping my son with his math homework or my daughter draw a picture whatever it is and just all those choices you make every day little choices right just suddenly become I don't know I keep going back to the word start they just become so immediate and man it is for whatever reason for the last couple weeks, that's just become an even bigger part of my brain than it already was. Yeah, I couldn't say it any better. I mean, it's a, like you said, we're both incredibly lucky.

You're both incredibly blessed to have, you know, wives that are certainly shouldering more of this than we are. A thousand percent. And, you know, and to echo that, too, I mean, it's, the blessing is to be able to be sort of the good soldier, you know, to just be following orders through a lot of it. But yeah, it's, it's, it's, um, there's the practical aspect. There's the fix it's the fixing lunch. The there's something else I could be doing.

And then there's just like the real emotional aspect of like getting up from the table. I mean, I was, you know, we were doing, uh, math homework before this, you know? And I don't think there's any part, there was any point in my life where I would have like, thought I would have rather done math homework than, well, anything. But, you know, it's tough to get up, you know? It's like, like, right into my babies asleep. now, which is a weird blessing because I don't have to like listen to them down the hall, you know, and wish I was there.

Yeah, it's a, it's a, we're, like I'm constantly reminded of how lucky I am in a bigger sense than whatever's going on right now because of, you know, because I'm blessed to be with my family. But, but yeah, it's, it is definitely a different balance, you know. It's like having to say, remember, like years ago I had a dog. And it was like the most painful part about it was when you would just shut the door every day and just like listen to them cry as you walk to your car. You know, I mean, just like leaving the, you know,

that tearful farewell. And thankfully my kids aren't crying every time I walk away. But it's like you have to go through that moment like 12 times a day instead of one. Every time you like have to go back to your laptop, there's like a small goodbye. And it's killer. It is absolutely killer.

One thing I've always liked about you is that you always push back against generic dad and parent complaining about the kids. Because there's so much of parents, even great parents, fall into this thing where they sound like the dad in the newspaper funny pages back in the 80s. Like, the damn kids are crawling all over me. I can't stand this, you know? That's not what this is.

This isn't we can't stand being around our kids. This is we love it, right? We love being around our kids. And we see the tradeoff. We see that walk away to the laptop. You know, we see like the article I was working on this morning. I wanted to be good, right? But all I have to do is wander back into the living room to see what I'm missing,

the responsibility, the fun, everything, to see what I'm missing for that article to be good. Right. And, you know, if you just think like today, you and I have what, eight to ten hours of work to do, maybe more. We also have eight to ten hours of parenting to do. maybe more just do the math and these are again two

privileged white male specimens of this so just think about parents during the coronavirus who are working so hard to get everything done

and worry about the things they ever do that's why you and I were joking the other day when we see these oppressive lists, you know, the hundred things you're supposed to do, you know. If we're stretched, imagine other parents in the world. They're really, they're actually stretched. Yeah. Really, really.

Oh, yeah. By the way, the cousin of these are those Facebook posts that people now put up about all the arts and crafts and like the giant vegetable garden they planted with their kids today. Like kind of like, it's like the quarantine bragging, you know. Here's me and the kids just planted 100 begonias. You know what? let's just cool it, okay?

You know, I understand you're proud of that, but just there's no need for shaming of this, right? Everybody's getting through this as best they can. Yeah. And you just, I mean, it's just one of those moments where I'm always like, just think of people that aren't as privileged as we are. Uh-huh. What is this like for them, right?

They're not at loose ends because they just need a book to read or something like that. They don't have any time at all. Yeah, that's totally right. We have done our fair share of kind of pointing and laughing at the Instagram bragging that you were just mentioning. People kind of rehashing their own curriculum online. And yeah, the begonias, my God, the begonias. But it's a, it's a, I don't know, I often wonder where people find time to do a lot of things. I'm actually kind of impressed by the fact that you can kind of taskmaster your.

kids there was some whole homemade curriculum, create the curriculum, and then have time to post it out of online. But, you know, it's a, so, I mean, but the vast majority of people don't, wouldn't have time to even begin on that, like you were just saying. And I don't even know how to, I mean, put into words what, what I think most people are probably going through.

It's a, it's an amazing privilege, but it's, it's just the, I mean, by far, the biggest shift that any of us are dealing with right now. Let's end this segment with something that everyone, kids or no can appreciate, which is bagging on Ivanka Trump. Oh, yeah. Ivanka Trump is the mother of three children,

not to minimize that experience at all, but she told Yahoo Finance that her experience during the quarantine was like, quote, pretty much every parent around the country. Every parent around the country. Turns out every parent has been doing this. In the evenings where normally we would have had a work-related commitment or something else, a school function, whatever it is.

I've been trying to use it to expand my own mind and explore things I normally wouldn't have prioritized. So I've got a Coursera free course going in Greek and Roman mythology, so I'm rereading the honesty. I've started to learn to play the guitar and now I'm really working on it. What? How do you have more time? I mean, I guess, like, she's not talking about raising kids.

She's talking about the life of someone who never spends time with their kids when they're not taking Instagram photos. I mean, that's just, and how much must you hate your significant other that, like, as soon as you're able to, like, put your kids to bed, your, the first priority is like, let me go do something by myself. I don't know. Yeah. I think let them study Greek is really the let them eat cake of our time. Let them read Greek. Yes, let them read Greek. Thanks, Ivanka.

David, it's time for the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod. David, I guess Rob Grunkowski won some kind of championship belt. Yeah, the 24-7 championship. The 24-7 championship at WrestleMania last night. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write,

so I guess Gronk can win a championship without Tom Brady. Thanks to Mike from CT. David has states scramble for coronavirus supplies that have not been issued by the feds. We saw this tweet. California Governor Gavin Newsom is building a consortium of states to buy personal protective equipment in bulk rather than compete against each other and drive up prices.

A consortium of states. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, so we're going to create, hear me out, a united group of states here in America? What a concept, thanks to Steve Seideman and Josh Peterson. And finally, David, we've had a hearty laugh at the way celebrities like Ivanka have been dragged into the pandemic, often in the form of a PSA about washing her hands. Well, this tweet from March 29th is one of my faves.

The Sky News Feed tweeted the following, Kate Winslet starred in the film Contagion about a hypothetical virus outbreak and gives tips on how to keep safe during the coronavirus. coronavirus pandemic. So Kate Winslet was in contagion. Therefore, we ought to listen to her about how to stay safe. That is the final evolutionary phase of I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV. Some great replies here.

Later, we'll be talking to Mel Gibson about Scottish freedom and what it would mean to him. Tomorrow, Harrison Ford will teach us the best way to raid a tomb. Alec Guinness on what to do with Darth Vader strikes you down. And finally, Kate Winslet was also in Titanic. Any advice on nautical navigation at night? If you're good with celebrities standing in for epidemiologists or media Twitter accounts pretending that they can, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, time for the notebook dump. A week ago, David, we allowed ourselves to engage in a little shaming. We called out corporations or individuals who had behaved abominably during the coronavirus.

Well, guess what? The have happened. haven't stopped. Man. So now it's time for the coronavirus corporate Hall of Shame round two. This is David, it's like the baseball Hall of Fame where the Veterans Committee

meets to put it some more guys in. We're not done. We're not done. No. Nominy number one in the coronavirus corporate Hall of Shame Hobby Lobby. Woo! Because in late March, Hobby Lobby CEO David Green net worth $6.4 billion

sent out a letter to managers saying that employees would need to, quote, tighten their belts and that stores would stay open because his wife had a vision from God. I could describe the vision to you. This is it in part. His blessings and the fruits of all your hard work have made it possible for the company not only to operate without significant amounts of debt, but for the past decade to maintain wages and benefits that have far exceeded most retailers, et cetera, et cetera. Well, Hobby Lobby ignored calls for non-essential businesses to close, insisting that the sale of fabric was an essential service. But last Thursday, deputies in Dallas served Hobby Lobby with a cease and desist, and on Friday

the chain, which employs over 43,000 people issued a statement saying they would be closing all stores until further notice and furlowing all store employees and many of its corporate and distribution workers. The employees will receive benefits until May 1, but the company ended emergency leave pay and suspended the use of paid time off benefits. Boys were outraged about the lack of warning given about the stores closing. Yeah. Kind of a tough arc there. From the vision from God to you're all furloughed within like weeks, you know, days even.

Hobby Lobby. I just feel like it's incumbent upon anyone that goes public with a vision from with a message from God to explain God's addendum to the original message, wherein he said, yes, never mind, please fire everybody. Or sorry, furlough everybody. Furlough is not a word I heard in the Bible. Yeah, no, I think furlougheth, I think is the way they say it there. But it's, I think that would be a help.

I think that'd be instructive for any of us, all the religious scholars amongst us who want to, you know, keep tabs on everything, the completists amongst us. who wants to keep tabs in all of God's God's words. That's right. The binge motors of the Bible, as you will. Coronavirus Corporate Hall of Shame nominee number two, Sports Illustrated, or more specifically

the Maven guys who run Sports Illustrated. Yeah. We've talked about how no games, the whole no games era is very tough on sports media. We talked about how even with enlightened employers, this can lead to layoffs, it can lead to pay cuts, etc. Well, the Washington Post, Ben Strauss emailed

Maven CEO James Heckman for a piece that ran on March 23rd about what was going to happen to all these companies with the without games. According to Strauss, Heckman called the concern, quote, pretty silly. We're a 150 million dollar business continue to forecast a profitable year and our traffic continues to scale up, he wrote, quote unquote. Well, a week later, Sports Illustrated laid off six percent of its already thin staff, including six of its editorial staffers, The layoffs claimed the jobs of Chris Ballard, Jack Dickey, Kaelin Collar, Lakin Littman, Tom Monsoranis, and Sarah Kwok. According to Strauss staffers also wanted to know why the company couldn't implement pay cuts like BuzzFeed didn't march. Well, apparently they did because on Sunday morning, the writer Grant Wall had an Instagram story saying the Maven had reduced his salary by 30% and was trying to make that reduction permanent beyond the pandemic.

Wow. He wrote, who would take advantage of a pandemic to permanently reduce someone's salary beyond that pandemic? Maven and James Heckman would. Wow. I mean, I can't say that any of this is terribly surprising. But most of the Hall of Shame candidates so far have by intention or by accident some level of some amount of excuse here, or some level of misdirection? Why would you issue that statement to the Washington Post?

And then days later, I mean, surely you knew, surely you had an inkling that something really bad was going to happen. Or at least you wanted a hedge so you didn't give people at the company the wrong idea. I don't get that. I just don't get that. Coronavirus Corporate Hall of Shame nominee, number three, David, this is via our friend Hugh Hopkins, the British football clubs,

Tottenham Hotspur, and Liverpool. Remember what the Philadelphia 76ers tried to do here, the U.S.? It actually happened in the UK. On March 31st, Tottenham Hotspur furloughed staff, putting them on a government program where workers are paid 80% of their monthly wages, effectively,

with taxpayer money that is meant to support small businesses. Liverpool followed suit on April 4, but players and executives across across the Premier League still have not taken pay cuts. Tottenham Chairman Daniel leaving made 8.6 million last year. And seven players on the team's payroll made over 100,000 pounds a week. Liverpool has 12 players making 100,000 pounds a week.

And both organizations made just over $50 million in profit last year. I wonder where all that money went. I just, I said this about the 76ers. As soon as you pull this move, you no longer get to engage in triumphalism about how great your league or sport is, right? If you can't afford to pay people for a few weeks, you don't get to say how your sport is taking over the world. You lose that privilege for the foreseeable future.

I mean, I know that there's a zero chance of this happening. But man, all these like multi-billion dollar valuations for teams sure's look pretty suspect, right? I mean, if we were about to spend $2.5 billion dollars by an NBA team, I'd like to figure out how I could invest all that money and how the team still be in the red every single year, right? Mm-hmm. For sure, right? I mean, I don't know why you would pay that much money for a team

that doesn't, it's not worth owning. It just seems like you got yourself into a mugs game, and you're too scared to admit it now. Either that or you're just really shitty at your job. Finally, nominee number four, this isn't a corporation, but as a University of Texas guy, I had to include the Cabo 44. Now I guess it's more than 44.

In mid-March, David, over 200 students from UT Austin flew on a chartered plane to Cabo-San-Lucas and some returned on separate commercial flights to Texas. Now, 49 of the over 200 people that went on this chartered plane have tested positive for coronavirus. 178 of the students were set up on the trip by just college, a travel. company that organizes spring break trips. Boy, if the alarms in your mind aren't going off right now, the company that organizes spring break trips, they should be,

according to emails obtained by Austin Television Station, KVUE, the company had been sending out emails assuring customers that the trips were safe. On March 12th, the company wrote, quote, we're currently in our second week of Cabo and have had almost 5,000 travelers, all with no issues. Wow. On April 4, just college.

This is J.U.S. College. I just want to make that clear to you. just college posted a statement on its website announcing the postponement of its remaining spring break trips. Oh, man. Well, hook them horns, I guess. David's never been prouder to go to Baylor than he was at this moment. Baylor to their great credit, canceled college, I mean, canceled, you know, in-person classes. The moment everybody else did, all the other universities did, maybe a little bit are on the early side.

And as far as I can tell, did not rely on faith over fear or any other means of godly healing to get them through the situation at all. Topic number three, David, today. What will the election look like? I've read a bunch of pieces scattered around the Internet over the last couple of days asking this question. How are we going to have Biden versus Trump in November? Yeah. With the pandemic, we're all locked in right now. The first big piece of news last Thursday is that the Democrats have already delayed their convention in Milwaukee from July until August 17th.

They were planning to do a convention and take a big breath for the summer Olympics. And then the Republicans were going to do their convention. Now they're back to back in August. This was all precipitated by Biden, the likely nominee, doing a remote interview with Jimmy Fallon, not Chuck Todd. Jimmy Fallon on April 1st. Listen up. It's going to depend on what kind of action is taken between now and the middle of the summer to change this curve as to what's going to happen going into the fall. For example, I doubt whether the Democratic Convention is going to be able to be held in mid-July,

early July. I think it's going to have to move into August. So I guess that was a trial balloon. I don't really know how to quite figure out what was going on there, but it is sort of moving the, convention itself. I mean, hopefully it's not a trial balloon for anything to follow, right? I mean, it does seem like, you know, the calendars for all this stuff from the very first, you know, few primaries onward. It's just so meticulously planned out. I'm really skeptical of our government, our electoral system, being able to sort of think on its feet fast enough for everything to run smoothly. But here we are. And hopefully, you know, democracy wins out, right?

hopefully but there's now I mean I think now you're going to see shockingly and I can't I can't believe I'm saying this with Donald Trump you're going to see this politicize right because as the Times points out there's going to be this giant game of chicken about who not only suspends their convention but cancels their convention first right kind of hard to imagine an auditorium full of people even in August right that that's on the front end of optimistic ideas about when sports may restart like without fans and now we're going to do this giant political convention in a basketball gym in August. But Donald Trump has said, as he said with many things during the coronavirus, we got to be back. We've got to be out there. So are the Democrats willing to cancel their convention if Donald Trump isn't willing to cancel his convention and willing to cede that PR tool to him? You talk about voting. We've talked about maybe national mail-in voting, which, which is, by the way, a great idea long before the coronavirus.

Yeah. Maybe that will help November run a little more smoothly. Guess who's skeptical of mail-in voting and greater voter participation? Aha, the party that has the White House. Yeah. So are they going to want to do that? Are they going to want to push that effort knowing that could hurt them at the ballot box? We've seen, you know, Trump and Mitch McConnell and those people do a lot of things in the name of winning.

and what makes us think that that's going to happen in November. Yeah. I mean, the more you think about it, the more frightening it becomes. And, I mean, listen, no one would say anything that's happening right now with the coronavirus is going according to plan for the president. But, you know, his instincts, as we get closer to the election, may not skew in a positive direction. So I think everything you just said is worth fretting over, even preemptively. Another issue raised by Times reporter Shane Goldmacher, how's Biden going to raise money now? He's way behind Trump in that department.

This is how Goldmacher has it. Roughly $225 million in cash on hand between Trump's reelection campaign, the Republican National Committee, and their shared committees. $225 million. Biden and the Democratic National Committee had only $20 million after accounting for debts. We know, and we've talked about on this pod many times before, Biden wasn't great at raising money anyway. Now, guess what, he can't have in-person fundraisers for the time being. It's pretty awkward to send out one of those emails asking for funds in the middle of a pandemic. plus there might be a recession coming and people will have less money to give, not to mention less hours to go knock on doors and volunteer. There was this sort of like weirdly semi-contraryan idea out there that this is the campaign

that Biden has always wanted to run the front porch campaign. Yeah. A la Warren Harding or William McKinley. I learned five seconds ago on Wikipedia that McKinley's front porch campaign worked because he had a massive fundraising advantage. So what would be the, you know, Biden is running from Wilmington, Delaware kind of campaign where he wasn't massively outspending Donald Trump? Well, I mean, I think it's hard to contextualize, but it's hard to draw direct comparisons

at all. I mean, certainly Trump proved four years ago that everything we thought we knew was wrong about how these elections work, at least on a national, the big, national stage. And I mean, I just think that if we do end up in a situation that that's that unusual, then the oddity of the situation itself will be all of the platform that either candidate could hope for, that the lack of traditional fundraising, the lack of traditional outlets for, you know, branding or whatever else you want to call it.

I think that'll just drive cameras to the front porch, you know, and drive viewers' eyes to, to, you know, those recordings. I think that we've talked about President Trump and Andrew Cuomo, you know, talking coronavirus, you know, in their press conferences every day. And it's obviously not one-to-one there either. I mean, people are very concerned about finding out the details or finding out what they can about the epidemic that we're experiencing. But I do think a lot of those eyeballs are just tuning in to see this new and interesting

form of communication, or at least something that's something. that we're not used to seeing from President Trump and certainly not from Governor Cuomo or those outside of New York. I don't know. So the question is, are we in a digital enough world that you don't need, or at least need as much the screaming crowd at the convention

and the screaming crowds out at the stump and that you could run these campaigns virtually enough to work? Yes, I mean, I think yes, and yes in multiple ways. I mean, I don't think that the conventions are particularly, I mean, I understand that that gets a lot of attention, lots of people watch, but I don't think they're necessary. Now, if you're right, if what you said is true and we get into kind of a showdown over who, if one party is not going to have one at all and the other party does, I mean, I guess that's an issue. But, man, I just came off of a weekend of watching WrestleMania with no crowd. So, I mean, I have absolutely no doubt that you could have a fully staged convention, a week-long series of convention speeches that look exactly the same as they normally do just without a crowd.

I mean, if that's, if that's, I mean, I don't think that's going to happen, but there's, but, you know, the, the things that are so impractical are not necessarily the barriers that, you know, we think they are. And I think it's just in a much more functional level. Yeah, I think we're, I definitely think we're at a technological phase where we don't need that. And, and, and I think that, you know, Joe Biden giving his nomination speech from the front porch of his house with like, you know, a $10 podium in front of him. could be as big of a moment as anything that would happen on like a, you know, backlit technicolor convention stage. I haven't priced a podium in a while, so I'm glad you had a figure handy for that. That's a cheap podium for the record. You could spend a lot of money on podiums. I agree that that can happen. I do think the crowd is a huge part of this, right?

I mean, I have not watched WrestleMania yet, but it strikes me that there is a certain, there is a certain value to having the crowd there. And if you're going to lock people in on political speeches for a couple of days and make it this giant television event, right? That's what it is. It's a television event. You want people getting fired up. You want people paying attention.

That having someone in a, you know, sealed chamber is going to really take a lot of, a lot of juice out of that. Yes and no. Listen, I think that... Do you want to hear a political... speech. I mean, to me, those are all about so much as the crowd going, Biden, Biden, we know Joe,

we know Joe, as much as it is about whatever Biden's going to tell us from the podium. Yeah. You feel fired up. You look at a person and goes like, look at that guy's popular. Everybody in the room likes that guy. Well, there's one thing that WrestleMania taught me. It's that if you stick to the same script, it's going to feel like about 50%

of what you could have had. But there's room for innovation. I mean, really simple pathways to innovation that can make something seem a whole lot more. powerful than it was in the first place. I mean, I think, and I also think that people are, I don't think forgiving is even the right word. I think that people in this whatever moment we're living through right now

are open-minded and interesting, I mean, interested in kind of what these new versions of reality might look like, you know? I mean, I think if the XFL had come out and done a, they did. I think they had XFL had their draft on Zoom a year ago or six months ago or whatever, and everybody was like, look at this low-budget, you know, second-rate sport. And now the NFL is going to basically have their draft on Zoom in the near future because there's no other option

and people are just I mean it's going to get as many eyeballs as it would have on television because people are just like first of all the NFL is a big you know big time obviously but I think people are intrigued as to what this will possibly how this will possibly come off and I think there's a lot of potential there

but you can't but like I said you can't stick to the same script and squander your opportunity the the unanswerable but fascinating question in the background here is what happens when election news is just pushed off the front page for months and months at a time, which it almost certainly will be. The news about the Democrats suspending their convention until August, that ran on page 822 of my edition of the New York Time. Think about that. It was literally buried in the paper because it's not one of the top

news stories right now. And so I think that's the other question here. Let's concede that you know, either a virtual campaign happens or we somehow cobble together stump speeches and conventions in a, in a semi-normal way by the fall. What's the effect of just not thinking really about the presidential campaign for, let's say, the next three or four months? You know, it's almost like we have a British-style campaign where you have that tiny window where everybody's actually locked in and campaigning. Yeah. Right. I mean, of course, but even that doesn't really work because we see Trump every day, you know,

and Trump is out here giving things. For better or worse for him, and I think it's probably a combination of those things, a lot of worse, but there's probably some better too. And of course, we don't know how this is all going to turn out. But I'm just fascinated by that. Because when was the last time in American history that

the presidential election was the B story? Never. I mean, it's pretty incredible. Yeah. And I don't know if that just favors, you know, there's a version of that where that kind of, you know, Joe Biden sort of plods to victory, you know, based on general Trumpiness and the handling of the coronavirus or Trump gets reelected. I don't have a great sense of that.

But to me, that is the interesting question. All right, time for David Schuemaker, guess is a strain pun headline. Yes. Thursday's headline about empty rush hour highways in Norfolk, Virginia was hush hour. Hush hour. Two distinguished sportswriters sent a suggestions, David. This is from Ivan Maisel of ESPN. Rush Limbo. Rush limbo. I love that. That's good.

This is from baseball writer and baseball newsletter writer Joe Sheehan. He had one that's elegantly simple for a Norfolk highway story. No folk. Oh, that's great. No folk. I am embarrassed. We didn't think of either one of those. This week's headline is from the journalist Stephen

Elliott. It's from high country news. which is described as, quote, an independent magazine dedicated to the coverage of the Western U.S. Cool. In November, David, I did not know this, but there's going to be an initiative on the ballot in Colorado about whether to restore wolves to the state. Wolves were basically hunted out of existence in Colorado. It will be up to a public vote about whether these wolves can return. What was the high country news?

strained pun headline. The voter, I'm trying to parse what you just said. I mean, it's like wolves at the door, wolves at the wolf in, wolf in sheep's clothing. Oh, another phrase involving wolves. Throw someone to the wolves? Is that it? There we go.

Flip it around to me, flip it around for me. Throw wolves to the people or throw, throw wolves to the ballot, throw wolves to the voters. There we go. Colorado throws wolves to the vote. I like that. I love it. Some clever people there at High Country News.

He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Erica Servantes and Chris Almeida, production magic by Jim Cunningham. And actually, Erica Zervantes too. Erica is doing everything this week. On Thursday, David, let us have the other half of that discussion.

start today. What's it like worrying about your parents during coronavirus? Yes. More lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, pal. See you, right.