The Press Box - Profiling Elizabeth Holmes, the NBA’s Fake Injuries, and Trump Returns to CNN

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

Bryan and David discuss what went wrong with the New York Times profile about Elizabeth Holmes (9:48). Later, they discuss Donald Trump’s town hall being broadcast on CNN and more Tucker Carlson news (35:18). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Isaiah Blakely Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Ryan Rosillo. I'm the host of the Ryan Risslo podcast at The Ringer. We are a sports show, but we do it a little differently because we want to cut through all of the nonsense and try to figure out what's really happening and give you those bigger picture observations. Do a lot of NFL, a lot of NBA, and of course, college football. Also have a great guest lineup, a lot of athletes, front office guys. And even we do some actors and writers from famous TV shows and movies, plus our life advice segment at the end of every show. So make sure you follow the Ryan Risslo show on Spotify. David, we haven't talked about a little media transaction that straddles sports TV and cable news. Charles Barkley is going to CNN to host a weekly show with Gail King. Mm-hmm. Have you seen the title of this new show? I was going to ask you the same thing. It's so funny, Charles Barkley and Gail King, together at last.

And the name of the show is, King Charles. Love it. I was thinking about having you guess that the strain pun headline. It's not quite a pun. By the way, a little inside baseball note for listeners, it would have been better for me

to have done research for this segment before this weekend's coronation. King Charles kind of became a popular search term. Yeah, that's true. My first reaction, and please credit the press box for this scoop, Charles Barkley is not retiring from television. You may have, heard him wondering aloud for, oh, the last decade or more, whether he was going to retire.

No, it turns out he's adding television. Charles Barkley has even more bandwidth for TV shows. CNN's own piece, by the way, also quoted him like this. I want the show to be non-political, said Barkley, though he added that the show would touch on politics. Topics covered on the show, said King and Barkley will range from hard-hitting topics like gun control to light or fair like food and pop culture. Okay.

Can I put it? Is it my turn to talk? Please. It's funny. It sounds a lot like the pitch for the press box. I'm not sure if that was true. But it does sound a lot like the pitch for every amorphous as yet to be defined to program on any platform. I mean, this is clearly the absence of a show, right?

I mean, this is even less substance than every single, you know, every single previous CNN, MSNBC Fox host who's like, you know, this new show is going to change the way we think about news talk, you know, this is so much less defined than that. Although, on the one hand, I'm not sure that it needs more definition than Charles Barkley and Gail King. We have microphones. certainly they'll have to, you know, sort of figure it out as they get closer. But at this point, I mean, this fall, you and I are sure already making plans for our, like, kids' sports teams this fall. But this fall is a million miles away in terms of TV production. So, you know, they got some time to figure it out. It was a totally, totally substance-free story, although I guess what else could you, would you expect from the official CNN story on it?

Did you see the variety story on this? I don't think I did. The only, the interesting note from that is that they, they really highlighted the notion of that the TV networks are moving away from the need for talent exclusivity. Like, you know, Gail King and Charles Barkley both doing very notable other things. Gail King's on CBS this morning. Charles Barkley's doing basketball. Is that meaningful to anybody outside of the media world?

It's not, though I've noticed it a lot at CNN at ESPN too. like this this never happened in the old days if you work for a network you work for a network and now we've seen stephen a smith say you know what i'm going to have this like quasi political podcast that's not going to be under the espion umbrella or kirk herb street i'm going to inaugurate amazon sports division by doing thursday night football part of this is i mean maybe it's the podcastization of sports media contracts or whatever it's like there's carve-outs, it also obviously has a ton to do with the power of agents in sports

media that you could just, you know, go to the bargaining table and say, that's great, we agree, except we're just not giving you like a solid third of this person, you know? We got to, you know, we want film the blank to be able to do Alpo commercials of his own free will or whatever. But, um, but that

part's interesting. But going back to the show, I mean, we don't know what it is. Nothing's there. But I think it's not just about planning. it's about the experience of it. We talked about a million shows that this has happened to where you go in with the best of intentions or best, worst, whatever, one set of intentions

and then, you know, reality slash just the norms of cable news programming intervene. I'm very interested in the sort. You said the word bandwidth before in relation to Berkeley. I don't think Charles Barkley has any idea as defined as personalities he is about what Charles Barkley co-host of King Charles is going to think about things a month

into the run of the show. And I'm not saying that as a, as a knock on him. He obviously is very opinionated and very thoughtful in a lot of ways. I just don't think that you know until you get your sea legs. I don't think he's going to know how this is going to feel.

And I don't think he's going to know necessarily what the flow of the show and what his political stance. He claims he wants to be apolitical. I don't even know what, would that would be pushing up against until he actually has some people in front of them that he's going to be arguing with or talking to. That's sort of his approach to basketball, isn't it? Yeah, that's what I mean.

I was pretty sure I saw a tweet over the weekend that says he doesn't go to show planning meetings. And the whole magic of Barclay on inside the NBA is, hey, a thing just having, I'm just going to have a reaction to it. Mm-hmm. On the air. But there's all, but that also, that's going to be an interesting thing, too, I mean, as well, right? Because last night, was it last night he was talking about what's it, how Jay, how Jay, Jason Tatum isn't on the level of some of the super duper stars. And he's talking about how low the low is.

And he wasn't talking about numbers in any sort of like real referential way. Right. I mean, he, he was making up the numbers, his points of reference off the top of his head. That's fine. That's part of the charm of Charles Barkley. I'm not sure if that's going to work for like statistics surrounding gun deaths on CNN. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

To your point about it's a show without an idea of what it wants to be. I'll up you. It's a cable news network without an idea of what it wants to be. We've heard CNN being like, we want to be less liberal. We want to be less political. So now we've hired Charles Barkley to come in and say, I'm not going to be political. To use the slogans of the people that run the network.

I mean, I guess in theory. In theory, you could have a worse idea to take the ESPN reference than to, you know, than to say, we're just going to throw everything against the wall until we find our Stephen A. Smith until we find our thing that defines the rest of the stuff that we do. But, but yeah, it's, it is very, they're in a searching phase, as many of us are. And it'll, it'll be interesting to see how this shakes out. The thing, the thing, the thing that worries me about Barclay and not Gil King, because Gilking is immensely, talented and is obviously in a very similar milieu right now.

The thing that worries me about Barclay is how he will react to being to being viewed differently, you know, how he will be reacted. The difference between being a, being a meme in the sort of like shacked in a fool way or gone fission on T&T sort of way and just being held to account across social media for getting things wrong is going, that is, that has defined. a lot of men of his generation in the past decade, the reaction to meme-dum, and it doesn't always go great. It's a really good point.

It's a really good point. You're really up in the ante and making those ad-libs that much more freighted every time he go there. I hope he doesn't change at all. I hope he doesn't, honestly, I think he will be, like, nominally a force for good if he literally just puts on earplugs and doesn't change.

I mean, it'll be a show, at least. you know. Attention seeing NPR. If you want to advertise this in advance, David Shoemaker, you can quote them, nominally a force for good. Which for cable news, that's aiming high. Coming up on today's podcast, the New York Times made just about everybody mad with a profile of Elizabeth Holmes. What exactly went wrong? We have NBA playoff notes, including the announcer's flopping crisis and the most insincere compliment on TV. Plus, Donald Trump returns to the arms of an old lover. CNN.

All that and much more on the press box. A part of the ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, producer Isaiah Blakely here. Isaiah is sitting in for Erica. David, I woke up Sunday, turned over in bed, looked at Twitter, as one does. And by 7 a.m. Pacific, legions and legions of people were upset about Amy Chosick's New York Times profile of Elizabeth Holmes. That is Elizabeth Holmes, the embattled and disgraced founder of Theranos, who was about to go to prison for a decade plus after being convicted of fraud. You read the piece.

What did you think? first of all, let me just say about your Twitter experience. I don't know if this falls into like the feeler faster thesis rubric, but it seems like of a P, it was absolutely omnipresent for that day, maybe less, maybe like a 12-hour span. And today, as I was prepping for this, I just did the real shorthandy thing

if I'm just going to mess around on Twitter for 15 minutes and then start finding people talking about it without trying too hard. And there was nothing. I mean, I think I found one tweet after scrolling around for a while, you know, and I was just trying to kind of read my way back into the conversation was impossible

because the conversation was over. But at the time, it was absolutely electric. I mean, I have, on first read, I think I had the reaction that a lot of people did, which was, man, this writer really got, taken in, but it really did stick with the, I really did get stuck on the fact that the writer seemed to be at least somewhat, Chosik seemed to be self-aware of the fact that she was at least victim, a potential victim to being, to getting taken in. And I reread it today. And I'm left

with more of a question than an answer, which is, if the piece was going to happen, and there's a whole conversation about that, about the first, if the piece is going to happen, and the point of the piece is, I am writing a profile of a person whose sole motivation is to take me in. I'm not sure how it looks much different than this. That's not really a question, but it's like, I'm not, I guess my question is, what would, what would one do differently? Because if you start from the premise that the author is self-aware, that the publication is self-aware or is aware enough to know what's going on. What else do you really do other than,

you know, maybe you don't hire a high-level photographer and maybe title the piece, look at this fucking con artist. But like the contents of the piece, I thought given the sort of the framework of it might, I just felt like a thing where I can imagine being in the editorial suite, taking a pen to paper and looking at this thing and kind of laughing with each other about how self-aware we are, right? But if you start from the premise that this author is getting taken in, then it really feels like they're getting taken in. My takeaway was the author didn't have a game plan.

Or if they did have a game plan, they didn't execute the game plan. Because you're right. This is tricky from the start. And I feel like if you're going to say yes to this, you have to pick an approach of some kind. So you really feel like this is what we're doing here. And I came up with some possible ones,

which may answer the question you just posed. Okay. Number one, Elizabeth Holmes isn't who you think she is. We can probably disregard this one because she is who we think she is. It's kind of preposterous. Also, you notice... The story does get to a point where it identifies that she's exactly who we thought she was, right? And she still thinks she's going to change.

He still thinks that Theranos was a good idea. She still thinks she's going to change medicine, you know, like, whatever. Like, we get there. Exactly. And Chosec nods a little bit at, like, media perceptions of Elizabeth Holmes. Maybe you're challenging that. But we've already been through that cycle. All those magazine writers that got snookered when she was at Theranos early in that whole thing.

And then as Holmes herself admits in this. piece, the pushback, and that's putting it very nicely, her team did against writers who were trying to expose what was really going on at there and us. We've been around that merry around already. So let's push that aside. And by the way, details like, well, she is a doting mother. Yeah. Not terribly responsive to critiques of Elizabeth Holmes. Like Brian and David are gimlit-eyed observers of the media. But at home, they love their kids. Well, I hope so.

It's kind of a low bar. All it did was raise more questions. There are so many questions raised in this, but I spent the last scene where the writer is like walking up the driveway and encounters this like very deliberately staged moment of the husband and wife slow dancing to no music in the kitchen. And then dad leaves to go get a workout and Elizabeth Holmes, sorry, Liz is left there to talk to her. The whole time I'm thinking where the kid.

kids, right? It's just like, is there... Interesting question. Is there a nanny? Or are we just not writing about the kids who are playing underfoot? It seems like we'd be mentioning them if they were underfoot. I don't know. It just, it ends up asking more questions than it resolves. Also, Liz, there's nothing that bugs me more on just a day-to-day basis than when someone's Wikipedia page has their abbreviated name listed as a nickname in quotations after their first name. Like Matthew, quote, Matt Smith or whatever, you know, it's like, Liz, going from Elizabeth to Liz is not a lifestyle change. It is a matter, like, it's just a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a,

it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, you know, the time sensitivity of those people around you. No one, no one's like, oh, I want you to call me Liz now. What do you, do you do that in sixth grade? You don't do that when you're 40 years old. Not to mention the old profile writer's trick. If there are two people and this is the person's full name and this is the person's person's nickname and those are actually two different people. That's when I closed the newspaper, close the magazine. All right, approach number two that could have been taken with this story. Elizabeth Holmes is exactly who you think she is.

Yeah. And I guess you could go in there, spend some time with her and her person, and she calls her partner and write that story that everything is. I'm not totally sure of the value of that story, really, because we've had a court of law, an overwhelming public opinion form this picture of her. You're not really moving the needle very much there. Approach number three to me would be you go in saying,

this is going to be a looky-lou peak at Elizabeth Holmes's life right before she goes to prison for a long time. Yeah. And maybe even within that, you say, back when she was at Theranos, this is the image she was projecting. Wonderkind. Yeah. Some smart person who's figured something out. Right.

Now here as I stand with her, here is what she is projecting to me. Here is, this is this master of projection, right, of getting people to think of her in a certain way. Here is her doing it again at this later point in her life. Here's what she's trying to project. Could you stand at 20 feet? Journalistically and do that story? Maybe. Aren't you way more interested in this story after she's in prison, though?

I mean, wouldn't you be more, I mean, isn't the actual story that you're kind of interested in just like dad and kids with mom locked up for 10 years? Like, what is their life like? what do they think about thereinos? What do they, you know? I mean, I'm not saying that's a story that would actually ever get reported or they would have the same audience clearly. But like, I don't know. I mean, I think what you, what everybody, well, sorry, do you have another pitch that

works better or is that the last one? No, that's the last one. Yeah, I just think what everybody's going to run up against and you, and this is what you're running up against too. It's like, why, why are you giving it oxygen, right? Like what, like, I don't think what some people have said, which is if you're, if someone's offering you a story where the soul, where the, where the, where the intention is clearly image rehab, I don't think you should, I don't think you should just say no just automatically, right? I think that there is certainly journalistic value in stories where the, where the subject comes at you with, with a, with a, with a motive, uh, depending on what the piece is. And it's just your, you know, decision about how you're going to try to get there, like, what you're going to seek out.

But I think that the bigger question is one of, is one of, of, of audience, right? I mean, there's a part in the piece where they talk about how there's more, I'm sure it's just fanciful numbers, but like how there's, you know, more links for Elizabeth Holmes than Osama bin Laden, you know, more hits for whatever and online or whatever. Like, yeah, people care about this. millions of people watch the documentaries and read all these pieces and read the books, whatever else. They might not care for the right reasons. And certainly she's sort of been turned into a caricature. Well, she turned herself into a caricature and sort of been demonized

and whatever else. I'm not here to say whether or not she deserves it. But this story was greenlit because they knew that a billion people would read it and that we would be talking about it and everything else. Right. I mean, that's the point of the story. So when you start from this sort of tenuous premise like that. Well, sorry, in terms of journalistic morality, the tenuous premise like that, then I don't know where you're really supposed to go from there, right? I mean, what is, what on earth?

I mean, you would not, you would not, I mean, could you imagine this with it under it for a different crime? I mean, I don't want to do some false correlation here, but if someone commits a murder, you don't go see what their home life is like in the weeks leading up to them reporting for prison, you know, and to see if they've seen that, I mean, maybe. I think people have probably done it. Yeah, but, you know, they've tried to be a sounding board for, I mean, they get up close to that figure, right? Like, I think that is a journalistic impulse.

I'm not defending it, but it's, it's old. You're right. You're right. You're right. You're right. That stuff has happened. I guess I'm, I'm not, I'm not right on that. But I think just the premise that.

a financial crime, or this is actually goes beyond, obviously goes beyond financial crimes as we can conventionally refer to them, but that the crimes that she's, that she committed were somehow like a lapse and that there's a potential for, for vindication or there's a, there's a, there's a potential that if she could, that if she's seen the error of her ways prior to going to prison, then maybe we. we can all agree we should just throw it out or something. You know, I mean, there's not even really advanced here. You know, there's a little bit of the, you know, it wasn't my fault that's kind of put in here as the other guy that my partner and all that stuff. But that's not really what's being, I don't even feel that that's being put forth here. No, no, not being advanced. I just feel like that's sort of baked into how this is being treated as a sort of a different special case. I don't know.

Maybe I'm wrong. I was reading this tweet from Defectors, Albert Bernico. He says, laboratory blood testing is not like other types of tech industry fraud. The people who do elaborate intentional laboratory blood testing fraud can't be treated like they just made some over-promised dating app for libertarian burning man vampires or whatever. Which I think is an important point here. And the story mentions a woman who had a healthy pregnancy and then this Theranos Edison machine she got tested by said she had a miscarriage.

There are other examples of that, people getting tested. results back. So I think bringing some of that more of that into the piece is probably really helpful to understand this because I think one thing that does happen here is when you get when you are face to face here and you're seeing motherhood and a partner and this life is forgetting the stakes of what we're talking about. Yeah. And there are stakes here besides money. There are real people out in the world and probably bringing that in would have helped a lot. I'd another idea for this. Something that would have been interesting to see.

Let's say an offer comes to the Times business desk. Some time with Elizabeth Holmes before she goes off to prison. And the Times says, okay, we'll entertain it, but the person we're sending to write it is John Kerry Rue, who broke all those there and no stories, who has an exquisite Elizabeth Holmes bullshit. detector who knows what the pressure of getting those stories into print was like. And by the way, just conveniently join the Times from the Wall Street Journal.

That's who we're sending. Yeah. And if the Holmes camps says, we don't like him, too bad. That's who gets to write the story. That would have been an interesting approach as well. I think that kind of gets to the bigger issue of play here, which is that the success of Theranos relied so much. and Elizabeth Holmes relied so much on the naivete of the press,

that it wasn't just the person sitting in front of her, but it was this broader question of, you know, are the claims that she's putting forward even in the realm of feasibility? Right. And everybody just said, well, you know, it's tech. So the answer must be yes. We like the cut of her turtleneck. We'll buy it, you know.

And more, I think more centrally, saying, judging the science, looking at the numbers, that's not really our responsibility. What we do is feature stories, you know, and you're right. That would have been incredibly helpful here. I think that it's, I think that's sort of the part that rankles me is that there's, you know, there's the implicit, there's the fraud. and then there's the sort of just like detachment from reality that that part seemed that that that anything that she was suggesting was feasible and to not I don't know it almost just seems

like continuing to cover her in the same way is this sort of abdication of that role you're right John Cario should have been would have been an ideal person why would you not insist why would you not have somebody who could do the numbers you know who could run all that stuff there. You're right. I remember when the Times did a big Tanya Harding profile a while back. And then you had all these people who had covered Tanya Harding in 1994 come forward and be like, actually, here's what it was like. Here is, here are the beats of this story in real time. Those of us who were trying to assess what she did or didn't do. It's just different to have that context. A listener, Declan McLaughlin tweets this at us. Is this a style of feature that should be

retired. Seems like we haven't had a good profile with the author inserted into the piece in a while. Not willing to write off features where the author is wondering aloud about what they should write within the piece, which we also saw in that Brandon Sanderson wired profile. I was about to say, I feel like every time a piece rears its head on this show, that that's what we're talking about. But it is often a sign that the writer doesn't know what to write. And minus just flashes of crazy literary inspiration, that's probably a warning sign. Yeah, the sources that were used in this

talking to her dad a lot just seemed a little bit beside the point, although I'm sure that was deliberate. There's a kind of lack of human interest and humanity in the actual subject and even her husband or whatever. But yeah, this is, I think that it's just,

there's a broader sense where it's just sort of the abdication. of responsibility. Like it would, like, listen, it was, in a lot of ways, it was a totally fine piece. And like I said, I'm not exactly sure how, that they needed to go over the top any further to let you know that they weren't, that being, they weren't, you know, the Chozik wasn't being conned. But the piece itself was the con, right?

The existence of the peace and the sort of abdication of responsibility in terms of, it's a fine piece. It's an interesting piece. It's a fun read. We're all talking about it. This might be the only piece someone in a year from now ever read. This might be the only piece they ever read about Elizabeth Holmes, right? Somebody trying to figure out what this story was all about.

And this is what they're going to see. This is, this is all the information they're going to come away with. It's, it's, I don't think deliberately, obviously not deliberately misleading, but it is just such a sort of bizarre, a bizarre episode. Hopefully they come see us and we'll tell them to go by bad blood instead of writing this, reading this piece. let's do our new segment which is called the NBA Today. And this is spelled David not today in the conventional sense,

but with the number two, the NBA Today. And see, that allows us to own the IP. Great. Because if somebody else has something called the NBA Today, we'll know, hey, wait a second. That's what we're doing over here at the press box. Couple notes for you. The first one is about injuries.

And more than that about, fake injuries or exaggerated injuries. What I've been watching the NBA playoffs, and I thought this on Sunday watching Anthony Davis get hit in the head and then watching him lie on the court holding his head, announcers are in a really hard spot because there's so much flopping that whenever anyone is injured, they don't know how seriously to take it. Yeah. I mean, Anthony Davis, who is often injured, you might have heard on a talk show recently,

who whose injury would be a huge, huge setback for the Lakers in their series against the Warriors. Mike Breen just got a look at him and goes, Anthony Davis line on the floor holding his head, and then everybody just moves on because we all know he's not that hurt. It's just really funny to me because there have been actual serious injuries in the playoffs this year. But announcers now are just have been, again, taught this lesson so many times that the injury you're looking at, the apparent injury is not really as bad as the player is making it out to be that they don't say anything at all. It's just kind of go ahead. It's interesting. It's like, it's like, you know, your kid's fighting.

You know, it's like, all you, you round the corner into the room and all you know is one of them's on the floor crying. You're just like, oh. Or, okay. Pretending to cry. Well, that's it. My son has some Marcus Martin. You know, just he goes flying across the room when his sister gets within three feet of and I'm like, should I intervene here?

Is that really a flagrant one? Mine's so much different because my four-year-old has not just the Marcus Smart. He doesn't fake cry. He cries convincingly on command, right? I mean, he riles himself up to the point of really crying in a snap. and our other kids 14. There's a 10-year age gap. So you find yourself just like talking to the 14-year-old,

trying to like rationalize with him. It's just like, this is going to happen. You have to sort of manage the situation before he gets here. But that's not fair. He's a little kid too, you know? So it's a, you know, anyway, we're way off subject here.

It is like you've got to, you're walking into the room. There's tears. You got to assess blame. not assess blame, but you got to figure out how hurt, how seriously to treat this potential injury in the midst of all this other stuff going on. Exactly. Right? In the heat of the moment.

An announcers now, they've decided, and I think probably correctly on balance to just be like, hey, he's fine. It'll be okay. At times of refs finish this official review. Everybody will be all right. Second item for you here in the NBA Today. Spelled with a two. you remember last year we had the Martin Brundle gridwalk during the F1 race down there in Miami

Yeah Martin Brundle does this little celebrity walk around Last year he thought he was interviewing Patrick Mahomes Turned out he was interviewing Palo Bancaro then of Duke now of the Orlando Magic Thank you, Simon. I found Palo Banquero, who I found him last year. I just didn't get the name right in the beginning. But what a year you've had since you made me infamous? It's been a hell of a year. And I'm honored that you know my name now, man. It's been a hell of a year. And you're a great at what you do. Yeah, genuine class from Bankero here. I know why this got all this attention. I know what we're talking about it. And it's so lovely in so many ways. Also just weird, like strangely still more awkward and

formal than I would have expected it to be given like everybody knows we're in it we're in this meme cycle together sort of I don't know what do you think how do you feel about the compliment you're great at what you do I feel I've been told that insincerely a few dozen times in my life by people who may not think I'm great at what I do it was the best possible way is it well it's a little bit like the Costanza, the, the, um, uh, jerk store, you know, like where you, where you're, where you think of the comeback, like an hour later after you leave the building, that would have been the perfect thing for him to say the first time when, when Gryndel, Gronald didn't know who he was, right?

If he was just like, oh, I know who you are. You're great at what you do because it's so clearly substance free that it's like just saying, I don't know who you are either without actually saying it. Exactly. It was beautiful in that sense. And I thought it worked really well here. Would it worked better a year ago, but still. Yeah.

Or I don't have a ton of respect for what you do, but I'm sure you're great at it. I think that's when I've heard it in terms of being a media critic. Yeah. I hear you're great at what you do, sweeping up poop on the ground. Coming up in 30 seconds, David, Trump is coming back to CNN this week. But is he coming back to the GOP primary debates? 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 Pressbox pod where they were always gratefully received. This week's winner in a runaway are King Charles Coronation jokes especially ones involving that picture that had Charles holding two giant scepters.

I think they're scepters. I really don't care. I could not be bothered to read one explainer about the coronation this week. No. Do not give a shit, folks. But I did like these jokes. Here are some good ones. Bringing your dad both screwdrivers because you don't know what he's talking about.

Just ordered at the Cheesecake Factory. And when you have to hold mom sticks while she goes to the bathroom. Also funny was a picture of Charles looking at a card. And you couldn't see what was on the card so people were imagining. My favorite was Charles trying to figure out if she underlined her crossed out his name. Good. Succession reference.

If you made the other King Charles feel like a must watch by comparison, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, let's do this week in 2024. We have got a big media event coming Wednesday night. Donald Trump is going to do a televised town hall in New Hampshire. And you'll never believe what network he's doing it on.

when you report fake news, which CNN does a lot, you are the enemy of the people. CNN's fake news. I don't take questions from CNN. CNN is fake news. I don't take questions from CNN. John Roberts of Fox. Let's go to a real, let's go to a real net. That's right. CNN.

This is the first time Donald Trump has granted an interview to CNN since 2016. Hmm. not a misprint and it is a network as you heard that News Nation clip that Trump regularly ridiculed as president

Caitlin Collins of the now Don Lemonless CNN morning show gets the nod here as the moderator should CNN let Trump hold a town hall on its airwaves should

should this is a question about journalistic ethics or what genre am I living in here? That makes it sound awfully boring, but there were a lot of people who say, why are you giving Donald Trump a platform? He's a big liar about the 2020 election and other matters. Yeah. Should you be putting him on your air, interviewing him on your air at all?

What do you think about that? Oh, God. Why don't have to be the moral, the voice of authority here? I think it's inevitable that he will be on the air. Yes. So maybe you just need to figure out exactly how to frame his appearance. I think so. I mean, we learn.

I think it would be frankly very valuable and hilarious to have him in a town hall where you get to pick everybody who's asking him questions. I mean, I'm guessing that probably wouldn't pass the negotiation phase. But the questions CNN said are pre-screened, I think, for relevance and factual. factual quality of the questions. They do know what the people are going to ask. To your other point, remember Savannah Guthrie interviewing Trump during 2020? And it was fact check, fact check, fact check.

And did show a way to interview him on the air. Yeah. I've seen no reason Caitlin Collins couldn't do the same thing. I'm a little iffy on if regular people are asking Donald Trump questions. Is the moderator still going to be able to jump in and be like, by the way, the answer he gave you Joe from Dixville Notch is not actually true. Is that going to be able to happen in the same way if it's not just a straight up Q&A?

Yeah. But Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. He is the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president. So at some point, you're probably going to interview him on the air. Yeah. And I think your question is the right one. What are the what's how do we do it? Talked before.

Do you do it on tape and then edit it up? Do you have MTV VH1 pop up video coming up to correct what he's saying? Do you have an anchor doing it in real time? We'll see Wednesday night. Wouldn't you just love to see him? We talked before we were coming on the air about the sort of, you know, all these, the dudes you'll see on like social media or just like middle, older, middle aged white dudes with with cow. boy hats are driving trucks and, you know, the gag is that it turns out they're like liberal at the end. And they really, and you're just like, yeah, he really made that point for all the

people out there. Wouldn't you love just a room full of those guys? That's the entire town hall. And Trump's just like, yeah, I want you ask me a question. He just gets, you know, just unravels more and more just trying to just shout back at these dudes who he kind of is dimly aware or his, or his target audience. Yeah, it starts out. Trump thinks they're the grown man, the big tough guys who are always crying when they meet Trump. It turns out they're yelling at Trump by the end of the question. I would enjoy that. This interview is interesting because it's a sub-tweet in two different ways,

according to all the reporting. One is it's a sub-tweet to Fox News. Oh, for sure. Probably enjoyed a highly rated hour of Donald Trump town hall. It's also a sub-tweet to Ron DeSantis, who is not talking to CNN style. outlets. Some other candidates are too afraid to take this step in their quest to defeat Joe Biden and are afraid to do anything other than Fox News, a Trump advisor tells Charlotte Klein of Vanity Fair.

So that's interesting. The New York Times Trump scoop duo of Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report that Donald Trump might skip one of the first two or maybe even both of the first two GOP primary debates, David. Yeah. This is not something way down the road either. Debate number one's going to be in August. Mr. Trump has made it clear that he does not want to breathe life into his Republican challengers by sharing the stage with them.

I'm up by too many points. One associate who spoke with Mr. Trump recalls him saying, that's from Haberman and Swan's article. What do we think about Trump refusing to debate people who are lower than him in the polls? I hate that so much of my Trump reaction this episode is just a shoulder shrug, but, like, no, there was no way he was going to do it. He didn't want to do it last time. He never wanted to do a debate.

And I don't need to psychoanalyze particularly to say that, why would he? Now, now he's got an excuse. You know, now, I mean, now it's not, he can just, the media is out to get me. The Republican establishment is out to get me, whatever. He doesn't, the government is out to get me. why should he do it? I mean, that's good. That's his thought process, obviously, but like, and he shouldn't, I mean, and the breathing

life and other opponents, I mean, that's sort of the whole premise of a primary, right? I mean, like, people get it, you appear together on the debate stage so that people get airtime, you know, less, you know, less well-known candidates get that opportunity. But then they've already started doing the cutoffs or percentages and stuff like that in previous campaigns, which we all sort of applauded. So what do you, I mean, what are you going to do? Meet him halfway and be like, okay, we'll give you twice as much question, I mean, answer time. And you're going to be on a really tall podium compared to everybody else.

Can I take that take and rotate it 45 degrees? Because you are right. But isn't what's inevitable is that Donald Trump will tease skipping one of the debates? And that Donald Trump might also, when we get to debate time, think, hmm, attention for me. We all said stuff like that we all said stuff like, whatever. I just said when I'm about to say four years, sorry, eight years ago, uh, well, you know, when we're, when he was doing it the first time that it was, it was a sort of faux campaign or whatever else. I mean, I think that there's, we're in a slightly different state of affairs now in

which on the one hand, it seemed, it's kind of more of a faux campaign in some ways. And still, there's obviously a track record in which is, which makes it much more reality. Um, but I'm just not sure. I'm just not sure what's in it for him. I think that winning and losing, there's some value there, although he probably, it's easier said than done. It's either said than processed. But I think you might be right. I think I guess the question for me is to what degree he's really trying to be present again. I don't know. That's a, that's a fascinating question. Whatever. I mean, I think that For whatever degree he'll end up being right. Being pretty successful.

Yeah. At doing it, he's up by a ton as he's pointing out. But I think even, even, I mean, listen, he's never made a decision like that based, you know, in this sort of frame of frame of mind before. But honestly, I think he only stands to lose, right? I mean, I don't, I don't think that he will gain anything from doing the debates. If you had like a real political consultant, then. they might advise him to do to skip the debates too. I mean, I don't know.

You mean like Pat Summerall's daughter? Yes, exactly like Pat Summerall's daughter. The hidden hand of the Trump campaign. Let's talk about Tucker Carlson before we get out of here. Since we last spoke, we heard about the racist Tucker Carlson text message unearthed by the New York Times. One had a line about it's not how white men fight. There has also been this been reporting on

how many of these damning things are coming to light. Rolling Stone had a story about a secret opophile inside Fox that could be deployed against Carlson. And then from Axios, we learned that Carlson may have his own opophile. I want you to appreciate the way this quote is worded. The ousted host, quote, knows where a lot of bodies are buried and is ready to start drawing a map

said a Carlson source who wasn't authorized to speak publicly. Now, was that a cable news source or somebody on HBO's adaptation of Perry Mason, David? You know where the bodies are buried and I'm ready to start drawing a map. Carlson's contract runs to January 2025, according to Axios.

So what he's trying to do is get out of the contract so he can be some part of this presidential election, either on another network, on a podcast, on a video thing, whatever it is. And Fox, of course, would say, well, we don't want him competing with us and we're willing to pay him out and just keep him off the air for a couple of years. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of bizarre, if when you look at it, that this is such a showdown

that seems to be so weighted, right, that like the information, the bodies, the info on the buried bodies on both sides seem, I mean, really feel like they're incredibly significant right now, right? I mean, and everybody would love for this to be an open source showdown, right? Everybody wants to know where all these bodies are buried. This is the Fox News trial we didn't get. Like now, oh, it's going to come out now in this war between Tucker and Fox since it didn't come out in open court.

But so much of it now is just, it is, it's just posturing on both sides, you know. And obviously it's not empty. D. You know, things are being released. Fox is out there threatening to sue Dominion again because things are leaking out from that trial. And now Tucker's, you know, making, you know, are already sort of acting like he is a free agent on the way to his next media empire, whatever else. There's rumors out there that he and Elon Musk have already chatted about what the future might hold. I don't remember if I said this, but someone was theorizing on Twitter last week

because we were having the Tucker conversation that someone's already fantasy booking Elon Musk buying CNN and putting Tucker on the air and now with CNN and Twitter combined, then you can really turn a profit. I mean, who knows? But.

Keep us in business for another few years. We'd be fine. We'd be the real winners in that story. But it's all posturing. I mean, everything that comes out is going to be measured is going to be so deliberate. And we're not going to find anybody. They're going to give us a toenail or two.

And then, you know, let people freak out about DNA evidence for the next five years. Washington Post reports that Tucker Carlson also wants to hold some kind of candidate forum, his own Republican debate during the primaries, which would also be a sub-tweet- Fox News. Lots of Fox News sub-tweeting going on. There's nothing better this time of year. I mean, the one great thing about the diffusion of media is people trying to, people trying to prove their power by putting stamps on candidates.

Just we, we were so close to I don't care what the local newspaper says about, you know, who they tell me to vote for anymore. And now we're just back on different. Now we're getting, now we have the every podcast and vlog as a freaking primary that people have to pay it attention to. It's time for a feature where one podcaster always has its say. It's time for David Shoemaker guesses, the strained pun headline. Yeah. Last Monday's headline, what David sounds enthusiastic today, about the fall of a retail

giant was Bed Bath and the Great Beyond. Today's headline comes from me. I was doing a tour of the book catalogs. summer book catalogs as one does. And I came upon a book, David, that is a history of a small object. You know that genre well. I'll tell you the history of this smallish thing, perhaps even a kind of fish, and then explain why it contains multitudes.

Big fan of those books, yeah. This book is by Keith Houston. The subtitle is The Rise and Rain of the Pocket Calculator. the rise and reign of the pocket calculator I want you to think of early Stephen Spielberg as you ponder what was W.W. Norton's strained upon book title.

I mean, close encounters of the nerd kind or something? Is that where we're going with it? That's pretty good, but it's not it. A little more obscure. Different movie? Yeah. I think very young Christian Bale, John Malcovich. I don't know this movie.

Very young Christian. Empire of the Sun. Oh. Empire of the Sun? Empire of the Sum? Empire of the Sum. It's correct. Empire of the Some.

He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Isaiah Blakely sitting in for Erica. Thank you, Isaiah. I'm back later this week with Pressbox final edition. And then on Monday, Shoemaker and I will return with a little succession talk. That should be fun. Plus more lukewarm takes about the media.

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