The Press Box - The American Canto Book Club, ESPN and Lane Kiffin, and Covering the NFL During the Holidays

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

Hello, media consumers! Bryan and Joel start the show with their thoughts on Olivia Nuzzi’s newly released book, 'American Canto,' including what they did and did not like about it. Bryan gives a short summary of the book before asking Joel questions not only about 'American Canto', but about what the future holds for Nuzzi now that the book is out. Next, Bryan and Joel dive into the Lane Kiffin—Ole Miss situation(53:45), and whether Jimmy Sexton and CAA had involvement in a certain 'College GameDay' segment this week (1:02:40). Lastly, the show rounds out with the guys’ thoughts on Paul Finebaum deciding to not run for U.S. Senate, and their takeaways from Erin Andrews’s message to sports media hopefuls (01:08:19). All that and so much more, here on the Press Box. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and Joel Anderson Producer: Bruce Baldwin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Press Box. It's Brian Curtis. It's Joel Anderson. It's producer Bruce Baldwin. Coming up on the podcast, Joel and I convene the Olivia Nootze Book Club, plus how ESPN covered the biggest coaching change of the year. And should we be outraged at Aaron Andrews for talking about how sports media types work holidays?

But first, Joel, I hold in my hands a hard-backed. copy of American Conto. Oh, yeah, you have to take a deep breath with that. You said it like some people used to say nine and a half weeks in the late 80s or early 90s. I feel inspired by both fragrance ads of the same period and the 90s, WWE Superstar Gold Dust. Yes. I'm aware, yeah, man, I wish I actually had a hard copy. I had to, I got the Kindle version and I got the Audible version.

Oh, which she narrates. Which she narrates, which I was very surprised about at the beginning. And is, I would encourage you if you're a person that wants to read this book and you're interested in it, I do think you need to probably check out the audio book version if you can. She writes about her voice in the book. Like Donald Trump comments that she has a very soft voice. Yes, yes. You think she's putting on airs or like trying to do some sort of, you know, damsel and distress sort of thing. But no, this is literally how Olivia Nussi sounds. If you live on a different media planet than our own, you might not know that American Kanto is the no subtitle-ne-necessary book by embattled political reporter of Olivia Nucy.

Beliegered? Beliegered. Beliegered, embattled, former, in the case of New York magazine. Book came out Tuesday. We spent the last two days reading or listening to it. What did you think? So I do think it's more interesting than maybe some people are giving it credit for. I saw on Amazon, Brian, that it has a 1.8 rating out of five.

I can never remember seeing a score that low. Have you, I mean, because usually most people don't care enough to review a book, either they really, really like it or they really, really hate it, but it doesn't usually work out with it. There's just so many people that hate it that it ends up at 1.8. But yeah, so, but I would encourage people to push through, push through the first half to two-thirds of the book, because it does pick up, and there are, like, more useful scenes of the occasional insight, if you're willing to wait on them. Like, if you're, there's a sprinkling about her life and backstory, but, and I don't know if

you ran into this problem, Brian. There are very few proper nouns. So names, people, places aren't necessarily clear to me or I assume most other readers. And it starts off sort of like a behind the scenes look at covering Trump. Like maybe the first draft of a Maggie Haberman feature. But it's not that information field, but there's lots of portraits, lots of psychoanalysis. But no real sense that there's any stakes in this book for anyone other than her. And so, yeah, so you get a sense of what it's like to be Olivia Nutsi in these rooms. And so if you would like to know what it's like to have Donald Trump or Rudy Giuliani talking at you, then I think this is the book for you. I feel like the late great Roger Ebert when he had a movie that was flawed, that even was bad.

but as you say had a lot of really interesting stuff in it and he was perched on the razor's edge between a three out of four star review or a two and a half out of four star review I'm going to wind up in the latter camp as we will see

but that's what I felt like I mean I was reading this a lot of this book is incredibly hard to read just a slog to get through right but wait stop there Why? Is it just because of the, it's the prose itself, right? Like, it's just this lyrical style that is very sort of inaccessible, correct? No, I actually don't think that's the case at all. I think this book is an absolute failure of editing and structure.

Okay. Like a monstrous failure of editing and structure. Yeah, fair point, yeah. Let's just get into a little summary for people who may have heard about this story, may have heard us talk about this story, but we'll never actually. read the book. The book tries to do, I would say, four things at the same time. Okay. One, Nutsi writes about her relationship, and never has that word been more freighted, with RFK Jr. Right. Who was running for president and then was a Trump surrogate and is now, of course, Secretary of Health and Human Services. The politician. The politician, because we don't do

proper nouns in this point. Right, that's right, yeah. That's number one. Number two is she tries to write about the entire Trump era of American life. Yes. Number three, as you mentioned, she writes a lot about her own life, especially about her parents and both of their deaths. That occurs all throughout the book. And then fourth,

she writes about what she calls My Exile in Malibu, post scandal, which that includes some of the trippiest and dreamiest parts of the book. Well, mushrooms come up a few times in this book. Right? And I mean, you know, so yeah, it is, I mean, I don't, do you think that she was trying to write a movie script?

No. You don't think so? No. I just, I felt like it was in the style. It reminded me, well, I wouldn't, I'm not trying to, Memento would not be the book I'm thinking of. I'm trying to think it's like a David Lynch, because she does bring up David Lynch in here. And it reminds me of like a really poor attempt to reconsider. the David Lynch movie.

Okay, I could buy it in the David Lynch narrative. Like a mohalla, not even Mohawk drive. In those terms, sure. Yeah. Now, you mentioned there are no proper nouns in the book. Like Donald Trump is referred to as Donald Trump. He is. But senators' names, her former fiance's name, all these people.

The man who I did not marry. The man whom I did not marry. Yes. Another odd thing is this book does not have any chapters. Right. It instead has sections, like the many sections of a magazine article. And some of Nutsi's sections are a sentence or two. Some go on for pages and pages.

But there's no part of this book where you can just take a breath and put your pivot foot in the ground and say, okay, now we are going to read about Trump's assassination attempt. Now we're going to read about how Nutsi meets RFK. No, no, no. It just pushes forward. And to top it all off, these little mini-sections, they are not in chronological order of events. Not at all. Yeah, it's just a lot of events just scattered around.

Like, you just really get, it's really difficult to figure out, like, is she still with Lizzie here? What year is this? Is this 2015? Is this 2023? You know, like, you just have to, I mean, it forces you to pay attention to it, right? Like, it forces you to be an active listener. at least in my instance. But yeah, like there's no,

there's no structure to this thing. There's no, I would, did she have something outlined with this? I don't know. I doubt it, but I, I feel like it. Yeah, absolutely. That's why I call this book a failure of editing. I mean, I cannot believe someone at Avid Reader Press

got this draft and said, this is the way we want to tell this story. Nutsi talks in this book about her friends like, Maureen Daud or Sally Quinn, if she sent them parts of American Canto. And maybe she didn't because they were too sensitive to put an email. Who knows? But if she sent them parts of this book, I cannot believe they wrote back and say, you've done it.

You've cracked the code. Because she's told this story in such a way that you never actually process any of the events. Right. Mention the first hundred pages of store or a slog because you're like, she hasn't met RFK. when does she meet RFK, okay, he doesn't show up.

Yeah, right. If you're hoping that this is going to like illuminate early on about RFK, you're going to be solely mistaken. You're going to have to hang in there a little bit longer because he doesn't turn up until much later in the story.

Well, there are glimpses of them, but it's just all splatterpaint. And you're like, okay, we're in Malibu, we're in Washington, we're here, we're there, we're in the past, we're in the future. And she said in her bulwark podcast with Tim Miller,

that she wrote it in this particular way. One, there's kind of a circular structure, which I will leave literary critics that are smarter than I am to ponder. But also that this is in a certain way where it's like small chapters, time rocketing around all over the place. That's kind of the way we consumed

the Trump administration and the Trump years of American life. I get that. That makes sense to me, but man, this is a hard book to read. It really is. You know what, okay, actually, I was talking about this with somebody. Do you know what it reminds me of or what I thought it is? It is a series of diary entries, right? Like, there's just no, there's no structure, there's no overarching narrative or theme that are through line here. It's just a person who is going through a really intense time in their life. And there, it's kind of like a stream of consciousness, right? And, and that's why the diary of it is what makes me, because, Because there'll be a lot of musing on,

oh, I saw a sparrow on the fence outside. And often the sparrow comes back and returns to you at night. But then you don't want to know where it is. That's how, I mean, that's how she's actually, like, narrating the book a lot. So, yeah. She said in interviews that she writes on her phone. She types into her phone, which is, to me, as a writer, just mind-blowing. Can you imagine writing a story on your phone?

Have you done that? Dude, my wife does that. I don't know how she does it. I don't know how she does it. She does that at necessity. A lot of times because her hands are babies around and stuff. Understandable. So she learned how to do it.

But, yeah, I don't know how to do that. Like for something as involved as a book, I don't know how you can do it. Yeah, a book. Yeah, I don't know. I need a whole page. I need shit around me. Yeah, I don't know how she was able to put together a book in this way. I mentioned the Tim Miller interview on the Bullwork podcast, which is really good.

You should check that out. I was interested in this passage because Nutsi was explaining what she wanted to do with this book. With the rapturous events of last year and with the big crash out, there was an enormous opportunity before me that I shouldn't waste. And that opportunity was about figuring out what I had done wrong and how it had come to be that I had made. made this mistake and assessing what had gone wrong and taking it seriously. And if I did that right, and if I, like, made it through this dishonor in an honorable way, if I didn't try to use anyone as a human shield, you know, if I didn't try to say, oh, you know, it wasn't so bad or it wasn't a big deal, or then hopefully I'd be able to proceed

better than I was living before and that I had led me to failure. Right. You think she was successful on those grounds, then no human shields method of memoir writing? No, not at all. I mean, I thought that the very early comparison to John Bonnet Ramsey, or the mention of John Bonnet Ramsey,

the deployment of it about how people, you know, this small, beautiful child and how she died and people keep bringing it up again, and it's another form of death, essentially, like it's sort of a laborer analysis. I did not get that, that she was really being thoughtful about where she'd gone wrong and what she could do to prevent herself from going through this again. I thought this was all about exposition, right?

Brian, you don't have to answer this question, but I'm going to put it out there. Uh-oh. Have you ever been in love in a way in that you are jeopardy, like you are really, you have put yourself at risk in ways? Like you've done things that are not the way that you are, you know, he would be in a normal state of mind, going places, doing things, putting your career, friendships at risk because you're so wrapped up in one person. Have that ever happened to you?

I'm going through the members of the Trump cabinet. Hold on just one second. Okay, so it wasn't Sarah Huckabee. Okay. Only on a low level, you know, only on a, you know, hey man, you're not keeping up your work. you're sitting there thinking about somebody in your office, you know, back when I was a young writer, that kind of stuff. But never in like a large scale, noot-y-level, self-destructive way, no. Right.

And so I think that, like, that is what is going on here. She was so wrapped up. And I don't even know if it was him, but the idea of being in a relationship with this guy and this mania that she really couldn't see past anything else. And so I felt like if you had to write that, like let's just say that you had to save your career and write about this part of your life and you didn't even have any distance from it. You're still living through it, right?

Like, she's still living through this. This is very fresh. I think it would probably end up like this. It would end up looking like this. And we can talk about the other part of this later about how this happened and like, why nobody? Because you say, why didn't Sally Quinn, a Marine dialed step in?

But I think that is one of the big problems with the Olivia Nutsi career story right here. That, like, nobody ever stepped in to mentor, help. This is not how you do this. You should not be doing it. You should not be conducting yourself in this way. Because nobody has ever provided any pushback. There was another interesting thing in the book where she says, despite the fact that she came up from a very young age, as you say, at New York Magazine. in the age of the self-confessional essay.

Yeah. Which New York Magazine, as we know, has and continues to make an absolute franchise out of. Absolutely. Despite the fact that she was working there at that time, Olivia Nutsi is not someone who really has written about herself all that much. Mm-hmm. That's right. And that feels weird to say because her style is so distinctive.

an Olivia Nutsi profile is an Olivia Nutsi profile. It doesn't sound like anybody else. And her writing is very personal when she writes about politicians. Mostly, I think, in a very good and affecting way. But she has not done a lot of like, hey, I'm writing about myself. And I think that also just puts her in a very uncomfortable position. So to add to what you're saying about it, here's somebody who's already kind of in this kind of strange state where she's trying to look at this fresh thing,

has never really had the appropriate distance or mentoring to kind of deal with it. Add that to the fact that she's just never done this type of writing before. Right. And as she, again, she admits this in the book, she's just a little bit at sea here. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that's understandable, right? Like, that is the sort of thing that could happen. But I think that is, it's okay. So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm not going to build up to this anymore. She should have never, she should have never gotten this far. This is the Elizabeth Holmes story, okay?

By which I mean, like, this is an autopsy on why, like, why did everyone platform somebody who, and support somebody and defend somebody who is not up to the task at this point in their career, right? Like from the book thing to the profile she was having to do to managing those sorts of professional relationships, I think that more than anything is the problem here. And in the same way that Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes highlighted the weaknesses and venture capital.

And it's just like, oh, a lot of this is a farce. Like people, but they welcome her in any way and a lot of people took care of. I think that this is sort of in a similar way, it reminds me and highlights some of the weaknesses and issues with a certain type of political journalism, right? Now, just so I understand what you're saying there, you now look back at all the profile. she wrote, not just the profile she wrote while she was in this relationship with RFK Jr. But all the stuff before that and say, this was built on a house of cards, these were not actually good, these are things that should not have been written by this person for this venue. I didn't think that they were bad, but I thought that her talent and

skill at this stuff was vastly overstated. And I think that, well, I mean, I think there's a couple reasons. And one of the obvious ones and the reason I make the comparison to Elizabeth Holmes is that they're blonde, conventionally attractive, thin women, the people that are in charge of these assignments and give them out and a lot of the people I might add. And I've just, I've been saying this for years online, but I just, you know, I was afraid to say it out loud because I don't want people accuse me to being a sexist. And if you accuse me to being a sexist for this, that will be a charge I just have to take. But I think that that played no small role in this. And I mean, Look, Olivia Nutsi, in her book and herself, she spends a lot of time talking about her looks

and how beautiful she is or how beautiful other people thinks that she is. But like, she's aware that this is a part of the package that comes with her. But I think the thing that with Olivia Nutsi is that the writing and the profiles, they get to convince you, if you spend enough time in the room with Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani and R.FK. Jr. and Michael Cohen or who, whoever else, you don't necessarily get any more insight into politics or have an ethic that you want to write about. But you do have some expertise on the people within that room, right? And it's really easy to do portraits that don't, that tell you a story about those people,

but not how they impact the world or what is going on in the world. And so they have like this familiarity with each other that becomes a kind of expertise, right? But I don't think that that makes the writing good or the writing important. It's a kind of writing, and there is some value to it, but I just think that, like, the idea that she got elevated way to this level, I'm like, how did that happen? Because I'm just, you never get, again, like I said, in this book, you never get a sense that there's any stakes of anything going on other than what is going on in her life. And occasionally it RFK's life. I think that's a really, really good description of the way she wrote political profiles. Yeah. I don't think she, and I don't think she had any interest in being the

person that was adding the to be sure paragraph, this is terrible for America. Yeah. Like she just, she did not. She tried to kind of pull this off on the Miller podcast, which she was like, well, you know, if you look at my choice of adjectives and look at the choice of stories and the way I dull things out, but that's just not Olivia Nutsi. And that was a big criticism of her long before RFK was part of the picture. Right.

That she had this talent of getting in the room with Donald Trump, of facing up to the monsters is to borrow another phrase from her and delivering you a portrait of the monster of getting this portrait that other people couldn't get I would say because they would get hung up on what you're talking about. They would say like, this sucks, this is a bad person who is screwing over America,

who's hurting the country, who's hurting the very definition and history of our country by their very presence in office, how can I get past that? And her talent, if this is in fact a talent, you're saying for you, this was not a valid talent, at least on the scale, was that she would just push right past that and be like, okay,

but let me show you the picture of this guy. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Again, I got into journalism, and I'm not saying that it was because, you know, necessarily some, this isn't making me like morally superior or anything. I got into journalism in part because, first of all, I like sports, right? There was another part.

But then as I got later in there, I was like, man, I'm really interested in how the world ends up in the way that it does. like why a person ends up here, why one person that lives on this side of town ends up with all the resources and a nice six-bedroom house, and while on this side of town, this person is living in a shotgun house, right?

Like, that is what motivates me and what I'm constantly interested in. Like, that is just the way I think of the world, right? I think that she just likes being in those rooms. And she said this multiple times, and she said it when she talked with you last, year, Brian, this is before all this stuff happens. She likes characters.

She likes writing about characters. Characters are really important. She finds these people absolutely fascinating. Yes. Yeah. Fascinating objects of study beyond whatever their politics are. So I'm not surprised that all this feels shallow. Because there's no ethic behind. There's nothing motivating it other than like, I like being in these rooms with these

people. And we're all in there together. We hire each other. We promote each other. We fuck each other. We defend each other. We normalize each other, right? And we excuse each other.

So I feel like that's what the complaints about the book, like you just don't, there's no there that you don't get any deep here because she's not even coming at it that way. It's not even important to her. Isn't it funny that she was so successful in the Trump administration? Because let's say Hillary Clinton gets elected in 2015. Oh, yeah. There would have been a line of magazine writers. who were trying to apply the Nutsi treatment to the members of the new Democratic administration.

Just as there was a line ready to do that for the Obama administration. I'm not saying, I'm not killing all the political press here, but there's a kind of magazine writer who'd be like, I'm interested in this liberal, democratic character just as a character. This is a fascinating character study to me. But as we know, when Donald Trump got elected,

a lot of people went, or they couldn't bring themselves to do it. Or like you say, they just had a different idea of what journalism should be about, what political journalism is for. Right. So this enables her to be the person like, uh-uh, I'm going to go do this.

And I don't work for Bright Bart. I don't work for, you know, a right-wing podcast. I work for New York Magazine. Right. So I'm going to go do this, right?

Now, New York Magazine had, you know, Jonathan Chade in the boxing ring with the gloves on, slugging it out over this policy or that policy. Nutsi was on a different level. She was doing a different thing. But I just,

I think the structure of the last 10, years of American political life made her rise possible. I do think that there are a lot of people in journalism that enjoy the Trump thing. Like, right? Because, you know, I just to be frank, a lot of people are not at risk, right? Like, there's a lot of people that are not going to lose anything by Trump being president, right? Like, they're not going to have a family member sent to Eswetini. They're not going to, you know, lose a job in federal government. you know, or, you know, maybe they think that their kid won't die of the whooping cough, okay, right?

Which is another thing about the Kennedy thing, the RFK thing that, like, she never, she talks, she wants to help him, she's in love with him. We just never deal with any of that stuff, man, like any of the vaccination stuff or like the, like the kind of person he is in the kind of the work that he's actually, she believes in him as a candidate and as a person and that he can like, she, she criticizes the Democrats for not welcoming him in, right? Because there's a point, there's a tension in the book, a moment when RFK is, he could go either way. If I go with the Democrats don't even want to deal with him. They don't have a space for him. They don't want to talk to him. They don't care about his followers.

He knows that if he goes with the Republicans and Trump, that they'll deal with him. They'll work with him. Right. But they don't shouldn't even talk about like, does that affect how you feel about him? Like, what does he actually believe? Like, what do you, like, what do you admire in him? what makes you think that he is a good politician for the rest of America? Because she doesn't care. Like, he's a good character, and she fills a certain way around him. And I think that there are a lot of journalists that exist in this world that like the fact that Trump says crazy things, and he mixes shit up, and he's always in the news cycle.

And they kind of get off on that shit, man. Yeah. He's given the material. Olivia News has a lot of friends and defenders and media. And, like, I don't want to come up like I hate her or anything. I don't have an opinion on her. I don't know. I've never met the woman.

But I just think that like this is not, this is not a marginal slice of political journalism in our country. Okay. Fair enough. I will add to your point about RFK that I'm not sure after reading this book, what she saw in him at all. I mean, I really don't.

And partly again, it's the structural parts we talk about because you're waiting and waiting and waiting. And even when RFK shows up, which I pegged at about page 117 shows up in earnest. Not until you get to page 152 of a 300-page book that you find out about the beginning of their relationship. Yeah. And I'm just like, wait a second.

You're the person who was going into these rooms and writing about these people. Right. Who was seeing these people clearly, at least in a magazine sense. And then you're consumed with this guy? I mean, man, you know what it is? So I, and I can't. can't remember it right now, but I'm not making this up.

RFK Jr. has previously slept with a reporter who had to give up their job. But it was many years ago, like when he was in college. I can't remember the name right now, but I remember thinking, I was like, damn, man, RFK, bro, you go to interview him. You never know. You know what might happen. But they both, and I'm going to give Van some credit on this, too. Van Lathen said this.

They've got a lot of game, man. And I think that the two of them, they game-recognized game when they saw each other. You know what I mean? Like they both have a way about themselves. And when they get into a room, they can command a room and people get interested in them. And from the voice to their appearance, both of them have, it's not a surprise that when her brother asked her, the guy with a weird voice and she goes, I love his voice. Right. Because they both kind of have a voice thing going on here.

And they're just like when they get into a room in and they know how. to charm people for whatever reason. And I think they were even, they kind of were drawn to each other that way. She doesn't say it like that, but I wonder if that's a part of it because they both have been able to gain people in that way. I find that totally believable. And that it's just, it's just a thing, right? Oh, my God, it's the presidential candidate. It's like, it's a Kennedy, you know, here we go. Yeah. And just as I was unsure about why she got consumed with them, I was also unsure about why the relationship ended. Other than its revelation. was a danger to RFK.

Right. So by this point, he- Well, yeah, but maybe there's that too. But it's just like, you're like,

okay, well, you know, it comes out, like they're worried it's going to come out. An RFK has this political capital

that he has amassed by endorsing Donald Trump, by going against every single member of his family, endorsing Trump, hoping that that will land him a big job or at least some kind of influence in the administration.

It turns out it lands him the biggest job he'd possibly could have gotten, which is JJHS secretary. He's worried about that, but then it feels like in the book that he just never speak again. There's a message to an intermediary that is called the bodyguard, that I guess is RFK's bodyguard, but I'm like, that's it? We're absolutely consumed with each other, and then we're just never going to, that's it, we're all done here because this could come out?

Well, Brian, does she, I mean, she, he asked her to, quote, take a bullet for her. Like, right, like, I mean, she wanted it, he wanted her to be the, to come off, I guess, as the pursuer, right, in this relationship. And to not make time honors, by the way, tradition. Oh, I was being stalked. Yeah, this young lady was here. I mean, which makes, it just kind of makes you to, and, you know, Olivia doesn't quite get into this in the book,

but, like, question the extent of their relationship. I'll just leave it at that, right? Like, what actually went on there, right? But, yeah, it seems like he tried to throw her under the bus. he was like, I'm, you know, I'm politically useful. I don't want to disrupt the Trump campaign. And I absolutely have an opportunity to do something. Once we get past Election Day, and she says this in the book,

once they get past Election Day, we're all gravy, right? And then it happens. But I guess at that point, she felt betrayed by him, even though she still loves it. Yeah, right. As you would. Right, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And I don't even know if it's I want to mess up the Trump campaign is I just want to mess up my mojo right now. Yeah. I got all this. She does talk about how he was suddenly on stage, you know, at these mega rallies. And oh my gosh, all the people are cheering it. They like me.

He loves it. Yeah, he's captivated by it. Yeah, that shit jazzed them up, man. They really like me. Here we go. Yeah, yeah. Can I make the case for what I liked about American Conto? I love that you say it like that.

But yeah, please, because I saw this in the notes and I'm curious to know what you loved about it. So I slog to the first 100 pages. I'm like, holy mackerel, how am I going to finish this book? And then I feel that the middle third of this book, roughly page 100 to 200, it was pretty good in parts. Like the parts of her, we finally hear about the relationship. Yeah. And then I think maybe even more compellingly, we hear about the revelation of the relationship.

Yeah. She's getting called into the office by her editor at New York Magazine. magazine, her being confronted by these reporters who know or think they know that there's a relationship between her and RFK. And there's an amazing scene in the book where she's using all her knowledge of the media business to try to beat back these scoops. Now, morally speaking, we can have that conversation too. But she's like, oh, there are two people on earth, I think, she thinks at this point, who know

about this relationship. It's her and it's RFK Jr. So she's like, if I just don't say anything on the record, if I don't confirm this, then a person at a respectable publication can't write the story because I understand what their constraints are. She has a tremendous grasp of the interplay there. Like I thought, I was like, oh, she's going to make a great Republican political operative when the time comes for it. Because I was really struck by that because I was like, she knew that right in the moment. It occurred to her immediately that she could trip up a reporter that way trying to get her on the comment. Or she said, you know, I refute.

There was another moment later after the revelation of the relationship comes up. And the reporter asked her, do you mind if I read these accusations to you? And she says, I know that if she did that, then they could say that, okay, you know, she had an opportunity to respond and did not. And she says, nope, not going to do it. Hand up. And I was like, man, that's really smart. That was really insightful. She knew she was on her shit.

No wonder RFK was asking her for advice about it. And the thing is, the advice she gave RFK and all this stuff, like, it's not journalistically, ethically sound, right? But on the whole, I was like, man, she's pretty smart about this stuff. She seems to know how to work these rooms and know the right way to frame these things. There's a huge understanding of American politics. Absolutely. And again, if you, if I totally accept what you say where it's a kind of, you know, I'm going to look the other way at the actual consequences of these policies and the people that are affected, but just understanding the mechanisms of American politics and how this stuff works, she understands it. She absolutely understands it. I find that, yeah, and I mean, the reason that I say that too is because like even when she's talking about horrific tragedies, we're talking about the fires that burn along the coast in California, it's really about how it's,

affects her. She was outside the courtroom when that guy emulated himself. She says, right, that she's... She's totally forgotten about until I read about in the book. She talks about how she can taste, taste, taste good stench of that in her mouth. Yeah. Right. And it's just like... Everybody just kind of moves on, right? Because we're all interested in the criminal trial of the former president of the United States. The theater and not like the tragedy. And so like I think that that is fundamentally what animates her and gets her jazzed. And, you know, I, obviously, they're editors who would love to set her loose on those kind of stories because she can bring back that kind of entertaining story, but I just, yeah. And I think the kind of sights and sounds

and things like that where, you know, you're writing about the trial, but really you're writing about it as a spectacle and as a series of small moments. Like, I mean, not a small moment when somebody sets themselves on fire, but small in the grand scheme of things, at least what everybody else. She's really good at that, right? She has those kind of senses. I also think what she can do is she can use language often to take you to a different place when she's describing things. Read you a few chapters here. She's writing about the reality of Trump.

This is one of her big themes in the book, the distortion of reality, both for the country and for her in particular over this last year and change. Here's what she writes about Trump. She said, always found the sight of him in the White House disorienting. He was a flash of technicolor, deeply saturated, as though he had stepped out of a third. television. And in certain context, his presence suggested a kind of glitch. In Midtown, he made perfect sense. In Vegas, even more so. In the snow banks of New Hampshire, somewhat. In the cornfields of Iowa, less. In the White House, none at all. But in such a way that sense inverted, his realness was not a question, but the set of the White House seemed in doubt. I'm like,

whoa. I love it. I mean, there we go, right? That's the, that's the Olivia Nutsi, you know, go just just like literary of fireworks right yeah yeah go ahead no no please no go ahead this is another one about fighters right donald trump we know donald trump loves fighters people but by fighters of course he means people that will like you know defend his cause even after january 6th or some you know completely indefensible act by the administration so she's writing about that she says he always valued the people he called fighters those who volunteered themselves to defend his honor, to spin on his behalf with special force, even at the expense, always at the expense, of their credibility, as they landed ideas such as alternative facts that compelled observers

to mock or condemn them, but compelled him, the supreme observer, the single member of the audience of one at whom their performances were directed to a kind of low-grade admiration, which was as good as it would get in all likelihood. But, yeah, man. Again, are those, like, wildly original thoughts about Donald Trump here in 2025 after we've been living with this guy as a political figure for 10 years? No, that's good writing. It's really good writing.

And then my eyes perked up when I saw passages like that. So, and I also thought about it as you're saying that, like, the familiarity that she has with Trump, like, they kind of settle into, you know, it's not even a relationship at arms distance, but I think kind of like with RFK, they can see each other in each other, by which I mean, people with no politics, just dealmaking and fame. She talks about in the book that, you know, that he wanted a vehicle to stay famous. Like, this is a lot of this was about, like, it was just about him, you know, TV, the TV shows off. How is he going to stay in the spotlight? Like, he's not used to not being in the spotlight anymore. Well, here's a way to do it. And it doesn't matter

He can categorize himself as a Democrat one year, a Republican the next, or a Democrat the next, or a Republican the next, which is the RFK story as well, right? The RFK Jr. story as well. And I think that, like, they all see, it's not, it's not a surprise that she was able to worm her way into that end circle and be able to observe them and make these sort of insights because I think she's very similar to them. Like, they all make a lot of sense together when you think about them in that way. 100%.

100%. That is definitely part of the magic. We should talk a little more about these passages that are a tad dreamy from this book. Should we? Well, I just want to get out there on the official record. Go for it. I don't want to look away from anything, Joel. Most of these passages occur when she's writing about her exile in California.

It's very hard to describe how many of them there are without reading the book. Just going through my notes here, she wrote about Leonard Cohen. Yeah. She wrote about Britney Spears. Yeah. She wrote about Aristotle and Eels. Oh, yeah. What did she?

Actually, I took note. She said something that, like, I thought of, I was thinking about Aristotle. That's how the passages started. But not about that Aristotle. I was thinking about Aristotle and Eels. Yeah, right. There's another one about swimming with manorays. Yeah.

There's another passage about Adam and Eve. Yeah. And, you know, some of these, I would say, well, maybe a couple of these actually land where you kind of start reading this passage. You're like, where in the hell is this going? And then it eventually gets home. But so many of them are, you're just like, a good editor would just be like, absolutely not. This is distracting from what it is you're trying to say. This is, this is, you know, dreaminess that is just, you know, adding absolutely nothing to the context or to the narrative, more importantly, of this book.

Right. Well, Brian, she says that this in the book, which I find to be shocking, given the profession we work in. I never feared bosses. If anything, bosses feared me. Oh, yeah. I love it. By the way, I love that passage, too, because that rang true. Yeah, I mean, it's true. Like, she's right. She, I mean, she does know why she's in there and how she's been able to succeed in it. She said, I was an improbable success. I would say, I don't know what was that improbable, but I get what she means by that. Yeah.

Like, there are big passages here where she's just driving around the country. Like, her filing schedule was very interesting, especially when you go back and look how many pieces she actually wrote. Absolutely. I think the idea would be that every one of them would be a home run, right? Like other people, you have to, yeah, we need your magazine, right? We need you to file once a month, once every six weeks, because some of them are going to be a stand-up double.

Right. some might be a long, you know, a single with a big round of first base. You just didn't really get there, but hers were like more sporadic. And again, that's like you have a certain amount of power to be able to pull off that kind of schedule.

Would you, if you were her editor, would, would you be embarrassed that she said that about you? Also, I should just say, she kind of aired out her editor at the New York magazine in a way that you have to listen to it. I'm not going to put his business

out there, but I was just like, damn. Like, I just had never come up before. Yeah. There's a big passage in there where she says that she was allowed the option of writing her way out of trouble at New York. Yes. Essentially, all this has been uncovered. You have kept

all of this not only from your editors, but more importantly from the audience. But hey, if you just write about it, maybe that could save your career here. We can make a deal. We haven't heard of comment from David Haskell or anybody in New York, but like, that to me is amazing. Oh yeah

It kind of sounds like magazines where you're like You know we would like this piece About this whole relationship We can keep you here That's right We're getting distracted Because I want to read you

About black holes Oh my God This is this is along with manta rays And Adam and Eve And the Sparrow and everything else Okay There's so much dialogue In this book that feels like

The stuff the soldier said In the movie The Thin Red Line Joel, what's your favorite Terence Malik movie? Oh you know You'd probably Live person, you go back to the 70s with Badlands movies like that.

Yeah, the Badlands is really good. Yeah, is that right? I'm going to read you about Black Hulls, and this is the voice of one of the soldiers in the thin red line. The closer you get to a black hole, the more you fall apart. The what and the when of you. Past and present and future stretch and overlap into scenes on a single stage. The world folds over and over, layer upon layer. Time becomes space, and space becomes time.

semicolon this is physics I mean editors are afraid of her man she said she said she said that editors are afraid of her

so I I mean and I'm again I'm not trying to reduce her to her looks but I'm sure that there's a lot of times that people have been like you know what okay Olivia you're right okay

whatever man whatever you say you know And I'll say that these pieces were very, very successful that she wrote for New York Magazine. These are these are bananas of pieces in our world. They got attention. They did. They absolutely did. I mean, you know, when I say success, I'm talking about metric success, right?

Right. Moral success. But these are big, you know, she was a, the word star is overapplied. And I hate that word. She actually even has a riff in here about people calling somebody a star reporter. Yeah. It's like calling someone a calling a publication, a storied publication. you only use that when something bad happens.

Yeah. And someone's only a star reporter when they get in trouble or they leave for another publication. Never a star when they're just working there. Oh, yeah. Nobody says, that's right. Well, Olivia was a star reporter. You know, she was a butts in the seats reporter at New York Magazine. I mean, she calls herself a walk-on guest star status.

You know what I mean? When she comes to the newsroom, she couldn't work there because people, but I mean, a lot of people have to deal with that as reporters. It's like if you, you know, of a certain strata, it works. can you go into the office because you don't normally do? People always are going to want to talk to you. But she, as much as anybody was very, very aware of her place in the hierarchy of journalism, you know, and what she could do and what she would be allowed to do and could get away with.

I got three what ifs for you. Okay. What if this book had come out without the awful excerpt in Vanity Fair? Would we think of it differently? Would we think of it differently? Don't you feel that kind of poison the well? I think it hurt, yeah. For a lot of people that will never read the book at all.

So, yes, the excerpt in the first hundred pages or so. I haven't read the whole book. But I just felt like if there was a way that they could have front-loaded the stuff from the middle that you're talking about or whatever or done that, like, maybe there was a bit a better chance it would have been received better, I think. Number two, what if this book had come out without? the constant bombardment from Ryan Lizza's substack? Man, that's a, that's a great question.

Man, it's just, I mean, the thing is, is that the one thing about Ryan Lizza that it does is it undercuts her credibility as a narrator, right? Because now I'm just like, is this really true? Are you telling us the whole story? Like, what's, so without that, that I think that people would, probably be a little bit more inclined to accept this as a sort of tell-all. She does a riff in the book about the tell-all, about how she resents the idea that that's the thing that you have to do, right, or that people were asking her to do.

So, yeah, I mean, that definitely didn't help. It may have generated interest in the book in a way, but I don't think it helped her sell books, and I definitely don't think it made her seem like a reliable narrator. What do you say? Finally. No, I think so. I mean, I think that was the point of it from Liz's point of view. Yeah.

I mean, that was, that was clearly was to undercut her and to say, oh, this story you're about to read, this book you're about to read. Here's my version of events. Yeah. And again, I don't know how many, you know, Dylan Byers had a line and puck it last night about how many, are there any reliable narrators in the story? Like, who in the world, you know, looking at all this stuff. And she's had her own comments about Liz's substatic conveying it into revenge porn. but like whatever he has set out to do I think he ceded the ground

in the way he wanted to here's what if number three what if Nutsi never has a relationship with RFK what is she married to Ryan Lizza maybe they're married today well yeah I was going to say could she have written a great book about the Trump years but maybe the question is could she have written

a great book about the Trump years by herself since she was co-writing one with Lizzo once upon a time or twice upon a time Maybe. I mean, it would have been, yeah, maybe. You still would have suffered from what you said. Yeah. You would not have, you would have not accepted that as a great book. I would not have found it illuminating in any way.

Like, I would have found it like sort of, you know, titillating in some ways. Like, oh, wow, you know, you were in the room with this person. This person flirted with you, said something inappropriate. She also says something about inappropriateness that, like, she has a. About the men, both she covers and is just around in Washington, D.C. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah, I don't know because so many people write books about Trump, like what is she really offering there if she doesn't have the RFK thing,

like what would be the impetus to write the book? Like maybe if she wrote about all the characters around him or something, but. But that's what I mean. I mean, she was, again, she has all these episodes. And some of them are in American Canto, like getting dragged into the Oval Office so that Trump can show her that he's not mad at his chief of staff. I mean, that, first of all, inviting on, here comes to Mike Pence, here comes all these people, we're all happy together.

That's an unbelievable piece in New York Magazine. And it's an unbelievable scene here. And I'm like, didn't you kind of do all? Haven't you mostly written this? And you just strung all these together and added new material. Like, wouldn't that be? And to me, again, this is the version of the book that should have been tried, which is just like, here is a history of me through the Trump years, and then guess what? You'll never

believe what happens when Trump is running a third time in 2024. But it's just so splatterpane. I guess the issue is that people may have not necessarily wanted any portraits. Like, they want, like, a book needs a through line. Like, you've got to have a point of view. And it's not just, you know, a character studies. Like, just putting a whole bunch of people together and doing a chapter on, this person is kind of crazy for this reason. This person is inappropriate with this reason. Like, people want a through line. They want, like, a thesis. What do you believe? Like, why does this matter? Why do these years matter? And I wonder if, like, that's where she would have fallen short with any of this stuff. I'll skip over what David Shoemaker has aptly

titled the Tellos Novellas from Liz's substack. God, what a great phrase that was. Great line. Great line. The folks at Puck were so jealous of that. I mean, they had that headline all queued up and David beat him to the punch. I'll ask you, two final questions instead. Okay. Has any or all of this changed your opinion about whether Olivia Nutsi should work for Vanity Fair going for it? If you were an editor at Vanity Fair and you have Olivia Nutsi in your employ, could you trust her? Could you trust that she's going to follow the rules, that she's going to do what she's, you know. That's a fundamental question.

The information is going to be procured in an ethical way, all that sort of stuff. No. No. No, so no. Would you? I mean, no. Absolutely not. And I think that, by the way, I totally agree with you about, like, firing journalists and losing people jobs and all that stuff, but just like, let's put it in our sense. We run a magazine. Yeah. Would you hire Olivia Nutsi? No. I wouldn't. And again, I admire her so greatly as a writer. I wouldn't do it.

No, I just wouldn't do it. Well, it's like the reason that, like, you wouldn't hire Bobby Petrino as your head coach. You know what I'm saying? That's more unfair to, but please continue. Yeah, well, you know, I'm just saying this is like, I, you, if, I know you might, I know you might lie to me when things get tight, bro. And anybody might lie. Like, I'm not putting myself above that. But, like, you, we've got you on, we've got evidence that you will do it.

And that just, that, that's just a risk that I'm not, I'm not willing to take. At least right now. If you read the reports, Dylan in Puck last night, Natalie Korach in status last night, too, the thinking is that Vanity Fair is not going to employ her beyond the extension, behind the extent of her contract. I do wonder this, and maybe this is a good place to close. What's she going to do after all this?

I mean, don't she think the Trump White House, like, I mean, they bring her in and you get to be a Republican operative? Maybe not the Trump White House, but don't she think that she can work in politics? Which, I mean, look at the world we live in. Why would she not be able to? Can she work in politics?

Yes. Maybe I am misplacing my, faith here, and if that is indeed the right word, but I don't believe she'd want to do something like that. Oh, well, you know what it would be? Podcasts, Substack. Yeah, it's just like, but what on Substack? I mean, look, I think the same way about Ryan Lizza, who I worked with a million years ago at the New Republic.

Like, Ryan was a very, very successful writer when he was in establishment media. Yeah. When he was at The New Yorker, when he was at Politico writing Playbook. And I look at him at Substack and I'm like, this is just funny to see him as like a resistance adjacent figure doing podcast with Stephen Schmidt. You know, like, okay. Like that just, I'm just like, what is that? And I think part of what made Nutsi work was her being at New York Magazine or Vanity Fair, right? Like, I think that's to take her out of that, like, what she going to, is she going to write books?

Can she write books? I don't know what the, I honestly don't know what the answer. Can she cover Hollywood for somebody? Yeah. I mean, I just think that, you know, I think is I haven't heard her talk a lot. So I have to, you know, fall back on that at least. But I think that, like, she's a compelling character. And because she likes characters, right?

So it's not a surprise that she's sort of a compelling character. We've spent, how many, we spent 50 minutes talking about Olivia Nutsi today, right? We did. Yeah. So I think that there, she has an audience, man. And that, like, if she pops up and is willing to talk and tell the truth about, would not even tell the truth, but just talk about her experiences and, you know, she can probably get on vaguely political figures to talk with her.

I think she could probably carve out some sort of niche there. Maybe. I think you know what the better question to ask you is. Do you think she'll get another mainstream media job? That's good. Never say never, man. Never say never in this business. I bet yes.

I mean, I don't know if job may be the wrong word, but like get bylines in a major publication. I was a bet yes. Yeah, I mean, like 10 years from now, why not? You know? Oh, dude, I don't know how things to be sooner in that. Oh, you think sooner than that? Oh, yeah. I think so.

All right. So I guess with Brian's saying, we might have an opening here at the ringer. No, I didn't say that. You know, I didn't say that. Alan Siegel's already our Hollywood Bureau Chiefs. I'm not, I'm not encouraging on the territory. Let us transition, however, ungainfully, to our next topic, which is Lane Kiffin.

Man, I would love to see. Wouldn't you like to see Olivia Nucey interview, Lane Kiffin? 100%. I would read that piece right now. Them being in a room together, appraising each other. I would love it. I know you say the thing on podcast,

you just say certainly outrageous things and be like, I am so down with this, but I am genuinely and absolutely in the heart of hearts down with her going to Baton Rouge and writing profile of Lane Kiffin Ray now. Whatever, water under the bridge.

I would read that story. And for what it's worth, I'm sure Lane would welcome her. He would welcome her into Padreuse and be willing to show her around and welcome her into his office. I'm certain of it. So last Saturday, which was rivalry Saturday in college football, Lane Kiffin was still the coach of Ole Miss. He was almost certainly leaving, we knew, for rival school LSU. The insiders were doing this really funny thing where they're like, you know, the thinking is that he will almost. certainly, they were reporting it without reporting it.

It's very, very funny. What was being negotiated was whether Lane Ciffin could take a job at a rival and simultaneously still stay at Ole Miss to coach his team through the playoffs. Ole Miss is 11 and 1. LSU didn't have a good season. They're not in the playoff. ESPN's College Game Day had a certain unanimity of opinion about this matter. Here, for example, is Kirk Kurb Street.

So there's chances are he's going to Bat Rouge. I think Ole Miss has to accept that and look at this as a magical year. You've never done what you're doing right now. Let Lane Kiffin, if he leaves, and these players finish the run this year. You know, I did not get any talking points from CAA or Jimmy Sexton. And I have been, let me, let me forge you them real quick here. Yeah, right, yeah, just kind of get a quick test. I can make sure I know.

Jimmy, man. If you can get me some of that lane money, that'd be great, too. I agree with them, but maybe not for the reasons that everybody else does or for the reasons they're being fueled. I think, like, look, those players, you can spend your whole life playing football, man, like your whole life working so hard to have a season like that. I just want everything to be the same when the opportunity comes to compete. I want my coach there. I want the same people calling players. I want the same people on the sideline. I don't want anything to change. We can worry about next year next year, right? But I would want my coach there, even if I know he was going to leave. And I bet there would be a better team in the playoffs

because Lane Kiffin is there. And the thing is that, you know, they're worried about, oh, this is a rival or whatever. Man, this stuff changed so fast. The portal turns over rosters. I mean, and it's not like he's going to be able to give his attention to LSU, you know, over that month. So LSU would actually kind of be a little bit behind, so you could be kind of hamstringing them a little bit by allowing him to do it. But I understand the argument for why they would not allow him to do it. But I don't know. What would you think, Brian? What's your take on that?

Well, you know, in my many years of professional football, I also didn't like distractions. I really didn't. I mean, wait, but the one thing I want to ask you is like, do you, even? Even if your coach was the coach of LSU, like whatever he said, he was thinking about the transfer portal, which is about to open, he was thinking about all that stuff. You'd still want him on the sidelines even in a year-to-year, man. We're in a year-to-year, everybody's in a year-to-year thing in football, man. And I don't, maybe I'm different in this way because I didn't have a close relationship with any of my coaches after I got past, like, youth football, right? You know, I mean, assistant coaches and stuff or my running backs coach or whatever, but like the head.

head coaches, like, you don't have a relationship with them anyway. You just want, I just want to be put in the best position to compete on Saturday, or Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. I know that I will be better if Lane Kiffin is there. And the reason I know that is because Ole Miss has never done, they've not done this in the last half century, right? Like, since everybody was allowed to play against everybody and everybody was allowed to play at everybody's pool, Ole Miss is not done this. You and I've been alive. Since we've been alive, right? They've never done this before. That's I know it. And so if I was a player at Ole Miss, I would want everything in my power to stay the same

so that I could compete for this season and then we can worry about next season at the end of the month. The game day segment we played a clip of there was fascinating. Yeah. Because what you just heard Herbie say was, I believe, a minority opinion in college football world. Yeah, that's fair. but if you watch Game Day,

it seemed like it was the majority opinion. Everybody had it, right, yeah. Nick Sabin had it. Herbie had it. And if you're watching this segment, I was watching it live on Saturday morning, you could feel the Reese Davis, I am the honest broker,

the figure of probity inside college football. You could feel that just robot just come to life in the middle of the segment. He's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let me play devil's advocate here. Yeah. And at least try to get in some of these ideas, like, you know, are we sure all the players want this?

You know, the administration at Ole Miss, do they want this? Like, just try to balance things a little bit. That would have been good. And I understand why it makes people think that ESPN and that the Game Day staff is compromised. But what I would say is that because these people all work in football and have worked in college football before, they can look at other situations. They can say, well, look, John Somerall is the head coach at Tulane. All right?

He was the head coach at Tulane. Well, in Florida. Right. But he's going to coach Tulane if they make it into the playoffs. Bob Chesney is the head coach of James Madison. He's going to coach them until, you know, he's going to coach that team if they make the playoffs, and then he'll go to UCLA or if he's not signed his contract, he'll go to Penn State, whatever. But so this is not an uncommon thing.

What is uncommon is about how much Lane dragged this out and the kind of like the idea that he went to a rival and did this. But like, it's not uncommon for a coach to accept a job and then. stay through and see things through, right? Like the unique part here is that this is LSU and this is Ole Miss, their rivals that are right next to each other, and you might be concerned that, okay, this person is going to deplete my roster or take whatever, confidential information, whatever,

and take it west of Baton Rouge. But they're used to this because this is what college football is. Well, I do think in the age of the 12th team playoff, we haven't seen something exactly like that. Right. We may have seen a coach hang around and coach, a bowl game before. But this idea that you have a chance to win the national championship.

Yeah. Yeah. And in Tulane's case, who knows, James Madison's case, who knows? But, like, Ole Miss has a decent chance to win the national championship. Yeah. So those stakes just seem to be different to me. So you wouldn't want your coach. You wouldn't want your coach.

I'm not saying I would or wouldn't. I mean, like, you're saying that as a former player is very convincing to me. Yeah. Because I'm like, I mean, it was interesting to think about it. It didn't seem like there's unanimity on Ole Miss's roster. you wouldn't expect with any roster. You know, some people are like, hey, Pete Golding, was our defensive coordinator.

He's the coach now. Great, let's go. We're all in with Pete Golding, you know. You go into a meeting, right? You think about things. I would say this about the game day segment. Absolutely somebody has to tell Nick Saban that if your agent was Jimmy Sexton, who was getting you all these great jobs and Lane Kiffin's agent is Jimmy Sexton,

who's getting him these great jobs, that needs to be disclosed on the air. They need to say it. They need to say it. Somebody needs to say that on the air. It's kind of weird though, right? Like, have you ever heard them ever do that sort of? No, but it doesn't mean it's not right. Like, first of all, I just, and I'm not talking about, I know there's a whole like CAA puppet

Master thing, which I think is a little overstated when it comes to the ESPN portion of this. Honestly, I think those guys are just boys with college football coaches. That's what it is. That show is structured around college football coaches welcoming them to their campus and them slapping them on the back and like, that's just the way these things work. Like, I don't even think you need to bring in the whole CAA. conspiracy theory about it. But the people watching Game Day, that's a huge audience.

It's not just you and me and Stephen Godfrey and Alex Kirshner watching the show. There are people who don't understand Jimmy Sexton's influence in college football or even understand that the guy who is talking to you on TV, his agent is also the agent of the guy they're talking about. Right. That is just worth saying, you know, out loud. This is an argument that we had on the ring of tailgate, and I'm going to ask you this, Brian. Do you think CAA or Jimmy Sexton provided them with talking points?

Oh, I don't, I don't think even think. I don't think that's necessary. Right. I mean, like, look, Lane Kiffin worked for Nick Saban. Like, he was, he, he talked to him, too, by the way. He came out and said during this process, like, Nick Saban is my mentor. I want him to give me advice. I consulted with him, yes.

Yeah. So I don't, like, again, I just don't think that's necessary. Like, what? Nick Sabin knows that he supports. Lane Kiffin. Like, that is his, that is his guy. Now, I would, I would disclose what the agent is. And also, and Godfrey brought this up in his column that he wrote for the Washington Post,

Nick Saban got rid of Lane Kiffin when Gane Kiffin was Sabin's offensive coordinator at Alabama and took another head coaching job. Right. He decided it was too distracting. He didn't think he could do it. Even though he wasn't going to arrival, he was going to Florida Atlantic, which had just no bearing on Alabama's success or failure at all. Yeah.

Somebody, when they're planning that segment, has got to be like, okay, if you guys are going to say this, that's fine. But Reese needs to be full on devil's advocate asking some tough questions. You absolutely have to ask Nick Sabin that question. Like, wait a second. How are things change so much? And again, I don't have any doubt what Sabin's going to say, but you have to speak that question into the universe.

Even if you don't want to do it in a formal way, because they have kind of this jocular thing and they can poke. each other, can't Matt McAfee joke and say, did Jimmy Sexton make you say that? And they can laugh it off. He's good at that. And they could make a go and do it that way. That's truly good at. That's one of the things that he could be there and could do. And since people have this concern, my thought is, is though, that's Nick Saban. He doesn't, I don't know how many talking points he's taken from anybody at 73 years old after this, an entire life of success, right? Like, some people will help him to formulate and talk or whatever, but I don't think, like,

If Jimmy Sexton says, hey, can you say this on air? If I want to, is what I would think Nick Saban would say. Yes, but I would also add to that. I don't think he understands, like, just the basics of disclosure in the media. And I think if somebody at ESPN is just like, we just need to say this. You don't have to say it, but Reese needs to say it. Somebody needs to say it on the air. I don't think Nick Saban is going to be like, absolutely not.

It's just like, oh, okay, those are the rules. Great. Let's abide by the rules. I'll still have exactly the same opinion. But there's not a disclosure network, though. Like, that's just not, this is just not the habit with which they do things. It's not a, we would like for them to be that way, but that's just not who they are or what they do. Speaking of ESPN and college football.

Yeah. Mark Heim of AL.com reports that Paul Feinbaum will not be running for a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama. Do you think Paul regrets up of bringing this up in the first place then? No. Really? Come on, Paul loves, Paul loves turn that pot. Yeah, that's fair. I don't pretend to know Paul well, but if I know him at all, he loved every one of those calls he got, and every one of those texts being like, are you running for Senate?

All people love that. That doesn't make him unusual, by the way. People love to explore a run for office. I guess the thing is, though, is that I just wouldn't want to, now I still got to deal with my bosses again. you know, like we had that we were at a little bit of a distance. You know, I may have done some things that run afoul of their desires and flirted with them in a way that, you know, could have them the question, hey, are you, are you loyal to us?

Because we didn't, we didn't want you to talk about that. Why are you discussing this with Clay Travis and not us or whatever? But he's also Paul Feinbaum. He's like, if you don't like me, I can set my thing up over here and I'll do just fine. It may not be the same, but I'll be fine. I'm at a point in my career where I can stand alone. So that probably you're to your point, Brian. I think you're right.

You're right. But that leads us to an interesting question because I think the last time you and I talked about this, we were almost agreed that it was going to be very hard for him to go back to ESPN. Yeah. After the Clay Travis interview. After everything that it happened. You know, after the whole, you know, ESPN Lewin let me have Donald Trump on the Paul Feinbaum show to talk about a big college football game.

Is it just going to be fine? Well, you know, I think in 20, 15, it wouldn't have been. But apparently, ESPN, you can do whatever you want now. I mean, I mean, from Stephen A. Smith to Pat McAfee, you can call out people. You can talk about things, disgusting. Like, it just, like, that does not, he's one of those people for whom they're not really any consequences that are meaningful.

Well, and he's not, you know, on the pat level of impunity. Yeah. Yeah, he's not always poking. Well, and also, that's just his own. its own tier. Like, that's just, you know, Pat and Stephen A are the only occupants of one tier. And Paul also, I think, is a little different as college football. He's off in Alabama, previously Charlotte. So, like, he's just not in the mothership. I guess the way we'll know about this if they're actually, if this actually hurt his relations to ESPN is when he has signed

his next contract. Yeah, which will be not this coming year, but the year after next, right? Yeah. But I would, I, with this ESPN regime, I would, I would not be surprised if they're just like, okay, we have you back. Yeah, come on back. I mean, I'm sure they don't want to lose Paul Feinbaum. They don't want to have to think about replacing him right now. They, I mean, they're going to have to do it one day. He's 71 years old. Presumably he's not going to do it forever. He's a sri and young and feisty 71.

He doesn't look 71. I give him that. He doesn't. A last topic for you. Okay. Before Thanksgiving, Aaron Andrews and Carissa Thompson. We're doing their podcast, which is called the Calm Down podcast. Aaron Andrews said this about people coming into the sports media business. This is what one of my first professors said. If you don't want to make $40,000 in your first job, get out.

If you don't want to be told you need a nose job, get out. If you don't want to be divorced, get out. If you don't want to work holidays, get out. And I don't say it like that, but I say, you got to love what you do because I miss all holidays. I didn't get married until I was in my 40s. Not that that is going to be your route, but I live. out of a suitcase. I miss a lot of stuff. I missed a lot of weddings. I miss a lot of events. You have to love it to get you through the fact I'm not going to be home for Thanksgiving

next week. You know, our Christmas is cut short. Can I have a little corrective here before we either add to the pile on or pull bodies off the pile like good referees that we are? Yeah, sure. So I actually went and watched this in its original form on YouTube. Okay. that clip got a lot of controversy. In fact, that clip was cut by the Calm Down podcast. Okay. But if you actually watch the podcast in its entirety, right after she says this, she says, yeah, but I'm getting to work Packers' Lions on Thanksgiving.

Man, they did it. It's all worth it. Like, these are the sacrifices inherent in this job, but it's worth it because I get to do an awesome job. And in fact, I accidentally watched another one of their episodes. I was looking for this clip. And in it, and this is again, before the controversy, and Carissa Thompson was like, hell yeah, we've made our peace with that. We're great with that.

We get to work awesome games. Netflix, Black Friday. You know, here we go. Let's go. It's like, oh, we had a whole controversy, not about something that was taken out of context, but something that was taken out of context by the podcast social team. That's smart. Good for them, I guess.

If you're, if you're, because, I mean, that is the most we've heard about that podcast in quite a while, right? Like, Carista Thompson didn't do the, I sometimes would make up sideline reports. Oh, forget about that. Thing on that podcast, did she? Was it? I don't remember which podcast. It was on that podcast. Yeah.

It was on that podcast. Okay. Yeah. So we haven't heard a lot about them since then. Well, you know, the thing is that we talk about this sometimes, Brian. Nobody likes us. Nobody likes sports reporters, man. They don't, nobody gives a shit about, yeah, they don't.

Yeah, they don't want to hear jokes about Marriott points and, you know, all that kind of stuff. Like, it's just not the kind of thing. They don't care that, you know, a lot of people. She said $40,000. I mean, man, you know, a lot of people make a lot less than that. I remember when I was growing up and Parade Magazine, they would include it in the Sunday edition of the newspaper. And every year, it would be like, what do people make? And then have all the professions.

I love that edition. I would go pour through that. And my parents would always, like, bring it up to me. They'd be like, you see the journalist is making $18,000. year, right? And I was like, well, that's not going to be my story. Anyway, but yeah, so people don't want to hear that because most people don't even have the luxury of working a job they love. Like, there's just, you've got to go to work.

And some people, it doesn't make a difference. They're making those sacrifices and not making a lot of money or whatever. So they don't want to hear that. But yeah, but to your point, I think people were being unfair about Aaron Andrews, but nobody cares. Nobody cares about the context at all. Like they don't like us. They don't want to hear about the theft.

They don't give a shit about any of that. And I kind of understand it because, yeah, it is kind of ridiculous that we get to make a living doing this. What I think she's doing is a very tricky thing. I think it's worthwhile, but I think it's tricky because she's trying to demystify the idea, especially for a young person who's sitting there in high school or college and thinking about what they might do with their lives. What you do with these jobs, you just show up. And it's fantastic.

And it's fun. And here it is. But what she's saying is there's actually work, a lot of work for these jobs, and there's a lot of sacrifice for these jobs. You don't just do it, even though. But at the same time, to go back to what you said, it's like it is the most, it is incredibly fun. Right. It is not another job.

Like, you know, it takes, it takes work to put together a really good podcast. You hope to read the whole 300-page book from a living movie, but it's still not another job. I know it's together. Yeah, and the thing, I mean, also, and this is geared towards, I don't even know because if she is said, when she talks to students or whatever, and that's the audience you want to talk to, right? Because it is kind of grim out there. Whenever I have to go talk to a class and I'm like, I don't know what you're supposed to do anymore.

Like, I don't know what you're going to do, how you're going to do it and get to a point in your career because most jobs are not the Aaron Andrew's job. Most jobs are actually, you make less than $40,000 a year and you don't get to do cool shit, you know? And you might, there's never, there's never a hope that you will ever do cool shit. Like you will probably work in a hard job, get, lose your job and then have to go into PR or something. Like that is for most, I'm sorry to say. So like it is so if you are talking to kids and right now I'm directing these comments

to people that within the business or, you know, people that would like to be Aaron Andrews, unfortunately you probably are not going to be. You're going to have to deal with all that stuff and there's probably not going to be a payoff at the end. But if you're lucky enough and you get to the end, then yeah, you get to, you can say, oh, but I get to work the Packers and Lions on Thanksgiving, but that is not the story for most people. Nicole Arbach had a good post about this on our substack.

Also talking about talking to journalism students, she'd say, I say that if you want to work in sports journalism because you like sports, you may be better off keeping sports as your hobby and finding a different job because you'll lose your fandom pretty quickly, or at least the kind of fandom you have before it's your job.

That's a really interesting distinction. Yeah. Because sometimes, like, is it you like sports? Is that where you're getting into this? Or do you like covering sports? That's the good. That is the best, very smart distinction, Nicole.

Those things are now closer than they've been at previous times in media history. You can stay a little bit more about who you like and yeah, with this stuff. Yeah, and I'm a football enthusiast. I was loving all those football writers. I love football. That's tweet.

I love it. It's the best. Oh, thanks. Thanks very much. It's very convincing that you tweeted that out as you were watching the football games. You've really made me feel like I know you. Other thing I want to point out is something you said way back when you were talking about entry-level jobs in journalism or sports writing.

You start out, you have to work holidays. Hey, you're the low person on, you know, at the publication here. You're going to be working Thanksgiving. You're going to be working Christmas. Then with any luck, if your newspaper still exists, you move up a little bit. Yeah. And you're not that person anymore. Oh my gosh.

Okay. You know, I have a day or two to fly. home to for Thanksgiving or, you know, celebrate with friends or however you, you decide to do it. Then, Joel, a funny thing happens. If you really make it in this business, you go back to working Christmas and Thanksgiving. Yeah. I'm staring at this, you know, graphic that Netflix put out about all the people who are going to be on their Christmas Day NFL coverage. I'm like, these are the people that made it.

Diana Rossini, Scott Hansen, Gene Sterator. Gene Sterator is working Christmas. Dean's Territory, man. Last year's lineup, Laura Rutledge, Mina Kimes, Jamie Erdahl, Robert Griffin III, on and on and on. I'm like, oh, so eventually you advanced the point where you are back to working holidays

and now it's an honor to work holidays. Absolutely, yeah. It's like, oh, you got selected to be in front of America, right? Yeah, I mean, it's just, again, nobody cares about the fact if you get divorced over this stuff. And this is what I'll tell you, I'll be the last thing I'll say to the kids, you know, if you want

to have a relationship and preserve, you know, have some sort of sense of normalcy, you should marry somebody into business. Get somebody in business, you know, I'm saying, because they'll understand, you know, what you're doing that? Okay, here we go. See, this is, we need this debate because you and I have made different choices in that department. We did. You know, wouldn't that be an interesting compare, contrast episode of the press bikes?

And I can think of two very special guests we could have on to. Well, I also should say, it's not like my wife is happy about me having a work on Saturday. She understands, huh? Yeah, she understands. Doesn't like it, though. Oh, my God. Here's Joel Anderson.

I'm Brian Curtis. Thanks to Magic. By Bruce Baldwin. A couple of announcements, we would love it. That is, Joel and I would love it. If you'd follow us over at at Pressbox Ringer on Instagram, where right now, Joel, you can find the lineup to today's podcast before it even came out, where you can find video clips of Bob Costis.

and Susan Orlean, recent guests on This Here Press Box, you can find David Shoemaker's fantastic magazine cover for the December issue of this podcast, which ran on Monday. Go great. Including clips with New Yorker editor David Remnick, talking about other things,

his failed profile of LeBron James and his fully realized profile of Howard Stern. Brian, I'm listening. I'm going to say this, and I texted this to him the other day, and I want to say it again. and hopefully embarrassing. Brian's the best interviewer at the business, man.

He's right there. He's him and Isaac. They're right up here, man. Brian is like, I really do prefer when Brian is around to help me with interviews because he's just really good at the Susan. The Orlean thing was amazing. It was a really good interview. And so, yeah.

So, yeah, you're great at this. And I hope people, if they haven't listened to it, go back and listen to it. One of a small moment I loved in the Remnick interview was he was talking about Isaac. And he just paused just for a second when he was thinking of the right adjective to describe Isaac's interviewing style. It was just great. Just a little moment. Appreciate some of us in the business.

Anyway, the December issue was out. Please check that out. Shoemaker and I had a huge conversation about the New Yorker and its history. And then Remnick and I got into the same subject here. Joel, can't wait to see you next Thursday with more lukewarm takes about the media. Looking forward to it, buddy.