The Press Box - The Debate Draft Lottery and O.J. Returns | The Press Box

Episode Date: June 18, 2019

The Democratic debate lineup (08:00), the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week (29:45), Sarah Huckabee Sanders stepping down as press secretary of the White House (17:45), the return of O.J. Simpson (27:30), and wrapping up the NBA Finals (34:15). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Again, that's podsurvey.com slash pressbox, P-R-E-S-S-B-O-X. Thanks for your help. David, the Democratic presidential candidates are finally going to have a debate next week. But Montana Governor Steve Bullock will not be on the stage because he needed just one more person to mention his name in a presidential poll. What I want to know is, if you went down to the street right now, how long would it take you to find that single Steve Bullock supporter?

If I, on the streets of Brooklyn, New York, how long would it take me to? Blue Brooklyn, right? A lot of Democrats walking around. I mean, there's a lot of, this is, this is, you know, Bernie Biden, Beto territory. I feel like, I don't even know if people are still voting for Beto. Gosh, I'm sure, I guess, you know, give me, give me 30 minutes. Again, a clipboard, brightly colored vest. I bet I could find, you don't think I could find somebody?

Steve Bullock? Do I have to be, am I limited to the streets of Brooklyn? Yeah, but I think a better question is, are you allowed to explain who Steve Bullock is to potential respondents? Yeah, I think if there's one person who definitely... Are you allowed to talk up Steve Bullock? There's this wonderful guy who's the governor of Montana, which you just, you know, list up a few of his positions.

It'd be nice. There's got to be some Montana transplant. It would just be like, yeah, I mean, Steve Bullock's not great, but he's my guy. am related to him. This is Brooklyn. There's people are from everywhere. What if I gave you a phone?

If you gave me a phone, I was to say there's one person who I guarantee would love for Steve Bullock to be on the stage. And that's our president, Donald Trump, because he's just got like bully Bullock already in his, in his like Twitter drafts, just ready to be ready to hit send on that. No, I have no idea. We are the margin of error of media podcasts. This is the press box, a part of the ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer here. Lots of stuff to get to on today's show, including the end of the Sarah Huckabee Sanders era in the White House, or as political reporters know it, the era of good feelings.

We've got news on the new people in charge of Sports Illustrated. We've also got the gag that every movie critic in the known universe made in their review of Men in Black International. Plus, he overwork, Twitter joke of the week and much, much more. But David, let's start with the Democratic debates, which are finally set. two nights next week, 10 Democratic candidates each night on Wednesday, June 26th,

it's going to be Elizabeth Warren versus a bunch of people who are probably not going to be president. This is like the old Eastern Conference of the NBA of debates. And then the next night, Thursday, June 27th, you have Joe Biden,

Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Kamala Harris all in the same debate. The early, analysis, I think it's kind of about Warren. Logan Dobson tweeted, Warren has been increasing in the polls and flashing some momentum. So of course, the smartest thing to do is get her into a debate with zero the other top five candidates. And then from the other side of the coin, Dante

Atkin says there's a possibility that both Warren and Bernie are happy. They're not in the same debate. Bernie gets to hammer Biden, which he really wants. And Warren gets to stay above the fray and talk values and policy. What do you make of Warren's draw on this whole thing? Both of the immediate reactions are somewhat compelling. As soon as it was announced, yeah, I think everybody came down on either one side, either on the Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Warren was maybe surprisingly, maybe not. The feet, the, everybody's reaction involved her. And it was, it was either that she was lucky to have her own, to be the star of her own show, basically, or, or that she was being, you know, she being relegated to the kids table at Thanksgiving or whatever and that no one

would take her seriously because everyone was only, you know, viewers are only going to tune in for the Biden Bernie night. and that, you know, obviously put someone like Pete Buttigieg in a poll position there, at least to be the surprise of the main debate. I don't know. I mean, I think you can make the case for either one. And I think that, I mean, I think until, I mean, listen, this double debate thing is not, I don't think there's any track record for what we can expect in the ratings.

And I think we're not going to know the answer to the question until we see the ratings, right? I mean, up until now, the American public has shown, you know, a hearty appetite for all things presidential primary debate related. And if they watch both of them, then this is a win for Elizabeth Warren. Is it, who is this hypothetical Democrat, curious, potential voter who wants to watch Joe Biden but doesn't want to watch the other Democrats? That's kind of what I want to know. Like, would you really just skip the first night? just kind of look at and go, eh,

it's not so glamorous. I'm going to, I'm going to skip out on. I guess, I guess that person exists. You're right, though, about,

I just think what's interesting to me about this, and Gabriel Deb and Daddy wrote this whole piece in New York Magazine a couple weeks ago about this, is that the debates have been kind of this black hole

for the Democratic candidates so far, because they haven't known until Friday who they're going to be on stage with. And they also haven't been clear on the idea, is, you know, is the idea everyone gets equal time? So is Elizabeth Warren going to get the same amount of questions as Tim Ryan and John Delaney in her debate?

Is Biden going to get the same amount of questions as Andrew Yang and Eric Swalwell? Or are the debates naturally going to put everybody on the stage, but naturally sort of give more time and questions to the frontrunners? My guess is that they would try to give equal time and through, you know, human error or, you know, producers in headsets, it'll skew towards the better known names. I just find it hard to imagine that, like, if you try to do it by the polls, I mean, I think doing it by the polls, it would go awry, right? Because, you know, Bill de Blasio would end up getting significantly more questions than

Julian Castro, or I don't even know how he's polling to everyone else on that side, but just, you know, name recognition, at least Northeast Corridor name recognition is going to go a long way too. I don't know. It is, it is weird. And the, and regardless, this opens up the door for the entire conversation surrounding the debates to be about working the refs, right? Or to be about, you know, like, how the rules were set up instead of the actual content of it, which is just hilarious. Which is it, by the way, every political debate in the history of political debates. If you lose, it was because the moderators were crooked and the format didn't favor you. But if you win, then everything was perfectly fair. It's just like referees.

in an NBA game. Sure. Nobody, nobody complains after you win. The other thing I think we don't know about this is who's going to get attacked because the Democratic primary has been pretty nice so far. And I think most of the attacks other than kind of Bernie Biden and a weird sort of Bernie, was it Bernie Hickenlooper that had kind of a thing last week on Twitter?

Yeah, I think so. They've mostly been kind of sub-tweedy kind of stuff of Biden. like we, you know, we can't win this election by being timid. We need to be, you know, real Democrats. We need to fight for our values, that sort of thing. And, you know, when you get on stage, the expectation to some extent is the people who are not the frontrunner are going to attack the frontrunner. But I don't know if anybody's going to tackle us with Warren.

I don't know that that's going to happen. Biden to me seems like somebody who's going to take some shots, maybe from Bernie, maybe from Kirsten Gillibrand. but I just think the dynamic is really, really strange at this point. It's almost, it's not, you know, totally different than the Republican dynamic was in 2016, where there was this kind of thing of do you attack Trump? Who does Trump attack? How do you just handle all these people?

Yeah. And I guess everybody's making that calculation right now. Yeah, I mean, I think Elizabeth Warren's bracket, if you will, I mean, does favor her in the sense that the real names on, on night one, besides Warren or Beto and Cory Booker, right? I mean, is there anybody on that side that is polling above and pulling in the double digits anywhere? You get into Hulian Castro pretty fast, Tulsi Gabbard territory, yeah. And Beto and Cory Booker have both, like, upon announcing their campaign or even before they announced their campaigns, were already being, you know, we discussed it on the show, or already being put in this position of considering female vice presidential nominees and, like,

demuring from even, like, you know, presuming that they would get the nomination. So I feel like they're already in a defensive crouch. It's going to be weird to see them going after Elizabeth Warren in any kind of direct way, especially because, I mean, listen, anybody can go after anybody. She's the top dog on that side. She will be a target. But it does seem, it does, if you're trying to play nice, if you're trying to be, you know, we have intellectual disagreements, but I respect where she's coming from, whatever. She has the most, certainly has done the most intellectual legwork of any of the campaign so far. So, you know, you're, you'd have to, I'm not saying you're punching up necessarily, but you're going to have to swing wide. And then, you know,

on night two, I think Biden's going to be a target, you know? I think that, and I think the question is, you know, how much time we spend with Buttigieg, with Harris, with Gillibrand, and then even with Hick and Lou Bram, I mean, with everybody on the kind of second half of it, but, you know, I think the second night is going to, to me, is going to be defined by how, if they do wait the amount of time each person gets by how deep tier one on night two goes, if that makes any sense. If Buttigieg's argument for being president is I'm not 70 plus years old, like those other guys, then being on stage with Biden and Bernie Sanders seems like a pretty good chance to make that point. I think it's, I think that's a really difficult argument for him to make because I think his,

I mean, I think if we're, if we're going to go into this hypothetical age discriminatory aspect of politics, then he's affected in the. opposite way, right? You don't have to make it explicitly, right? You can just make it implicitly. Sure. You know, that's, you're, you know, there's a, there's a grand history of young, vital looking candidates standing next to old, less vital looking candidates and just making the point that way. Based on absolutely nothing except my gut instinct. I think that the age, that sort of, you know, vital candidate versus old candidate, the age difference in real, you know, standing side by side makes a lot more, is a lot more significant in a two-person race at the, you know,

end of the primaries or in the general election because if you're young and you're on the general elect, you know, if you're young and you're in a debate for the presidency, you've already been vetted by the primaries, right? But if there's, if there's 12 or if there's 10 people on stage, 20 people total, you know, in the field and you're up there arguing that everybody else is too old and you look like you're 30, then that I don't think that necessarily helps you because you haven't been vetted by the process yet. You know, you could just be a kid. There is some clarity about the moderators. These are the NBC MSNBC Telemundo debates.

You're going to have Savannah Guthrie, Lesterholt, Chuck Todd, Jose Diaz Ballard, and Rachel Maddow. There's a little bit of a, I guess, sort of a surprise around Maddow, though, you know, she is such a power broker within the left that sort of be weird not to have her there. One person that was unhappy was Sean Hannity over on Fox News. Listen to his reaction to Matt out being named a moderator of the Democratic debates. Okay, so NBC is rewarding that fake news by giving more airtime and putting her in a position of being a moderator. They have to wonder, if you work at fake news NBC and maybe you consider yourself a real reporter, I wonder how those people are feeling tonight. You know, how do the real reporters feel if there are any left being passed over?

for the job by Roswell Maddow, the conspiracy theorist. What must that be like, David? You're a straight news reporter to cable network, and this crazy opinionator comes on every night and keeps peddling conspiracy theories. Thank goodness that's not a problem at Fox. That must be bad. By the way, Hannity did like three minutes on Roswell, Maddow, or whatever he called her, and then he brought in Sean Spicer and Jesse Waters to talk about it.

I'll show him how to do a real newscast. It's also probably worth saying that there's always, is a moderator that sort of has this moment during the debates. It's kind of how Megan Kelly got that insane deal at NBC last time around. John Dickerson sort of had that a little bit. Martha Radditz back in 2012. So that's something that's going to be kind of interesting. Is somebody, a media person we sort of see in a new light.

I was also really interested in how these people were picked. This is from the New York Times. The selection of candidate lineups unfolded like a scene from The Apprentice. representatives from campaigns gathered on the 11th floor conference room at Rockefeller Center. Each of the candidate's names were written on pieces of paper, folded in half and placed in the appropriate box. This sounds very children's birthday party, by the way. The names were drawn from the boxes one by one and affixed onto one of two easels with tape. That also sounds very children's birthday.

Mr. Sanders was the first candidate whose name was drawn, and soon after Mr. Biden's name was placed on the same easel. once they pulled Biden, all the air went out of the room said a person present. So some very analog, I don't know, I don't know what the best way to do this is. I don't know if you really need the full NBA draft lottery style ping pong ball thing, but it seems like a very, very basic way to do it is to fold a piece of paper in half, have some Democratic official reach in and then tape the piece of paper to an easel. But that's what happened. why is the Warren debate running first?

Well, Ruby Kramer of BuzzFeed reports per multiple people present. NBC told the room that it was because they wanted to maximize viewership, quote, unquote. So that's going to be first. By the way, speaking of shameless attempts to goose viewership, David and I will be getting in front of the mics next Wednesday and Thursday night. Right after the debates are over, we'll do like 30 minutes or so and get the pot up for you and you can listen to it that night or in the morning. Total debate coverage here at the press box,

at least as long as we can see. stand it. All right, David, time for the overwork. Twitter joke of the week where we celebrated gag that was so

obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Please send nominees to at the press box pod where they will be gratefully received. David, game six of the NBA finals.

I know you're watching last week. It was played after we'd recorded the pod. Clay Thompson of the Warriors tore his ACL. Going to be out a long time. Yeah. And he came out of the dressing room

and then left the dressing room eventually on crutches. A very tough scene, as they say. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write. What if Clay just had to poop? And if you don't understand that joke, please look up Paul Pierce on the internet. Thanks to Gordon Duffley for that one.

Our pal Tyler Tourville, who always brings this great stories from the world of finance, which you and I would otherwise miss, brings us this one, a story about bank mergers, bank mergers, B, B, and T, and SunTrust, are coming together in a transformational merger of equals to create Truist,

the premier financial institution in the country. Truist is the name of the new company, David, T-R-U-I-S-T. They did not keep one of the original names. They just sort of uncomfortably melded them together and came up with Truist. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, sounds like the name for an artificial sweetener or something that I should ask my doctor if it's right for me.

Again, thanks Tyler for that one. Sunday was Father's Day, David. Happy Father's Day to you. Happy Father's Day to you, too. Thank you. You and I spent the days with our respective families. Donald Trump, on the other hand, spent the day playing golf with Lindsay Graham.

And it was an overwork Twitter joke to write. Donald has apparently chosen to play golf on Father's Day with his recently adopted and most loyal son, Lindsey Graham Trump. We would have also accepted, you know you're a beloved dad when your Father's Day gift is a round of golf with Lindsey Graham. Thanks to Dre for that one.

And finally, David, on Friday, Donald Trump announced that Sarah Huckabee Sanders was leaving the White House and her job as press secretary after three and a half years. Incidentally, Trump has not been in office three and a half years, but never mind. At least he didn't spell whales wrong like you did the other day. It was a very overworked Twitter joke to say, I'm not going to believe that Sarah Huckabby Sanders is leaving the White House as press secretary until she denies it herself. Thanks to a whole bunch of people. Let me name them. Brian Cogsall, Bonnie Rachel, Michael, F, Chris, Lumack, KV, GW, W in an account called Mary Carrillo minus context.

Much appreciated. All right, David, time for the notebook dump. Yeah. The Department of Press Relations, and David, on behalf of a grateful nation, I'm pleased to report that you won't be hearing verbal fisticuffs like this again. The Attorney General earlier today said that somehow there's a justification for this in the Bible. Where does it say in the Bible that it's moral to take children away from their mothers? I'm not aware of the Attorney General's comments or what he would be referencing.

I can say that it is very biblical to enforce the law. That is actually repeated a number of times throughout the Bible. However, this, hold on, Jim, if you'll let me finish. Again, I'm not going to comment on the attorney-specific comments that I haven't seen. It's not what I said, and I know it's hard for you to understand, even short sentences, I guess, but please don't take my words out of context. That was CNN's Jim Acosta being gratuitously insulted last summer by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary,

who announced David on Thursday that she is resigning. Here is a potted history of Sanders tenure. Please hit me if I leave anything out. She lasted 23 months in the job. She presided over the effective cancellation of the White House press briefing. There hadn't been one. in 94 days when she resigned on Thursday, according to the New York Times. Sanders refused the offer to say the press isn't the enemy of the American people.

She was mocked by Michelle Wolfe, which briefly made her into a sympathetic figure, and she was revealed as a liar in the Mueller report. Did I leave anything out? Well, I can only answer that with the question. Do you think that she resigned because she was afraid of the release of Jim Acosta's memoir, The Enemy of the People, which was just released? It's the first victim of Jim Acosta's book is that was the moment. She was okay to say that he was essentially really dumb in front of all of his peers,

but the release of a book just put her over the edge. I had a little trouble with this when I was typing up notes last night in terms of her legacy. Because it's sort of like, what do you even say? Yeah. You know, there is a part of her that's, I think, just about taking a job that's already about lying and taking it to the logical extreme where you just, deny everything, you basically never level with the press, and then you stop talking to the press altogether. So there is that sort of incremental change to it, but what else do you think about how we're going to remember her?

I think that that's probably right. And I don't, I think that her, I think the fact that she's appeared so infrequently, or not at all, in over the past several months, as you pointed out, will lead us to remember her less significantly than maybe you would have if she had just gone out, you know, done a press briefing and then quit the next day. I guess there'd be a lot more trying to read into why she had done it. But it does see, I think you're right that it is a sort of logical conclusion of the job description, especially under Trump, right? I mean, we saw her predecessor, Sean Spicer most notably, who I think I can say lied more brazenly. It's close, but yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean, sure. I mean, Sarah Tugabe-Sanders

certainly has her own Pinocchio's that she can be proud of. But I feel like she was, without delving to deep end armchair psychology, it seemed like she was, you know, a little bit more embarrassed by the requirements of the job. And then, I mean, if not, you know, unwilling to do it,

which probably says something about her as well. But I think that at some point you just, You know, after so much of, I mean, she just, towards the end, it was just so much referring back to, you know, the vague conversations that she had instead of concrete answers or saying that she would have to circle back with the president or, you know, just relying, like I said, relying on vagaries instead of actually answering any questions. And then, as you pointed out, just ceasing the press briefings altogether, you know, you got to imagine that the president just sort of lost interest in it when she wasn't, when she wasn't, you know, performing with the same bombast as her predecessors. assessor as the same bombast as she had shown herself at times. And, you know, when she kind of lost her steam, I'm guessing he lost his passion for the whole production. And that's why it just sort of stopped, you know, I mean, there's no, if the whole thing is, is your insinuation was that the press briefings are kind of in so much as it for the American people or they're for news or for journalists, they're sort of a sham. I think that's true. But I think that in this administration, they've been

they've been performance art with an audience of one. And if he's not interested in it, then there's no purpose in having it. Yeah, I'm for them. generally. They do, they do become somewhat redundant because I think if we got on YouTube and watched a normal one, almost all the questions would be, what is the administration think about this? Or what is the, can you clarify the administration's policy on this? Which we get daily in very bizarre form in Trump's Twitter account. So there's really no point in having her go out and say something which Trump then might contradict 30 seconds later from their point of view. There probably is a point to it from the media's point of view.

And I think there probably should be. I do often think about this with sports, which is, you know, media access in sports is essentially voluntary. There are, their leagues have all these rules and all this stuff. But I always often wonder, it's like, what if the leagues just said, you know, we're not helping the reporters anymore? We just don't care. You can't come in the locker room anymore. You can't, you don't have any time with the players at the podium anymore. We're not going to give you seats in the press box anymore.

Maybe we'll just do that. That's it. We just don't care because it just doesn't matter to us all that much anymore. And the Trump White House is sort of the political experiment in that. What if we just stopped? And you realize, I think she has helped us realize in a kind of terrifying way that there's really no, there's no, they don't have to do this. This is all just by kind of norms and agreements and this is the way we've always done it. And, you know, she and, you know, acting at the behest of

Trump, surely just decided not to do it anymore. Yeah. And the whole thing disappeared. Yeah. I think that about sums it up. I mean, you're right. All the press briefings, as you said, kind of became, instead of being an actual informative question answered in this administration have been sort of a cat and mouse game to either put some, basically to put her or whatever, you know, predecessors or co-workers on the spot to answer for Trump's tweets or to respond to

a leak or yeah, I mean, it's basically an exercise in getting her to contradict something that, you know, the reporter knows, suspects to be true and make that the news story itself, which is, you know, that's not exactly not news, but it's not, you know,

the way that things have traditionally been done. But I think the point you're making you right is more salient, that it's, it's a frightening precedent. Well, we'll see what comes after her, but I'm guessing that her successor won't, you know, have any more control over the process than she did. I'm also interested in how she fits into the universe of Trump apparatchiks, because I think, and I think at this point anyway, and maybe she's going to go write some amazing book, I seriously doubt it, but let's say she could go write a great tell-all and we could, you know, reevaluate. But she seems to me to be on, if not the true.

believer into the spectrum, then I'm not going to reveal any doubts in public into the spectrum. Because with almost all of these other people, there's been some moment off the record, you know, ferreted out by the New York Times or whomever that they are embarrassed by Trump or that Trump is doing something that they don't want to happen. And I think she's, you know, probably of all of them, somebody who's, she's been with the campaign a really long time. I saw John Carl say on ABC, that she was actually sitting with Trump at the table during the summit with Kim Jong-un, which is very unusual for a press secretary. She's one of the few people who was around the campaign who's actually still with him.

And I just think she's probably in that group that, you know, again, if you put everybody on a spectrum and Rex Tillerson's here and Mike Flynn is here and all this stuff, you know, about people who just, you know, and all the kind of people he's tried to bring in John Kelly and all that stuff. I think she is going to be at the end of just no public doubts and maybe even no private doubts about what she was doing. Other than the strain, you know, we've heard people talk about, oh, she's, she finds this very unpleasant. She finds the strain on her and her family to be very tough and all that stuff. And I have no doubt that that's true.

And I have no doubt she said that to reporters. But, you know, there's no, I guess I'll put it this way. There's no back channel like there is with Jared and Ivanka and even some of these other people where you have this little wink, wink with reporters. Or, you know, I know her and she's, or even Hope Hicks, right? I know, you know, how she feels and, and look, she's not as bad as you say. I've just never heard anybody say that about Sarah Huckabee Sanders. And I kind of suspect she's just never said anything. No, and that's why her post White House career will be interesting, you know, I mean,

if she stays, if she goes into the, you know, the Trump 2020 campaign and we don't really see much for her except as a talking head, then that'll be one thing. And then if she comes out and kind of does the rounds, sells a book, does that whole thing, that'll be, you know, I guess we'll have something to learn. But until then, you're right, it's sort of, it's, she's, it's a big question mark. David, I'd like to make a hard transition from Sarah Sanders to OJ Simpson. If you were wondering, when is America getting more first person OJ content? Your ship has come in on Friday, the Twitter account at the real OJ 32. Put up a 24. Twitter video in which Simpson described his vision for a bustling social media account. Hey, Twitter world, this is yours truly. Now, coming soon to Twitter, you'll get to read all my thoughts and opinions on just about everything. Now, there's a lot of fake OJ accounts out there. So this one, at the real OJ 32, is the only official one. So this should be a lot of fun.

I got a little getting even to do. So God bless, take care. Now, I think we can immediately agree that getting even was maybe not the most felicitous phrase that O.J. could have come up with, especially considering as the LA Times notes that the video appeared two days after the 25th anniversary of the murderers of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Also, David, in OJ News, his attorney tells the L.A. Times, and I am not making up this quote. Like President Trump, Mr. Simpson will finally have a medium to clarify the many false and misleading statements and rumors surrounding him over the years and even. currently. So I was reading the New York Times this weekend. There was, I believe it was one of the people who is running the Sudan now. And they were using the term fake news.

And it was just one of those moments to kind of, oh, wow, look how far and wide the Trumpian idea of fake news has spread. Closer to home, it's OJ's Twitter account because he feels that like President Trump, there is a lot of stuff out there about him that he would, just like to get a grip on and really make sure that nobody's let astray.

Didn't the Goldman family just announced they were doing a podcast about OJ Simpson as well? I didn't see that, but sure. Yeah, that's true. There we go. Thank you, Jim. We're in a very OJ. We're in a very OJ point. I mean, I guess we had the TV show and everything else, but OJ is always going to be there in our lives, I feel like.

The L.E. Times also notes Simpson plans to use the account to engage with people on different topics, including fantasy football. So you can ask OJ how the media and the LAPD framed him for two murders and who to start a wide receiver on Sunday. Going to be great stuff. I hope the segment's called If I drafted him by OJ. Department of Depressing Media News. Did you see the latest, David, about Sports Illustrated? Back in May, they were bought by authentic brands, which wanted to use SI as a freestanding name to stick on stuff, maybe even medical clinics.

Meredith was going to continue to publish SI. Well, now thanks to a new deal reported by the New York Post, Keith, Jay Kelly. S.I. is going to be published by a company called the Maven. Now, if I didn't tell you anything more, would you feel confident about being published by a company called the Maven? Jim,

can we queue up WWE Maven theme song for this? Sure. It's not going to be recognizable to anyone except for me, but I'm just going to crack up when I hear it again. All right. Well, just going to play it every time we talk about SI now. Okay. If you want to feel worse,

a former Tronk executive name Ross Levinson is coming aboard as CEO of Sports Illustrated I just think and again I don't take any any glee any pleasure in this at all

this is not happy for me it's in fact the opposite but that a former Tronk executive is running Sports Illustrated I think this was an NPR

David Fulken flick wrote a big piece about Tronk and Levinson and his I was just reading this as we were coming on the air and his description

of Ross Levinson was let's see, okay, Tronk has placed its bets on its chief digital executive, Ross Levinson. He is perhaps best known as a consummate salesman. I'm not sure. I don't know how those words add up to being the most like underhanded compliment that you could give, but it's, yeah, I don't think you could read that without insinuating that the, or without feeling that the writer was snickering as he put those words down.

Yeah, it's a great piece, and I recommend anybody to read it. And please make sure you get down to the part where Levenson, is describing his ideas for Tronk and how to reinvent the company. This was the company, of course, it controlled a number of newspapers in the United States, all of which withered, withered under their stewardship. But one of his concepts for Tronk,

he called gravitas with scale. Gravitas with scale. Now, remember we had accomplished long form, white long form males on the podcast like last week, as just great empty phrases about journalism. Gravitas with scale. Think about that. So,

S.I. Come into S.I. Gravitas with scale. I'm really, I think that the, uh, the new Godzilla movie really missed out on the opportunity of having all their posters say gravitas with scales.

Yo. Oh. That's an excellent pun. Uh, annals of film criticism, David, there was a great Twitter thread last week that Matt Zyland brought to my attention by a guy named Sleepy Skunk.

Sleepy Skunk. Yeah. Did you see this? He described himself as a trailer editor here in L.A. he was writing about the new men in black international movie and how nearly every film critic in America used the same pun now if you remember in the men and black movies the agents use this glowing device called a neuralizer

to erase people's memories and keep all the alien stuff under wraps can I just give you a handful of neuralizer jokes that were made in the reviews please men and black international is so forgettable by the time you've left your seat you'll feel like you've been zapped by the neuralizer it may be a men and black film on paper, but the soul of the series is missing and the experience of watching it is mostly a letdown.

Has anyone got a neuralizer? I mean, and it's, this is honestly incredible. Men and Black International review, you'll pray for a neuralizer. No need for a neuralizer. You'll forget you've seen Men and Black International not long after walking out.

And on and on. And then I opened the Hollywood Reporter's Daily email this morning, and it said that after Men and Black made a paltry 28, million dollars domestically this weekend. Sony execs may want to break out the neuralizer to forget this one. So, congrats to the world's film critics.

It's, do we think the neuralizer has explicitly mentioned the name? People did not remember what that was called, surely. No, it's it. As you said it over and over again,

it never quite felt right when I heard it each time. It certainly does not, rise the level of, you know, lightsabers or even proton packs. Got some NBA finals clean up for you, David. Great. The finals ended Thursday with a Toronto Raptors win.

You may have known about that. I know when we talk about sports TV, we're only supposed to talk about TV ratings and how great Doris Burke is. I understand those are the only two approve topics. That is, we must talk about that when we're talking about basketball. But I just can't believe

we had this amazing moment in game six. Clay Thompson, the aforementioned, tears his ACL, we find out later, hobbles to the locker room, then realizes due to a kind of small thing with the NBA rules, it is worth his while to hobble out on a torn ACL and sink two free throws

before getting out of the game. And that moment was not on live television in the United States. Yeah. We were in a commercial. And, you know, I know, I know, understand this is how TV works and all that stuff. There has to be a button in the truck where the producer and the director can say there is a

player hobbling heroically out of the locker room to make two free throws. We just need to hit the button. We need to show this. Like this is a big deal. This is going to be big. I know what Mark Jackson says is important, but this is really important. And let's go to it. But somehow we did not see that on live television in the United States.

That is truly amazing to me. I did hear on Twitter people said they showed it in Canada. So another vote for Canada. By the way, things I'm tired of in this NBA postseason is all the Canada praise. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Are you, I think I tweeted this, but I really wanted ESPN to have an alternative feed where it was just kind of anti-Canada.

And I'm not talking about Trump style, you know, insults or anything. Just sort of, you know, just sort of a check, right? you know, I know we've, you know, we've said a lot about how these great fans and this whole great country and how great it is, but just, you know, just give me an alternative. I just want, I just want something to just, just a little tired of it. I also made a list of best or most interesting pieces of the postseason. Oh, good. Chris Haynes on Dame Lillard. Yeah. That ran after the fact, that was pretty amazing. The Kauai Leonard Boardman gets paid oral history in the athletic by Jason Jenks. Mm-hmm.

Ramona Shelburne on Friday after the finals end was pretty excellent. Yeah. And she was really good on how the lack of info about Kevin Durant's entry really screwed up, not just reporters, but the warriors who were kind of left hanging and sort of were in this weird phantom zone where they didn't know what was going on. I really like that. A tiny thing on the Ramona piece, we talk a lot, and I feel like I talk a lot on every podcast I've ever been on about about the problem with not knowing what you should

know. And one of the hardest things that we have to do as sports fans is to wrap our minds around something like this Kevin Durant injury where we don't know if we're, like the assumption is that like Kevin Durant's people are messing with us or the Warriors are messing with us. We don't know who's messing with us. And there's something just, there was remarkably clear-eyed and smart about the way that Ramona Shelburne wrote that piece just to let us know that there was a lot of mystery surrounding it in the quarters that are actually involved as well. I thought that was really, really great word. Nobody knew, including the other warriors, which is incredible. Speaking of the NBA, we've got the draft coming up on Thursday.

Does the ring or cover the NBA draft? I'll check. Jim? Yeah, that's true. Do we have something on the homepage? Yeah, that's true. I'm really hoping we get the rerun of Adrian Woznarowski basketball insider tipping the picks in advance.

If you are not a sports person, Woznarowski used to work at Yahoo. And it was part of his sort of shiv into the ribs of ESPN, and he would tip all the picks on Twitter, whereas ESPN, which was showing the draft on television, had to wait for them to be announced. So it became this kind of alternative feed. Last year, he now,

Woge now works for ESPN. And ESPN apparently said, please do not tip the picks and spoil the broadcast. So he did this thing where he didn't exactly say on Twitter what was going to happen, but he sort of mad-lived it up. So instead of saying Cleveland is taking Colin Sexton at number eight, he said Cleveland prefers Colin Sexton at number eight. Fantastic.

So I just warned, Do we have any other verbs we would like to give to Woge that he can use this year to pick but not pick the draft choices in advance? I don't think he needs to draw a direct correlation between the team and the player. At this point, right? If he just puts, it's like Madlibs. If he puts the right team, the right city and the right name in the same sentence, wouldn't you be much more entertained if it was like, you know, we're coming up to the top pick? and he just tweeted out, you know, Zion Williamson wrote a horse in New Orleans when he was

eight years old or something. And you're just like, okay, I know what that means. I know exactly where we're going with that. So it's like a real, it's a real buried bed. That sounds like a children's treasure hunt or something like that. Exactly. Listen, children's games are, take up maybe too much in my brain space right now. But, but yeah, as long, if the, if the Democrat Party is using guess who to pick their to pick how we're setting up the two debates then I think that's okay. That's time for David Schumacher guesses the strain pun headline. This is not the strain pun, but I thought you'd enjoy this. You know that L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti has taken a bunch of criticism from the L.A. Times

for the city's homelessness crisis. Garcetti issued a public letter in response that said we must respond to the homelessness crisis, that is. Like it's an earthquake, it's time for a seismic shift. in how we confront the crisis. So he went, he went full pun, a seismic, maybe when there's the homelessness crisis,

you don't, you don't try to sneak in that pun. All right, David, but this week's pun, sent in by Kyle Rather. It is from the February issue of the Georgia State Alumni magazine.

Now, if you've already seen this, David, let me know, and I'll pick something else. Yes, it is the cover story, the magazine profiled an alumni,

who has become a famous barbecue writer, a famous barbecue journalist, you might say. So my challenge to you is, what is the cover line in the Georgia State Alumni Magazine about a famous barbecue writer? Do I need to know what Georgia State's mascot is here? Nope, nope. This could be in any alumni magazine.

This could be at UT Arlington. It could be anything. It's not Georgia-based. There's no, peach in it. Nothing like that. I'm trying to make valedictorian and ribs go together

right here. Barbecue, brisket. What's a one-syllable way to express the word barbecue? One syllable. Q?

Q? Okay. Okay. And we're talking about this journalist, so why don't we work with Q? Q the... I know I should be getting this.

So close. Close. Q the press it? No. You're circling it. You can smell the barbecue from where you are. God, I can't get it. What is it? You got to tell me. You got to tell me. It is right on cue.

Oh, God. W-R-I-T-E. Right on Q. Right. The cover in the Georgia State University magazine. Thanks to Kyle for that one. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Producer Jim Cunningham. our researcher is Chris Almeida

more lukewarm takes on the press on Friday morning I'll talk to you then David See you later If you were wondering I'm not 70 plus years old This is a big deal I heard yeah

I know what Mark Jackson says is important But this is really important By the way Things I'm tired of The press box Oh God What if we just stopped And the whole thing

disappeared. Great. You can't come in the locker room anymore. I know. Think about that. I don't know how those words add up to being the most like underhanded compliment that you could give. It's not what I said and I know it's hard for you to understand. Yeah. Even short sentences, I guess, but please don't take my words out of context. We just don't care. And this is the way we've always done it. Yeah. And we just don't care. Did I leave anything out? No. I think that about it. That sums it up.