The Press Box - The Democrats Picked Their 2028 Primary Calendar. Which Contender Benefits? Plus: Our July Issue Grapples With Hulk Hogan.

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

Today on The Press Box, Bryan and David take a look at the shift in the 2028 Democratic primary calendar and discuss which contenders can win which states (02:58). They also talk about the rescheduled White House Correspondents' Dinner (38:12). Then they get to the July Issue (47:08). Bryan talks with David about his new book, 'Why Hulk Hogan Matters.' They talk about the ups and downs of Hogan’s time in the spotlight and how he was often a reflection of American culture. Plus, David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline! Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producers: Isaiah Blakely, Jon Jones, and Lucy Brick Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Wayfair, every style, every home. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox. Brian Curtis here, along with David Shoemaker. How are you, David? I'm good. How are you, man? I'm good. We're a day early today.

because we're going to talk about the July issue of the press box where we're going to dive into a new book by David Shoemaker called Why Hulk Hogan Matters. There it is right behind him. And in front of me. Which is out tomorrow from Harper Collins. David did an unbelievable job writing about this fascinating, gigantic, often troubling American character.

We're going to look at the story. the book and discuss... You did an excellent job just writing that sentence, so good job, man. We're going to look at the book. We're going to discuss Hulk Hogan's many incarnations from the 80s to the 90s to the 2000s. But first, David, some news. We have been talking about the 2028 Democratic contenders. And it's a little bit of a weird discussion to have because we didn't know the order of the primaries. Yeah. It's like saying, I think... think the University of Texas is going to win the national championship. Who are they playing?

We didn't know the order of any of these things. Well, the DNC got together. I like how you laughed when I said DNC. Do you read this piece of the Times by Shane Goldmacher and Reid Epstein? I opened it and started it and was like, I don't have the energy right now because I felt like I'd read all the things, all the pieces that led up to this New York Times piece, which I'm sure will be comprehensive and incisive. I had read so much on the subject.

I was like, I can save that for later today. It's a great piece, but I just want to highlight the headline here. Inside the phone throwing drama at the troubled, broke Democratic Party. It was a very rough headline. Sometimes when you see a headline, the editor comes again says, can we just juice that up a little bit, make sure people click on it? This was fully juiced. I mean, it's sort of like, like, it feels like it started off.

as a rule of three title and then the editor was like can we just not do rule of three like can we just do that can we can we get phone throwing into the head without without doing that format. I love it. The times is so conservative but we were happy to go with broke in the headline

oh yeah it's more and more side of aggressive as the title goes on right or more and more less and less formal as the title went on yeah it was definitely like It was definitely doing something, that headline. When the DNC was not throwing phones or throwing away all their money,

they were picking the order of the 2028 primaries. This is the Rules and Bylaws Committee. The full DNC has to approve all this. But David, what we have is a schedule. Six weeks in 28, one primary each week, and then Super Tuesday. And if that sounds like made for television or made for podcasting, It kind of is. It's content.

It's a rollout of the Democrats. Yeah. And whomever will be the eventual Democratic nominee. So you may to go through the schedule here and we'll pick out what stands out to you. Yeah. First in the batting order. South Carolina. Hell yeah.

Now, South Carolina, if you remember back to 2020, was actually fourth. Yeah. But. Traditionally was second. Is that right? Or what was the, it's traditional order? It was third?

I think it was fourth. Well, Nevada, maybe Nevada jumped ahead of it at some point. It jumped it. That's what it was, yeah. It was fourth in 2020. And then guess what happened? South Carolina gave the Democratic nomination

of Joe Biden. And Joe Biden said, I like South Carolina. I like the taste of Democratic voters down there. So he moved it to number one in the order in 2024, primaries that we mostly ignored

because Biden was still the nominee. So when the D&C met, it became not just where should South Carolina be in the order, but are we actually going to demote the state? They didn't. South Carolina is number one. Well, South Carolina has, you know, traditionally has the highest percentage of black voters and black voters, particularly black women, are such a huge important constituency to

Democrats that it quickly becomes a sort of interesting race argument if there's any conversation about demoting it, right? It's just like Jim Clyburn's out here saying you don't care about black people and that could very well be the B, you know, that's a valid interpretation, you know, like, so it's, so demoting it just becomes incredibly messy, despite the fact that like South Carolina separate from any sort of race conversation is like such a dependably Republican state. It's a, anyway, it said it's a decision that I'm sure, Not everybody agrees with. Number two is Nevada.

Number three, our old friend, New Hampshire, from every presidential primary cycle of our lifetimes. Yeah, in Iowa. Was Iowa still up there? Iowa has been completely erased from this. Really? Yeah. Well, you know why?

Because I'll take you back to 2020, and I only remember this because you and I were doing a podcast together. Refresh me. The Iowa caucuses were the day after the Super Bowl. Oh, yeah. And I was in Miami. I had gone to the game. The Chiefs beat the 49ers.

I was supposed to have breakfast with Kevin Clark. And Kevin wrote himself sick that night and was like, dude, I just can't. I feel terrible. I can't come to breakfast. So I remember hanging out in my hotel room. And then that night, you and I were like, all right, as soon as we have a winner, we are going to podcast. And then the results were just a complete cock up.

Oh, yeah. Could not count the votes and could not process. anything and all of a sudden they just and then at that point the democrats said okay we're done with iowa can the democrats that have already spent time in iowa like do they can they still write off their trips there like like is that is hanging out is like you know canvary just doing a little little retail politicking in iowa for like pete buddha judge is he able to like write to get get is that okay it's a business expense i just i assume that i would be somewhere in the order um yeah that's it i so i totally

I totally missed that story, that they were out, which is my own idiocy. But, yeah, I mean, that's fine. I think Nevada, you're right, it was not a traditional primary state, you know, big primary state. I think it was like the second round or whatever. So good move by them, I guess, to become, to get that national relevance. Listen, having everybody a week apart in the modern media ecosystem is, I think, a smart way to do it.

if you're actually invested in not in having different voices giving a fair shake, because the day after South Carolina, we're going to be talking about the next primary, right? I mean, it's like everyone is the conversation going to go right to the next. I do think that there's like a really significant, obviously. I laugh at the D&C. Obviously, there's some factional warfare going on in the party writ large, the DSA and everybody's read all these pieces.

Listen to all these podcasts already. You know, South Carolina has been incredibly, incredibly consistent. And the South Carolina Democrats have been, you know, real party loyalists. I don't know, I don't know where this is going to go. But it wouldn't shock me if some of these primaries really surprised us, just because any feeling that the DNC is putting their thumb on the scales is going to really not be, is not going to get a good response from a lot of voters that may not even be counted as like dependable primary voters yet. It's going to be a really interesting thing

to watch. That is the real X factor in all of democratic politics, but I think by the time we get to the presidential race, it'll certainly be one there too. It's just the anger at the establishment and how does that manifest itself? Because it doesn't necessarily mean that you're picking an anti-establishment candidate. But how does that get channeled? And if you are a candidate that's seen as a member of the establishment, right, or more establishment-friendly, adjacent, how do you fend that off?

Yeah. We do. And we could talk about that for basically all these people, for Kamala Harris, for Josh Shapiro, Gavin Newsom. I can't believe Kamala Harris is, like, actually positioning herself for another run. I can't believe she's actually going to do it either. But she didn't run for governor, and she sure seems like she's interested in running for president.

No, I mean, she definitely seems interested. I just can't believe it. What is the idea? Let me just like recede into the background for four years and then reemerge as a more thoughtful person. It's just like, it just seemed crazy. It's just a crazy idea. Like I understand the thought process is what other politicians have done.

But if you want to be... Yeah, I mean, you want, yeah, exactly. I mean, a lot of politicians have thought, I'm just going to be quiet and let my opponent, you know, ruin themselves or whatever. But, dude, no, the number one, like, the most beneficial thing you could be doing for your party in for America over the past two years is being a vocal opponent of Donald Trump. Being at the barricades. Yeah. Even though that's not who she is, I get it.

But, like, still, like, if you can't rise to the occasion, then what, then I don't know. I mean, you're already, like, a historical sort of also ran. You just like stepped into the spotlight when the other dude, you know, failed out of the race. And now you're just going to continue to seem like someone who's like on vacation until the race is halfway done. I don't know. It just seems so like, why would you vote for her? Why is stability and normalcy? This is not Joe Biden when he won.

We're not interested in normalcy anymore. We're not interested in like evening things out. You're like so many. We're interested in actual change that might actually, if we don't need someone else to get elected and then. and not fix everything that was broken during the Trump administration under the guise of national unity. We need to fucking fix this stuff, you know?

I've asked variations of this question. Almost every politician's been on this podcast. Like, what does post-Trump politics look like? And what is normal now? What goes back to being the same? Biden tried that, as you pointed out. It didn't work. Well, yes.

I just think, and I said this before, but the most important thing for the party, the DNC or the party at largest, to not make it look like the DNC is pulling strings. Putting South Carolina first, not a great look, but okay. Putting South Carolina first in the same week that, like, everybody just comes out, just, you know, comes out like in lockstep support of Haley Stevens against Adela Seed in Minnesota. it's bonkers. Like literally, I know that these algorithms are tailored to your personal taste or whatever. Literally every response to every Haley Stevens endorsement is like, here they just, okay, I guess they got their check from the home office.

You know, like every, or everybody's just so scared of change that they'll line up behind the lesser candidate, whatever. Dude, if she wins, our for you page is just going to explode. And I'm the same way. I'm just like, am I just being fed people that are angry at Haley Stevens on Twitter? or is everybody angry at Haley Stevens on Twitter? I don't think we're getting the worst of it because I see lots of references to people making personal insults at her, but I never see the insults, right?

So maybe that's a PS, but I feel like there's much worse stuff out there than I'm not getting. She really got a good news cycle from TMZ DC. Yeah. Do you see, I think it was Jacob Wasserman went up and talked to her about the video that went viral of her sounding very Michigan-y, and she kind of leaned it into it in the video.

Everybody's like, I don't know, Haley Stevens is growing on me. That was the, those are the few positive tweets I've seen about her in the last. There were, there worked about 20 people tweets that said, I don't know, I don't know, Haley Stevens is growing on me. And that is now supposed evidence of, you know, coordination behind the scenes. I don't believe it is for the record. But I also think that, like, she's just such an inferior candidate. I mean, it's just as a politician.

As a politician. And personally, but for what she stands for. But it's just like the, I don't know, maybe I'm blinded. Maybe I'm just blindered by, you know, like my dreams of the revolution or whatever. I'm laughing because it obviously, that's not me if you know me. But like, like, it's just, it's, you get the, I mean, I really, it. It really seems like when people say the only reason that anybody be lining up for her is racism. And it kind of feels true.

Like, I don't know what else it would. I mean, listen, it's not just that. but the dissent from El-Sayed is just mind-boggling. Like, I just don't know. I just don't get it. I just don't get it. But also there's a big media thing, too, and this is a media podcast. A lot of people have raised this, and I think we should continue to do it.

It's like every Democrat that has ever sniffed around socialism has to answer for, like, the worst excesses of the dictionary definition of such. and yet like literally 50% of Republican congressmen are crazier and do crazier things on a day-to-day basis and nobody's got to answer for that. Barely even the politicians. And by the way, Donald Trump is like the most socialist president we've ever had. You know, anyway. I do wonder with Stevens if all politics has now become, I don't know anybody who voted for blank, we're like, how could Haley Stevens win? you're absolutely right see also how could Donald Trump win how could you know listen man there's a huge

race being a small factor in it but there's a huge component of like like people are they vote for the thing that feels comfortable right the same reason you would vote for a politician with the same last name as the one you voted for last time even if they're not related you know people this is like it happens time and time again yeah I mean I can imagine a lot of people I know voting for heyle see by the way heyle see she gets a bad rap don't get me wrong like I think all the personality stuff, all the whatever. She is sort of charming. Like, I think she seems like she really cares.

I just think her politics are kind of bad. And especially in this election cycle, it's not her. It's just galling to think that, like, when the left is clearly embracing a more modern, maybe slightly leftier version of politics, that, like, that the party is just, like, covering their eyes. at it. You know, it's pretending that doesn't exist. How can we prohibit that? How can we end this conversation? They're doing the worst, they're doing it the worst way possible because they're going to energize a whole new section of the voter, of the vote, you know, the electorate that, that is going to be pissed off. And they're going to come out, especially in primaries, and show

that. That's where 2028 becomes so fascinating. I mean, the real questions for me about 2028. Someone just had a big AOC piece yesterday, right, or today. But, and used her as the example of Democrat voters wanting more someone who's willing to fight, you know, whatever? I think my biggest question is like is AOC and a co-no, is she going to be too

mainstream by then to fill that role? Which he's done a really good job of not becoming mainstream. But that's got to be part of the calculus here. Whoever gets that spot, I mean, the right politician in that spot could change the world, you know? That means a problem.

probably won't happen. South Carolina number one, Nevada number two, New Hampshire number three. Now here's where things get really different. Number four in the Democratic primary order is New Mexico. This made me so happy having spent half my childhood in Albuquerque. Miranda family is it will be out voting in force in that primary. Could I do some newspaper facts here for all? all the newspaper writers who are about to parachute into Albuquerque and Santa Fe and Los

Cruces and points in between. Please. New Mexico has just over two million residents in that gigantic state. Two million. That's crazy. Brooklyn has 2.6 million risks. Yeah. In a space smaller than Albuquerque, probably.

There's your comma phrase, if you're a newspaper writer. New Mexico, which has fewer residents in Brooklyn. Who's the most famous living New Mexico citizen? Oh, yeah, because we lost Cormat McCarthy. Yeah. Or a person born in New Mexico. Demi Moore? It's from Roswell.

Okay, that's fine. That's good. Go to me more? Here's a question. Just for the sake of primary, who's the most famous South Carolinian who could run for Darius Rucker as a Democrat? You're really, David's really feeling, feeling some anti-establishment fever here.

Can we get Darius Rucker in here? Who else? I'm a Google right now. Chris Rock, Aziz and sorry about him, South Carolina, Viola Davis. That's a pretty good line. But Darius Rucker, if he decided to do politics for 15 minutes, like, I'm just going to, all I care about it, I'm just in South Carolina. If you have a camera, you can find me.

I'm just going to be at the restaurant here. At the restaurant. You could have win the South Carolina primary, right? And if he wins the South Carolina primary, doesn't he just have a pretty straight path to the nomination? I don't know what to do with that hypothetical. I really don't. It just seems you're putting so much stock in South Carolina.

It's like, let's just, whatever, let's just find a South Carolinian. I may have told you this before. One of my favorite memories of going to New Mexico as a kid was my grandparents got New Mexico magazine as grandparents are wont to do. And there was a column at the back of it that was just devoted to people who, from New Mexico sharing stories about meeting

other people who didn't know New Mexico was a state? Didn't know it existed? Didn't know it existed. The column was

called one of our 50 is missing. And it was kind of the penthouse forum of New Mexicans who were frustrated by the anonymity

of their state and they would write in and tell these stories. So I'd go through this stack and I'd flip through like, oh, look at the funny story about someone

who doesn't know that New Mexico was a state. That's great. Anyway, welcome to the first floor. By the way, Demi Lovato, Neil Patrick Harris, and Freddie Prince Jr.,

all New Mexico-born and all wonderful presidential candidate. There we go. Freddie Prince Jr. feels like a politician, doesn't he? Doesn't he feel like he could be a successful politician? He does. He feels like he had played a politician in a movie

if he'd really stuck with the acting thing slightly longer than he did. New Mexico's four. Michigan is fifth. This is where the heavy weights began, which is to say states that are really big and expensive. And you just talked about the Democratic. primary there. And then six is Virginia. So that's the list. South Carolina, Nevada, New Hampshire,

New Mexico, Michigan, and then Virginia. Man, if you start plotting out who's going to win those, you get like a big conversation with every state. You mentioned South Carolina. I've seen a lot of very reductive political analysis saying, okay, half the primary electorate in South Carolina is black, therefore black candidates have a better chance to win there maybe dreamy john ossoff is also in the state next door andy bashear is going to run for president we haven't talked about him in a while i talk about i talk about any bashear almost every day um you do uh in in the mirror with other people a lot of times it's in the mirror this with my my life-size stuffed annie bashear doll that i keep over off camera uh i like andy bashear uh leaning a little bit too

hard into this sort of technocrat, like, middle of the road position now that he's trying to run for president. I just think that's bad calculus. That's bad in math for anyone that's doing that. John Ossoff might be the best guy who you can read into him exactly what you want him to be. That's good for a presidential candidate. Yeah. And he's also, I mean, incredibly, he's incredibly good speaker and politician. Oh, speaking of somebody the algorithm keeps serving up to you.

John Ossif clips Every weekend It's kind of pretty recently for me I haven't Googled his name a single time But he's now he's coming up more and more And he could definitely get South Carolina The problem is South Carolina will also go South Carolina will vote for Kamala Harris

Not because she's black But because she's familiar Because they fought for her last time Because like that she's so meaningful I mean it's a Joe Biden state I think the problem with South Carolina Is not the electorate It's the perception that it's that it's that

sort of gimmicks the results, right? We're going to go to a very specific state that's predictable or knowable in a very certain, in some way, instead of just throwing open the ballot box to all the dims in the country, which is not a real thing. I'm just saying it doesn't seem like, it seems like, like, again, you're putting your thumb on the scale a little bit. See, that's interesting too, because we've seen candidates before say, I'm going to lose the first state and I'm going to lose the second state and maybe

even lose the third state, and then I'm going to start winning all the states. And with the exception of Joe Biden in 2020, excuse me, in 2020, that's almost never happened. You have to win early. Yes. Well, people start dropping out. People stop getting money, you know? It's just like one donor disappears from a lot of these primary campaigns and the campaign's over. Part of it is that, yeah, part of it is money.

But part of it's, too, just like the media and voters tolerance, right? You just lose interest and, okay, you haven't won anything. Let's move on and let's start rallying around. There's always that. let's rally around a winner, let's not extend this. But I think that there's a lot of value in hanging around that maybe more now than there, I mean, like, look how long like Andrew Yang hung around and like that was, people took him more and more seriously as the months wore on.

You know, I mean, it's like, I mean, not to people take him super seriously as a candidate now, but I'm just saying persistence pays off, you know, you don't have to. And in this day and age, you don't have to disappear. I'm in like HD camera right now and like, you know, a mic that costs less than $100 of the camera was free. I mean, like, I'm, I could be running for president. Like, what do you have, all you have to do is have a Zoom window open, you know? Like, it's not like you have to travel around a bunch.

David will not be disappearing. No. Anytime soon. No, I agree. And I think when you have a rollout like this, we have six different primaries. They're in different parts of the country. There are states like New Mexico and New Hampshire, they're going to be relatively, and even Nevada, I think, in South Carolina, it'll be relatively, you know, they're

will not be cost prohibitive to compete in. Mm-hmm. It'd be interesting to see how long it goes. And also, you know, when we talk about like Gavin Newsom, to mention his name again, where's Gavin Newsom competing? Nevada? Maybe. Well, when Biden came from behind, he turned the corner in South Carolina, right?

And I think that's the vibe. That's what gives people the bad vibes about South Carolina, that it's an establishment state. Not that there's not the race thing, right? It's a state that will vote for Joe Biden, that will save Joe Biden's ass. They gave us Joe Biden. Yeah. And listen, man, Joe Biden might have been the best option in that cycle.

Like, he won, like, whatever, you know? Like, but that's not where this party is pointed or where it should be pointed right now. Like, protecting the status quo, you know, especially when it's not just about getting the White House, man. And it's about, like, the national, it's not about getting, like, all these senators have to get reelected. It was a very small block, but, like, the national opinion polls on Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. I mean, they're just going down and down in town, right? Like, we don't want to be, and no one wants to be seen as an establishment party, or in a part of the establishment of the party.

But yeah, but I do think that doing it week by week and knowing that it's six back-to-back primaries will keep the, we'll make it harder, easier for people to stay in, harder for people to make calls for other people to drop out. So it'd be interesting to see where it goes. And then there's Super Tuesday, which is Super Tuesday copyrighted, copyrighted? Is it like the final four where like it's officially like the Democrats and Republicans co-own this thing or something? Yeah, I wouldn't know who owned it if it was copyrighted. If not, can we get a better name?

Do the Dems just get a better name for Super Tuesday? Just be like... A rebranded Super Tuesday? Yeah. it seem a little bit more like young and vital, you know, just like a... Instagram Tuesday. Yeah, it's online Tuesday. Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, really, it's got, it's Taco Tuesday and nothing else. You're always running second on Tuesdays to the tacos. Taco's a Trump thing, you know? Trump always chickens out. So it might work for a Democratic rebranding. Just call it Taco Tuesday. Give everybody a taco at the poll and, you know, just make it, at least people are well-fed. Nevada

Tends to be was Bernie did very well in Nevada So if you read You know columns by Peter Hamby and Puck and others They say is Would that be an AOC type of state? You know whoever is carrying the Bernie mantle I don't know I mean listen I just don't know

I don't know the state of Nevada that well It's a hair you read state You know it's like it really that felt like the most like In some ways politically stable state under his guidance or it's just like we all do it but perry reed tells us to do you know and it just sort of works out obviously there's a huge union presence there yes um because of los vegas workers and stuff like that and that i think goes a lot to bernie i don't know if a oc carries that same mantle on i don't i don't know i don't know how the fucking moonies vote like like a huge percentage of

unification church members live there uh i i just don't know i don't know i don't know it'll be an interesting one. So, yeah, I mean, certainly if AOC's running, it's hard to imagine her not being the most, the leftmost candidate in terms of workers' rights and stuff, but I don't think she'll be the only one appealing to the unions in a very, you know, kitchen table economic sort of way. New Hampshire, Mayor Pete did well there in 2020. He's mystifying to me. Like, not in a bad way.

I just like, I'm just like, like, his next. next year is going to be one of the most intriguing to watch. Fascinating. Mark Kelly feels like the kind of candidate that won New Hampshire primaries of your. I throw his name out there. Mark Kelly is really, I mean, I like Mark Kelly. He's running this very, like, frontrunner campaign despite not being a frontrunner anywhere, which I think is smart.

Like he is a, you know, a bald white man of a certain age, just sort of embrace, embrace the authority that comes with that. Who was a fighter pilot? It was a fighter pilot and an astronaut and a senator and, like, you know. You're going to be a bald white man of a certain age, at least, you know. Yeah. I think he's kind of doing it all right so far. So it'll be right.

I don't know, you know, he could be, he could be the frontrunner coming out of South Carolina. Like you said, he could be a main guy too. He could be out of the race, like, faster than West Clark, you know? Like, you just don't know. To throw out a name. Well, military guy who seemed sort of, you know. In that lane. Yeah.

I wrote down Josh Shapiro for New Hampshire, too. He's another one. It's like, where's Josh Shapiro going to win? And where is he going to win early if he runs for president? That's a good question. I mean, but I think there's a little bit of, I like Ossoff better than Shapiro, but I don't, I think that they're sort of in the same, like, group of white guys who we've been talking about being president for so long that they'll seem like the establishment by the time we get there.

Shapiro more so, just because I think he's had a longer. Oh, for sure. He's been whispered about for longer than Assov. But just Democrats who come from red or purple states, you know, I'm not saying the establishment as an insult like I was earlier. I just mean they'll just... Like I was earlier. Now I've just switched to a more neutral description of the establishment.

I just feel like they'll be so... I feel like what I'm trying to say is I think Shapiro could kind of win any of these states that we're talking about. Or he may not, but I think that like he's got to go in. trying to win every state. Yeah, the fire burns inside David, but not for the entire segment. Cools off after a while. New Mexico, also Mark Kelly next door in Arizona.

Also, Ruben Gallego, is Ruben Gallego going to run for president? He'd be an interesting candidate in New Mexico. He's an incredibly, is he the last, like, loudmouth standing? Is Gavin a loudmouth? I wouldn't, well, maybe I'm just being sizes, but I wouldn't say he's a little. But yeah, no, he counts as a loudmouth.

I think a lot of people want to be loud mouse. And I think they style themselves to get at what you're talking about with that kind of insurgent energy. Doesn't he have some shit though? Doesn't Ruben Giego? We could do a whole segment on that too. Okay. Because that's interesting. I know Republicans think they have a lot of dirt on him.

But anyway. Michigan then, by the way, Mayor Pete lives in Michigan now in Traverse City. Elizabeth Slotkin, who was just on the press box last week. by the way, go back and listen to her answer when I asked her about Chuck Schumer to get the vibes David's talking about with the establishment and the way she answered that question was really interesting. Speaking of Loudmouths, is J.B. Prisker on the list? He's in the Michigan column for me too, and he's another one where I'm wondering, where

is he going to win early? Like, what's, you know, he might, maybe he plays in New Hampshire. Sure. But, you know, South Carolina, New Hampshire. What works for him is that he has an appeal, he has a crossover appeal, even though his politics are rather left word. He, you know, he has that, he has the sort of Chris Christie vibe too, you know? Like, it's just a little like, I'm telling the truth.

What are you trying to say, David? No, nothing. I'm just like, he speaks truth to power. That's his gimmick, you know, he's, I'm going to say the obvious thing that for some reason no one's willing to say. I find him to be a very intriguing candidate. I do. But then he's another one where it's like, what's the path here?

Now that we know what the path is. Well, I think a lot like Chris Christie, it's like, and like, I mean, almost similar to Shapiro, because he's sort of, but like Chris Christie, you're sort of a national figure already. And you could very well seem like the front runner for five minutes,

but you get two primaries tops. Like if you're not polling by the second primary, people are just going to take your name off the list. I think New Hampshire is the answer for him. Yeah. But again, that's the third, but that's the third primary. Yeah, no, I think maybe you get three in this new thing.

Okay, fine. But like, you have a very short, We're going to have a very short attention span for all these guys who were acting like frontrunners. Like, I've just said about five of them, you know? Like, it's like you just, your campaign is immediately proven to be a lie if you lose two primaries, you know, so. We'll see. After that, we get to Virginia, which at that point, you know, gravity may take over. It's usually a gravity-based election, but is it, or when you, when we're talking about Virginia voters, we're talking about D.C. voters, right?

I mean, it's like the, it is. Virginia Democrats, sure. I mean, that's like the bulk of the, I mean, that's where the bulk of votes are going to come from, right? It's an interesting state. Again, I just don't know sixth in the order. Are you voting like Virginia? Are you voting like Virginia voters who've watched five primaries happen in five weeks?

I think the latter. And have definitive ideas about who's going to win, who's the frontrunner. We need to wrap this up. We've got to wrap this up. I can't wait for people to start saying that. Well, you would think, too, that it would be, yeah, you got to wrap this up. And also, like, do people or even need the campaign in Virginia? Haven't we just made up our minds already?

But, of course, if somebody didn't campaign, that would be the whole story. You know, like, why don't you care about Virginia? Oh, you got to show you care. But there will be some strategic skipping, especially early. If you don't think you play in South Carolina, you just go to Nevada. I can see that for South Carolina. I think it's an error. I don't think that's, I don't think you can play that in 2028, like whatever, but like,

2027, right? Well, they'll be there in 2027. Yeah. I don't think you can play that in this same age, but it might work for South Carolina in the sense of you could just be like, we haven't decided if we're running yet. You know, like you can play that lie card.

But I think of having all these week to week back to back, it would be so conspicuous if somebody did one, two, and not three, and then back for four. Yeah. Like, it would just go down as a loss for them. And maybe you compete there, but not, you don't try that hard, right? And you're spending your money else.

Sure. you're right, then not try that hard as the killer move because you can be like, hey, I didn't try. Like, of course I didn't do well. I wasn't even trying, you know, but I got 15% and I didn't try, I didn't lift a finger, you know? But yeah, I think it's harder for people to strategically skip stuff.

I just think everybody's in on it now. Like, it's not when literally every story is like so forthright and everybody who's going to vote knows this stuff. It's just what, like why the facade? You just seem like somebody who's willing to lie, or mislead at least. campaign reporters our friends the campaign reporters

this feels like a win in a lot of ways I was out so no more pizza ranch a chain I've read so much about but have never gotten within 9,000 feet of that's out hey but you get to go to Vegas

you get to go to Nevada you get to go to New Mexico and eat green and red chili New Hampshire's still there. Michigan. It's a fun trip, an interesting trip. Maybe you're hanging in there to Virginia. I think it's a good calendar for the campaign reporter. I'm sure I'll hear from some. By the way, I was getting my car, I was at the getting my oil change the other day, and I was right across the street from a place called Pizza Walla that I think I sort of can't play. I was like,

I've heard of that before. And I Googled it, and it was weirdly the only location. So good job branding pizza wall of wherever New Jersey that, like, looks. like a major national chain even though there's like one and it's like maybe fake. I don't really even know. Yeah, pizza ranch it is a good eating one. The New Mexico, I mean,

the New Mexico, which my experience is negligible, but the green chilies I've had and the green chilies are just decadent. Green chili, get some carne de Vada. When you, when you, when you, when you, what you've described to is just like every meal is just like, is just covered in

the green chili? Like, it's the... Yes, the food is a chili delivery vehicle. Yeah, it's just so good. Just so good. But yeah, it's good for the... Is it a different schedule? I mean, I know it's literally a different schedule.

But does it change with the work-life balance for the reporters at all? Are they being six weeks back to back? Or are they still on the road the whole time anyway? I think mostly the latter, but I will be interested to see how long this primary really goes. Because if you're assigned to... a candidate who's not around four primaries in either you get reassigned or you're just kind of off the road

now we don't need you anymore there's a lot of things we need to talk about the life of the campaign reporter a little bit more as we get yeah we'll do it because by the way the jockeying will start immediately which candidates you get assigned to it's an interesting choice and if you're a reporter right now who's thinking

which candidate should I pick do you get first dibs should we have a draft this is the ringer podcast network the political reporter draft. Yeah. Do we need to get input from these people though,

right? Or somehow? Are you and I doing it? From the writers? Yeah. I mean, yeah, we could get input. Should I get them to put them in order? Yeah.

I mean, is finding out the truth more fun than us doing it? Maybe not. No, no, I think probably. This is the ringer. Be can do both. I don't know. I don't know how to answer that.

Can we get Van back? I mean, just like, get the whole team back together? Yeah. Get the whole, not back together. haven't done that, but get Joel and whoever has an opinion on it and really do like a draft. You basically only get like two picks each.

I'm very interested in this question. We're going to figure out how to do this. The only other thing I had for you before we get to the July issue, we had the White House Correspondence dinner on Friday night. Dear God. Dude, here's the thing. Often people will come to me and just be like,

hey, why don't you do Press Box Thursdays anymore? I'd be like, it's been a long time, dude. Also, how can, like, Joel is the best. So everything worked out so well. But sometimes things will come up on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, and I'm like, I'm so glad I don't have to talk about this on a podcast. I said that to myself about the correspondence dinner, not realizing that it was on my...

That I was on the clock. Oh, man, it's weird to do only half of a podcast because this is the way your mind works. That's where I was going with that whole thing. Jesus Christ. What do you want to talk about? I don't have much to talk about, but just the idea that you gave Donald Trump

an open microphone and let him insult Caitlin Collins. And I know the jokes bombed. I know he looked dumb and bad doing it. But the fact that you threw a dinner and you did that is so embarrassing. Well, he was, he's just, he won in another one of his, like, addled tweet rampages yesterday. And I think one of the first one or one of the first ones, was a Caitlin Collins

It was a AI photo of Caitlin I don't even know I don't even know But now he's hung up on the Caitlin Collins thing Not because of her He's more, But he's somehow more mad at her Because other people are like

That was dumb of you Like why did you do that? Because it bombed There's nothing worse for Trump than bombing I mean that might have been the lowest day Of his presidency Like just this You see just the

Whoever wrote those jokes It was fired Do you think they got the writing staff of Gutfeld to write that stuff? It was just it was one of those things where it's like, this has the rhythm of a joke but it's not funny at all? Sure, no, no, no.

I mean, Gutfeld, the writing staff of Gutfeld might be the answer because that's how I feel about the lot of humor on that show and that's where they would go or they get like the staff of the Babylon B, or it's like, or it's like Stephen Miller wrote it all one night and everyone's just like, you don't understand. Stephen Miller's really funny if you know him. Yeah, that's right. In person, he's really funny. Comes off

a little strong on Twitter, but in person he's really fun. Also, the way that Trump is reading this, I'm not putting chat GPT out of the running either. Like, some of it was like they were discernibly jokes, but like not a joke that any human being would write. You know, like, it's very strange. I don't know. Watching him just breakdown is just, was just very difficult to watch. Like, I didn't even relish in it. It was very, very hard to watch.

It was just awkward as hell, man. And, but I just, I, and they kept cutting reporters. who were just visibly, like, detached from whatever it was going on. And then there were right, the people writing articles about the dinner that were referencing the fact that the reporters were just staring into space or like whatever. Like, it was just amazing. Yes. You feel like you feel like you could see everybody typing out what a dismal performance it was.

But I saw this note from Max Taney at 740 Day where he said that the CNN staff was livid about the comments the president made about Caitlin Collins. I'm sorry. Did you hear the comments he made about Caitlin Collins in the oval office? when she was standing there. Yeah. And now you're like, well, this is a bridge too far. I'm sorry.

He's been saying this the whole time. He's been treating the press like this the whole time and not just making comments about them, but suing them. Yeah. Kaking them out of the White House and the Pentagon in other places. Yeah, this is the bridge too far. This is the bridge too far. And I don't admit that that moment where Wolf Blitzer was handing out the award to the Wall

Street Journal people who reported on the Jeffrey Epstein birthday book. And, you know, Trump's going there. he suited for 20 million. I just get a little bit of a shrug there. Like that moment was kind of great. But then you just give Trump an open mic, and it's like, well, we just undid everything that was happening here tonight.

Like, we were not forcing the president to watch people get journalism awards, including for reporting on the president. But we just give them, this just thing to just sit here and insult everybody. Like, okay, what's the point of that? I was so shocked. I guess it's important that they had it

after what happened at the first, that the first one? Sure. But why couldn't you just be like, let's just do something else. Do something smaller because now it's the rebooking and like whatever else.

It shouldn't have been, it shouldn't have been the, it shouldn't have been the first time. Listen, I agree. Nobody needs to see that. Wait, it wasn't Trump. Didn't Trump have a magician scheduled for this or something?

O's the mentalist. Oh, the O's that he, did he do it? I just watched the Trump stuff. I didn't watch the O's. I was really hoping for, I didn't watch it either. That's why I'm wondering if he was there. O's the mentalist.

Is he one of those, like, computer mentalists, too? Does he'll do it? Doesn't he do it, like, over Zoom? His mentalism? I think O's is pretty available because he's been, like, college game day and everything else. I'm not sure. I'm not sure we've turned down O's.

Yes, O's was performing at the rescheduled White House Correspondence. I will not be watching his set. Thank you very much. All right, David, I always found it awkward watching the Masters over on CBS when Jim Nance would throw it to himself. in Butler Cabin. He'd be doing some narration about the winner, and then here's me still talking.

We're about to do that right here. David and I got together in New York. We talked about his new book. We talked about the man, the myth, the good, the bad, the ugly of one Hulk Hogan. Let's throw it to ourselves. All right, it's time for another edition of David Shoemaker guesses,

the strain pun headline. Yeah. Our last headline about Dion Sanders feeling good about this year's Colorado Buffs. This is a very good one. Go on. It was Optimist Prime. Optimist Prime. Today's headline comes to us from Matt Felling. It's from Maine's Mid Coast Villager.

Okay. This is the paper that Alex Sites Wald works for. Uh-huh. He was a political reporter at NBC News. He moved to Maine, take care of his mom, I believe. Yeah. And then all of a sudden he said, you know what? Politics is not that fun to cover anymore.

I'd like to take a shot at figuring out how to make local news work. So he went from politics to this news outlet in Maine. Well, to quote the great Yaakov Smirnoff, sometimes politics go looking for you. And Maine turned into one of the messiest and most interesting political stories of 2026. This is a long way of David of saying that the Democrats picked Troy Jackson as their Senate nominee to replace Grand Platner. I want you to think of recent popular movies, as you ponder,

what was the Mid Coast Villagers strained pun headline? What was the subject just as a Grand Platiners? I mean, what's the guy? Troy Jackson replacing Grand Platiner on the ballot. Oh. Current movies? Current movies. Current films.

Troy? So it's got to be the fall or the, the call, of Troy the it was a long journey for those Democrats in Maine before the Odyssey yeah yeah so well how does that even work together

the Odyssey well this is really a pun but but it's why did I just read this to you and we'll just appreciate it okay after an Odyssey of a primary Democrats get to Troy yeah good that's good pretty good he's David Shoemaker

I'm Brian Curtis pretty excited by Isaiah Blakely and John Jones. Coming up on the press box, New York month continues, David. I'll be down in that studio tomorrow morning, interviewing another eminence from New York media. You can find out who that is on our Instagram page. Speaking of Instagram pages at Pressbox Ringer, you can see David Shoemaker's cover of the July issue, which doubles as an ad for David Shoemaker's book, which is out right now. I did not do this cover. It's absolutely good. It looks really good. Yeah, it looks good on the table. When you showed it to me, I was very, very impressed. Shoemaker quality. That book is out, why Hulk Hogan Matter. So please buy that from all fine bookstores online or in person.

Yeah. Brexbox Ringer at Gmail, if you need to get in touch with us. David, happy flogging. That does mean selling, right? Isn't that the secondary definition of it? I don't think it's derogatory or anything. Happy flogging. I will see you next week.

with more lukewarm takes about the media. See that, Dave. See you later, Brian. All right, welcome to the July issue. I'm joined in studio by the one, the only David Shoemaker. It's a long time getting here. It feels like a tag team match in wrestling

where one of the tag team members is getting beaten up and they're just crawling across the ring waiting to make the tag. The hot tag, yeah. In this case, it's been like three or four years since you and I've done a podcast together. I can't even remember.

We've been doing a podcast for a decade together. We probably have done fewer than 10% of them in person. You used to drive to the L.A. office all the time when I was living in L.A. and I was always in the office. So we would do them there together. I think we did a couple of them via Zoom when it was not pot. Maybe this time a year. Maybe you were out of town.

And it was totally impossible. Like you would talk and I would have to kind of wait for 10 seconds and then I would talk, you know. And I was remember complaining. It's like, this works because Brian and I are old friends, but I've got to be able to see his face. Like, I can't just like, listen. And then, of course, the pandemic happens. And quickly the world learns how to do everything remotely. You know, it used to be used to have to have the, what is the radio?

If you're on radio, my friends that work for Hot 97, ESPN, they always have some enormous electronic setup to be able to do live radio from another location. It costs thousands of dollars to send somebody. But now we just all do it on our computers. And it's great to see you. It's weird to be face to face with you. That's where this whole thing is. It truly is weird, but it's a happy occasion, David. It is.

Because you've got a new book that is coming out tomorrow. As this publishes, yes. Yes. Coming out tomorrow, it's called Why Hulk Hogan Matters. That's right. It's a fantastic book. It's about professional wrestling, but it's about more than professional wrestling. Well, thank you.

It is a, I would call it a forensic study of this character in the culture. Yeah. Who embodied the culture in the 80s and the 90s and beyond. Yeah. It's not like a radio station, the 80s, 90s, and today. That's true. He embodied the culture. Maybe the culture embodied him in a way.

With everything in pro wrestling, there's a sort of transactional element to it, right? That, like, the most concise, the most powerful reflection of our societies in pro wrestling, give as much as they take as much as they give, right? Because they are, in a lot of times, acting out, not. just our deep-seated emotions. I really want to beat up a bad guy or the more urgent, the more realistic thing. I want to beat up my boss. But they're just those very basic things, but also just literally storylines that reflect what's going on in the news, you know? I mean, the geopolitical stuff is maybe the most obvious. You know, like right now, if this were the 80s,

there'd be an evil Iranian running around, you know? And crazy that there's not. But yeah, so Hogan was, I think, in a lot of ways, more, he was more of an American icon than I think I even gave him credit for. Not just his popularity and his fame, which were real, which were very significant, but the pitch perfectness of this metaphor, the way that he embodied the sort of 80s American mythos or ideals, it was just so on the nose. And then in large part why I wrote the book was not just when he died, but just sort of wrestling, no pun intended, with how somebody could have that much influence on culture, on me as a person, and still you're left with this sort of really conflicted set of feelings at the end. Hulk Hogan, alias Terry Belia, died last summer. So how much time did you have to write this book?

If from the moment that you first said to me, hey, you should write a book. If I had started in earnest that day and finished with the very last deadline that my publisher gave me, six months. But I didn't start that day. So thinking about it, a germ of an idea in your mind. Well, you know when you're writing an article, the thinking about it can be really a significant part of it. Because if you really think about an article for eight hours, you can write it in one or two, you know, if you have a real good outline. But you can think about a book forever and nothing's getting that written in less than, I'm in less than. I mean, I didn't do, I didn't do, I didn't seek out any illicit substances,

but I definitely went down the rabbit hole of Googling what Philip K. Dick and Stephen King were doing in their like drug taking prime. It's like, how could I write a novel in a day? Like, is that possible? And, you know, you get to, you get closer and closer to the deadline. You start wasting more time thinking about those things than actually writing. But it's not a super long book. It's just a lot of, I mean, but it's still, I don't. even remember 75,000 words or something like that. Like, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a lot more than an article. And it's a, as all the writers of books out there will tell you, like, that's, it's a skill. And it's a muscle group that you have to keep working out. And man, when you have to think beyond the 5,000th word, you realize very quickly that it's not something you're doing a lot.

Here's the other question I had after I finished it today. You call Hogan a legendary liar and exaggerator in the book. And wrestling, as you know, it's not. as you also note is based on legend rather than fact. So how do you find reliable information about somebody like Hulk Hogan? It's very difficult. Hogan himself will tell you the same story five times or when he was alive. I would tell you the same story five times if it was on,

well, it wouldn't be the same different five different times. But if it was on five different days, the story would be different, five different times. And it's not just Hulk Hogan. He's the most famous liar, right? I write about it in the book. He's the one who says that when he wrestled in Memphis, that Elvis was there watching him, like Elvis was dead.

By the time he was there, he says, you know. Was it John Belushi? He used to party with John Belushi in L.A. John Belushi was dead by the time he was there. Like, it's off by like periods of time, right? And then that's separate from the just unnecessary stuff.

Like, you know, Metallica want me to play bass for him, like the rolling, like, whatever. Like everybody would want him to play bass for them back in the day. again, there's no evidence of any of this. And then there's the really specific wrestling stuff. Like the most famous example was Hokko Hogan versus Andre the Giant. WrestleMania 3. He claims he didn't know Andre was going to let him win until it happened, which, okay,

Andre the Giants 500-something pounds according to the tail of the tape, but actually much less than that. But of course, if Andre doesn't want to lie down for you, he doesn't have to. But when would this ever occur to you in pro wrestling? Like it's a project you're working on together. and my reading has always been that this is Hogan's way of re-legitimizing it, retroactively legitimizing it in a world where now we all know it's fake. Oh, so you think this is a fake fight and you're right, but I wasn't sure if Andre would lie down and let the rough count one, two, three.

So much of this mythologizing, especially self-mythologizing in the period since wrestling came out, which the WWF, the WWE sort of did in 86, but had done previously, the date is very blurry. But basically since the mid-90s when wrestling became, was popular in the attitude era and just had this widespread popularity, feels like there's been an effort to rewrite history.

We all know that this is a put-on, but let me tell you the ways that it was real. You know, even if it's just like, let me tell you the financial hardships that this company was under at the time, or let me tell you how close I was to not making rent that month before I won the title, there's always personal stakes

that are layered on top of the stakes that we know, now to be farcical. So it's like origin stories. Yeah, exactly. The way they get fudged and exaggerated, made harder, perhaps, than they actually were. And the bigger, the match, the bigger the event, the more important the stakes are because you don't want to lose Andre versus, if you're Hulk Hogan, you don't want to lose

Andre the Giant versus Hulk Hogan. You don't want that to disappear, to fade into history. You still got to hang on to it. So how do we make that important now? So anyway, Hogan's full of crap. Everything he's, and it's silly lies and significant lies all like one on top of the other. when we did the Vince McMahon documentary as you know

I was basically brought on to alert the director when somebody was lying or when I believed there was more to be you know re-ask the question you know I was typing into a Google doc with him reading it in real time

and when we interviewed Hogan I told him ahead of time it was like this is going to be tough and I just sort of gave up like two minutes in I'm like nothing he's saying is true and yet he's this is incredible this is incredible footage

you know Hogan's impossible. But it's all of pro wrestling. The whole first chapter is about Hogan's origin story, how we got into the business, and I tell it basically from like four different points of view at once, as best I can. Everybody has competing narratives.

Everybody wants to be the guy who helped Hogan get into the business, right? So everybody has these different stories. And, but I've known this from the beginning. The first time I ever called a professional wrestler to get a quote, I mean, you probably would remember better than me. maybe I was doing a side piece for ESPN. Why would I have needed a quote? But the first time I ever called anybody

looking for a quote about a piece of wrestling history, and this was a wrestler from our lifetimes, the wrestler said, how much money are you going to pay me? This is one, I had one question for the guy. You know, it's, so there's the financial side, but it's really just,

its mythology is important, and there are some wrestlers that care very much about the mythology of the sport, but for most of them, it's self mythology. you've got to tell every story in such a way as it puts you over you know and so the truth is

impossible to find were there existing Hulk Hogan books anybody that cross paths with Hulk Hogan wrote about it in their memoir and in any other field you would say oh here's my primary source you know what I mean these aren't be I know they're not primary sources

basically what you do is you find all the things people said and you thread the needle right you kind of what feels the most true and you write it in such a way that you're acknowledging that you don't know the truth, right? But I will show you, it did bring me to you. When I first started, is this camera on me? When I first started, I said,

let me buy all the Holcogon biographies that are out there so I can reference them. This is some of eBay's finest stuff. This is a kind of like a, like a, one of those magazines you buy in the arena, I guess. I don't know. I mean, this is clearly sold and store, but it's a magazine size, full-size,

Holcomania, just mostly photographic. official biography of Hulk Hogan by the WWF? This is amazing. And then I got, this is my favorite one, Hulk Hogan America's Hero by Abbott Neal in mass market paperback form. I still have the receipt in there, I guess. Just in case people aren't looking at this.

This is called Hulkomania, the official biography of Hulk Hogan. And then it says includes an exclusive introduction by Hulk Hogan. So I think we've got that covered. This one is also called Hulkomania. Hulkomania exclamation point, Hulk Hogan, America's hero. No punctuation between Hogan and America's there.

But this is a good one. But this is just like the kind of book you would have read in third grade or whatever when you're doing a report on Hulk Hogan. The nice quickie biography. Same thing here, except it has the rocky, the thunderlips treatment. I mean, photo on the front. Maybe that was the only one that was available in the wire when they did it. Oh, yeah.

We used to check those at the elementary school library. Yeah. This is 100% the book that only existed in your elementary. elementary school library, right? Yeah, you would never find it anywhere else, weirdly enough. No. I mean, now, I mean, I don't want to get too inside publishing. Now we don't do the same thing anymore.

They don't do exactly the same thing anymore. But there are a lot of sports memoirs that exist because they know libraries will buy them. The floor is higher on the memoir of an athlete or other historical figure. What I'd love to do here, because Holkogen is a wrestler, but he's also this great American character. He's a staggeringly large cultural figure in our lifetime. So I thought we'd go through the three different Hulk Hogan's. Oh, great. Okay.

That you and I experienced that tracked pretty neatly with our childhood and then our adolescence and college years and then up to the present where we're doing a media podcast. This is a great idea. Thank you for that. And also, I just want to say that I'm really happy that we're doing this together, that you keep saying our, I mean, we did share most of this history together. but when it comes to a controversial figure like Holgogne, I just kind of, you know,

just appreciate you jumping in with both feet with me. Absolutely. When we start rhapsodizing about our childhood love of Hulkogen, at least we'll be doing this together. We're going to do the good and the bad here. Let's start with the 1980s incarnation of the holkster. So I'm sorry to cut you off, but it starts from a place for me,

and I touch on this in the book, but I want to know if your memory is similar. I started watching wrestling because of Hulk Hogan. I don't know the specific reason, but it was some combination of the rock and wrestling thing, of WrestleMania, of the cartoon, of everything else, the action figures. It was so unavoidable, and then,

and Hoke Hogan was the driving force of that, and he was my favorite guy. But the reason why I say that is, in my memory, I was watching him beat the Iron Sheek. Right? I watched him beat the Iron Sheek for the title. There's no way in the world I would have been watching. You and I didn't see that. No.

but almost immediately thereafter? I mean, it must have happened really quickly because we have memories of some wrestlers that weren't around in the WWF for that long. No. You know, that were around then. So, I mean, it was weird. It's like he won the title

and then suddenly we were all card-carrying members of the WWF fan club. Like, it was just so weird. The only way I know to explain how big he was in that period. And you and I both saw him live. We were both taken by parental, figures and then said here we are going to get to see the great Hulk Hogan wrestle the only the only way I can explain it is it was like the Beatles what I've heard the Beatles were like

two people like that's how excited I was I was I was they left me and my sister alone so I was probably in third fourth grade I was in Charlotte visiting my grandparents and my uncle had season tickets the Hornets brought us to go see Michael Jordan the Bulls are in town and he apparently had access to three seats. So that was my mom, my dad, and him. My sister and I got put up in literally the second to last row. And as the last thing they said to me,

who's my uncle squatted down? He was just like, you're going to see a guy down there in a red jersey. He'll be shooting a lot. That's Michael Jordan. And then he just walked away. It felt, I mean,

like it seems sacrilegious to compare Hokogen to another, to an athlete. But he was bigger than Michael Jordan. Oh, I think so. But during the first three, I mean, during that first run, for sure. I, yeah, that's why I go to the Beatles. I mean, that's why, and again, I wasn't around for the Beatles,

obviously, thank God, we're not that old. But just the excitement that I felt in my young body, and it's just almost just, you know, other out-of-body experience where I was seeing somebody that I couldn't believe I was seeing in real life. That's how I felt the first time I saw him. Yeah, for sure. My uncles took me to the love. I was going to say it was it rot or girl, but it's both.

It's both. The lovely tingly Coliseum in Albuquerque. Oh, in Albuquerque. And this is when wrestling was just crossing over from, like, evil, bad place to family-friendly place. Yeah. And it was the first time in my life I saw drunk people. It was probably fortunate. I never saw drunk people in my house.

And there were adults getting in fights at ringside all night. Like I would just be watching the matches. And then all of a sudden you just hear this weird scrum. And everybody was fighting. And I was like, I remember the guy behind us was like a larger man sitting behind us and he was eating nachos. And then I looked back and he had the cheese all over his face because he had just face planted into his own nachos at some point. Like he passed out or yes, I think I believe so. And I just never say anything like that. And then in this just, you know, den of iniquity comes the great American hero Hulk Hogan and little Brian was like, this is so awesome. This is incredible.

That's great. That's what Vince McMahon was trying to get away from. Like the crowd's he was trying to move away from. But that's so funny. It's like the first time, I took, I took my older son to Vegas for SummerSlam one year, just the two of us.

And I was just like, as soon as we touched down, I was like, oh, I got to have a talk. I was like, you're going to see some people like you've never seen before.

They're going to be going through some really hard times, you know? But that's so funny. Yeah, seeing Hulk in person, I think my first time was at the Louisville Gardens

during the Kentucky State Fair. The guys who listened to my podcast found the ad in the paper. help me reconstruct it. It's like if you bought your way into the fair, it was a dollar to go see the WWF show. And it was Hogan versus Killer Khan, who had previously broken Andre's ankle,

but I wasn't there for that. I wasn't a fan during that period. I was dimly aware of Killer Con, I guess from WWF TV, but this was more of a house show feud than like a main, than a big TV feud. But yeah, I got to see Hulk Hogan and,

and see my buddy Chad was there with his dad. I think Sean was probably there. Like, there's a whole crew of us. Like, everybody liked wrestling. And boy, watching Hulk Hogan come out was, it was unbelievable. I mean, he really just, he was larger than life. It didn't seem real. Yeah.

Truly. You have this line in the book. Wrestling is at its best when it reflects the world around it. So how did Hulk Hogan reflect Ronald Reagan's America in the 80s? Everything that Ronald Reagan said, like, Hulk Hogan embodied, sort of, you know. I mean, every, not just Ronald Reagan. Reagan, but just the sort of vibe of 80s culture. You know, it's like the self-reliance, the bootstraps, the excess, the, the, the, the, the, the American, I mean, the jingoism, so many elements of it.

And when we think of the Reagan era, we're tempted to think of Alex P. Keaton, you know, who's the, of course, Michael J. Fox's character on his family ties, a young Republican, all that kind of stuff. And there's a lot of truth there. But looking through a 20-25 lens, where it's like, actually if you want to fully embody this, I know how. And like, you can work out. You know, you could. Muscle culture was huge. Yeah, muscle culture was just on the rise. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the Hulk Hogan of the movies?

Absolutely, yeah. And, you know, I mean, obviously Hogan was in Rocky. It was in Rocky 3 with, I mean, as thunderlips. But Stallone is another famously muscled guy that was famously about a third the size of Hulk Hogan when they stood next to each other, right? I mean, Hogan was, in some ways, despite being from the fake, you know, fake sport. And by the way, they hate it when you say fake in wrestling. I try to avoid it.

It is scripted. It is staged. It is whatever. It's certainly not fake. They do get hurt. It's a lot of, it's a huge physical exercise. So I don't mean to demean it. If any wrestlers are listening to the press box right now, apologies.

Yeah. I don't want anybody's feelings here. You'd be surprised. But, yeah, but Hogan was in, despite being in a staged sport, was in some ways more real than a lot of his contemporaries because he was that big, you know, a few inches shorter than what the tail of the tape said maybe, but what were the official measurements? I used to have this measure, I memorized as a key. Well, I quoted myself writing about it in, like, Andre the Giant, but he was listed at like 6-8350, and it's just implausible. I mean, he obviously, he shrunk a lot

as he got older and, you know, he had some medical conditions and stuff. But like, when he was tag teaming with Dennis Rodman. He was only a few inches shorter than Rodman. You know, so it's not like totally implausible. 24-inch pythons. That's probably not. Well, I bet the python thing might be true. Because it feels like that'd be a thing that somebody at the gym would like ask you to,

would challenge you on, you know? But, yeah, 24-inch python, that's probably not true. The height, the weight. When he first came to WWE, or when he first came in the national scene, one of his first stops was in Memphis, which was my hometown. Again, I wasn't watching at this point. I mean, I was in Louisville, but we got Memphis wrestling.

And they did this ridiculous, like, like Tony Atlas presentation of him, where they put him in a dark room with the spotlight on and just had the camera sort of close up and spin around him, and the announcer was just like, with a back that's five feet across, you know, just all the different sizes. So he has, probably everything was measured

in a totally fake way. that promo, but I don't remember. So tell me this. Is Hulk Hogan reading the cultural wins of the 80s of Reagan's America or as a promoter telling him to lean into that? I mean, obviously, that's a little bit lost to history. When he was wrestling, so the story that is often told is largely true, broad strokes true. He was wrestling for Vince McMahon's father, Vincent J. McMahon, so also Vince McMahon, when he ran the Northeast of the pro wrestling world in the northeast of the United States. But he was also working in Japan. He was also, Hogan, he had other

options, right? And then he got an opportunity to do Rocky 3. And this story famously is that Vince Sr. said, told him he couldn't do it. He'd be fired if he did it because it would be exposing the falsehood of wrestling to be, to have a wrestler as an actor playing a wrestler. That doesn't make a lot of logical sense. Even if everyone in the world believes wrestling is real, you could still allow that wrestler to work a side job.

Like, he's not a caged beast. Sylvester Stallone is not really a boxer. Right. It would be strange if George the Animal Steel was playing like a verbose accountant in a movie because you'd be like, wait a second, I thought he was really dumb. But like, but Hulk Hogan playing a Hulk Hogan-esque character, like that's what we expect our athletes to do.

also Vince Sr. was on the cutting edge of exposing the business. I have articles from him in, like, in D.C., when that was his main stomping grounds two decades prior, there was almost a riot because the bad guy, you've gotten to too violent a fight with the good guy. And he was quoted in the paper the next day as saying, come on, those two guys are probably having steak together after the show. They're like, everybody's fine. And he wasn't saying it explicitly, but he was saying it, right? So it's a weird story. But anyway, Hogan is supposed to, Hogan wanted to do Rocky 3.

Apparently, Vince Sr. said no. So Hogan left and ended up working for Varn Ganya, who was running the AWA, which was another giant wrestling territory based out of Minnesota, but they owned Chicago. And that's where Chicago and pro wrestling go back a long way, even to this day. But that's where the Dumont Network was founded. Or that's where the DeMont Network filmed the earliest wrestling broadcast, which was the first national sport, the first national televised sport. and so there's a lot of Chicago Chicago history is a big thing

but anyway so Hogan went there and he I think discovered he built his entire character there the entirety of Hocomania was created in Minnesota or in the AWA because when he was with Vince Senior he was playing an evil Irishman

while he wasn't talking with a brogue or anything but that's where Hogan came from he was a bad guy he was feuding with good guy Andre the Giant So he goes to Minnesota and he starts putting these pieces together. I think there was just a giant open lane for an all-American wrestler. And who was trying to be what that meant to a 1980s audience. To be Mr. America.

And he got to be everything at once. You know, like it almost fell into his lap. His original WWF song was not, I'm a Real American. That was written for the U.S. Express, the tag team. They left. He took their theme song. like the jingle is almost an afterthought but that's all that we remember now

is waving the flag and the opening strains of that song he was the guy he came to the ring to eye of the tiger forever because of Rocky 3 you know and that was it was and somehow somehow sort of like ripping off his Rocky 3 character was exactly what 1980s America was looking for it's like it seems perfect

the self-awareness of being like not just famous because of what I've earned because of the vitamins I took. I'm famous because I was in a movie, you know, and now we're doing this out of here. And it's so perfect that it's a Rocky sequel. Yeah.

It's not even the original Rocky. It's a sequel. It's Rocky 3, which feels so 80s in and of itself. You said the word jingoism, so I just have to tell a quick story. You and I were in high school together. Yeah.

And we had this English teacher who was trying to do something kind of cutting edge, and she was like, what I want you to do is bring in a music video. Because music videos are like poetry. It's the same thing. We're studying poetry, and I want to do something that the kids really get into.

Yeah, to try to meet us on our level, yeah. Some people are bringing in, like, Tom Petty videos and, you know, whatever the bands of the 90s were. You and I brought in this cheapo WWF video that was made for a wrestler named Hacksaw Jim Douggan, and he was just going around talking about his love of America. Yeah, it's not much of a song. It's not much of a song. If you go back and buy any of the old WWF albums, it's like half-themed songs and half, thematic songs. It's like spoken word about you, what your wrestling life is like.

Right. It was pretty straightforward. But we were supposed to play this for the class and then explain like the themes of this video. And so you and I push play on this VCR in this class and this whole group of you know 30 odd random high school juniors is just completely speechless watching this this terrible video of Haxel Jim Duggett and then you and I gave a very straight-faced explanation of how he was showing his jingoism. Yeah, that's totally. I totally forgot. An SAT word we had learned like 20 minutes before that class started by holding

the American flag anyway. Also, it was like the least interpretation needed for any of these any video that was shown. Yeah, what is Tom Petty singing about? Like, no, it's pretty straightforward. The complete lyrics where I've got my two by four, I've got the American flag. Oh!

Yeah, that's it. I think we got an A, so what are you going to do? Here's another question. We loved Hulk Hogan in the 80s. Yeah. But we were kids. Did adults love Hulk Logan in the 80s? Well, sure.

I mean, like, I think your uncles are evidence of that, right? Like, when my dad took me, he was no kind of wrestling fan, but, like, he was very much, like, in on the phenomenon. I mean, I think adults were very into Hulk Hogan. I mean, all you have to do is turn on an old YouTube video of, you know, if you go watch back and watch Hulk beating the Iron Sheek and just sort of put it on full screen, turn it up a little bit,

a breath, don't do anything else. Like, that crowd reaction is, is nuts. And those are adults in MSG. Yeah. Just like, I am so happy because. Oh, 100% adults. Now, WW makes a big push towards a younger audience or more of a family-friendly audience,

but it's so they can get kids. It coincide. That push coincides with Hogan's rise. But Hogan's, I mean, Hogan went from employed by the AWA to beating the Iron Sheek for the Dunds. WWF title in like 20 minutes. Like there wasn't like some long windup to him going, you know, or him climbing the ranks.

He just showed up in one. So as soon as that happens, they start going younger. But yeah, adults like, and what I write about in the book is if you go back and watch Hogan versus Nick Bockwinkle in the AWA, the crowd there was even more excited for Hogan to almost win and lose. Those are straight. I mean, those AWA crowds were, I mean, they had guys like Dick the Brewzer and the crusher whose gimmick was basically like, I can drink as much as you, you know, like.

But these are like employed adults. These are not nine-year-old Brian and David going to wild. No, these are all like men who want to get, who were there to get into fights. Like this is like a serious, this is drinking. They are into this guy. Yeah. This is their hero too. Yeah. And I think with Hogan, again, we talked about how this gym culture is sort of on the rise, right? We have, we have, I mean, and really, in Hogan's reign, it goes from very quickly from like, I don't know anyone who's ever worked out to there's a gym on every corner right like and and but there's something so there was something so compelling about Hulk Hogan the figure the physique the body that everybody who was there along the way in the early days Bruce Pritchard will talk about this

Jerry Briscoe who is there for a lot of the Florida stuff we'll talk about it Hogan walks into the room Hogan comes out from behind the curtain and these are wrestling fans no matter where you're from no matter how real you think it is, the first time you see somebody is usually not going to be a great experience. They're still figuring the thing out. You know, they're still working on it. But Hogan walks through the curtain,

and it goes quiet. And you're like, wait, are they, are they not sure about him? It's like, no, they're taking it in. And then massive applause. You know, it's almost like, like, backdraft. You know, it's like the fire gets sucked in and then it gets shot back out.

It's a very bizarre experience. but grown men, yes, 100%. Part of his story in the 80s is he gets hooked up with Vince McMahon, the younger. Yeah. In the WWF, as it was then called, Vince McMahon, as you helped make a documentary about,

is trying to take wrestling and take it from being a regional business into a national monopoly. You've got a great sentence in the book where you say, Vince McMahon did not want to make wrestling respectable. He wanted to make it unavoidable. Yeah.

We'll go ahead. How soon does he realize that Hulk Hogan is the guy who can help him do that. I think for, I think immediately. Now, I think he could have been wrong. But I think, I think to convince his mind, it was pick the guy and then the plan

and then proceed with the plan. I don't think he left much room for error. I think if Hogan had been a bomb, I think the company would have just gone under. And it was partly because Hogan was the perfect guy, maybe he, not just that he would have known that, but I think more that once it starts,

it's either, it's momentum one way or the other. All the money that Vince was spending was dependent on the money he was making the following month. Like every contract he signed was robbing Peter to pay Paul or whatever the phrase is.

But I think it was obvious to give your question a better read. I think it was obvious pretty much immediately. I mean, in wrestling terms, you have Hogan beating the Iron Sheek, You watched the reaction that got, like I just said, and I can say with confidence that everybody backstage was elbowing each other and saying, that's money right there. Like, we just, we got them.

You know, speaking of the fans, they had to know immediately that there was a huge upside. And I think that prevents the national expansion, the international expansion, the making it unavoidable was always the mission. but you know there are a lot of i think i think there was probably a moment there had to be a moment where he got his first offer from Mattel or whatever you know got your free you get your first licensing opportunity or or just general like someone calls you to try to stage a show and you're just like you want this like they want this it all happens so quickly that i i got to imagine um that vince had to realize right away what he had even beyond his wildest dreams though. Like this is, this is the plan I'm going to do, but this is happening very, very fast,

and this guy is getting me there maybe faster than I thought was possible. Vince's early business model when he was taking over was basically to buy TV time. He would go to, like, he went, I mean, he famously, like, bought the rights to Georgia Championship Wrestling from one of the sets of owners who kind of had the in with the TV, crew, with a TV station, and just sort of usurped it, but he'd buy it. Like, he'd buy paid commercials. Like, a lot of were pay for play back then, but wrestling specifically, because in some sense,

they were just live commercials for the arena show that was coming at the end of the week, or the, or, you know, at the end of the month. And he did it time and time again, buying air time to try to establish WWF and drive other people out of business,

but paying for your airtime. When Hulk Hogan reaches his apex, you're not paying for Jack, shit. Oh, they're paying you. People are backing up the Brinks truck, you know? So that's, I mean, that's just one example of how the business model changes because of the unimaginable success of Hulk Hogan. All right, that's 80s, Hogan.

Yeah. Let's talk about 90s, Hogan. So you write about this in the book. He has this great run, and then people stop caring about him as intensely as they did. One of the notes from my editor was sort of like to go in more on that, to explain that more. And I feel like I spent so much time on that in the book. Just like trying to express the emotion and the background of why we don't care anymore. but, you know, there's more than there was now.

But yeah, everything, every fad dies out. If we use the Beatles analogy, they're probably a bad analogy. Well, they broke up at the top. Use a band analogy, the band that stayed together. Yeah. They just, their stuff just didn't play like it did anymore. And people cared less. No.

I mean, the band was actually a good example because a lot of bands that would have been together a long time have the fan base. that they can, financially, they'll be fine if they keep cranking out albums, reunion tours, doing whatever. But they'll never be the way, at the heights they were at initially. And so if you're the record label,

you might have ditched them. Like, it might be time to cut ties. They're going to be fine. The return on investment is not enough for us, right? Sure. And Hogan sort of reaches that point. It's interesting to look at it from that angle because it felt like everybody was out on Hogan

at a certain point. It's just, we're just so exhausted. by him, you know, by the idea of him coming back and doing the same stuff. But, like, you think about it in the band analogy, it's like, but also, we were the diehard fans. We're also, like, we love Hulk Hogan. There's elements of it that we are just so attached to. But we were entering a time, if you went on to make it a cultural thing, we're in movies

and media and culture, there was just, things weren't so straightforward. Yes. Every action movie was not, bad thing happened. and good guy comes in, kills everybody, celebrates with the American flag, right? There has to be some depth, some conflict, some inner turmoil, and Hogan represented none of those things.

No, the mid-90s is like NYPD Blue. You know, it's like you're starting to get grittier, more complicated, more ironic in a lot of sense. You know, not uncomplicated heroes, as you say, are out and, you know, beating up people in uncomplicated situations. Well, and also, I mentioned this before, but as wrestling starts to grapple with its own identity, We're kind of reaching by the mid-90s of time where we openly say that wrestling is scripted,

then you want to see wrestling reflect that self-awareness, and Hulk Hogan doesn't reflect that. Right? Hulk Hogan is the definition of the blindered or pretending this is real sort of sport. And it took him a while to get beyond that. And it's 1996, summer of 1996, when all of a sudden this guy who had been America's hero, America's good guy becomes a bad guy on television. Reflecting that change in the culture. Now, is Hulk Hogan saying,

hey, let me tell you something, brother. You know, drama's on television. I've gotten darker and more complicated. It's not for me to do something like that. Or is that just him just running into a wall and being like, hey, my old stuff doesn't work anymore. I need to try something else. It's a little bit of both.

I mean, the one thing, the major thing, obviously, that happened between, I mean, we didn't mention was him leaving WWF to go to WCW, and I won't go into any great detail there except to say he arrived in WCW. They threw him a ticker tape, a literal ticker tape parade at Universal Studios where they were filming, and it's one of the most bizarre things you could ever watch. Like, this was a decision made by a bunch of people who thought putting him in a limousine and having fans around, I mean, 200 fans around him would seem like a big deal.

No one cares about any of this, right? It's such a retrograde, it's such an old-fashioned thing to do. I wasn't watching it and hating it. I just wasn't watching it. It just was so uninteresting me. And the speech that he gives afterwards, well, it's in the book. You can go read it.

But so not only was he still playing this tired character, but somehow it was even more excessively tired. You know, like, he comes to WCW, and they leaned so hard into the things that made Hogan work in 1985. Not even the things that were like tweaked about his character, and his later WWF run. There weren't a lot.

But they were just so, they were happy to have the hardcore fans that are lining up for the reunion tour, right? Like, tickets, like, that's what they were going for. So Hogan was at his most boring in WCW in a lot of ways. And then, yeah, the NWO forms. Wrestling fans know the story. If you don't, you can read some of it in the book.

Long story short, he becomes a bad guy with a gang of other bad guys. Yes, and who are all former, WWF employees now working in WCW. So is a little bit of a invasion thing. But if you go listen to his first promo, this gets to your question. He doesn't say anything that's not true.

You know, it's a little, it's with any great heel. The disrespect he has for the fans is a little bit over the top, but he's, they all kind of resent the fans. You know, it's like you don't get the cheer you want. You know, every wrestler, or the boo you want, every wrestler is thinking FU to the guy in the second row. you know like and i think hogan was wrestling with a lot of the responses he was getting he was getting like like unironic booze or ironic depending on where you're at how you really want to define it

but there were people reacting being tired of him in the audience this was all relatively new and hogan's point of view is basically i've done everything for this business you wouldn't be here if it wasn't for me and you're gonna boo me it's like okay i'll give you a reason to boo me and that that just embrace of reality is all he needed to revitalize himself for an extra decade. And this gets into the unreliable lore, but did he come up with that idea? Did he come up with that speech? Or was that speech given to him? Oh, the speech is, who knows?

I would guess that the speech was probably ad-lib. I mean, it was certainly ad-lib, you know, thematically, was he given bullet points, probably. But the creative team at that point was Eric Bischoff, who was no writer. Like, he was an ideas guy. you know, and wrestlers all came up with their own promos in those days. So that's mostly Hulk Hogan. But the NWO idea was something that Bischoff had stolen, I mean, it's not like it's some great crime.

Everything in wrestling is borrowed from somewhere else. But yeah, he borrowed it from a Japanese angle. He borrowed the idea from a Japanese angle, came up with the idea of the NWO when Scott Hall and Kevin Nash were coming over. And they didn't know that Hogan was going to be the third guy until basically they made the decision the day of. and it was, if it wasn't Hogan, it was going to be Sting, who was the other big hero at the time.

Sting would never work for WWF, so it made much less thematic sense. If it hadn't, I mean, if it hadn't been Hogan, it would have been a totally different situation. So give Hogan credit. But if it hadn't been for that, I don't know what our memory of Hulk Hogan would be. I don't think it would be nothing,

but it really revitalized his career and showed a doubt, to him that didn't exist before. We might remember him as an 80s guy. Somebody who had a great run in the 80s and hung around to diminishing returns for a long time after, and that might be where he sat in the months. And that would be it. I'm trying to think how the end of his, the last phase of his life, sort of from the gawker stuff forward,

would have go if he had just been an 80s guy. Would he have even been in that position? I don't think they would have even had any interest in running the story. I mean, he would have been like Mr. T or something like that, where it's like, oh, Well, this guy's cool, but this guy is of a particular time and place and only of a particular time. Yeah, would you be disappointed in Hogan giving a speech at the R&C if he had just sort of faded out in 97? It would have been like Fran Tarkenden giving a speech to the RNC, but I'd like, oh, who cares? And thought about that kind of decking.

Yeah, exactly. So two things about that moment in the summer of 96. One is in the arena, and you write about this in your book, it was a traumatic event, Hulk Hogan becoming a bad guy. go back to those adults, you know, who are, you know, so invested in this. They are throwing garbage in the ring. That's a good point because the kids in the crowd didn't have beer cans to throw. They weren't throwing beer cans and full drinks into the ring. They could not reach the ring.

Those were adult arms throwing those drinks. They were pissed off. The move to, when a wrestling company, WWF, is the biggest one, WWB by far, who's done this, deliberately courts a young audience. yes they're trying to sell plush toys of the kids yes they're trying to sell t-shirts to the kids but really what you're doing is setting up the next generation

of adult fans right you want to keep appealing to kids so there will always be a next generation but there's always been adult fans especially in the south that has this very deep-seated you know southern wrestling tradition yeah they were mad when Hulk Hogan turned it doesn't matter if you were bored of him

when he walked to the ring when he turned heel I guarantee 20% of the people in that arena would have stabbed him if they could Oh my God. I mean, we just had the 30th anniversary of that moment and Twitter that day was just this unbelievable experience of people reliving where they were,

how they found out. It's easy to watch now and think that we all knew it was coming or it's obvious that it was coming. Even Bobby Heenan, who was doing commentary, he was the bad guy commentator. He famously said, I bet Hogan's joining the NWO or not that literally, but said it because he was so sure it wasn't going to happen.

He was just messing with the Hogan character, right? Nobody knew that was coming. even if that had been a stylistic possibility, even if we had seen another hill turn in the recent end of the year before that said, well, that's on the table. We would have never believed that of Hulk Hogan because it just seemed like he was immutable.

That was the entire, and at WCW in particular, their entire business model was based on not the immortal Hulkogen, but the sort of immutable Hulcogen, right? The sort of boring Hulgogen. And, yeah, so it was a wild moment. So it was wild in the arena. and then the second part of it is

that made Hulk Hogan huge. That made him a figure of the 90s. I don't know if it was as big as he had been in the 80s or was as big but different. How would you pull that part? Well, I mean, listen, we were teenagers at the time. It felt like a much bigger deal.

But that was sort of the wrestling title wave was not just about Hulk Hogan at that point. You know, you would go to the mall and see NWO T-shirts, but you'd also see DX T-shirts. you know, you'd see there'd be other stuff. We're bad guys. We're rule breaker.

But I will say this about Hogan. There are a lot of parallels to his big advent in the 80s. But one of the things is he gets, he sort of weirdly creates his own definition of cool, drawing from a bunch of different sources, obviously like he bought the sunglasses at a store, so it's not like he invented sunglasses. But like, dude, Hogan coming out in,

in then the mid to late 90s in the black tights or if he wasn't wrestling that night the black jinko jeans with like a NWO t-shirt cut into various you know cut into into tank top or just the panel on the front panel on the back look the black bandana the black beard that that was he tried a couple of different looks at the beginning but the really black dense five o'clock shadow that was that that still worked in the hand the blind hand handlebar mustache and sideburns. Looks like it been made with a black Sharpie. And maybe it had.

Yeah. And playing the guitar, he entered to Jimmy Hendricks, which if you remember, he only played it once per show because they had to pay another licensing fee so he would exit to other music. But he entered to Jimmy Hendricks strumming the title belt like it was a guitar, just the, I mean, real basic stuff. But like, no one looked like this on TV before. No.

He turned himself into, sometimes I'll. say, I will speak negatively of a wrestling gimmick by saying they look like they went in their grandma's attic into the, into the costume chest, and came back with too many costumes on. Right? They just put everything on instead of saying, I want to be a pirate. You're like a pirate with a ghost thing, with a feather boa, with everything else, and it doesn't work. Hogan somehow threw all this crap together and it worked. Like, it was, he was just this magnet that could just turn things into something else.

Like, it was incredible. Totally. And if you never watched wrestling, the thing you should understand about this is that wrestling the industry felt like it had lost the culture. Like in the 80s, it made perfect sense. Yeah. There is a man with, you know, male stripper pants, and he's coming out with clippers to cut somebody's hair. And this is a thing. This makes complete sense in this time and place.

By the time you got to the 90s, especially the mid-90s, it felt like, this just belongs to another time. I remember you and I were watching all of that stuff in high school, but it was just like, we were kind of the only ones we knew. Nobody really cared about it. And it was like, it just felt like it had lost the culture. And then all of a sudden, very dramatically, it feels like it has gotten the culture by the scruff of the neck. And it's like, we're back.

What would have been our defense? I mean, we were never in the position of having to talk about it. We're in such a weird minority in terms of fandoms. But like, what would have been the defense of wrestling pre-Hogan heel turn? Dude, this was like our D&D in high school. Like, once in a while I would wear a t-shirt. You were not in that big nerd. But once in a while I would wear a t-shirt, I remember.

And you and I would just kind of like talk about it privately. But there was no conversation. No, nobody else cared. They were just because, again, it just was not culturally relevant. It seemed out of time. It seemed like a different, like a lame thing from another period of American life. There was also less. I mean, they had a weekly show, but it wasn't live for so long.

and the only things that we really ever talked about were the pay-per-views, which I, like, never watched. You got to see occasionally. More people cared about Brooks and Dunn at our high school. That's what I mean, though? Like, you would say, like, what are the results? Like, it was almost like a real sport,

but nobody watched it. Nobody cared. Nobody cared. And then all of a sudden, people dramatically started caring again. And then, of course, Volkogen being interesting, Spurs Vince McMahon, to be more interesting, and here we go, right? We have this kind of second boom time of wrestling

that he is at the tip of the spirit. And again, Like I said, is at its best when it reflects the culture, and wrestling when it's at its best is openly reflecting the culture. It's no great secret. Any wrestling promoter can say, this works because it's like fill in the blank, or look at a time in wrestling history like we're doing.

That worked because, look at the culture around it. But sometimes it's the hardest thing to do to get out of your, to get out of your own way, to get out of your old habits. This is what works. Vince McMahon was there thinking, I know exactly what it works. Hulk Hogan versus a monster, and we'll just do this four times a year.

And it stopped working. And then what reinvigorated it was Hogan going heel, but in some sense you say Hogan being honest with us. That's what I write about in the book. And WWE, it's the same thing too. It's just like, what if we just throw out everything we think we know? Like what do we actually want? What's cool here?

And it's like, oh, these wrestlers, we just want them to be dicks. Like we want, you know, we kind of let them do whatever they want and give it some real violence and vitality to this whole thing. And it's just realism. And that's a 90s ideal, too. Being a true teller on television in a way that seemed impossible in a previous time. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's easier for us to compare, you know,

Hogan to the big action movies of the 80s. And there were a lot of big movies of the 90s that you can draw parallels to, but just think about the Auteur, the sort of indie movement of the 90s. I mean, that's more, it's similar in scale to pro wrestling. But it's also, it's just like people actually saying the things that are their mind. You know, it's just, it's, and in pro wrestling, it's more important than even in a lot of other forms because I write this in the book, but I've said it before, the most baseline,

important thing in pro wrestling is to, is to not insult your audience's intelligence. I know a lot of wrestling fans will hear that and say, and laugh, say, how is that possible? But everybody who liked pro wrestling, even back when it was quote unquote real, everybody's been in on the joke, right? Everybody is part of, every wrestling fan is in on the secret handshake. We all know what to put on. But we all engage with it in real,

like when we're at the arena, like it's really happening. This is what makes it so wonderful, and this is what makes it work. We're part of it, too, we wrestling fans. And if you treat your wrestling fans, if you take them for granted, or if you treat them like their rubs,

then the whole thing falls apart. because wrestling fans stop, they stop caring. You're not holding up your end of the bargain. You're not treating with sending respect. So why are we doing our part to make this thing work? Because if somebody's not getting cheered, they're not a hero. If they're not getting booed, they're not a bad guy. Like wrestling is entirely dependent on the crowd.

So you have to engage with the crowd. And by reflecting the culture, the crowd is actually being taken seriously for the first time in almost a decade. All right, let's talk about 2000s. Holkogen. This is where things get considerably darker. First of all, Hulk Hogan is a figure in the shutdown of gawker.com. And as two people who were living in New York

and were writing journalism in the 2000s, how insane does that sentence sound? I didn't believe it, even as it was happening. It seemed so implausible until the day that it just went offline. You know? That like, this would be good forever. for a media podcast.

I wonder if we know anyone that has one. But like we, but no, I mean, the idea that this place wouldn't be funded to defend itself in court in the most obvious

no lose case of all time was mind boggling. But to then, but when it became a reality, it became this like, it was like a scare, right? It was like every fly-by-night blog in the country,

every newspaper that wasn't heavily funded is like, wait, we can just go out of business? Like, you can just, just make, have a judgment for that much money. Somebody can go find a jury. Find a jury. Find financial backing.

Find financial backing. Peter Thiel, who had a long-running gripe with Gawker, funded Hogan's, supposedly, funded Hogan's thing. And obviously, Hogan had a lot on the line, too. But yeah, so he, there was, the story, obviously, and to get it in the right order is that they had a piece of a sex tape, Gawker did. and published a sort of treatise on it.

Basically, the treatise was like, why it's okay to publish this. But that was, the argument was like, that was transformative enough to publish this very personal thing. It was a celebrity who we all care about as, AJ wrote it,

AJ Delirio wrote it, right? Explaining, so the piece was short-sighted and probably not as smart as it thought it was, but it passed muster for a thing that, like, could be published

without a loss, suit, you know, in my mind anyway. But it didn't really matter because they sued him and Hogan won and Gawker and everybody else just went out of business. And again, that this would involve Hulk Hogan of all people, that he would be at the center of this. It's just, and again, I don't mean that in a way like, oh my God, scales from my eyes. Just the him of all people. It's just so bizarre. So bizarre. One of those times where you and I is wrestling fans, people

come to you to get your opinion and you're just like why would I have an opinion on this? I like to watch these guys fight in a ring. I don't know anything about media. I like media criticism and I like wrestling, but I'm kind of uncomfortable when you put those two things together. Then in the course of all of this,

this tape is released and you write about this in the book two, where Hulk Hogan is heard using the N-word. And this becomes an event that then gets a lot of people, including the WWE, to cut ties with Holko. Yeah. To say goodbye.

You are not a person we want to be associating ourselves with. I mean, the WWE is not a particularly progressive place, is not now, nor has it ever been. I mean, probably more progressive now than it was, just in terms of its structure. But, like, you know, it's employees or independent contractors. There's a lot of stuff they could be doing better. which is a really long windup, I guess, but like the best things the company has done in some ways

over the past couple of decades have been PR-driven. Right? We don't give health insurance to our wrestlers, but like now that we hear that there's an audience for it, we'll give free rehab to any of our current or former wrestlers if they needed, right? These are like PR decisions. And cutting ties with Hogan, I think, was one of those. I'm not sure if anybody at the top of the food chain

was particularly offended by, I don't even remember who was in charge then. I mean, it's certainly Vince. But, I mean, I don't know that he would have benefited by it. Right. And this is not a company that's had a lot of, you know, morals about racist tropes and all these things. But they were like, that's it. You're gone or at least you're going to go away for a little while. And, I mean, and obviously you have to say Hogan wasn't making the money that day, week, or month or year.

If he had been, it might have been a different story, right? Hogan, at this point, was a reality show figure, right? He had been on Hogan knows best, which was surprisingly good and weirdly important, at least in my mind, for of the of in that genre. And he would occasionally come back and do things for the WWF, but was not, or for WWE, but was not integral to their weekly programming. So it was easy to cut ties.

Now listen, they should have cut ties. Yes. But based on the tape alone. Um, and I go through it, the history of it in the, in the book,

but like, and Hogan filed the lawsuit against Gawker in large part to prevent the inward tape from coming out. That wasn't public knowledge yet. It was just a snippet of a sex tape. He knew that if that was recorded what the conversation he had afterwards was. He knew what revealing the longer tape would entail.

So we tried to sue them to prohibit it from ever happening. It ended up backfiring. And when it came out, yeah, it sort of ended his career for a minute. Do you want to ask another question? Well, let's fast forward to 2024. When Hulk Hogan becomes a major supporter of Donald Trump. I went back and watched

his convention speech. This was on July 18th, 2024, if you went the exact day, the Republican convention was in Milwaukee. What an absolutely strange spectacle that was. Yeah. Because on the one hand, it was idiocracy.

For sure. Here is a man tearing his shirt off as he once did in a wrestling ring in support of Donald Trump's re-election campaign. And by the way, if you watch the Fox clip on YouTube. They did a split screen so you can watch

Trump watch the speech. Oh, yeah. And you and I have seen lots of politicians like watch people praise them. Yeah. I mean, it's that kind of fake politician nod and politician smile. Donald Trump looks legitimately thrilled that Hulk Hogan is up there doing catchphrases. Yeah. If you go, I mean, I remember watching that convention, particularly because there's so many people speaking,

Donald Trump has to sit through basically all of them. But you can tell when you, you, could tell very quickly when he was interested in somebody. Like, he listened to every word Dana White said, and Hulk Hogan made him smile. Hulke Hogan, like, got him excited. It's interesting. It obviously would have been less of a big deal if Hogan had retired in 98, like we were just sort of fantasy booking before, right?

If he had just been Hulk Hogan, never turned heel, and then he showed up to do this, he'd be like, okay, and it probably would have been fun to see him tear his shirt and whatever. but Hogan become, at some point along the line, Hulk Hogan becomes the immortal Hulk Hogan, right? That's what that you can hear all of the announcers calling him this over the years, right? Going back to the early days of his stardom. And in the early days, it was this sort of,

it implied he's not defeatable, right? He's unstoppable. But then it sort of progresses in his dotage, and he wasn't that old, even in these periods that it seems like he was so old. He's younger. He's only 71 when he died. I know.

I mean, during his various peaks, like when he was joined the NWO, he was like younger than all of the current WrestleMania headliners. You know, and it just seemed like he was already 60. But he becomes immortal. It seems like he becomes immortal in a bigger way. The legend of Hulk Ogan, the myth of Hulk Ogan, becomes a bigger deal with the passage of time

as he continues to be relevant. And I think for me, a lot of the disappointment wasn't about political alignment And it was about, like, you were bigger than this. I've invested a lot in your immortality. You were turning your back on it by, like, appealing to a subset of your fan base. You know what I mean? And that's all separate from the racism, which it's a really interesting period of our country's history.

If that tape had come out today, would it have affected his career at all, I think, is a really reasonable question. I think there'd be much more of a push of people who were defending him in a really gross way, but also just companies that are like, do we want to worry about offending that set of customers by cutting ties with him? I mean, Trump's embrace of him is, you know, in a way of very conventional embrace. I tried really hard to not say Trump during that, but yet, it's true. In the post-Trump's like, oh, you're canceled? Oh, you're a friend of mine. Yeah.

Because we don't care about that here. We don't care about whatever you did before. And he brings him on. It's like, oh, you want to go up and, you know, give a big speech at the Republican convention? That's okay. Yeah. And what's so funny is you have this like this riff in the book that's very funny when you're going through Hulk Hogan's terrible movies.

And you're like, he was a really bad actor because he would just say catchphrases or say lines like he was saying a catchphrase over and over again. If you watch this speech, politicians kind of just say a bunch of catchphrases in a row. That's how they speak. Especially when you're on a convention stage. Everybody, the current wrestling fans know the, the terrible effect that Steve Austin's what chant has wrought on the industry. Steve Austin post his major heyday, started saying what to people when they were cutting promos opposite him in the ring. And say, Steve, I got it.

And he go, what? You know, at every pause, he would say what. And then fans started doing the same thing. So you have to tell, you have to give all of your speeches with the expectation that the what chant might start. And you have to have it all broken down into like, three syllable pieces because that might be all you get out. Between each what? That's sort of what the convention speech is.

It's like, here's a, you know, like, we got to work on immigration because A, B, and C, applause. And another idea, you know, like, and then. Yeah, and a kind of catchphrase about Trump and some more praise of Trump. And if you watch this, it's just, it's a fascinating life. Who started that? Which one? Just the catchphraseation of the convention.

speech. Oh, that's a good death. Was it that you can call me George W. Was that, I come from a place called Hope. What was that? Yeah, John Kerry coming out and saluting. I'm John Kerry and I'm reporting for duty. It's just this moment, and I want to make too big a deal of it, but it, if we're just

thinking about like the end of his life and the end of his career and the end of his run as this just strange American celebrity, it's like he's using the same catchphrases he used in wrestling. He's tearing off his shirt just like he did back in the 80s. Now it's all in service to Donald Trump. Like, it's all these things have been reappropriated. And the thing I wanted to ask you is, what are wrestling fans? So, you know, you and I are uniquely situated here because we were very young when he first came up.

We were in college when the whole bad guy, 90s, whole Kogan thing happened. And now we are people with kids when he had this final chapter. What did wrestling fans make of all those? final, strange, awful years of this guy's life. Wrestling fans are not a monolith. And I'm sure that the wrestling fans I interact with, both online and in person, you know, are people that are more likely to be an ideological agreement with me because they listen to my podcast and read the things that I write and everything like that.

But the vast majority of wrestling fans that I heard were, were, we're, we're, we're closer to good riddins when it came when you know when all this stuff when hogan was cut off part of that is snarky part of that is we've seen him enough on tv all he does is drag down the product you know like what else is he going to do but like you said before racism and pro wrestling have a really weird intertwined history i mean you don't have to like everybody has a most racist gimmick that they can think of off the top of your head even if you're 20 years old you know but even at its most Like when the junkyard dog was the biggest star in Louisiana, the guy running the promotion was a racist.

I guarantee 70% of the people on the floor of those arenas were nominally racist compared to, I mean, from 2026 size, probably 95%. They were all cheering for, they're all cheering for junkyard dog and booing his racist villain opponents. Like his opponents would be racist as a dog whistle to get the crowd to boo them. it's always been implicitly acknowledged that racism is terrible in pro wrestling even if the racist are the ones telling you to think that right um and so it's i think that all wrestling fans especially the younger ones who come for a different generation are just like what the hell man like it was just enough like it wasn't hard to say goodbye to him because where he wasn't in his

career and it felt like to me like it felt like a very reasonable punishment to you know know, deprive this creature of the spotlight of the spotlight. I remember I was in the arena, the Intuit Dome. Simmons was there too when he made his final appearance, what turned out to be his final appearance. Oh, on the first Netflix, Raw. Yeah, and he comes out and, you know, doing the thing and the song plays, and everybody just booed.

And however loud it was on Netflix, it was louder in the building. So the one thing that you skipped in going through, one thing that you skipped in going through our story was the time we were at Madison Square Garden for what I, I don't remember if it was some time that you, You got tickets, or was it right when I started working for Grantland and I got a ticket? I think I got tickets for that one. But we were at MSG, Edge and Chris Benoit, who also we can't really talk about, brawled through the crowd and underneath us.

Like, we were right over one of the entrance ramps. We had good seats. We could, like, see through the floor to them fighting. And Sean Michaels was feuding with Muhammad Hassan, famous Middle Eastern Terror. A gimmick of that, yes. He was an Italian-American guy who was playing an American... a grand awful tradition of wrestling, yes. And Hulk Ogan came out and made the save.

When Muhammad Asan Navarra were beating up Sean Michaels. We had an inkling this was going to happen. This was projected a little bit. But we didn't know if it was going to happen then. I don't even think at the time we were so canny as to say like, oh, it's MSG, he's definitely going to be at MSG. But in retrospect, yes, of course. But man, when his music hit, it was a transcendent.

It was a transcendent experience. It really was. Like, we were both there as kids, but, like, you're immediately back there. Like hearing the music, getting up out of your seat, you don't even remember standing up. The whole place just erupts.

Yep. It's crazy. So, just want to set the stage. Like, we've, we've worshipped at the altar for quite some time. When he came out at the end, his last appearance on Monday Night Raw, I didn't know what was going to happen,

how the crowd was going to react. But my feeling is that it would have gone better for him if he hadn't been promoting his beer. I think that there was a huge part of it that was boo you for your racism, for the various things you've done. By the way, it's widely,

rumors have been around, and I can attest to them, to their veracity, that when he finally made his comeback to WW, which was sometime before this appearance, they gathered all the wrestlers together in the locker room so that Hogan could come in and talk to them. And they're all like, okay, he's going to give his road apology,

we're all going to move on. And he came in and he gave a speech about avoiding cameras. Yeah, so not an apology. Not an apology. And part of the biggest problem with Hogan's apology tour was that he never really apologized. I think even as a fan who doesn't really have real state, I mean, you know, any real investment in this

in terms of making money or losing money or whatever, it was exhausting. And not just that he wouldn't apologize, but he kept insisting that he had. Like, what do you? It was almost like, immediately he was in this mode of like, what do you guys want me to do? I already said, I'm sorry.

And, like, nobody heard of apologize. But also it's like, you got to kind of keep apologizing for like six months on this one, man. Every time somebody asked, you repeat it, yeah. And I know a lot of wrestlers who, and I heard this story from two African-American wrestlers who were just like, come on, man. They were like, they could laugh about it,

but they're also like, what do you want me to do here? You know? What is it? And so I think there was a huge part of that, and wrestling fans were aware of that, both in terms of watching it happen from a distance as fans and hearing these rumors. So people are going to boo him anyway.

But coming out, he wasn't coming out to say, good job WWU on landing a Netflix contract. This is a new era of WWE, and I want to be a part of it just to break the champagne glass over the hall of it or whatever. No, he came out to hawk his own real American beer. And it felt exploited it. Like it felt like we were being used as wrestling fans.

And I think it just felt, you know, it just felt like, not only are you not apologizing. Not only are we not, like, establishing, like, a new status quo. But it just feels like what you're only, like, I said the thing earlier about taking, about treating wrestling fans with some respect, right? Like taking the, not just denigrating them, not calling them roobes. A similar thing that I say is in the modern era, the most important criteria for being a professional, a successful wrestler.

in the 80s with Hulk Hogan, it was probably the physique, right? It was, there were a lot of very easily, like, clockable things. You can say you have to be X number of inches high. You got to have a tan. You got to have bleach chair. Like, whatever. These things are knowable. In the modern era, I swear, number one is you have to be a wrestling fan.

Fans have to feel like you care about wrestling as much as they do. And so a lot of the biggest stars are, we have, we see footage on a monthly basis of, like, when they were in the crowd at the wrestling event or when they were meeting their favorite wrestler or just hearing them talk about wrestling in a knowable way, I mean, in a way that puts them in the seat of a fan. Whereas in the 80s, a lot of these guys

were just bodybuilders who didn't love it that much. All that is to say, when you come out to hawk your beer brand, we logically, at least subconsciously asked this question, is like, does he love wrestling? Is he here because we're all in this together? Or is he here because he can sell us because he knows we'll buy something.

And it just felt really dirty. Yeah, and it's six months after the R&C. I mean, there's just a lot of, just to set the timeline there, and then six months before his eventual death. Which is wild. That he came out, he got booed. Like, I don't think there's anything mystical. There's no woo element to this,

but, like, if you're writing the book... As you did. If I were writing the screenplay, I think it would be... There would be probably a much more direct line from the man who's been... his whole life getting cheered, getting the adulation of the crowd suddenly gets the opposite, and then his life force leaves him. You know, I mean, there's almost, I mean, there is. That's a Greek

myth, right? I mean, that's exactly, when I talk about mythology, it's like you don't have to spice it up. Like, it's right there in front of you. All right, David's book, why Hulk Hogan matters. We have just covered a tiny, tiny bit of what is in this book over the last hour here. There's so much in here. It's so good, it's so nuanced. It gives weight to the good. It gives weight to the bad. It gives weight to everything in between. Yeah, I mean, the hardest thing is, was set getting the tone.

I mean, mostly on the cover, you know, but the title. Because, you know, it would be too easy. I mean, it's really hard to convey both sides. You know, I don't want both sides. It's two different periods of my own life, two different pieces of my own self that go, that are sort of reacting in real time. but the book is, as you know, is broken up into each chapter is like a moment in time, an important moment in Hulk Hogan's life.

You know, it's the Andre the Giant match, the Randy Savage match, and then go back and set the stage. But I wanted to make it like readable, approachable. It's not strictly like, here's a list of the good things Hogan did and a list of the bad thing. You know, I'm not, it's not all philosophical. It's all rooted in these memories that make that, that are, why this book is written is because of our memories. You know, it's like without the matches that we saw in person and on TV, like, we wouldn't care. Hulk Hogan wouldn't matter at all.

So all of that goes to why he matters. And a lot of the negative aspects of the, you know, later period of his life that we just discussed, explain why he matters too. Because it's not just why the book is not why Hulk Hogan is awesome. It's why Hulke Hogan matters. And there is a lot that we can learn about ourselves and about our, culture through this man's rise and like the downfall or however you want to categorize the last act of his life so good i can't wait for people to read it i'm so proud of you man congrats and thanks for coming on the press box which is also your own podcast