The Press Box - The Midterms Are Here, Elon Musk and Twitter, and NFL Insider Trade Inflation

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

One week until the midterm elections, Bryan and David discuss signs that we have entered the late stage of the election cycle while discussing ad campaigns, reevaluating Senate races, and touching on Beto O’Rourke’s position in his state race (3:24). Later, they revisit Twitter underneath Elon Musk and touch on his recent response to Hillary Clinton, weigh in on the potential for misinformation, and discuss the amount one would have to pay for a verified Twitter account (23:40). Then, they discuss Ian Eagle’s new role next year calling the NCAA Final Four (35:24), before then addressing NFL insider trader inflation (43:35). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker  Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The time has come to get ready for the 2022 World Cup. And what better way to prepare than by revisiting the World Cup's most amazing goals? I'm Brian Phillips. I'm making a podcast about the history of the men's World Cup, told through the stories of 22 iconic goals. The show's called 22 Goals. It's out now on the Ringer Podcast Network, and we're having so much fun. Yes.

New York Times columnist Brett Stevens got religion on global warming. But he had to take a trip to Greenland to get religion on global warming. What I want to know is what international trip would you take on the ringer's dime to confirm something obvious? Oh, man.

I mean, I know this really isn't what you're asking, but I would love to do the, to have like the New York Times helicopter in approach to just like, you know, sports in general, right? Imagine if the ringer was like, we're going to send David Chewaker out on the road to confirm that basketball is good, you know? Just taking in our national or various national pastimes.

I don't know, man. Is it just like like the beaches of South America? Is it the, I mean, the, like a food tour of Europe? Like, what would be the, I have no idea. What would be the dream here? Beaches of South America still stunning. Yeah. Wild and refined.

By David Shoemaker. I thought we could get some midterm action out of this. Oh, okay. We could go check in on the Better Aurora campaign in Austin. No excuse to go to Austin. Yeah, like I have an excuse to go take in some bar. barbecue and just see friends and stuff? Beto is still running for governor of Texas.

I've seen it with my own eyes. Could go to the Midwest. How about that Wisconsin Senate race? Confirm that Midwest diners actually exist? I think your sports idea is exactly right, though. How about that big Georgia Tennessee game on Saturday? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that would be really fun.

I want to confirm with my own eyes. I don't want to write a gamer. I don't really have any higher-level takes on Georgia, Tennessee. See, I just want to confirm that it's happened. Yeah. Need to go. Watch it for four and a half hours in the press box. I think we can pull that off.

Let's do it. Let's pull it Brett Stevens. Let's go confirm something. Coming up on the press box, the latest news about next week's midterm elections, including a partial defense of Beto O'Rourke. How's Elon Musk's ownership of Twitter going? Well, it sucks.

We explain why. Plus, NFL insiders are suffering from trade inflation. Did you get a celebrity author to review your novel? And the life, fake death, and actual death of a music legend. All that more on the press box. A part of the ringer. Podcast Network. Omedient consumers, Brian Curtis David Shoemaker, producer Erica Servantez here. The midterm elections are November 8th. Exactly one week from tomorrow. This is a good time to throw in a native ad for our live podcast that night. Please join us. David, I have some signs that were in the last stages of a midterm election campaign.

Oh, okay. One is you cannot watch a sporting event that does not consist mostly of political ads. Oh, yeah. Used to be light beer and the progressive insurance lady. Now it is my opponent is a terrible crook, completely unfit to serve in office. And here is some grainy slow motion of them doing. something that looks vaguely evil. It's there in the World Series.

Yeah. I mean, it's not even the low-tier college football game anymore. Yeah, it's everywhere. Are you getting a bunch of those in New Jersey? Do you get Pennsylvania ads transmitted to you? Yeah, I mean, we're in the Philly TV market. So, yeah, there's a lot of Pennsylvania attraction over here. Sign number two, we're in the last stages of a mid-year.

term campaign. Poll guy Nate Silver is mad at Paul guy Nate Cohn on Twitter. This is one that sort of been waiting in the wings for a while, right? This is just kind of a sign that something is happening. Yeah. The Nates are

at war. We've also reached peak political reporter midterm cliche. Oh. Can I get a count here as I read the lead from this New York Times article that was posted today? Yeah, absolutely. Here we go.

Control of the Senate rests on a knife's edge. According to new polls, with Republican challengers in Nevada and Georgia neck in neck. Oh my gosh. With Democratic incumbents and the Democratic candidate in Pennsylvania clinging to what appears to be a tenuous advantage. That's three. The bright spot for Democrats.

and four key states polled was in Arizona where Senator Mark Kelly is holding a small but steady lead over his Republican challenge. Midterm elections are typically referendums on the party in power and Democrats must defy

decades of that political history to win the control of the Senate, an outcome that has, wait for it, David, not completely slipped out of the party's grasp. Wow. Where was that one? New York Times.

Oh my gosh. I just, I mean, it just, it's almost like you see the leaves changing. Yeah. You see decades of political history and go, aha, it's November. It's time for an election. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, listen, a lot of people have pointed this out.

This isn't like, you know, super novel thing to say. But, and again, this is, I'm sure that piece was written, was. conceived on this very specific angle, but man, every, every, every, all the coverage is about the, is about the race, is about the polls, is about the, the Senate numbers, is about, nothing is actually about the content, you know? I mean, it's, there's, this is kind of old man yells at Cloud's territory, but like, it's a real, real failure of the Democratic Party, and that's, you know, maybe not where the turn you expect to be to take, but like, the, the, the, that's what we're talking about.

You know? Like overturn Roe versus Wade and every single article is about is about numbers. It's about, oh, what the likelihood of the Republicans taking back to Senate. I mean, that's just that there,

Republicans are just going, are just like laughing hysterically that that's a kind of coverage. This midterms are getting. It's talking to Perry Bacon about this last week. It feels like the week before the Super Bowl. Mm-hmm. where listeners, readers, media consumers want to know the answer to one thing, which is who's going to win the race. Yeah.

And the political press doesn't know the answer to that question, at least in a lot of key races. But there's an incentive not to say that. You can't shrug your shoulders and go, you know, I have no idea what's going to happen in a week. Yeah. The incentive is to pounce on every poll. Mm-hmm. every fresh bit of data and say, look at this. Oh, look at this.

Memit Oz catching up to John Federman in Pennsylvania. What do you think? What do you think about this? Look at these fresh poles from Arizona. What do you think about this? Never mind that, you know, in a week, all of that is going to be completely forgotten. And that actual insights divine from data like that will probably be pretty minimal. Yep.

but that's where the clicks are to be had right now. That is where the action is. We got to revisit the Senate campaign of John Federman. For people just tuning in, John Federman had a stroke in May. He has what his doctor calls an auditory processing disorder, which means when he debated Mehmed Oz the other day, he used the accommodation of closed captioning

so he could read the questions, read Oz's responses, then offer his own. People watch the debate. there was a feeling that Federman at times, and again, this has been expected given he is recovering from a stroke, had struggled over words. There have been a slight delay because of the accommodation. And now we're in this kind of weird news cycle where reporters to my eye cannot come out and say, I think John Federman is going to have problems fulfilling the duty of being a U.S. Senator. or and they can also come out and say the opposite in a lot of cases that they work for a newspaper and say this is not you know he's going to be able these accommodations will allow him to fulfill the duties and it will not be an issue so they have to do this thing where they're like

I'm wondering if people watching the debate had a certain reaction to the debate and if their vote will change it doesn't it feel like it's just this meta level of I think a voter may think this after watching it. Yeah. And therefore, that is the gist of my story spoken or unspoken? Yeah, that's a really good point. You read a lot of articles that kind of have that framing, right? It's just like you're in the pursuit of seeming completely unbiased,

which should not be the goal, so much as transparency should. but at the risk of fearing that you're, the pretense of an article contained some bias, you displace that onto either an ephemeral voter or some hand-picked, you know, anonymous voters or, you know, on the record voters who just sort of say the thing that you wanted to say or the journalists in question probably wanted to say anyway,

except with such a just obvious pretense that it seems even less reliable in a certain way. New York Times sent some reporters out to talk to voters in Pennsylvania. Reporters are Katie Gloick and Alice McFadden. It's a really interesting story to hear people talk just about their feelings after a debate like that in a race like this. But what's so interesting is the people talk like pundits. They talk that they're worried that other people will be having a reaction to that. So you don't find the voter that says, you know what?

I was thinking about Federman. Now I'm a little bit concerned. I am now leaning toward Oz because of this specific issue. They say things like, it does make me concerned about what voters who are less familiar might think. Yes. Or for people who are merely going to listen and not really think it through themselves or check the research, unfortunately, I think Federman might have lost a few. independent votes.

These are people doing what the reporters are doing. Yeah. That's really perceptive. I mean, in some sense, that's the way that we talk now, right? I mean, anybody that kind of follows politics enough to be interested in going on the record in an article like that probably spends a lot of time reading and watching and otherwise engaging with sort of political talking hetery. But it is. And again, just like the polling, kind of entirely misses the point, right? I mean, it's like, are you really worried about it?

If you were really worried about it, you could probably do something about it, right? But also, like, you have to own feeling that way if you feel that way. And if you don't feel that way, then what's the point of putting that in a piece? Right? It's like, it's like the old, you know, not the old, but the notion that like for something to be offensive, someone has to be offended, right? You can't just be like, well, that's offensive. I feel okay about it, but that's a. You know, like, no, you got to own being offended by it or else you got to kind of just, you know, back off.

It's a weird, it's just a really weird framing. This was the one nugget of poll data that was interesting. Came out today from the New York Times. I'm reading from the article here. In calls made on Wednesday, the night after the matchup, that is the debate, a plurality of voters said Mr. Federman was not healthy enough to do the job, though Mr. Federman still maintained a slight lead over Dr. Oz among all Wednesday respondents. That was a shift from the previous two evenings when majorities rated him as sufficiently

well to serve in the Senate. So there we have at least one day's worth of voter where people are more concerned about his health, his ability to serve in the Senate. But we still have them, even though even that sample size, which is very, very small, it's just one day of out there in the field. They are still voting Federman over Oz. Yes. Which is an interesting result.

And I don't doubt, by the way, that there's a scenario here where this is a really, really close election. Mm-hmm. And Federman, either Federman's health or Dr. Oz's ability to try to capitalize on perceptions about Federman's health is the difference in this race. Yeah. I also don't, I also think the political reporters absolutely have the right to ask questions about this and ask for, information and we want medical records, we want to talk to your doctor, you're giving us a statement from your doctor, we'd love to talk to them ourselves. Absolutely the job of the political press to try to suss out these things. Yeah. That could make a difference in a really tight race.

It's just funny to read the way people write about these things. Totally agree. Chal seems very secondhand. I've got a partial defense of better O'Rourke for you, David. Oh, thank goodness. Does he need your defense? I kind of think so. Our pals over at the hottest take, we're having some merry fun with, what does Beto do now? Oh, yeah, okay.

Lost his Senate race in Texas in 2018, ran for president, kind of sort of in 2020, and let us say, did not win that race, now running for governor of Texas against Greg Abbott. And according to 538, in 97 out of the 100 outcomes they run. Greg Abbott wins the race for governor of Texas.

Hot to his stake was having some merry fun with Beto. And you know what? We should have some merry fun with Beto. You and I, I believe, when he was running for president, said he has a presidential campaign that sounds like a podcast. There is that sort of messianic quality to any better. Beto campaign. Yes.

That sort of very Twitter liberal sound and feeling to his campaign. Yeah. If the Twitter account Brooklyn Dad Defiant ran for Senate, it would sound a lot like Better O'Rourke's campaigns. Yeah. Well, it's kind of the funny thing about Beto O'Rourke in general is that he's, he is dogged by. Ooh, good, good political.

word there. Okay, keep going. I like this. Now I feel like I need to say doggy. He's dogged by some of the some of what makes his campaigns sort of gives it sort of the magic that it does, right? I mean, it's like, when he first popped up, I mean, running before he ran for president,

the first time we, Eddie would talk about better, I think we talked about it on this show. The first time I heard the name Betterer Work, well, probably the second time I heard the name Betterer O'Rourke was like on a yard sign in Brooklyn, right? I mean, it was like, he has this sort of national platform just almost intrinsically.

But after a couple of campaigns, a couple of failed campaigns, you just sort of, you know, that starts to become more of an in-joke than, you know, a big, you know, a bright spot on your resume. And because if that's all you have, then it sort of, I think, you know, they mentioned like Sarah Jessica Parker donations on the hottest take, right? I mean, it's that sort of perception that you're less serious than you are a sort of celebrity in the world of politics. And but I don't, I mean, here's the thing. The presidential campaign was, I don't know if it was hopeless or misbegotten or probably some combination of the two. Do we have to choose? But when Texas goes blue, if and when it does.

it will certainly be part of like a national wave election. And again, now I'm going to numbers and polls in the way that I was like, you know, deriding them earlier. But a lot of big moments happen that way, right? I mean, it's not, it's, it's, someone's got to win and lose, you know, someone's got to build the grassroots. Someone's got to create the infrastructure for someone to win in the future. And when someone wins in the future, it may or may not be better or Rourke.

But it will almost be, well, it will be reliant on a lot of the stuff that a lot of the advances that he made, much like Stacey Abrams and Georgia, and also it'll be, and also I think that in some sense, like I said, if it's a wave situation, it'll be sort of incidental to who's running. You know, I mean, the candidate, it will be less significant than the moment. Stacey Abrams is a great comp here.

Ran for governor of Georgia didn't win. Currently running for the same office might not win again, but created the pathway. and in fact built the specific political machine that got two Democratic senators from Georgia elected two years ago. Two Democratic senators that determined control of the United States Senate gave Biden any hope of passing any legislation and putting a justice on the Supreme Court. That was big.

And I guess that's my defense of Beto is, isn't this what we say we want from politicians of either party, but let's talk about Democrats for a second, we say run for something. Yeah. Don't be an MSNBC pundit and cash checks for the rest of your life. Yep. Don't be a Twitter account. Spend your political capital to go out and try to change people's lives.

Yeah. like that's what we want and Beto's thing is Beto is running in a state that has not elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994 28 years ago and Texas has a lot of statewide

offices because the governor's entire cabinet is elected. Every Supreme Court justice is elected in Texas. There hasn't been one Democrat since in 1994. Yeah. I was in college in 1998. All my friends worked for Democrats in state government there.

I was a savvy one. I was the intern for the Democratic congressman, excuse me, who was in the U.S. House, who couldn't win. They all worked in there. And I remember 1998 that election when W was running for re-election. They were shattered. It was this like event of like where everybody's looking at each other going, should we stop working in politics right now?

Because the Democrats didn't win any elections statewide and may never, little did they know, not win another one for 24 more years and counting. And so when I see Beto being like, I'm going to run against Greg Abbott, Texas is a huge state. I don't want what's going to happen to abortion rights to happen here and happen to kids in schools and education and stuff like. like that. There's something noble about that. I totally agree. Even though I am almost certainly going to lose. And I think that's where the streams get crossed a little bit here because like,

he's not losing because he's Beto. He's losing because he's running in Texas. That's, that's why he's losing. If you can go find another candidate who would be winning an election over Greg Abbott right now, go find him. Yeah. It's, it's, there is it, again, And again, I grant everything anybody says about better O'Rourg. But surely this is what we want politicians to be doing rather than cashing in in the Twitter blogospherey way of being a political talking head, which he could have easily done. Yeah, he could already be there. And you're right. I mean, I certainly think he saw a path to victory.

I mean, this isn't just like a totally quixotic campaign, but it's. Sure. But, you know, running, running boldly, running, you know, not over-moderating, you're right. This is what we want from politicians. Now, you know, I don't know if it's possible for a politician to be in our lives for three-plus election cycles and to still feel genuine in whatever the sense is we mean. mean that these days. But, and it isn't kind of, regardless of what you think of Beto or Roerke, if he's inspiring people to run the way that he's running, I think that that's definitely a net positive.

Yeah. And genuine's always a guess. How much does this person want to run to change people's lives versus how much do they want to run to become a powerful person? Because they have their eyes on the prize. You could say the same thing about Obama. And same thing about anybody. who's running for office.

And I'm happy to pun on that question, whatever. But still, there's something kind of noble about it. Strangest and scariest item from this midterm election, David, was early Friday morning, Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was attacked in their home in San Francisco by an assailant who allegedly attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer. This brings us to our next topic, because on Saturday, Hillary Clinton, took to Twitter, as the reporters say, and tweeted something about Republicans and conspiracy

theories and how violence inevitably results from them. I'll pick up the LA Times story here. In response, Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, tweeted Sunday morning to his 112 million followers that, quote, there is a tiny possibility that there might be more to this story than meets the eye. Yeah. Unquote. And posted a link

to an unfounded story offering a conspiracy theory about the attack. The story was posted in the Santa Monica Observer, a publication known for spreading misinformation. So we had this whole conversation

about would Elon Musk Twitter be a nightmarish portal of disinformation? Would a quasi-moderated site become an unmoderated site. Elon must tweet it out

the conspiracy theory. He just tweeted it out. What did you make of that? It was weird. I mean, he's deleted it since. Which is maybe more interesting than the tweet itself. I mean, I guess there is some intrigue to the tweet, right?

Is he trolling or is he sort of that misguided? you know i think that there's a lot of things uh i think Elon Musk's ownership elan musk and saudi arabia's ownership of twitter is going to be um an interesting sort of experiment of nothing else uh i think that there's going to you know obviously the ideological move here is just you know fantastical notion of free speech and whatever else um I wonder, I suspect that it's going to end up being a lot more like, you know, tech bros inventing the city bus. I think that it's going to be a whole lot of, I think it's going to be a whole lot of, you know, noise and a whole lot of bombast and a whole lot of, you know, and

massive amounts of discomfort amongst the, you know, the Twitter class or whatever. And then Elon Musk is going to figure out that for better or worse, Twitter, is probably being operated pretty much as well as it could be. And then, you know, by then it, who knows, by then it might be too late. But I think that that's a direction. A lot of the stuff's going to go. All of which is to say, if you're already, if you're already proving to yourself that content moderation is an important part of digesting news, then it can't be,

the tail can't be that long. behind the website sort of learning that too, the company you now own, sort of re-learning that too. Does that make sense? He's proving the point. He's arguing against by just tweeting something like that as if, and believing it, by believing it first and foremost, tweeting it sort of secondary. He also announced he's going to form a committee. Back when I worked at Slate, Michael Kinsley used to have a rule that if you wrote an opinion piece, you could not call for the formation of a committee. was kind of the lamest place to end up. He is forming a content moderation council

that would look over any what he called major content decisions or, for example, decision to reinstate Donald Trump to Twitter. We also heard from reporter Casey Newton and others that Musk was considering making you pay to be a verified Twitter account.

I saw all kinds of ranges for this payment too. Casey Newton says $4.99 a month. Some of them were more expensive than that. I saw $20 a month, yeah. Would you pay to be a verified Twitter account? Absolutely not. Would your employer pay to have you verified, I think, is a more salient question. Hmm.

You know, if you're the New York Times or whatever, do you, is there some, I mean, because there's a lot of people on a lot of the, probably the majority of blue check marks out there are not volume tweeters, or not people that, you know, have to have to have their legitimacy weighed every day. But there's a ton of blue checkmarks that are just like, you get hired by a company that values that. I mean, that places even a tiny premium on that,

they go out and get you verified, right? So that they can follow you in the same way and that you can, you know, you are out there as a representative of the company. And so there will be some employer, I'd say, you know, that sort of employer stuff. depending on the price tag, obviously. But how much would you pay yourself? I mean, it's interesting.

I feel like getting verified, and this is what 10 years ago or something, felt like a real step. But now if my blue checkmark disappeared, I can't, I mean, I can't imagine that it would affect my life that much. I think that the real people that's going to affect,

people that really need the checkmark, which is to say celebrities or people who have parody, you know, anyone that risks having a parody account about them out there, celebrities, politicians, et cetera. And I think, like I said, the employer-driven stuff, arbiters of information. But I don't know. Josh Marshall actually had a really good Twitter threat on this, you know, late at night sort of going through the whole issue. you know the money makes a big difference obviously that was where he started out um but he he goes on he goes he goes he goes on to make the point that that if the blue checkmark becomes a sort of badge of Elon Musk fandom or like you know if you if you're basically saying like i'm here as i think let me let me read

his exact line because i don't want to take i don't want to take credit for it he says if the blue Chegbert means, quote, I decided I want to help fund Musk's Twitter adventure. A lot of people won't want to publicly be saying that. Oh, and he compares it to the New Yorker. He said a wise person once told him, the New Yorker isn't a publication. It's a club with a publication at its center, right? Like, the reason why people have the New Yorker on their coffee table is to be part of this club, right? Which is, you and I can both verify. There's a lot of truth to that. All of which is to say, if there are a bunch of Elon Musk fans who go out and buy the blue check mark

to sort of like, you know, show their admiration or, you know, excitement about Elon Musk, then there's going to be some people that reject it. A lot of people are going to reject it on those grounds, right? And at some point, again, back to reinventing the city bus, if everybody, if there's a whole new class that develops, that monopolize more or less the blue checks,

then they're going to have to invent something else that functions the way that the blue check marks function now. Right? It's going to be like the sneaches. We're like, oh, wait, everybody's got stars on ours. So now the people that had the stars have to go figure out something else to paint on their stomach, right? And I think that it's, again, really interesting experiments about to happen.

But we will see how it goes. Do we line up with our friend Jay Kang, who says that the people who say they're going to leave Twitter are like the people who said they were going to move to Canada if Trump got reelected? Sure. They're not really leaving, right? I saw a headline that Shonda Rhymes is leaving Twitter. Well, I think that there will be some number of people that leave Twitter because they kind of wanted to leave Twitter anyway.

I think for a certain celebrity class, too, that feels like they're maybe more obligated to do it than they, then, you know, their obligation outweighs their enjoyment or whatever. I think there will be some people that walk away, but that'll be a vanishingly small number. I mean, I think everybody's going to stay on. I think it's just a matter of interaction, right? Like, to what degree do average users, I mean, if it ends up being fairly functional to just, I don't know, use the mute button a lot or the block button a lot to just sort of maintain the Twitter experience as you know it, I think most people stay on and most people engage in a fairly similar way to the way they're doing it now. Now. And even if it gets kind of bad, I think most people, I think there'll be really a small number of people that will actually shudder their accounts, right?

I think you might just sort of like piece out for a little while and then see what happens. Or just, again, you sort of engage differently. I don't, I think that the function of Twitter is both so established and so sort of niche in its way that I, that it does. seem sort of implausible that, that, you know, people would give it up and that it, I mean, largely implausible that it would like, you know, that everybody would like recongerate somewhere else. That sounds like the Trump thing, you know, we're all going to true social. Yeah, exactly.

Are we really all going to liberal true social? Mm-hmm. Is that really going to happen? I love it when journalists have a moral quandary pitted against their own careerism. I'm going to lose. I can't blast out this article to all my followers. Nobody's true. Nobody's leaving.

Okay, Shonda Rimes is leaving. Some people are leaving. I agree with you. There'll be some quiet quitting of Twitter. Some peace out of Twitter. Or the whole thing of, I only come here to tweet out my articles. Yeah.

Because that's the moral stand. I don't like this Musk platform, but I will tweet out my articles from it because that's where my audience is. Yep. Okay. Bravo. Coming up at 30 seconds, David, breaking news.

Our NFL insiders are committing trade inflation. Plus the life, fake death and actual death of a music legend. But first let us do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter

made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are, always, always gratefully received. This week's runner up was the New York Post employee who was tweeting out crappy headlines from the publication's account. The joke being, how could you tell those fake headlines from actual New York Post headlines? Thanks to Danforth for that one.

But this week's winner comes from noted sports radio host Dan McDowell. I'm sure you saw that Adidas has severed its ties to Kanye West. a.k.a. Ye. After his many anti-Semitic remarks. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, Adidas has signed a deal with Pete Davidson. We would have also accepted Adidas seen leaving Pete Davidson's apartment this morning.

If you thought the shoe fits, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. In the notebook dump, David, we got some big broadcasting news from that very same New York Post, Ian Eagle, CBS announcer, Turner announcer, has gotten a number one job in broadcasting. Finally.

There aren't many number one jobs to go around. But starting next year, meaning 2023, Ian Eagle is going to call the final four for CBS and Turner, replacing Jim Nance. Jim Nance, and this gives you an idea about how precious those number one jobs are,

has been calling the final four since the 1991. Wow. Oh, just 32 years in the seat. First of all, about Ian Eagle. One of the handful of guys in this business with 100% approval rating.

Yeah. Or something really close. close to it. Yeah. Which is an interesting combination, right? It's partly NBA and Nets in particular, I think. The market. NBA, the sport, and nets the market.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I also think it's, I mean, listen, vanishingly small number of people that probably fit the profile about to describe. But I do think he gets, I do think there's a little underdog status, you know, underdog cred to what he's doing because he hasn't gotten the call-up. yet. You know, I mean, he's been everybody's, he's the guy that you always say, well, why didn't Ian Eagle get that job? You know, like, oh, what's he, what's that guy doing on TV?

Where's Ian Eagle right now, you know? I thought that last year when Kevin Harlan got the conference finals for Turner, totally good with Kevin Harlan, like both of those guys, very, very different announcers. But I was like, shouldn't we have an outcry for Ian Eagle here for a second? Yeah. or at least if Turner was saying, well, we're going to do this on a year by year basis and outcry that says,

shouldn't I and Eagle get a turn in this seat next year? Yeah. Because you're right. There has been an underdog status about him. He's the Nets rather than the Nix. When he had the Nets job, Marv Albert, who was displaced from the Nix job,

came in and sort of like shared the job in a kind of a weird way for a while. Yeah. And everybody's like, but it's Ion Eagle. No, no, we've come to love. an eagle.

His dad was a comedian, a cat skills comedian. Really? And his mom was a singer. When he was on the pod last time, he talked about this, that they would basically push him out on stage when he was incredibly young to entertain the crowd, to do impressions. So there's a little bit of this showbiz kid quality to him. There is, yeah. Where not only is he funny, and he's very funny.

But funny in a way, like, I know this business inside and out, this business that is not only television, but show business broadly defined. Yeah. And I'm taking this character that you know is the announcer, the kind of plasticy robotic guy. And within those confines, I'm having a hell of a lot of fun during a basketball game. Yeah. I'm talking like an announcer's supposed to talk in those same cadences and rhythms. but I'm just doing it with a big, big wink at the audience. Yeah.

I mean, it's not a wink in a bad way. It's like, you know, it's like a, it's like a band. It's like you go to see a band, you know, an up-and-coming indie rock band in Philadelphia. And, you know, it's a bunch of like, you know, greasy-haired 28-year-olds or something like that. And they sound exactly like 70s stones, you know? It's like they all they're doing is just taking the stone. early stone sound and they're just like, and just like watch what we can do with this,

these is our parameters. And that could be the best band you've ever seen, right? It doesn't matter that they're not inventing music in some, you know, reinventing music in some magical way. It's, it's just a different way of having the same conversation. And we talked a million times about how one of the, how key it is to make a sporting event feel like a sporting event with your announcers, you know, and, and, um, yeah, you, you end up having in some, sometimes you end up having a lot more fun just kind of playing with the form, playing with the strictures of the form than you do trying to make it into something new.

That's exactly right. Being a funny announcer is coloring inside the lines. You cannot be an announcer calling a huge college basketball game or NBA game and be Howard Stern. You can not be John Malaney. But you can have fun and he has so much merry fun working within the strictures of this larger thing. Absolutely right. And of course, the other thing about him that makes him beloved is he calls a great game. Oh, yeah. He calls a near perfect game.

He told me when we did that interview that he went something like 10 years without making a mistake when he was calling Nets games. When I say mistake, it means not misidentifying a player. Oh, my God. On a shot or on a pass. Now, could not be independently verified. as they say in the news pages of the newspaper. But I believe him. Because it's like...

Well, it's almost a better story if you go 10 years and the only thing you've ever done is mispronounce, you know, whatever. It's like, oh, God, I just had a total brain fart and called him Concy Billups or something. You know, whatever. Like, that would be almost a better story than I never made a mistake. But it goes to that underdog thing you mentioned. Like, I remember him talking.

He's like, I was so... desperate to prove that I belonged here, that I would not allow myself to make a mistake. That's how I'm going to show people that I'm ready for the big leagues. And if you listen to him, not only does he call a near perfect game in terms of identifying players right and just not making obvious mistakes, what I've always been impressed with him about him is that his voice is always in the right place.

it's a lot of exciting moments during a basketball game sure but he knows when you know what my voice here instinctively should go to a seven three-pointer here my voice should go to about a seven point three-pointer in the fourth quarter down the stretch now my voice is about nine point one it's not ten yet i'm saving ten for the next really big thing for the buzzer beater i don't don't know how one learns to do that other than just doing a million basketball games. There's no way to talk about it other than it's just you see something you instinctively know how to perform that moment. Yeah.

He does that as well as anybody I've ever seen in the business. And so when you're watching a basketball game, there's something more honest about it. You don't feel like you're being sold an exciting moment that really is not that important because there's three and a half minutes left in the first quarter. there's something more honest about it. And I think if we're getting a little meta here, he's telling the story of a basketball game in a really, really subtle and exquisite way

when you do that. Yeah, I think that's right. You're working me up. You are putting the emotional beats, as they say, in screenwriting right in the right place. Mm-hmm. And again, I don't know that people at home understand that. I don't know that you know that that's happening,

but subconsciously you do. with him. Well done, Ian Eagle. Fly, Eagle, fly. I say. Tomorrow is the NFL's trade deadline, David. And I've got a problem with something I want to call trade inflation. Oh, wow.

Okay. As a society, we've tackled grade inflation. But what if our insiders are not telling us exactly how important various NFL trades are. Example. The Jacksonville Jaguars last week traded running back James Robinson. Yeah.

Ian Rappaport of the NFL network called that a quote, big trade. Big trade James Robinson going over to the Jets. Well, the price the Jets paid for James Robinson was a conditional sixth round pick. That's a big trade. Yeah.

Two days. after that, David, the Bears traded defensive end Robert Quinn to the Eagles. Ian Rappaport called this a blockbuster. A blockbuster. The price the Eagles paid for Robert Quinn was

a fourth round pick. But isn't some of that because like there's no value in the NFL players? Like the the chasm between actual and potential players in the NFL is just so much greater. Also, you know, setting aside like the first 15, 20 picks in the draft,

like every other pick has sort of has a relatively equal value because of, you know, depending on how good your scouting is. I mean, it's, I don't know, it does seem crazy in this world of NBA trades where like Rudy Gobert gets seven first round picks or whatever to think that like, you know, there's no number ones next to Christian McCaffrey's name. You know, I mean, in that trade. But I don't know.

It does seem crazy. I mean, listen, it stretches a lot. I think that there's a real, I think that given what I said, there's still a lot of, I think there's maybe a little bit of trade envy on behalf of the NFL reporters who just do want to be reporting these blockbusters when they don't really exist in season. So the trade deadline in the NFL is not what it is in the NBA. Rapsheet is not going to have woge-like massive. blockbuster things to report.

Right. So the way envy is expressed is to call something else a blockbuster. I like that. And here's where I get a little worried that maybe we need some agreed upon terms here. Oh, no. Okay. Kind of an AP style book. Okay.

So the conditional sixth was a big trade. The fourth rounder was a blockbuster. Well, then the Giants traded embattled wide receiver Cadarius Tony to the Chiefs. They got a third round pick and a six. Third round pick. According to Ian Rappaport, this was unloading Cadarious Tony. So if it's a blockbuster, if you get a fourth, but if you get a third, you're unloading it. Yeah.

Just think we need some, we need some, we need a. rubric. We need a lexicon. Yeah. It seems it has more to do with context, I guess, than it does actual, like... Tony was a first round pick. I get it. You're trying to recover some of your value, but just be a little careful out there around the NFL trade deadline. On the matter of book reviews, David, we talked the other day about Cormick, the old guy still got it McCarthy. And his new novel, The Passenger.

Yes. Well, this was an occasion because you have a huge author. he was writing or publishing a novel for the first time in 16 years, first novel since the road. And that gives us the occasion for a very special figure in journalism to emerge, the celebrity book reviewer. All right, yeah. Because when Cormick McCarthy is publishing something,

we got to make the call to the bullpen. We got to get the big names. You know, no disrespect for is an assistant professor of English at Marist College. But you're not getting the call from the bullpen today. No. That's for a different novel. Cornbroke McCarthy, we got to get into the big guns.

So the best I've seen was John Jeremiah Sullivan. Oh, yeah. Reviewing the passenger for the New York Times. Perfect. Someone we don't hear from a ton reviewing someone we don't hear from a ton. Yeah. It felt special. Mm-hmm.

I went back and looked some of these up, too. Thomas Harris's novel, Hannibal, came out in 1999. That was the sequel to The Silence of the Lamb. Of course, Harris's first novel in 11 years. The Times went out and got Stephen King to review Hannibal. Good celebrity book reviewer. Yeah. I think the high water market this might be 1998.

Tom Wolfe's a man in full. Once again, Wolf's first novel in 11 years. He got this Troika, Norman Mailer in the New York Review of Books, John Updike in the New Yorker, and Michael Lewis in the New York Times. Wow. Now show me when anybody else gets that murderers row of reviews to review their long-awaited novel. The car McCarthy would is great. It also, I mean, you know, depending, I haven't read the book, but depending on what style of court McCarthy retirement here, it could be a little bit daunting, you know.

But I agree. That's why you need the big person. Yeah. Because they're not going to be afraid. Sure. They're undaunted. Well, they could be afraid, but you're right. Undaunted.

And it does, yeah, I mean, it's just such a, I love that so much. John Jeremiah Sullivan, what, I mean, an actual living legend. Love the guy. I love everything that he writes. And the Stephen King, though, too, also a living legend. I love Stephen King more and more with every passing year of my life. And, you know, doesn't do a lot of reviews, but does a lot of blurbs, so he's really got the, you know, I'm sure he's, he's getting the reps in. Yeah, that's, it's, I guess you're right.

You know, you know, it's a big deal. There's also the political one, like the, the, the, the cousin of the phenomenon you're talking about is like when a big part. is like when a big politics book comes out, they'll get another established politician to do it. Or it'll be just like the new whatever. LBJ biography, it's like, well, what's Al Gore doing right now? You know, and it's like, you know, you get, you know,

you find, you find that sort of, that sort of lineup. But yeah, it's, it's fantastic. It's fantastic. I would love to be a part of those meetings. We're still waiting in Cormond McCarthy's case on the new,

on the New York review of books and the London review of books. Mm-hmm. When you have the longer gestation time. Yeah. I feel that's where you truly get the celebrity book reviewer. Oh, yeah. For sure. I mean, level of celebrity maybe regresses a little bit towards the mean and some of those.

But yes, it's for sure. I mean, you're always excited to see who it's going to be. One final item for you, David. Let me jump off your term living legend. This news item came across the wires from T. TMZ the other day. It was headline Jerry Lee Lewis alive in Memphis. No, no. You're already a little suspicious when you see that headline.

Here's the text of TMZ's story. Jerry Lee Lewis is not dead, dot, dot, dot, as we previously reported. We're told the rock and roll legend is alive living in Memphis. Earlier today, we were told by someone claiming to be Lewis's rep that he had passed. That turned out not to be the case. TMZ regrets the error. I'm sorry to laugh. So we had a big day on Twitter.

Jerry Lee Lewis is still alive. Our pal Brian Phillips tweeted, goodness gracious, great false expire. Which is a fantastic pun. Then on Friday, Davidson, sad news from DeSoto County, Mississippi. Jerry Lee Lewis has died. Oof.

So we went from false report of death to then actual death outpouring of tributes. I know what do you want to talk more generally here, but before we get to that, it's really strange that the implication was someone who is, this person who

called TMC was not actually the agent and yet he was only off by a day. I mean, if It feels a little bit like the, like the, you know, like a news outlet. Like, we regret calling Arizona for Joe Biden, but we're going to end up being right. So we're not going to change our call, right? I feel when you get the fake celebrity death report, it's never, again, sadly, for everyone involved and all relatives involved, it's not going to be this person lives for 10 more years.

There's probably someone who knows something about diet. something about dire circumstances. Didn't we see some example recently where it was like they kind of withdrew the death notice because they wanted to inform the family or whatever in the correct sequence before they actually made it a public thing? Maybe there was some of that in there. Yeah. So there's often it.

And then this is when news gets out, leaks from somewhere along the, you know, the, I don't know, somewhere from the family or something like that. Yeah, that's always a kind of a. Kind of a touchy situation. By the way, always blew my mind that Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swagger were cousin. Yeah. Well, totally bizarre.

Yeah. Jerry Lee Lewis, by the way, performed it Jerry Jones's birthday party last, what, two weeks ago or something like that? Fairly recently. How old was Jerry, 80? Or which was two jerrys? You mean Jerry Lee Lewis? No, no, no.

Jerry Jones. How much how old did he just turn 75? Something. Jerry was celebrating his 80th birthday. Right. And I remember that. The fact that Jerry Lee Lewis performed at that party seemed to be met with a sort of chorus of,

like, I didn't know he was still alive. So I don't really know what that says, but it does add a little bit of just creepy death to the story. Sorry, creepy depth to the story. That was a total slip of the tongue, but we can leave that in. I got an only in journalism word for you, David. Let's do it.

From valued listener, El Horse, Jaira Bolsonaro lost the Brazilian presidential election yesterday. Bolsonaro was embattled in many different ways, including a long stretch of COVID denialism, or at least COVID downplaying. The Guardian in their story about Bolsonaro losing the election called him, wait for it, a firebrand. Oh, a firebrand. we really need someone to tweet out that Australian lists we had of how you describe a politician at every stage of their career. There's firebrand, there was colorful, there was embattled, and there was former. Whichever Australian listener gave us that, please retweet that list to us.

We need that for future reference. Speaking of a place where words always matter, it's time for David Shoemaker. Guess is the strained pun headline. Yeah. Friday's headline about a 19-year-old in a freighted chess tournament was the teens gambit. The teens gambit. Today's headline comes to us from listener Paul Beer.

Not to be confused with Paul Bearer. It's from Las Vegas magazine. It's an article about carrot top. Oh, wow. Carrot top. Carrot top with no longer the curly, but kind of a kind of a straight, long hair

80s wrestler, 80s rocker kind of look. You got to get to the headline because I am resisting the urge to Google it and look at the picture right now. All right. I cannot read this article. I don't have Las Vegas magazine in front of me, but let's say this is about a kinder,

gentler carrot top, perhaps. Maybe caratop in kind of his older, more reflective phase. What was Las Vegas? magazine's strain punt headline. Oh my gosh. Carrot puree. I'm trying to think of like soft carrots.

Remember the hair? The curly, red curly. We call hair. We call it. No, general hairstyle we might call what? For short, a, I got a new. I got a new.

A new do, a new do. Mm-hmm. There we go. kinder, gentler, more relaxed carrot top. It is. Maybe think a little Shakespeare here. I know. He's right there, folks.

What is it? The taming of the dew. Oh. Tang. The taming of the dew. Do you think, did he get the haircut just to make that pun work? I don't know. He is David Chewaker.

I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica. Cervantes. A couple things to put on your radar. Next Tuesday, November 8th, we will be going live on Spotify Live for our election night podcast full of joy and sadness

and recriminations. And possible goodbye to the political career of Beto. Join us live or join us in pod form the next day. David and I'll be tweeting out that night when we're going to be going live. We'd love to have you. Following week, Sean Fennyson and I are doing our long

awaited media movie countdown. the definitive rankings of media movies since all the president's men in 1976. There is a huge and expanding thread at the press box pod where I have been logging the movies as I watched them. Thought it made good progress, David.

There's still like 20 to go. Watch two a day to get to the magic number. We also mentioned we got a big football game coming up on Saturday. Undefeated Georgia, the number one team in the nation, versus undefeated Tennessee, the number two team in the nation. Haven't done an interview pod in a while,

so we're going to have the longtime voice of SEC football, Vern Lundquist, joining us to talk about what it was like to call those magical, gigantic games of the week in the SEC for years and years. Can't wait to talk to Vern. And David and I are back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.