The Press Box - The New Howard Stern, Ben Shapiro DESTROYED, and Kamala Harris Reboots | The Press Box

Episode Date: May 14, 2019

Howard Stern has written a new book and the takeaway is that he’s "matured" (02:47), Ben Shapiro gets OWNED during a BBC interview (21:00), and Kamala Harris pivots her campaign back toward the center (31:45). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelly and welcome to the Ringer podcast network. The NBA playoffs are in full swing and we have coverage across all of our channels to keep you up to speed as we make our way towards the finals. Make sure to check out the Ringer MBA show for daily coverage of the games from each series and the Ringer.com to read Kevin O'Connor, Dan Devine, and the rest of our NBA experts break down every key matchup. And don't forget to tune in every Sunday evening to the Bill Simmons podcast to hear Bill and Ryan Rucillo's NBA reactions from the weekend. As always, these can be found on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. David, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes

turned heel against his old pal Mark Zuckerberg this week. What I want to know is is it okay for us to mainstream the phrase turned heel? I'm glad that you brought this up

because the ringer.com, reputable website, the ringer.com, use the phrase turning heel or heel turn in reference to a certain Game of Thrones character four times.

today by my count. Yes, that is it, I'm happy that wrestling parlance has, you know, anytime it busts into the mainstream, although I think we all, all wrestling fans got a little bit beaten down by the Donald Trump is pro wrestling essay fest

of 2016 to present. But yeah, I mean, listen, it's important on the Chris Hughes front to point out that just because you turn on your partner doesn't necessarily make you a heel. I think if you're cutting ties with the with the behemoth of Facebook,

you might be turning baby face for the first time in your, in your wrestling career. So it just depends on who the evil guy is and who the guy from the forces of light is. Yeah, listen. You're saying, this is actually, no, this is actually a different wrestling reference.

You're saying Chris Hughes turned face. Yeah, he's turned. That would be my right off the top take. I mean, I'm not some doctor, and I don't have some hard and fast opinion on the evils of Facebook. But I would think that that would be. Facebook, yeah, turned Facebook.

Well, you build, just because you build it into the name doesn't mean that you're, that's what side of the spectrum you're on. I mean, listen, you can toss your partner through a play glass window and then strut in your, you know, shirtless and a leather jacket. And it's clear that you're turning heel. But there's definitely some splits, even violent splits where, you know, the, the active part, the actor, the aggressor, uh, ends up, you know, more of a fan favor than before. And I think that's what we're looking at with Mr. Hughes. Mr. Hughes, also a great wrestler. We are the bog god that's so-and-so's music of media podcast. This is the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network.

The Pressbox is the media podcast. We are not allowed to be late with your post-presidential memoir. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer here. With three topics for your pleasure and amusement, first David, Howard Stern has written a new book. And according to the journalism angle du jour, Howard Stern has matured. What do we make at the King of All Media's growing?

up period. Second, ha ha, right wing wonderkin, Ben Shapiro got owned on television. We mostly laugh, but we also at Marvel at the invasiveness of the British celebrity interview. And finally, Kamala Harris became the latest candidate to reboot her presidential campaign.

What does it say about Harris and what does it say about reading the tea leaves of the Democratic Party? All that plus the notebook dump and the overwork Twitter joke of the week. But first, David, by the time anyone is listening to this pod, Howard Stern will have published his third book, which is called Howard Stern

comes again. And by the way, David, can I tell you how 90s that double entendre of a title list? Doesn't it remind you of the old days when Howard was on FM and would talk about someone pleasuring themselves? Like we were just taking this whole language of FCC mandate language. Very funny. Anyway, if you've read anything from Howard's media tour, and I know you have, the takeaway seems to be the journalist

marveling at the way he has matured, the way he has evolved. He's not a shock jock anymore. He's a long-form celebrity interviewer. What do you make of his purported transformation? Well, I mean, anyone of our generation who, who, you know, grew up more or less listening to Stern,

I'm sure remembers that one of his biggest points of discussion along the way were the various imitators, various pretenders to the stern throne. And I think that, you know, and this is something that you've talked about a lot and written about too, you know, there were want to be Howard Stearns filling up the airwaves during his peak.

But I think more significantly, he influenced the entire subsequent generation of radio and television personalities. And so that combined with the sort of general moral decline of the culture and broadly stated, I think made anything that he was doing. You know, I don't know

there's really a place for shock jocks anymore, at least not in the same sort of sphere, that same mode of like just sort of poking the bear, you know, rabble-rousing, that sort of thing. I think you have to have a much different tack to be, you know, to be that sort of offensive these days. And it's just hard to be what Howard was. And I think that that coupled with the fact

that he has certainly evolved as a human being. And a lot of that has come, I think, probably with his time on, you know, being on serious and not being in direct competition. looking at numbers every day to see what to you know to sort of put him in the position of constantly upping the ante yeah it's a two-track evolution isn't it because on the one hand i do think reading the interviews he did one with david marchese in the new york times and i'm with the hollywood reporter that he has gone to a lot of therapy he has obviously discovered some things about

himself and sort of rethought a lot of the stuff from his radio days and i believe that there is that part of this is a sincere transformation. I also believe part of it is probably commercially minded. I think these things tend to be complex and we try to reduce them to one thing or the other. And in fact, usually with humans, they're both. And, you know, he even said in an earlier interview, I saw that, you know, he was worried about his relevancy and doing those kind of jokes about race, about women, about sexuality in 2019, ain't going to do it.

And when there's YouTube and all kinds of ways to be quoted instantly and to get in a totally different kind of trouble that he got into in the 80s and 90s, it just doesn't work. You know, I think there's a commercial imperative too where it's like if I still, if I want to be big now or I want to be maybe even different than being big is being respected, I do need to enter this kind of grand old man of radio phase where it's like, oh, you know, hey, he's the guy who gets stuff out of celebrities. He's the guy I can sit down the other day with Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen and do this big interview that everybody was quoting to me last week. I just think that is interesting.

As a longtime Howard Stern fan yourself and listener, when you read these pieces, do you begin to think that people who are writing them maybe didn't listen to him 20 years ago? Because am I wrong? Or wasn't he a good celebrity interviewer back then, too? Like this isn't just totally new, is it? No, but I mean, I think even if you were listening to him 20 years ago, I think that I think Howard being a great interviewer was sort of, you know, would have been a little bit of a take even though it's absolutely true, right? I mean, the conventional, I mean, the overall opinion of him had little to do with

this celebrity interviewing. I mean, I guess complimenting Howard Stern's interview skills in the 90s would, you know, is kind of like reading Playboy for the articles, you know. You know, though I do feel it became a take. It became one of those takes, let's call it early 2000s, where everybody would start saying, you know, actually, Howard Stern is the best celebrity interviewer. And for the next 15 years, everybody thought they were making an original point. Yeah, that's true. Controversial take.

And in fact, everybody had been saying this. I love this little story in the Hollywood reporter. Stern, I'm quoting here, points to an early 2015 interview with Gwyneth Paltrow that weaved its way from a discussion of relationships. to one of oral sex as a major turning point in his career. And here's Howard talking. Had I said to her, Gwyneth, do you blow your husband? I'm an asshole. But sure enough, we start talking and she's fascinating.

And I'm getting to know her. And then she goes and then Gwyneth proceeds to describe a sexual act on her own volition. And then Howard says, so she took me there. Now, wait a second. So the idea is in either approach, you really just wanted to know about with Quedith Paltrow's sex life, but the idea is you just win a different way to get there.

I guess I don't quite see the moral thing. And again, I totally believe that he's a different person, but I thought that was really funny. I wrote a piece about Howard Stern and his relationship with sportscasters who are fans of his. And one thing that Joe Buck told me, Joe Buck,

a longtime Stern fan and then later a Stern guest a couple of times, is he said the biggest thing about his interviews that struck him, one that he actually pays attention to what you're saying and he rolls with you when you answer questions rather than just kind of asking, you know, what's next on his list. And he said the other thing is he's just so self-assured for a guy who has made his entire living off describing his insecurities. He is so secure in himself that he can just watch you and be like, I know what to say next. I know exactly where to go with this. and Buck's whole thing with me was like, he always says, in other words.

So you give an answer and then Stern goes, in other words, and kind of restates what you said, that's him kind of buying time thinking about what to say, and then boom, he hits you with the next question and tries to dig deeper. Yeah, that's really interesting.

I mean, anyone that's done any sort of interviewing, I mean, live or, you know, for print or anything else knows that, like the, I mean,

that's the, the hardest thing is to stay absolutely present and to be so prepared that you always, know where to go, but to be present enough to take what your subject is talking about and lead that to somewhere interesting. I mean, I think it's impossible to overstate how much his, you know, no matter how much he's changed, how much his history, you know, affects the way that he interacts with people. The fact that he got such high ratings, you know, for so long that he got

every celebrity that he wanted. Everybody that was doing a press tour came in and they all knew what they were getting into. And I think that the Gwyneth Paltrow example is a, is a pertinent one. because I think that, you know, she might have gotten to that, to that line on her own, but she wouldn't have gotten to that line in any other interview, right? I mean, she, I'm sure came prepared to have a certain sort of discussion on the Howard Stern show, whether or not that was outmoded or not. And even during his heyday, I mean, I mean, I remember you could especially see it on that old e-show when they had the television show that was like clips from the day's episode or whatever.

Some of the even, like, the raunchier parts of the show, you could just see him sort of enduring, even at the peak, you know, because like people would come in and he would just sort of be, you know, there'd be the sort of like put on thrill. But everybody would just roll in, like, knowing what it was to perform on the Howard Stern Show. And that, you know, your mileage may vary on how interesting that stuff is in retrospect. But even Howard, you know, it seemed like was just, there was a certain, obviously a titillation. But there was, but like I said, it seemed like he was just kind of, kind of enduring some of that at the time. Yeah, he had some interesting things with Marchesey to that effect where he said stuff like,

I was just trying to get people to pay attention to me. So I would say things that I didn't believe because I would just, I was so, all I want to do is lock down people's attention at 15 minute intervals. And even he would, he would cut off otherwise interesting guests and just blurt things out because he was afraid that guests were boring the audience. So like he had Robin Williams in there or something. And it was one of the one of the things in the book, he regrets how he handled a Robin Williams interview.

But he sort of thought he feared Robin Williams was boring. Just imagine that, by the way. Williams who was who was who did what Howard Stern did every time he went on the tonight show and just lit up the place he feared Robin Williams is boring so he would cut him off here is um this interested me this is stern talking to CBS's Tracy Smith the other day when asked by Smith what makes you a good celebrity interviewer why do you think it is that celebrities open up to you I think what happens is they, and I've spent a lot of time reflecting on this, you know, my whole career has been about honesty. Painful honesty, you know, penis size, insecurities, I hate the way I look.

Like right now I'm so aware of this camera and I have my glasses off and I look horrible. You don't. Yeah, well, thank you, but I feel that way. And so, you know, I think that kind of honesty, when people walk in, they feel that expectation that maybe they should open up. That makes a lot of sense too. If Howard has confessed everything, then surely I can talk about my bad relationship with my dad or my divorce for my first wife. This is not me, by the way, talking this is hypothetical celebrity.

My divorce for my first wife, whatever it is. And, you know, I'm never going to go as far as he did. I think that's powerful too. Yeah, I think that's right. We can talk about it all we want. I mean, there's certainly an aspect of it that's just, there's that certain something that only he has. There's a way that he can make you feel at ease enough to talk about that.

And obviously there's people, all different types of celebrities and people in politics and everything else, people that would never say that kind of stuff. And they, you know, found their way to saying it on the Howard Stern show. I mean, part of it, I think, you know, at the time, and this is, you know, we'll talk a little bit about our president, but it seemed like it was sort of an opportunity to say something in a safe space, right? There's part of it that, like, you know, it was accepted if you were there, if you were on the air.

It was, at the time, it was part of the, you know, you were part of the performance. And I'm sure there's a lot of people who were just dying for opportunities to say some of the stuff that you could only say on the Howard Stern show. There's also the radio aspect of it, the volume that he produced, and our,

our producer, Evan, was saying before we started recording that, you know, he found some Stern fan pages where they're just like trading old, you know, just like bit torrents of episodes like, like their trading cards or whatever. I mean, there was certainly the aspect of it to which, like, you would do an interview and it would be lost to history immediately. You know, I mean, like, it's not, unless it was picked up on the e-show, I mean, like, who's recording this stuff?

You know? I mean, and there is a safety to that, too. Yeah, they would just disappear in the radio airwaves. I like your thing about a safe space. I also think there's this weird process now where every celebrity he goes and does the interview and does it with any level of honesty comes out more liked than when they went in. And I know driving around listening to Sirius, sometimes I'll be like,

all right, the David Crosby interview. Now there's somebody I don't care about at all. Somebody who I probably just viscerally don't like for no reason at all. But then you listen to him go like an hour plus with Stern. You're like, man, that was awesome.

Yeah, that was incredible. I heard Melissa Etheridge. And I'm like, oh, wow, Melissa Etheridge is badass. That's not an opinion I ever had.

I had no opinion. But anyway, I'm just like, I just think that's so funny because I think that's actually to me the most surprising thing because, you know, his old, his old personality is him screaming at Richard Simmons or something. And you, you just kind of coming out thinking Richard Simmons is crazy and weird and all stuff. But his new personality somehow transforms the celebrity into somebody like, like I said, likable or cool who's had this incredible journey that you've been on.

It's, it's really wild. I think that, you know, you can talk about sportscasters or whatever. I think, you know, that obvious, you know, an ascendant of that is, is podcasts, right? I mean, how many times have we, I mean, and I, and I'm sure that a lot of podcasters, the best ones, like Marin came out of radio. I'm sure, you know, there's a lot of connectivity there too. But, you know, how many times have you listened to that long-form podcast and been like, oh, man, I really like whatever athlete or comedian or actor or whatever better than I ever thought I would? And it doesn't really click until a few minutes in. And it takes a great interviewer and it takes, you know, a period of

time, which only Howard Stern is one of the blessed few that got that sort of time to interview people. He earned it, obviously, but he was the only, you know, one of the few people interviewing at that length for years. I don't know if you're talking about long-form podcasts with the capital L or a lowercase help, but I'm glad it's the latter. On Donald Trump, Stern tells David Marchese in the New York Times, Donald is a well-guarded personality. I think he's actually so emotional that somewhere along the line he had to close it off. That's a valuable technique for people who have been traumatized. Donald has been traumatized. Make no mistake, I believe his father was a very difficult guy. That's an interesting insight. Also on Tiger Woods, I love Howard Stern,

the sports media critic. He says, you hated him 10 minutes ago. Then he got the ball in the hole and you're redeeming him. Why did you hate him in the first place? You probably shouldn't have hated him then because what did his life have to do with you? And now that he was able to be number one, putting the ball in the hole, you love him again. I don't know. I kind of wish I'd written that piece. Also in random Stern news, Stuttering John Melendez also has a book coming out. Go on. He tweets, I find it very odd that Howard Stern is coming out with another book two weeks before mine. What does he need to buy another house in Fiji?

I just, one, that Stuttering John has a book at all, but two, that he would think that Howard Stern's giant Simon & Chuster book release was just programmed to. to ace his book out. I love that. That's good stuff by Sutter and John there. All right, David, now it's time for 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. Can I start with an overworked Twitter joke lawsuit for you? Did you happen to see the piece Conan O'Brien wrote in variety with the title, My Stupid Lawsuit, where he discusses the fact that he settled a case with a man who had claimed that O'Brien and his writing staff stole jokes from his Twitter account

and also stole jokes from this guy's blog. O'Brien's piece on the one hand is this very carefully written thing where you can see that he's come to this conclusion where he's trying to concluding the case and doesn't want to, you know, to overrun anything. But essentially he's making the point that it's sort of important. possible to write original joke comedy anymore. He is essentially just talking about the overworked Twitter joke of the week in his way and that we all come up with the same lines at the same time and even cite some of the

times that he and multiple late night hosts had the same joke on the same night. It's just funny to me that we gave everybody the tools to write gags. And this is the reason we do this every week because it's just funny. And that everybody comes up with the same jokes. And even the professionals come up with the same jokes. the people who are paid to be funny. Anyway, that's funny. Anybody wants to check that out, please do.

In other overworked news, here's a tweet from the Hill, David. Sarah Sanders, who is, of course, Trump's secretary, hopes people remember her as being transparent and honest. Yeah. It was an overboard Twitter show to have some fun with that.

I really hope people will remember me. Someone tweeted as a power-hitting gold glove center fielder for the Red Sox. I hope people remember me as Olivia De Hathaland. What a poll that is. I hope and finally I hope I'm remembered for winning the WWE Heavyweight Championship and an Oscar for my performance as Godzilla. Thanks to Josh Sandin for that one.

Some overworked Twitter low hanging fruit. Did you see the new coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers's University of Michigan coach John Beeline? Yeah. It was a very easy of work, Twitter joke to say you could say he made a Bline out of Michigan. again thanks to cheesehead sports nut. It was a very overworked Twitter joke that I don't quite understand, but I'm going to catch up when I get back to the States to say next week on Game of Thrones, the Targaryen administration announces infrastructure week.

I believe that. I believe that has to do with a plot twist thanks to skirt rambus for that one. All right, David. Topic number two, we got to talk about Ben Shapiro. Oh, man. Okay. How much did you enjoy? this is mostly a ha-ha. I've got very little agenda here, but how much did you enjoy the Ben Shapiro

clip of him getting interviewed about his new book on the BBC? I mean, I'm glad that we're doing multiple segments on new books. I think just for the literacy of our country. That's an important step. Amen. Yeah, that was a, it was quite a show, man. I mean, just one of the, one of the all-time, I don't know how deep I should get into this right off the bat, but I mean, the reason why this is great. For anyone who's wondering, like, who the hell is Ben Shapiro or why do we care? Ben Shapiro is the, I would say the leading sort of new media conservative when it comes to X destroys Y YouTube videos. And he is, you know, amongst a younger audience. I think the sort of, the sort of icon of debate club conservatism. And obviously he's very young and that's part of his calling card too. He's

been around since he was a wee lad. So yeah, it's pretty impressive, though, that his greatest moment in the sunlight exists only on kind of ironic terms, right? I mean, the reason why this has blew up so much, is because he got destroyed. He got owned. He got, you know, he got served up what he purports to serve up on a regular basis. And now it's,

it's, you know, it's online everywhere too. Yeah. I was also struck, I mean, I mean, that's the first part of this,

right, is you get out of the nice bubble where people who like you are interviewing you, or you're just destroying college kids who are kind of helpless. Yeah. And it goes badly. The second part of this to me,

that's even more interesting. is just the fact that you submitted to a British interview and kind of belatedly found out what a British interview is about. His interviewer on the BBC was Andrew Neal, who Shapiro at one point, should we listen to a little bit of the end of this? Yes, please. Can we play just a little bit of the end of the greatest interview in the history of books? And I've never heard of you until I briefed myself for this, but that's not the issue. You haven't. And why the hell are you interviewing me, sir?

It's an interesting book. But my point is your book claims that society... Well, it would be nice if you would quote it from time to time. Your book is... Well, actually, I've done so several times, and I'm about to do so again if you would let me just finish the question. You book claims that society is turning its back on Judeo-Christian values. What are those values that's turning its back on?

I'm not inclined to continue an interview with a person as badly motivated as you as an interviewer. So I think we're done here. I appreciate your time. All right. Well, thank you for your time and for showing that anger is not part of American political discourse. Now, Mr. Shapiro, we'll say goodbye. Amazing. Oh, my goodness.

His entire reputation is sort of, or not a lot of his reputation is based on this sort of boast that he could, you know, that if given equal footing and a fair playing field and even playing field, he could beat any lib and he could beat any lib and. a debate and he goes up against someone who's not even a liberal and who's not even trying to debate him and he just sort of melts under the pressure. It's a little bit of a mind-boggling, but, you know, thoroughly enjoyable experience. Yeah, I mean, if anybody who thinks that, as Shapiro did briefly, that Andrew Neal is a liberal and that that was the reason he was questioning him roughly about his book, I would invite you to check out the political positions portion of Neal's Wikipedia page, especially his views on climate change and HIV AIDS. He is not a liberal.

In fact, runs the company that owns the media company that owns the spectator, the longstanding conservative magazine. The funny thing about this is, is I think Shapiro's just so not used to television interviews working like this. I have no doubt in America that lots of print interviews. use work like this where the person asking the questions is, you know, being skeptical, is playing devil's advocate, is taking flimsy ideas and challenging the person who's being interviewed or on the book tour in this case to try to defend them or to try to bolster them. But that doesn't really exist on television in the United States outside of what? Like the political Sunday shows, maybe? I mean, I, I, I, I, I was just thinking about this while I was watching this clip. What on American television is like this at all, even with, you know, polite sort of pushback? Yeah, I mean, certainly not much when it comes to politics, right? I mean, you're either, I mean, you're almost always going into friendly territory.

And when you're not, you're kind of very aware, immediately aware that that's where you're headed. Or you're, you know, I'm sure you get a heads up from your publicist. It's sort of surprising that he was, that he was so surprised or so. off guard by this interaction. But yeah, I mean, I just can't imagine as crazy as it is. I just can't imagine any place, like you said, for polite pushback. And you could tell by his answers to some of these questions about early abortion and various other things that he was either not in the mood or not prepared to answer these questions. Before I can't, we do the pod tonight. I was at a thing that the Guardian had here. And it was the Guardian live featuring Tony Blair.

It was like an hour and a half. And what was so funny, it was a journalist from the Guardian interviewing him. And of course, what Tony Blair wanted to do more than anything was Peacock about Brexit and lay into everyone left and right who was responsible directly or indirectly for the Brexit mess that the UK now finds itself in. But the interviewer was like, let's talk, hey, Mr. Blair, let's talk about your, for like 20 minutes about your immigration positions when you were PM and just roughed him up really, really nice. nicely. Again, not being impolite, not destroying or owning anyone, but just actually having a semi-confrontational tough interview. And a crowd that was overwhelmingly pro-Blair loved it, as far as I could tell, because it was actually a stimulating discussion. And it's the way you're supposed to interview people. I always think like Isaac Chotner,

who's a pal of mine, does those interviews over the New Yorker. I think those are great. and I think he's really, really talented. But I think part of the reason people get such a charge out of those on Twitter and elsewhere is because they don't read anything like that. That just doesn't exist in their media diet at all. And when they see something like that, they're like, yeah, finally. And it's and it's a deficit in the United States. It really is because almost, I mean, I was watching Blair tonight. I was like, what American president would A, be treated like that?

And by the way, B, submit to an interview like that, you know, in front of a crowd. Like, what would it just be like if you're George W. Bush going to go do that? Is Obama going to do that? No, they're not for the most part. Clinton's certainly not going to do that. They'd rather do a roadshow with with Hillary. Yeah. I just think that's a really interesting thing.

And again, of all people to just step into the booby trap, Ben Shapiro really is. And by the way, if you want to hear the fun is wait till the BBC panel. discusses the interview after Andrew Neal signs off there. One of them calls Shapiro a nitwit. That's another great highlight. So just Brits talking about Ben Shapiro. What a, what a time. At the risk of walking headlong into our own overworked Twitter joke, there was a great, I mean, there's been a nice little meme that I saw a couple times that juxtaposes to Shapiro tweets, one from May of 2014, where he says the right side of history may be the most morally idiotic phrase of modern times. History is not God and has no morality. And then, of course, from very recently in 2019, my new book, The Right Side of History, is out today.

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Learn more at Hulu.com. All right, David, topic number three. We've been covering some of the Democratic presidential campaigns, and I thought we should get around to Kamala Harris. Because even though the primary is only a few months old, we already have another reboot. So Beto O'Rourke rebooted a couple days ago. And now Kamala Harris,

according to the New York Times's Jonathan Martin and Asted Wesley is attempting to, quote, reset her campaign. You might remember that Harris had 20,000 people at her first rally in January, but since then, her polls haven't gone anywhere. And what's happened is she's sort of stuck between being a centrist,

former prosecutor, and trying to ride the leftward wave at the Democratic Party. Martin and Wesley Wright in the Times, some Harris advisors and allies have winced at some of the senator's overtures to liberals, such as calling out for the, calling for the eliminating private health insurance and refusing to rule out letting prisoners vote dot, dot, dot. These supporters believe her pool of attainable voters

sit squarely between the center and the left. What do you make of Harris attempting at this early stage to recalibrate her campaign? I mean, the other thing I heard today was that she's, you know, that Iowa voters are salty because she hasn't been spending enough time there. She's kind of putting all of her chips in the South Carolina basket. It just sort of feels like, I mean, the connective tissue there is just that it's, I don't know, just like an overabundance of gamesmanship of like trying to figure. I mean, this is not exclusive to Kamala Harris by a long shot. But also just like the way you're seeing now with the, you know,

there all this rumors are going around of a potential Biden Harris ticket, like that they're already in discussions about it. Is it too much to ask that people just go to Iowa and try to get votes? you know, and kind of see where everything shakes out. I feel like the more that we, the more that politicians try to game the system or, you know, or it makes it more difficult to vote for the best candidate. All the gamesmanship in the world doesn't necessarily add up to winning an election. Do you feel, and I'm sure they have like sophisticated polling things that we don't have access to,

but do you feel the Democratic candidates are wrestling with the is Twitter real life question that we've talked about on this pot a couple of times? times? Yeah, I think they certainly are. There's a degree to which it's inevitably real because that's going to be, you know, the first responders to anything that you do or say, right? And that ends up shaping news coverage and that ends up shaping the popular opinion. But the question about whether or not they're indicative of anything other than just some number of hundreds or thousands of voices on Twitter, I mean, I think that's something that these candidates are dealing with every day. Jonathan Chait has this big piece in New York today about this.

very idea that and part of what he says is he doesn't think the Democratic parties has really gone to the left as much as it might appear. And one of his, the arguments he makes is that, or one of the pieces of evidence he points out is that, you know, AOC has in many ways become the face of the Democratic Party. And there's two forces doing that. One is Fox News, which would love to have her be for their own gruesome reasons the face of the Democratic Party. And then the second force is allies of AOC or people on her side of the party who of course also actually do want her to be the face of the Democratic Party because they like her politics more than they like Joe Biden's. But it creates this kind of media sense that the Democrats

are in one place. And then you look at the polls and Joe Biden is. beating everybody's brains out in these admittedly very early polls. And, you know, Kamala Harris is, it was in that article, I just quoted, you know, making these overtures to the Bernie Sanders wing of the party essentially and getting nowhere with them and then thinking, wait a second, maybe this isn't the way the wind is moving after all. And I should just run for president as who I am. I just think that's fascinating because it just to me, it all gets down to how much of the energy and the Democratic Party as it comes out in the media is just, you know, shock and awe and how much of it is actually

the party and its voters moving one direction? I think that's a really valid question, but I think that it's difficult. I think that that's an issue that candidates and the voting public and we, and journalists should be wrestling with on a regular basis. I also think that there's a certain sort of candidate that that will transcend the problems that this system, you know, that that juxtaposition creates. And, uh, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and some ways it is a good, it's a good testing ground to see how the various candidates deal with such things. Yeah, maybe, maybe they'll bridge the two, uh, parts of the party or maybe they'll be just like Hillary Clinton and just win anyway. Yeah. And, and then, and then the party will have to figure it out. You mean seal the nomination,

Brian, I believe. And to go back to the Biden-Harris point, there is a big piece in Politico today where Congressional Black Caucus senior members are putting forward this idea that Biden-Harris would be the dream ticket to beat Donald Trump. So, I mean, I... This is silly season already, though, don't you think? I mean, that actually would be an appealing ticket for the Democrats in a lot of ways. But this just feels like, oh, my God, this is a new and dangerous phase of the media.

where we're already into dream ticket phase. It is, it is. And listen, I mean, you can have great affection for both of these candidates, and I have some measure of affection for both of them. But, I mean, as well as Biden is doing in the polls, as, you know, intriguing as the Harris candidacy has been, I mean, both of these campaigns have been politically, sort of caught flat-footed at various points already. And, you know, this feels more like a PR push than an actual strategy.

All right, David, let's do the no. dumb quickly. Topic number one, the most important news story in the world, Barack Obama is taking too long to write his book. This is from Edward Isaac Devere over at the Atlantic. Obama's memoir, which many people had thought was going to come out in 2019, won't be published this year, according to a person familiar with the writing process. What do you make of Obama taking some extra time to really, you know, iron out those transitions, make sure his chapter kickers go well? Well, listen, this is what happens when you hire someone to write a book and they actually write the book. You know, I mean, if it's, I mean, I remember when both, when both, both Clinton volumes came out and you were just like, wait, they wrote, like this person wrote 800 pages in the time between, I mean, and if you know the publishing industry, I mean, there was probably, you know, delivered nine months before the book hit the shelves. I mean, just they, they turn to these around so quickly, often with the, almost always with the help of some degree of ghost writing.

And, you know, I'm sure that Obama is probably getting some amount of help, but he's always been a very proud, you know, author. And my guess is that's what's holding up the process here. What do we make of the end of Edward Isaac DeVier's tweet where he says, according to a person familiar with the writing process? Is that like a joke on the basketball source close to the process thing? It must be, right? Or is he serious. I, God, I hope so. I really hope so. loyal listener bent casmore noted something david that i also noticed last week which is a few times you've referred to the democrat primary the democrat yeah and party yeah instead of the

democratic primary which somebody sent me a direct message about this and i went i didn't actually i meant to i meant to mention it it might be the same person what do you have to say for yourself this is that's a hyper corrective i believe i think at some point it was locked into my head that people say this incorrectly and i uh and i end up doing it just like when people overuse I when they should be saying me, I've, I have, I have ruined the way that my, my brain works and my mouth works by trying to be more right than is necessary. David is not a right wing apparatchik. In case anybody could not tell from the rest of the podcast.

I mentioned this earlier, Dave, but Kamala Harris is not the only one rebooting. His or her campaign, the AP reports that Beto O'Rourke is, quote, reintroducing his candidacy. It's time. He hasn't gone viral. and O'Rourke will appear on Maddow and the View, if he has not already, to reintroduce his candidacy. So we're here officially at Beto reboot.

I just love this because it's such a great, these both pieces included lots of, you know, really interesting details about what the two candidates were thinking, but it's sort of a good way to get attention, isn't it? To say, I'm ready to reboot my candidacy.

Yeah. I'm going to go to the press and say, like, yeah, it's time for some change, boys. Let me let you in on my thinking here. Yeah, I mean, it, you know, I mean, I'm sure that there's some, some advisors that would say it shows weakness, but I think it also, you could say it shows some, you know, flexibility. And you're right, it does, it does get attention. Now, it depends, you know, I guess it remains to be seen how hungry for attention

someone like better work will be. I mean, I think that appearing on Maddow is a good move. And at times I wonder why, you know, these, these top line candidates aren't spending more time on MSNBC, you know, at least on the prime time shows, but especially in the primary season. But, you know, the view, I mean, I guess we would be, I wonder if there's betting odds on whether or not Beto will be standing on the table during his appearance there. I think that'll, that'll tell us a lot about how hungry for attention he is. And that was part of the reboot that he had to stop standing on tables. I mean, he, he, Beto was weirdly shamed in so many different ways upon getting into the primary. That is just a, just a weird, wild story of someone getting in with a

ton of attention and then bombing out really quickly. The only other thing I have down here is the Trump calling Buttigieg Alfred E. Newman. And which was one, an incredibly dated reference as the judge was quick to capitalize on. Number two, I am genuinely interested. What should the media do when that happens? Because there was a Politico story going around about this. I think the interview where he gave it was Politico and they're like three authors on it. Everybody's making fun of it. What do you do when Trump says something like that? How do you handle it? That's a great question. I have no idea. I mean, do you, are you talking about from? Because a judge had a response. There's a back and forth. So that's a thing. But he just, is it just buried in an

interview? I mean, what political. Politico's doing, I think you could probably argue that Politico doesn't really think it's that important anyway, but it kind of comes down to do we aggregate our own interview transcript or just leave it in a piece and let somebody else find it. That's one of the big, that's one of the, you know, the great discussions in modern media. Do we self-aggregate? Yeah, it's a, that Politico is not exactly, you know, it's not a, you know, pop culture website that could, that could put up a listical about, you know, 10 times Alfredi Newman entered politics or whatever. But, but, but there does seem to be a little. bit. It does seem to beg for a little bit of explanation or backstory there. I want some, some of those funny Mad Magazine headlines from our youth where it would be like NYPD Blue cover and it'd be like NYPD Black. That would be there. Just so somebody throwing up or something like that. Yeah. I did find this funny for, I even tweeted this from the Politico story. So they're

writing about Trump and this, in this, the Offerty Newman bit. And they, and they, and they, quote somebody anonymously. Listen to this. Trump believes if you can encapsulate someone in a phrase or a nickname, you can own them, a person who knows Trump said in a recent interview, low energy Jeb, little Marco, that kind of shit really diminishes people and puts you in control of them. And that's what Trump is a genius for doing. Now, did we need to grant someone anonymity to say that Trump is trying to own someone or control them by giving them a nickname? Did we not, did we not know that? I mean, that's just, like what? That's really bizarre.

It's so funny to me. That is just really strange. All right. Time for David guesses the terrible pun headliner book title. Oh no. Okay. David's most favorite segment.

Let's go. All right. Come on. Do you, I had a couple of options, but should we just do Suttering John Melendez's memoir? Oh my gosh. The difficulty here,

the difficulty here is that he's certainly done other memoir. He's written other books, right? Yeah. I mean, I would assume that he that in the Howard Stern private parts heyday when like everybody was churning out books, I assume that he had one. It is, it's hard to imagine he hasn't. But I'll say this. Why was it?

Why was Howard Stern's book not called the second coming? I guess he's done more than two books. He's already done a second book. So. Yeah, that's be the third. I believe this is I believe this is stuttering John's first book. But this is, I'll give you this. It could be the, it is kind of like a generic stuttering.

John memoir title. If you want to, if you really, I mean, for some reason, maybe I'm just stuck in the 90s. My brain immediately goes to stuttering John's bathroom reader, which would be funny if you are familiar with a certain sort of publishing from the 90s. Yes, that's funny. How about did I stutter? Ooh, that's pretty good. It's not it?

That's pretty, it's not it, though. Dang, that's what I would. You're right going to the one thing that people know about sitting. though. It is a speech-related book title. Talk. I don't know. I don't know. I think I've gone as far as I can go. The memoir title is easy for you to say. Oh, that's great. Pretty good, right? Yeah. Yeah, I like that.

He got some good advice. I'm very excited to see what Suttering John has to say after a lifetime, you know, working in media. Maybe young reporters that listen to the show can get something valuable. from that. Yeah, how to ask funny questions to Walter Cronkite on the red carpet. All right, that's the press box for this week. He's David Chewmaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Evan, the man. Do we thank Jim Cunningham at this part? Or do we thank Evan Campbell? What do you think the, what's the proper thing? Thank you, Evan Campbell for joining him. He's up killing bears. He's dead to us. Chris Almeida helps us with research. More press box next week. More

look warm take. See you then, David. See you later, man.