The Press Box - The Twitter Exodus Begins, the Return of the Trump News Cycle, and Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

Hello, media consumers. Bryan and Joel kick off the show by discussing whether or not they are still on X (formerly known as Twitter) as they get into celebrities that have left the social media platform (1:04). Then they talk about Donald Trump’s endless news cycle restarting (17:24). Later, they go over the upcoming boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul live on Netflix (32:32), and close the show with talk of some The Onion's recent antics (44:23). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and Joel Anderson Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's happening? It's Todd McShay and I'm back with a new home and a new show at the Ringer and Spotify. The McShay Show. It's a video and audio podcast coming to you year round with all my NFL draft information, big boards, mock drafts and player movement. Plus, I'll be chatting with some of my best friends in football, including some of your favorite football analysts. During the week, we'll have episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays that'll include discussions about my player rankings, who's rising, who's falling, and who your NFL team should be keeping an eye on. Plus, we'll be reacting each week to the college football playoff polls and giving you previews and picks for each Saturday's slate. In addition, I'll have episodes on Saturday nights

with my immediate reaction to the full day in college football every week. So if you love the college game, the NFL, the draft, or all of it like me, make sure to like, follow, subscribe, and get ready for the McShay show on the ringer, Spotify, and wherever you watch or listen to podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox, Brian Curtis, Joel Anderson, and producer Brian Waters here. Joel, let's start with a quick social media check-in. Are you still on Twitter? I am in a manner of speaking, but I'm trying to leave. What about you? Are you still on there? I think that's exactly where I am. I'm blue sky curious, but I'm still on Twitter. Mostly because our friend Corey McConnell from the ringer mentioned this today.

Look, there's just a lot of work doing another app and going through all of this outside of the moral obligations. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's that. And I mean, look, I mean, this is a little bit of vanity in this. It took me a long time to build a following I have. You know what I mean? I have like, you know, close to 75,000 followers. Right now at Blue Sky, I've got a little over 10.

and it's just, you know, maybe I'll rebuild it, maybe I won't, and I don't want to admit that I'm tweeting in part because I'm talking to a larger audience. But, I mean, it is a part of it, right? That's a big community, and to just sort of walk away from it would be really difficult, I think. I'm right there with you. I mean, I was interrogating this today before we came on

because there's this mass exodus of Twitter that's happening. Jamie Lee Curtis, Joel, is gone. I know you were following her tweets very closely. Big Jem. I mean. I mean, Jamie, no, no. Trading places. Halloween.

Bet Midler is gone. Mm-hmm. The Guardian is gone. Wow. Yeah, I mean, that sounds about right, though. And then Don Lemon tweeted a goodbye that was actually on Don Lemon letterhead. Really? I hear no letterhead, huh?

Okay. Yeah, like a printed. letter and at the bottom there was like a picture of Don holding a microphone out. Oh my God. That was dramatic farewell to Twitter. That is so funny. I mean, he has personal beef with Twitter and Elon Musk. So I don't even know that you could say that he's making some sort of a moral or ethical stand.

I mean, this is actually a with him in Twitter, it's a business deal gone bad, right? So, yeah. I mean, if you even look back a ways ago, like, I mean, we've kind of got. and use to celebrities or even our peers leaving Twitter like Tanahasi Coates left Twitter years ago. NPR left Twitter about it was about a year ago. Jim Kerry, Whoopi Goldberg, one of my personal faves, Tony Braxton, left in 2022 when Elon Musk took over. So we've, Twitter has constantly been hemorrhaging people over the last couple years, but it seems like now, like I don't, maybe this is finally the tipping point when people are really getting serious about, okay, what's next?

Because we had several stages here, right? There was Twitter as a hell site, which was the entire history of Twitter. Right. Elon in 2022, okay, another couple of people left then. And then Twitter becomes an unofficial arm of the Donald Trump campaign. Right. Donald Trump wins. And so now you have another group of people saying, okay, that's the moment. then I'm done. Right. Now I'm out. You know, and I don't know if you feel the way that I felt.

Initially, I wanted to stay because my hope was that Elon Musk won't own this forever. And it was people like us and, you know, people not like us and a whole bunch of other kind of people that built Twitter into what it was. And I thought it had value and it served a real purpose. And I was like, you know, why should Elon Musk run me off of here? I was here before he was here. But now it's just a little bit harder to grapple with that. And especially, I mean, I don't, which it's kind of crazy. I don't deal with a lot of the racism or any of the other stuff that's going on out there.

I don't see a lot of that, fortunately. But apparently it's infesting everything. And I can kind of understand not wanting to be privy to that, you know, hour after hour. It's much easier to find. And it was really easy to find if we talk about racism. conspiracy theories, strange pro-Trump propaganda during the campaign itself. Right. Whenever I get on the 4U tab, I mean, it was like, not interested, not interested, not

interested. Here's Joel tweeting about college football. Okay, not interested, not interested. It was bleak out there. Right. It was bad. It was noticeably worse. Right.

I mean, like, I mean, Twitter already had like a very sizable, uh, population of like sex workers and porn on there. But that is really, it's gone to the next level in the last couple of years. Like, I mean, it's really difficult to get to a tweet by anybody with a moderate amount of following and not see a little bit of porn at the end of it. Even if it's nothing related to do with genitals, you might get a little bit of porn in your tweet. Dude, I have looked in the press box accounts, DMs, and occasionally we'll get all like, hello, how are you?

I'm sorry, bot or whoever you are, but you've come to the DMs of a media podcast. This is the least cool place you could possibly be right now. You are really scraping the bottle of mother barrel here, right? Yeah.

But wait, let me ask you about this, Brian, because I was sort of thinking about this. And I mean, I know we're going to shift to the blue sky of this, but like, isn't some of the, like, feralness of Twitter what drew you to it a little bit too. You know,

speaking personally, my most viral tweet is sort of a challenge to a famous influential far-right journalist who owns their own publication right now. Like, that's the tweet that I have that went far and wide

several years ago. You know, one of my favorite stories about Twitter is like DMing a formerly famous hip-hip-hop video vixen on behalf of my colleagues. and having a conversation with her in the DMs. Like, you know, and they're not like Hillary Banks.

Her real name is Karen Parsons. Once she left at one of my jokes. Like, I don't know that, I don't know that that can be replicated really on any other social media app, you know? Unless you get a bunch of people there. But the no seatbelt's part of it, to a point anyway, that was part of Twitter. That's what was exciting.

And it was interesting to see people in our profession, who are very upright in your time. and Washington Post reporters, they would tweet stuff and it would be more interesting than what they published in the newspaper. Absolutely. Oh, that's what you really think.

Absolutely. That wouldn't have slid by your editor because it's on here, it's okay. And we get closer to something like, I don't know, truth is the right word, but an unvarnished kind of media product that's more like what people are actually thinking. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Yeah. I know so much more about Keith Oberman and his affinity for dying dogs. There's been a lot of sharing. You're just talking about the dogs. Okay. But there's been a lot of sharing recently. Yeah.

Yeah. But I mean, you really did. And in a way, I mean, I really enjoyed that in some ways to get behind that curtain and behind the byline. And, you know, I don't know if anything will ever really truly be able to approximate that again. that mix of people and people revealing. Maybe people are going to be a little too wary now to do that. But I don't know. Maybe I'm thinking out loud here.

But maybe people will be, you know, they're just like, hey, man, we're all out here now. You know, maybe we'll all let it hang out. Maybe, you know, and people have the illusion of creating their own communities on social media now, too. And so they may let their guard down. They may continue to let their guard down going forward, too, you know. When I think about why I'm still on there, my number one reason is, is your number one reason, which is, hey, I built up this number. We want to call that careerism that I'm completely happy with calling it careerism.

I want people to read what I write and I want people to listen to the podcast that we do over here. And walking away from that and starting the odometer at zero, whether it's on blue sky or threads or wherever it is, that's not fun. That's not an exciting thing. I think a lot of media people are like us, right? like, I have a moral objection to what you are doing, Mr. Musk, but I don't want to lose my follow-ups. I was having a conversation about this with, and I think he won't mind me talking out of school here, but Monty Jones. And he was like, why are you really leaving? Like, what's going on? Like, you could walk away from this. And I'm like, brother, you make, you know, millions of dollars.

You're a famous person. You can go places. This is the only place where I have any real cachet. in the world. Also, it is inarguable that pretty much every job I've gotten in the last decade is because of Twitter, because editors saw me on there, they read my work on there. Like, I mean, go back to the dark old days of 2006 when I'm working at the Shreveport Times. How did anybody know what I was writing about? You know what I mean? Like, unless you subscribe to the Shreveport Times or, you know, you just happen to really like me for whatever reason. Maybe you're related to me. I don't know. That's how you would do it. But now, I mean, without Twitter, I don't know how so many editors and so many other people in news media would have their eyes on my work. So like you say, careerism is a huge part of this.

The second reason, I think, is just that everybody was on Twitter and everything was on Twitter. And I still, we can test drive this together on blue sky if you want to, but it is so nice on a night when there's like, oh, there's big political news. I can figure out what happened really, really quickly. Steph Curry did something tonight. I can watch that right now. I was watching Sunday night football last week and this last weekend. Mike Tariko was talking about the Texans uniforms, which were just this horrific child

of color rush red thing. And he called them terrible on the air. And I was like, whoa, it was right before halftime. And I was like, did he just say this? the words terrible, like Mike Tarrico, a very controlled person in what he says on television. And if I go to Twitter, there's the clip.

He did, he called them terrible. Is that going to be there on Blue Sky or somewhere else? We need to talk to Jose 3030 or worldwide wobb and see if we can get them to migrate over to Blue Sky. Because yeah, that's the kind of stuff that you're missing. And even though it's not nearly the same sort of

news environment that it was, right? Because oftentimes I'll see something with a check and it's ostensibly news and I'm like, I'm not sure what this is, right? It's not the way that it was, but even still, like, there's no better tool for community watching and things or experiencing something all together at once. And yeah, like that's what I want to see what everybody's saying about the NBA finals or a debate. Like, I go to Twitter first. And that's a hard habit to break when you've been doing it for like 15 years. I've tried threads a little bit. And let me tell you, I got over there.

And it was all the people that I had either muted or completely avoided on Twitter. We're now in my feed. I'm like, what? This is a hell site of a different color. Like, this sucks. So I just mostly post the pot over there and then like, see ya. Nothing. Did you do the thing where you follow everybody?

that you followed on Instagram. Did you do it that way? And these are not those people, but there were other people that somehow just are in my views. I don't know if I like, it was like, you're interested in press criticism. No, I'm actually not in my downtime. So please go away.

So that's kind of a cross off for me. Yeah. And I mean, like if you got a problem with Elon Musk, I mean, it's not like Zuckerberg is, you know, some sort of sainted figure. in social media, right? So if you have a real issue with this, it doesn't seem like that

would necessarily be where you would want to go. So now I guess we go migrate over to Blue Sky and give that a whirl. A lot of media people have been there, some since 2020 or, you know, shortly after Musk bought Twitter. It's interesting because speaking of pick your favorite or, you know, least least favorite media titan,

Blue Sky was a product of Jack Dorsey who was running Twitter and then was sort of to some extent uncomfortable with how profit-driven Twitter had become and starts the seed that becomes Blue Sky and now Blue Sky has its own thing outside of Twitter. But it sort of birthed in the womb of Twitter. It's a very, very, very hard to track thing here.

I have also seen this. I want to get your opinion on this. People that are posting now on Twitter and Blue Sky at the same time, Does that count as a moral stand? Wow. No. No.

But like we all like our fault. But you know, I don't know, man. Maybe I need to be a little bit more thoughtful about this because I mean, we are at the end of the day looking for our people. We're trying to reach our people. And sometimes bad people own the place where you meet. Like I don't know who owned the malls that I hung out with when I was 16 to 17 years. So presumably they weren't, you know, socialist or anything. You know what I mean?

Like, these weren't altruistic titans of industry. And so I think it's, we're constantly just trying to find our people and go to where they are. I don't know about you, but like I was on Google Reader. When Google Reader went away, I was really bummed. It took me a while. I used to blog. I had a horrible blog called False Hustle and people used to gather there. And then that went away.

And then I kind of stuck with Twitter. Twitter's the only thing that stuck, but like, you know, if you're, I can kind of understand being like, well, all right, I just want to make sure I touch everybody as much as I can until I can convince everybody, which is, I don't know if you experienced this. And our mutual friend, Josh Levine has done this. He's like, come on over to blue sky. Come on over here. Please. You know, and I'm just like, all right. But I mean, it's, have you ever the sensation of somebody, you know, they've gone to a party and they're there and they're calling you like, hey, man, when you're going to get to this party, we didn't get to this party.

I'm like, you know, if the party was really good, you wouldn't be worried about if I was there or not, right? You've asked me one too many times. Yeah, right. I don't understand. Is it not interesting enough over there without me? That is hilarious. Whatever I, whatever social media app I end up on, I wanted to be the one where the Joel

Anderson trolling Saturday college football threat is happening. It was like screw texts. Okay, here we go. Whenever I see that, I just smile. So you just tell me. where that is and that's where I'm going to decide based on what you say it should I do the thread this week on Twitter or should I do it on blue sky I think blue sky let's let's get to 20 followers by you know by trashing college football teams okay okay I'm going to count I'm going to join

you over there I'm going to I'm going to re sky you or whatever we're calling it over there just to give a world I would give me by the way I am going to go over there because we've had Press Box listeners come to me and be like, I like you and I don't want to be here anymore. I don't want to be here. So look out for Joel and Brian and the press box. Yes. We're going to gravitate. We're going to do it.

We're going to try. We're going to try. Here's something you've been reading about on Twitter or whatever social media app you prefer this week. The endless Trump news cycle has restarted. Yeah. In earnest yesterday, when he named Matt G. Gates as his nominee for Attorney General. Yeah.

What was your instant reaction to that? I couldn't, you know, the first thought, I was like, oh, man, I can't believe we're doing this shit again, right? Like I was like, oh, it's happening. It's happening again. I had gone pretty much since election night, and this is bad to admit. I've been trying to avoid cable news for a while just because it was kind of, you know, to be frank.

And, I mean, I don't think people will be surprised that I felt a little glum. after the election and I just kind of didn't want to revisit all that. And then you get the Gates news and I'm like, okay, I got to, I got to rea Gates. It's time to get back in the game. And yeah, man, I mean, Trump, I'm, I'm, I'm going to ask you, do you think this is like some sort of, you know, some sort of Trump mastery of the media and his ability to sort of control the public's attention? Or is this just him? This is just what he's got to do. doing what he's going to be doing? Such a tough question because it feels like he naturally does understand what makes us all scurry around and get mad and shake our fists and give him attention. On the other hand, if we understand the mind of Donald Trump to whatever extent we do, picking Matt Gates as his attorney general is exactly the kind of thing he would do. Right.

This is a loyalist. This is somebody who is going to treat the Justice Department. how he thinks the Justice Department should be treated? Yeah. So is, I guess the question is, is there a difference between those two things, between this is what I want from government and this is the thing that will make, that will troll the libs, that will make the media scramble to keep up with me? Isn't that so much of what like mega politics is, though?

Like, I'm going to piss lives off, but also I'm piss them off because I'm getting people that I know that are going to be tough for everybody else to. sort of digest. I mean, no less than, you know, not exactly liberal commentator, John Bolton, was on MSNBC talking about how, you know, Gates and Gabbard weren't qualified. And I just, sometimes I can't tell if this division among like conservatives and Republicans and, you know, the range of people on the right, is this real? It's like, is this division real or is it scripted? and that's i mean that makes me sound sort of you know like a conspiracy theorist right but i'm like i don't sometimes i just can't tell if like this is a real thing because it's like susan collins see you know

her i'm very concerned about this pose before she's often very concerned yeah she's very concerned before she goes ahead and supports whatever donald trump wants anyway so yeah that's that's kind of where i was with it i think so to that specific question i meant to talk to you about this last week is this election for me was the end of the never Trump movement or at least a point where we should think of the movement differently. You always need three examples for a think piece. So I'll give you three here. Number one, Liz Cheney going on the trail with Kamala Harris and not battering. Number two, Mitt Romney retiring.

And number three, Nikki Haley, despite her best efforts to get back into Trump's good crazes, being completely shunned by Trump on the trail. and she's not going to be part of this cabinet when it comes down. Trump's already said that. And I'm like, okay, so now let's think of the never Trump movement. It's a negligible movement within politics. Right. But it is a brand of pundit.

That's what it's become. We're Steve Schmidt. Does he go on TV anymore? Brand of pundit. Yeah, okay. Because I don't think that seems to seem to a while. hundred. That's what it is. And it's a hand. Look, it's a hand that have done that have sacrificed career opportunities to go right for the bulwark or to be Steve Schmidt and never manage a Republican

campaign again. Like, there's some genuine professional bravery in there. But what it is now is a kind of op-ed columnist or a kind of panelists that balances out the panel on CNN or MSNBC. Right. That's what never Trumper means. They're a stand-in for the kind of person that would ordinarily be on there. Like, let's just say it was Laura Trump, right? That, you know, they don't want to have her on a panel, right? You know, outside of, like, the Foxes and the newsmaxes or whatever. And so they bring on Michael Steele.

They bring on, you know. I was going to say Claire McCaskill, but I know she's a Democrat. But, you know, you get what I mean. They bring on Michael Steele with Claire McCaskill. With Claire McCaskill, the Stewart Stevens of the world. So, yeah, I mean, I think that. I don't know about you. I kind of feel like that moment's over. I feel like those folks are exhausted. I think that they'll take the opportunities that are there. But in terms of, like, I think it exists

on media. But in the world, yes, yes. It has been absorbed into media, but it is not a thing out in the world, at least in national government, to any consequence anymore. Show me, show me their constituency. Like, show me the people that follow them and listen to them in the real world and take their cues from those folks. I don't, I think they just, they're only on MSNBC and Twitter. And outside of that, I don't know that they have any real influence in the world. Yes, I kind of feel like, I don't, to you, I just kind of feel like everybody is just sort of exhausted.

Like maybe people will pick the energy back up. But I definitely feel like, and maybe this is naive of me to believe, but that liberals and people that are on the left are probably not going to be bringing them into the new, into this new administration. I could be wrong. And that could be really stupid of me to say this. I'll look dumb for saying this. But I just, I don't, if they do bring them, I would just again like to say, all right, who are their fans?

Who do they talk to in the Republican Party still? Like, where did they explain to me like, well, we need to listen to these people and take their cues from them? Because running around the country, Liz Cheney clearly did not have the impact that you thought it was going to have. Another thing we talked about last week was what the resistance would look like under Trump 2.0. we didn't quite get an answer on that. We won't for a few months. But I was thinking when I saw the Matt Gates news, I was like,

oh, covering the second Trump White House is going to look a lot like covering the first one. Oh, yeah. We learned from Sophia Kai of Axios that Matt Gates got the AG job because he was on Trump Force One. And he had this big conversation.

And Donald Trump's like, I will now make you give you one of the most prominent jobs in government. And all of a sudden you get all these reporters like, oh my God, I got to figure this out right now. And there'll be so much news. Just stuff, or maybe stuff is a better word, just stuff that happens. And you will be running around at all times with your hair on fire to cover it.

Yeah. I mean, this is the start with 24 hours into that news cycle. The next thing is going to be, you know, they're going to get responses from all the Republican senators. And then they're going to have, you know, presumably the lead up to whatever hearings are going be and it's just going to keep going on and on. And then, like, I mean, he's going to name other people, like, as to part of his cabinet, right?

Like, my joke is that, I mean, he has to name somebody for HUD. And I don't know, it's like probably Byron Donald's and, I don't know. Byron Donald's and Tim Scott, maybe they're in the running for that job. But yeah, no, I mean, it's hard to break this habit.

And the thing is, is that it is news, right? Like, I mean, that nobody is being critical of the way that this is news that it is important because this is a very important job and this is a very questionable character that might be in charge of it and it is going to royal the Senate. Like this is going to be a thing that is going to be on the tips of their tongue for a very long while, but it still just shows that like at the end of the day, man, like the Trump media boost. Like we can't, we, it's not that we can't help ourselves. There's no, I don't know what the

alternative is. I don't either because you have to cover it. And I don't know if the boost is actually going to be in subscriptions, but it's definitely going to be in making people work all the time and go like crazy to chase stuff. Yeah. I mean, it's November 14th. And think of what like the last two days have been,

Pete Hegson for defense. Mike Huckabee, ambassador to Israel. I mean, that is some wild. Can we talk also about Donald Trump drawing his cabinet from the Fox News, day part. Yeah. Didn't you read that about the Hexf? What they said is they thought that in large part that Hexoff had started doing programming

that was targeted at Donald Trump, that it was meant to appeal to him specifically so that he would stand out, right? And obviously it worked. Which is the way people have been reaching him since 2017, right? If you want to reach the president, go on television. Go on TV, right. And I mean, he has, I have to admit, I did not know a lot about this guy before. but he is, I'm going to have to admit this.

He's shockingly handsome. He's a very handsome, ruggedly handsome dude. And I mean, I'm sure that draws people in. And then he starts talking. And he talks like, you know, a podcast, bro, a little bit, right? And I'm sure that, like, that hits all of the things that Trump loves. He's like, oh, man, people like, they're going to, like, look at this person. And also, he's talking my kind of talk, you know?

So yeah, I mean, like that that pipeline, again, it's also not a surprise that somebody who was a creature of the 80s would look to TV for his cues on like how to staff up and how to run things, right? Like, I mean, this is that, yeah, that's that's Donald Trump in a nutshell. Here's some other Pete Hegseth facts for you. This is it from Jeremy Barr's Washington Post piece. Got married at the Trump National Golf Club in 2019. smart. Smart move. Smart move, right? Pay those wedding fees and rent the room from the man himself who would later give you a job. Yep.

He also hosted, and I think this was for Fox's streaming service, which is Fox Nation, the election night coverage. And this is real, Joel. He hosted it from Kid Rock's Big Honky Tonkin Steakhouse in Nashville. What? I'm sure why that was. Well, I know part of the reason. but not sure why Nashville was the particular place to host this.

And he was seen. He is, but you know, there's been a bit of a musical reinvention. He's a country guy now. Hexeth also, and this is according to Jeremy Barr, was wearing a Make America Great Again hat and was pumping his fist and jumping up and down with excitement when the election was called. This all happening at Kid Rock's big honky Tonk and Steakhouse. I mean, it sounds like a rockin' time. I mean, that's a, I mean, again, I don't know how smart Hexeth really is, but he knows how to play his dude.

And I think anybody, that's the one thing you kind of get to see with Trump is that the people, I mean, it's not like he's a mysterious person. You know, you've got like the things that he likes and is attracted to are so obvious. He's not like a secretive guy or like a comp. He doesn't seem to be a very complicated person. And so if you can do that sort of stuff. And I'm sure Tulsi Gabbard kind of hits a lot of the same neurons. you're right like attractive is willing to say things

you know was on Fox News all the time you know like it makes sense that like when Trump is thinking it'd be like me being like man who could I get to hire who could I get to coach my football team Desmond Howard you know Desmond Howard's on TV all the time maybe I should have Lewis Riddick maybe I should get

him to be my GM you know it's the same kind of thinking I guess and like we see it in sports a lot like JJ Reddick you know went from being a commentator to being an NBA coach. And so, like, maybe this is just sort of like, you know, the political, the political version of this. What did you make of Elon Musk and Vivekramuswamy leading the Department of Government Efficiency for Trump? This is a Twitter joke, but where they say, in America, it takes two people to read the Department of Government Efficiency, right? Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. And I saw a little bit of something about how, um,

you know, like they're not going to actually be able to set up a department because, I mean, that requires so much bureaucracy, right? Like, their attempt to cut down to bureaucracy is going to be stunted by the bureaucracy itself, but that they'll just sort of be unpaid advisors essentially. And my thought on this is that these are people that don't get along with anybody. And like, if they don't get along, when they're along together, trying to cook up how to change America, it won't be a surprise, don't you think? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I read that one book about Elon Character Limit about him buying Twitter,

and all he did was just come in and break Twitter. Yeah. Like, he cut a ton of jobs. Right. But he did it in a crazy haphazard way that just broke the site. And the site has never, as we explained earlier, has never recovered from it. It's like, oh, I'll just come in and be like, you're gone, you're gone. Who are you?

What do you? you're gone. That's his idea of making government more efficient. Right. Just cut, I mean, they had him on stage. They ran a clip of him and they were like, all right, some guy was, you know, it was one of the Trump rallies and he handed

Elon the mic and he said, so what are we going to do to cut into this $6.5 trillion? You know, what do you think it'll take to get it in line? And Elon says, I don't know, we could cut about $2 trillion. Like, you know, it's not like he had been looking at

budgets or anything like that. So yeah, like, I mean, that's that's about the sort of analysis that we would expect. And actually, my former BuzzFeed colleague, Charlie Warzel, he's at the Atlantic, and he wrote this before the election about how Elon Trump's plan for Twitter is how he, what he has for the government. And it's really insightful about like what happened to Twitter. I mean, you basically said it there. It's like been hollowed out. And they're just lucky that it doesn't collapse every day. And that is sort of his plan for government, which, like, if you think the government has the means to improve people's lives, that seems sort of worrisome, but I guess we'll find out.

Topic number three for you, Joel, there's a major sporting event. Sort of. On Netflix on Friday. In this corner, 58-year-old Mike Tyson. Yeah, man. Baddest man on the planet who is eligible to receive the AARP magazine. and in this corner YouTuber

Jake Paul are you going to watch this? Yeah you are too right? Yeah I think I'm a little less even half-hearted in my yeah I'm yeah yeah so

against against with all qualifiers about like oh my God but yeah I am going to watch it. Yeah, I mean, look, man, do you, do people, I was a huge, I mean, like most kids are the 80s, I was a huge Mike Tyson fan, right? Like, I mean, I played Mike Tyson's punchout. Like, I mean, I just, every, you know, like, I'm not, again, like, obviously, like,

he's a convicted felon and he had done some things that are reprehensible that he's not apologized for, and I'm not making any excuses for that. But him as a boxing figure was an alluring, he was an alluring figure. Like, I mean, there's not really a way to explain to people how menacing he looked walking to the ring with that, those black shorts, no socks, the towel over him coming out to the ring to, like, beat somebody up in 91 seconds, right? But the thing that kind of came up to me and to build up to this fight is that, man, his career was really a sad spectacle by the end. Like, do you remember how it ended for Mike Tyson when he was taking boxing seriously 20 years ago? Yeah, I had to look this up. He lost to the legend Kevin McBride.

Yes. In 2005. He quit on his stool. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and before, he lost, he lost before then. He lost to a guy named, and this is just, I mean, this is pathetic. He lost to Danny Williams.

This is this penultimate fight. He was knocked out into fourth round. Do you want to take a guess of what Danny Williams' career, boxing record was? Tell me. 55. 33 in one. Oh, whoa. Yeah.

33. That's like a pitcher with a lot of decisions. Yeah. So, I mean, it's just like, this is when Mike Tyson was tracking boxing seriously. It's 20 years later. He does look like he's in great. I hope, I want to look in the shape that Mike Tyson is now at the age of 46 that he is in 58. But I don't have a lot of hope.

I think a lot of people that are hoping that Mike Tyson is going to recapture something from 1988, I just don't think that's going to happen. Okay, so help me with the storylines here. If Tyson gets his ass kicked, then the man who once knocked out Carl the Truth Williams will have turned into Carl the Truth Williams. Yes. Yes.

If Jake Paul gets his ass kicked. Man, so didn't you, so he lost a Tommy Fury a few years ago. And I thought that was going to sort of take the steam out of his career and his boxing, but it doesn't seem like it. did, right? Like, I mean, people still want to tune into this. People still think of him as somebody to watch fighting,

but, like, he lost to the not good Fury brother. Right? Like, so what are we supposed to, if he gets his ass kicked, it's like, well, that guy was 10 and 1 against the,

you know, he beat Tyrone Woodley twice. He beat Nate Robinson. I mean, you know. Yeah. I mean, is it somebody people want to watch fight or just people want to watch?

the attention economy way. Right. I mean, there is a very long tradition of people throwing celebrities out there and fighting, even if we know they're not good. I mean, you remember, did you watch

celebrity boxing in 2002? Do you remember the lineups? Okay. I'm going to give you the first episode of celebrity boxing. Danny Bonaducci, better known as Danny Partridge of the Partridge family,

versus Barry Williams, who is Greg Brady from the Brady Bunch. Bonaducci wins by TKO in round two. Todd Bridges versus Vanilla Ice. Todd Bridges, who was... Willis, best known as the last surviving original cast member of different strokes, versus Vanilla Ice, the first solo white rapper to achieve commercial success.

I saw Vanilla Ice perform at the Houston Summit in 1991. Wow. Part of the mic, part of the MC Ham. tour. He was actually really good. Look, man, don't front over in their lives, but ice could dance his ass off. Anyway, he couldn't fight.

Todd Bridges beat his ass. He won, he wanted a unanimous decision. And then the third fight, and this is really sad. Paula Jones, the people remember Paula Jones, sued Bill Clinton for sexual harassment,

former Arkansas State employee, versus Tonya Harding. And it was so bad because Paula Jones clearly had not trained, did not want to fight every time Tonya Harding raised her fist to punch her. Like she ran from her.

And they ended that nonsense in, you know, fairly fairly quick short order because she was not into it. So, yeah, I love how you have a note that Paula Jones didn't take the fight seriously, didn't do a road work to get in shape. Yeah.

Look, man, I mean, if I have to fight in front of her national audience, I think I would train a little bit. I would think. I would make sure. I knew what I was doing before I could send it to it. I would hope so. And you were listing like celebrity boxing there.

But we could just also do like boxing, boxing and find spectacles that are like this. Yeah. I mean, this is the thing. With boxing, you can never be like, oh, wow, this seems like a sad cash grab. You're like, no, let me introduce you to lots of other fights. Some involving Muhammad Ali and other people late in their run, right? Roy Jones Jr., who become kind of a tomato can down the stretch, which is, shocking to say. But yeah, so yeah, man, people like to see people get beat up, you know.

And Jake Paul has really, yeah, and he's really seemed to have tapped into that, which is just, you know, so I am going to watch it though. Yeah, I mean, I guess we've talked it up. I was like, yeah, I guess I kind of want to see what happens here. Well, it's, I mean, one part of this is it's on Netflix. So like sometimes, you know, I'll see people on Twitter or your preferred social media app going, hey, you know, big boxing match tonight, big UFC fight tonight. I'm like, ooh, 79.99 is a lot of money for me to pay to just live tweet something, you know, that I wouldn't forget about 30 seconds later. Even as a nominal sports writer, that just, that's just kind of like, yeah. Absolutely. But this is like, I mean, I don't pay for a lot of those fights.

I don't, I don't, yeah, like, no. I mean, that just, that feels like a lot of, that feels like a lot effort. That doesn't mean that I don't watch them though, Brian, but anyway. There are other ways. There are other ways to watch fights. Joel, with a bracing confession here on the press box. I will say this does feel like, you know, when you turn on Netflix and there's a movie that came out like eight months ago and you're like, oh, that movie, I'll watch that. That's kind of what this feels like.

Like a bonus. Like, okay, I don't have to pay. I'm already paying for this. I'll take it. Like, the other night, I had the base. baby sitting on my chest and I'm just kind of scrolling. She's sleeping and I'm like, oh, starting five. I didn't watch that documentary. Might as well watch, you know, the starting five with LeBron and your boy, Aunt Edwards and all that. So yeah, man, I mean, you know, look, yeah, we've got Netflix.

It certainly seemed, but don't you just, didn't this make you feel bad though? Like, I just, as I was reading over that celebrity boxing, which like even got even darker because then it was like Joey Buttafoucault that fought in a, one of the matches. Joy Butterfouca is like a pretty odious figure from a generation ago. It just seems like these fights are like a precursor to like a darker, less humane degradation of American culture. And I mean, I know that Mike Tyson used to be a real boxer and Jake Paul is sort of a boxer. But like I just, especially coming so close after the election, it just feels like this sort of spectacle doesn't make us better. Like it's not sports.

It's just spectacle. And that's just kind of, but I'm going to watch. Yeah. I, that feels correct to me. Again, I think we could probably go look and find a thousand sad boxing matches. There is something about this being on Netflix, like, you know, the biggest of powerhouse streaming companies. Yeah. A company that it's going to have Christmas Day NFL games on a Wednesday.

Yeah. The night everybody loves to watch the NFL. It's going to have Monday Night Raw, which I guess is a little more. thematically coherent here starting in January. Like so they've created this. Right. So that there will be live things that people can watch on Netflix. Right.

That's that is kind of part of part of that discomfort here. But yeah, I'm with you. I mean, it's like it is it is one of those things. I would just say like let's let's put it in the scale of boxing matches that made me feel bad that I watched anyway. I mean, Mayweather McGregor made me feel bad not that many years ago. Watch that. I watched it. I mean, but though, like, there were two fighters somewhere near the end of their primes who I thought could kind of protect themselves and they're like kind of odious people. Like I didn't feel bad about one of them beating up the other one and like it seems like their money is okay. You know what I mean? I don't feel like they were doing this out of desperation. It was a cash grab, but it was a desperation. And I, you know, Mike Tyson says that his finances are okay. Okay. Cool. Cool story. Cool story, bro. Can he just show up and be Mike Tyson? I feel like he's been doing

stage shows where he tells his stories from growing up in Brooklyn for the last 20 years. Can he just be Mike Tyson, sign autographs and have a great living? Mike Tyson talking for an hour would be captivating to me, as it were. He doesn't have to box for me anymore. But, you know, I guess he feels like he's got something to prove. And yeah, man, I don't think he has to do this. But, yeah, maybe, maybe I'm being too bleak about this. I mean, you know what do they say? Rice plays Texas, right?

So we watch all sort of mismatches all the time, right? So two final thoughts for you. The fight's going to take place at AT&T Stadium, home with the Dallas Cowboys, making it the most interesting sporting event that will take place. for the rest of the fall at AT&T Stadium. It's number one. Number two, both Tyson in 2016 and Jake Paul just a couple of weeks ago, endorsed Donald Trump for president.

So the winner of this fight will get to be the next Treasury Secretary. That's something that's not a man. Tyson and Trump go back, man. I mean, back when people used to fight in Atlantic City. You know, so I mean, I guess. it. Tyson actually kind of voiced support for Trump recently, too. I thought I saw like a clip of him talking with a whole bunch of other people and he was like, ah, I'll probably vote for Trump. Yeah, it wasn't an official endorsement, but he was, you know, he's not going to be a never-trumper

with Steve Schmidt. Let's let's go. No, no, no. We won't see him on MSNBC. I don't believe. All right, real quick, before we go, Joel, topic number four here. This morning, the onion had the chance to do the funniest thing possible and it did it. It announced it had bought Alex Jones's Info Wars. The funny fake news bought the not funny fake news. What did you make of this story? I mean, I guess there are some happy endings, right? That, I mean, you know, Alex Jones, you don't need me to revisit his resume, but I mean,

what he did through that platform is one of the ugliest chapters in American media history, right? and that he has to watch that happen. And my understanding, again, is that this is that Ben Collins, who I think he runs the new onion now, he was a former NBC disinformation reporter and bought it. And it just seems like, and he's working with the Sandy Hook families through this purchase. And so, like, I'm not going to say it's good news, right?

But it's like, I'm happy it ended this way. This seems like the best possible outcome where it all could be concerned. Although I just kind of wonder like, I haven't, have you gone to Infowars.com? Have you ever tried that? I'm sure I have at least once because I was trying to run something down, but it's not on my usual media diet. Usually ring Brian Stelter's newsletter before I went over to Info Wars. I just looked it up. It says, site unavailable till first.

their notice on Google. So, yeah, what are you? Well, yeah, I was just going to say, people don't know if you mentioned Sandy Hook, right? So the families of the, their parents of Sandy Hook victims sued. Right. Alex Jones won a $1.4 billion defamation judgment. So that's why this is, this is even available in bankruptcy auction. And then the onion bought it.

Ben Collins told the New York Times, we thought this would be a hilarious joke. This is going to be our answer to this no guardrails world. where there are no gatekeepers and everything's kind of insane. But I'm with you. It's kind of a muted smile, you know, like here is something reprehensible that is ending up, you know, you know, again, if it's a gag, I mean, the Sandy Hook parents, every town for gun safety is a nonprofit. They're going to advertise on this new relaunched info wars.

So their sign-off makes you feel at least a little bit good about it. Yeah, man. God bless those people, man. Sandy Hook just one of the uglier news stories ever in my lifetime and that anything that makes them feel a little bit more whole is okay with me. All right, you and I, Joel, are going to meet up here next Thursday.

We've got to do a college football segment. Yeah, let's do it. I'm ready. We both got vested interests in the sport. Next Saturday, or a week from this Saturday, Indiana's going to play Ohio State. It's kind of our fourth big, mega college football game of the year. It's been a very weird year to watch college football.

In some respects, a really good year to watch college football. Gus Johnson was bored last Saturday calling a game, which just felt like an alarm going off that this stuff needs to be talked about. Don't show Ohio State playing anybody. Like, if you want to get, like, I don't know if that's why Gus was bad. Don't show Ohio State playing the worst, possibly the worst P4 team in the country. and then we will avoid this. But yeah.

So, you know what? So this is my opportunity. This weekend, check me out at Joel Anderson on Blue Sky. I'm going to be blue skying the games this weekend, right? For more takes before next week. Shoemaker and I return Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. Have a fantastic review.