The Press Box - The We’re-Back Show: RIP New York Times Sports, ESPN Layoffs, GQ, and More

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

Bryan and David discuss The New York Times replacing its sports section with The Athletic and what that means for their sports writers (2:10). Then, they talk about GQ’s column about Warner Bros. Discovery president David Zaslav (32:06). Later, they get into the latest round of ESPN layoffs and how it is now affecting the people we see on air (41:01). Finally, Bryan has some notes for David from his summer vacation (58:37). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producers: Erika Cervantes and Carlos Chiriboga Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You may find this hard to believe, but 60 songs that explain the 90s. America's favorite poorly named music podcast is back. With 30 more songs than 120 songs total. I'm your host, Rob Harvilla, here to bring you more shrewd musical analysis, poignant nostalgic reveries, crude personal anecdotes, and rad special guests, all with even less restraint than usual. Join us once more on 60 Saws that Explain the 90s every Wednesday, on Spotify.

David? Hello. I finally got back from London with my family. Did you miss anything while you were gone? Well, I heard there were some media news. Mm-hmm. I was going to start with some complaints

about flight cancellations, travel snafus. But you know what I hate? Weren't anything in the world as though journalists that get on Twitter. Damn you at American Air for screwing up me and my family's vacation to hell with you, United.

Yeah. I don't want to be that person. No. It's a lot of things I don't mind being in this world, but a person who complains publicly about the airlines, you have to draw a line somewhere. I'm just worried about doing that and it becoming my top tweet.

You know, like that gets more of a response than anything I do in my regular tweeting activities. Your insights about, wrestlers past and present were profound, but your rant about JetBlue is what you'll always be remembered for. JetBlue is amazing. Coming up on today's pod, we catch up on all the stuff we missed. The New York Times liquidated its sports section and replaced it with the athletic.

How should we understand that move? Plus, GQ bows before a Hollywood mogul. Did ESPN get rid of the best NBA colored commentator of all time? and Brian's summer vacation album. All that and much more on the press box. A part of the ringer. Podcast Network. Radio consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, and producer Erica Servantes.

Back together again. David, let's start with the news of the week. It happened Monday. The New York Times sports section is no more. The section had been on the ropes, as the Washington Post Ben Strauss reported. Times Sports employees sent management a letter saying, you guys want to check in and tell us about the fate of our jobs?

And the fate of our section? Management answered Monday and said, you're out. We're going to assign you to different jobs at the paper. And our sports content, such as it is, will come from the athletic, which at times bought for half a billion dollars early last year. Can I ask a stupid question? Please. Are they not being assigned to different roles in the athletic,

or is that specifically or is that unclear? Is it a corporate structuring thing? The fact that they have New York Times contracts and not presumably whatever the sub-organization is? So the union part of this is interesting. Well, that's right. The athletic's not unionized. It's not unionized.

So I don't know if Tyler Kepner, for instance, can go be an athletic baseball writer, even though it makes absolute sense for Tyler Kepner to be an athletic baseball writer to be whatever we're going to call a New York Times baseball writer now alongside Kenny Rosenthal. That just makes sense.

But there are people allegedly going to obits. There are people going to the national desk. People go into styles. People may be doing sports business but within the business section. I mean, and this is if we're going to talk about the profound

suckiness of what's happening here, you're not losing your job in the sense of you're unemployed, but you're losing your job. All these people are sports writers by choice. Most of them have been sports writers their entire careers. And now you're being told, hey, you've got to go do something else at the paper

because the section you work for doesn't exist anymore. So it's a really bad day at the New York Times. Charlotte Klein of Vandy Fair also reports this. Sports staff were invited to a morning meeting on Monday and the news alert that the sports desk was shuddering came out before executive editor Joe Khan had said the words aloud to the room. So you invite everybody in to break the bad news and then the bad news gets broken on their phones. Yeah. While they're sitting in there. I don't know. I mean, I think sometimes we maybe go too hard on these all hands. We're closing the

doors meetings because they're sort of inherently terrible. I'm not sure like there's any level of preparation or management that you could really expect out of some of them. But I do think it's important here because it's sort of emblematic about the whole thing. And I think to me the most shocking thing, and this is really setting aside the, you know, humans involved. But the most shocking thing to me was how kind of unartful the whole situation was, right? I mean, the athletic has been part of the New York Times family for a while.

We've been asking these questions out loud on this podcast for a while. And then at the end of the day, it still just comes like a just total slapdash, just embarrassing bout of unpreparedness, you know? I mean, it just feels it. I mean, and presumably they did prepare to some degree. Who knows it was kind of unclear. how much the letter from the time staffers actually, you know,

immediately spur this reaction or action. But how can you acquire the athletic? Presumably wrestle with these questions for so long and then still have it feel like, like, just like such a ham-handed blunder. Yeah, we're talking 18 months. Yeah.

And 18 months. In which, and again, speaking of things you and I talked about on this podcast, the time sports section was being strangled right before our eyes. Yeah. Some days, three or four pages, tiny handful of articles. And I think that, if anything, is an underplayed part of the story, is that management made this decision, a fairly shocking decision at the time, to spend half a billion dollars on sports writers.

Yeah. But then looked at their own sports section and said, how can we not edit this? How can we do something that has no vision with it, that has no leadership to it? Especially, and this is not a reflection on the writers, there's a reflection on the paper. Like, you were strangling this thing.

Of course. Right in front of all of us. I don't know how many people read this thing every day. I always say, I get the New York Times on paper, and I say that because I can attest to opening it up. And of course, I want to read sports and going, where's the sports? Yeah.

What's happening? What's the plan for this? I think it's important when talking about the Times Sports section, to talk about the unique place that sports has had within that particular paper over the years. Mm-hmm. It's almost like Times sports writers worked for what the country's most essential newspaper considered to be its least essential section. This is what the paper thought. Sure. Right?

Bob Lipside. who was a columnist there twice, told me, The Times was always amused by having a sports section. They saw it as their comics. So at the Washington Post or the New York Post or the San Francisco Chronicle, L.A. Times, sports writers are some of the biggest writers on the whole paper. They were seen as your superstars.

Yeah. They were expected to sell newspapers at those papers. Times Sports writers, though they were often as good as any of the other writers on those papers, papers did not have that kind of cachet. They were sort of more expected to adorn the paper, make the paper better than to actually sell papers, like the guys writing for the back page of the post. It's just a way it was.

It was totally different. You know, I mean, some of those local papers, it was like, you ain't buying it for the school board meetings, but you're buying the paper for coverage of the NFL team and for the columnist who's blasting off, just different at the times, partly because of the the greatness of the rest of the paper, but also partly because of the way the paper looked very particularly at sports. And it's almost whenever I think of sports writing, sports writing has a very long history of people at the top of the masthead not giving a shit about it,

which is part of the lot of being a sports writer, but it's also the opportunity. You're not paying a lot of attention. So guess what? We get to write in our section that the person covering school board meetings doesn't get to write. the Times is like an extreme version of that. We're not paying attention to you at all because we just don't think of this as part of the very important task of our paper. We pay even less attention to you then fill in the blank paper.

So that is an opportunity on the one hand. Times has had lots of great sports writers over the years. Lots of great people who've gone on to do other things or stayed at the paper, but also a lot of neglect. So going back in time, what would have been the argument for? for having the internal argument for having a sports page at all 50 years ago. Because that's what newspapers do. Because it seems like the Times has never shied away from defining for the rest of the industry what newspapers do. I mean, to have somebody on staff ready to go win, you know, the Yankees win the World Series and they need a front page story.

Is that part of the calculus? Well, we've got to think of that at one point in history, it seems weird now. the New York Times was a New York newspaper. Sure. You know, it was being read by people across the country, but it was also like, we have local teams here we need to cover. We're in New York newspaper, so we should have somebody covering the Yankees and the Giants. They had to take over the region before they took over the world for sure.

Yeah. I mean, that's like the, that's the base function of any sports page, right, covering the local teams. So they did that for a while. Slowly they pulled away from that. you know, and I think probably as they became a national paper and also the world was really changing and said, okay, what if we don't have to cover the Yankees and the Mets every day? Remember, New York has tons of sports teams. So they were in order to do that, it's just a lot of manpower. What if we become a more nationalized section? And that, as you and I've seen over the last even just decade has had a lot of interesting manifestations. If you're not going to do nuts and meat and potatoes, you know, coach so-and-so stood before the media today and said, X, how do you do a sports section?

What's a national sports section supposed to look like? And how do you do it? I mean, and presumably you're trying to do it with a smaller staff. And, and, you know, we've experienced this to the ringer. Just to have like a reactive blog post up every day about whatever the story of the day is, is not a two-person job, right? I mean, it takes a big staff to make that happen. It does.

And that's why I was, you know, whenever I thought about the Times Sports page, the one thing that never made sense to me was why they kind of got rid of their column, which is called Sports of the Times. And then when they brought it back recently, it seems to get written on average about every seven days. Because what's the easiest way to react to the news of the day? what's the easiest way to make your section seem current? Let's write about LeBron today. We need a LeBron piece.

Yeah, a column like that. Shoemaker, you're the columnist. Come up with something in a couple of hours. And like the New York Times opinion section, I haven't made this joke before. If you were a carbon-based life form and you have a take on today's news, you probably already have a contract to write for the New York Times opinion section. there are 1,396, I counted this morning, contributors to the Times Opinion section.

There's nobody writing a sports column with that frequency. There's nobody diving on the news. They have a column. It happens like every seven days. It's more essayistic than anything most of the time. But you're like, why aren't like three or four people assigned to do this? Well, I mean, listen to it, if there's one thing that we know from Twitter and other social media is that like probably 50, at least 50% of those thousand plus. us people who have New York Times opinion contracts have sports takes too.

Yes, they do. There was a time, I remember when I wrote about this like 10 years ago, that there were Manti-TEO columns in opinion, but there wasn't a Manti-Tio column on the sports page, which is, again, like, what? You don't think that's good enough for the sports page? You don't think that's juicy enough story. Now, when it comes to trying to do a national sports section versus a local sports section, or at least a sports section that's rooted in local coverage.

There basically been two approaches recently. Remember the snowfall era when we were at Grantland? We thought we were the choose your own feature story, exotic dateline kings of the world. Time Sports section, when Jason Stallman was the editor, came in and said, we can do that. Open the paper every day and, ha-ho, did you know about this skier in Eastern Europe, who is fascinating? Look at that here, dateline. and we're just going to almost take the old Sports Illustrated bonus piece and just bonus it up every day. I'm going to give you the most wildest, craziest, you weren't expecting this comes out of nowhere feature of which snowfall is probably the king.

So they did that. And when those pieces hit, awesome. Yeah. But when they didn't hit, it was kind of like, got anything about LeBron today? Got anything about the Dallas Cowboys? Well, intrinsic in that decision, and there were some great pieces that came out of that and made for a very enjoyable reading experience a lot of the time. But it seems like the mission statement is sort of sports for people who don't care about sports, right?

Exactly how it read. For that very narrow slice of people who, for whom the existence of the sports section is imperative, but the content of a traditional sports section is uninteresting, oh, look, I turned the page here's a sports story. Here's a magazine piece from the days of yore, as you said. And I think that sort of speaks to the bigger issue, right? I mean, it's like the concept, it's like the, this is, the Man Titeo's piece or idea speaks to this too. The idea of covering sports seems to be so part and parcel with the notion of having a sports page

or the way those two things interact just never seem to make any sort of logical sense. for the New York Times. And it would almost have, it feels like everybody would have been happier if they had just folded the sports page itself at some point along the way, right? I mean, but, and still covered the content. But deciding what content is deemed worthy

of the sports page and what lives outside of it just seemed to be an insurmountable sort of philosophical quest. Your point about it being not for sports fans per se is right on. it felt like it was programmed for people that were reading the rest of the times to come over. And here's a sports feature that's going to interest you. But it's not going to be something that's, you know, going to be a sportsy sports piece that you won't care about. And again, I just don't know how many of those people exist. Like, I really want to read sports features, but I don't want to read regularly about LeBron James and the biggest stars in sports.

And, you know, and again, it doesn't even have to be what happened last night. Because I know if you have a smaller staff and smaller space and news hole in the paper, you're not going to be able to do like last night's game, last night's game, last night's game. I totally understand that. But there has to be some currency to it where it feels like it's not just existing in a, you know, a bubble where it's like here's kind of a feature that happened. You know, that's about something kind of tangentially related to whatever the news is. Well, I mean, if you look at like the politics coverage, I mean, I'm going to use really broad strokes here. But they dedicate a ton more time and space to politics. So they're able to cover politics in greater depth.

But they're also sort of buoyed to a large extent by the lack of ideological complexity in modern politics. Like you can cover national politics in a way that you can't cover national sports. You know, there's not a lot of no matter how much you care about your local congressman, you're not really interested in the day-to-day of their lives and voting patterns or maybe, maybe votes, but usually not because it's more of a block, you know, a voting block situation and more of a national politics conversation. I think one of the problems with sports is that if you're, if you're interested in the day-to-day, you are interested in the minutiae of whatever team or teams or player or sports

that you follow. And once you've decided we're not covering New York sports specifically, which is not in of itself a bad decision. They're a national paper, you know, then you sort of have to decide whether or not you're going to cover things more broadly or you're just going to kind of abdicate to ESPN and, you know, whatever the local beat is. I mean, I do think the existence of ESPN to a large degree is a big piece of this conversation because the New York Times can't and couldn't for years, sit back and say, we can be the best at this vertical, right? There's already somebody else.

And there's more places than just ESPN. But ESPN as this sort of totem for all things, sports, is already doing it better. So I think that that is probably, I mean, I think that's probably always been an issue internally. It's a pride issue, you know? We're not even going to try this fight because the chances of us winning are zero. What's interesting about that is, if you look at the New York Times, is art section. I hope I'm not insulting

anybody here, but it's not the best arts coverage in America right now. No. But it can be seen. But if all you read is the New York Times, you might be mistaken for thinking that you're getting all the, I mean, that you're getting everything there is to get. Well, and that's what I was going to add. It's maybe the best collection of daily book

critics in the country, in fact, I'm sure it is for daily book critics. It's been one of the best collections of TV critics and movie critics. So you can, and certainly high culture, right, coverage of art and ballet and dance and things like that that they basically own other than the New York are very special publications. Yeah, yeah, the real stuff. So I'm just like, couldn't you do that with sports?

Is it, is it impossible? I mean, we saw them in this, in their most recent iteration say, we're going to cover a ton of tennis. So it's a lot of tennis in there. We're going to cover a ton of golf. The golf majors will be a big thing. We saw them pick, you know, if there was anything that's like a sport story that's also an A section story like PGA Live, NIL and college football, you know, brain injuries going back a couple years, a beat they really, really did great work on. We can get that, right? Like, we got that.

But maybe sports, to your point, is just harder to do that, to pick your spots on. You're right. It's absolutely more difficult. We've, again, gone through this at the ringer, you know. I always wonder how they pick those sports because they are the sort of, you know, those are the sports that you mentioned are closer to the ballet and opera

into the sports spectrum. And I do wonder if there's a little bit of that. I mean, you see that all over the place. You know, there were definitely like opinions about which sports were merited discussion even at ESPN, you know, when we spent time there. Yeah. And this is the New York Times, right?

Like, there's going to be a lot of crossover of people watching the tennis majors. Also, by the way, soccer, which they pretty much imported. I should put in that to the thing they hired Rory Smith. And they do a lot of soccer versus, you know, as part of their diet or at least as a percentage of their diet. And that speaks to some of the, I mean, to the audience, but it's also sort of a caricature of the audience, you know, and is the audience, you know, is the general reader of the New York Times really a definable person? Or is it someone that's clicking through through Twitter to read an article? You know, I mean, that's that I think that's part of the conundrum. It's interesting about this most recent version of the section, the post-no-fall era, if we can call it that, where basically they stripped away most, if not all of those very, very far-flung features.

But they still weren't doing a ton of news of the day thing. The columns, as I said, was not super regular, or it was every seven days, so you weren't responding to things that happened. and where they would make noise, and this attests to the talent of a lot of the people that work there, was with investigations. Ken Belson on news from NFL headquarters, Kevin Draper on the whole Rachel Nichols story. Of course, we were seeing a lot of quotations of Draper's old athletic story this week. Jenny Vrentis on basically anything, Deshaun Watson, name it.

They could make news on those big enterprise investigations. that was working perfectly well. And again, but again, when I looked at this most recent version of the section, it was like, I don't see a person here who has a vision of what New York Times sports should be. I don't see the signs of that where that's like, we're going to do X, Y, and Z, or we're going to try this thing. Again, we got a tiny staff or small as staff, about 30 to 50, the estimates I saw.

It's not going to be, again, within the Times is, own power ranking of all the things we should be doing, it's going to be down the list in terms of importance. That's just the way it's always been in the paper. So what is our approach to that? I just didn't see an approach. I mean, in the defense of the people there, they were, as you said, being strangled, you know, metaphorically, but like in real time. And they probably weren't getting a lot of guidance about what to do. They probably were being left out of all the important discussions about sports in the New York Times that were being- Certainly sounds like it from their letter to management. Or maybe they were, maybe they were, you know, who knows, did agree to which they were hamstrung from a day-to-day perspective by under-staffing and whatever else.

But you're right. There wasn't a lot of vision there. And what there was didn't really seem compatible with A, any sort of integration with the athletic and be sort of the future in broadly stated. It's interesting to watch people try to fit this into the death of journalism and death of sports writing stories we've been hearing, which have been true for so many months now, for so many years now in terms of, oh my God, the Times eliminated their sports section. What are we going to do now? And I'm like, this absolutely sucks for the people involved. There's no doubt about that, for the people who have to change jobs, who have effectively lost their jobs, writing sports for the New York

Times. I do not doubt that. But the supreme irony here is the New York Times, underplayed sports, underplayed sports, underplayed sports, and then went out and spent a half a billion dollars to buy hundreds of sports writers. They went all in. They went no in or like one little toe in, and then they went all in in this dramatic way, which forced them in a way,

I guess forced is a wrong word, but led them to then say, well, wait a second, why don't it was the athletic handle our sports? I saw a quote from Kahn, I think this is in one of Ben Strauss's article saying, we have more sports writers of this paper than we have people covering anything else. Well, yeah, you went and bought the athletic. So there's the irony, right?

Sports is down our power rankings and now we paid so much for it that we have to figure out what to do with the athletic. We have to figure out how to make it work. It's something more than just a list of potential people to come to the New York Times bundle. And I, dude, I don't know about you, but as I look at this and I read a Wall Street Journal profile of David Purpich, who was the publisher of the athletic, I have the same question that I've always had about time sports, which is, what are you going to do with the athletic? What's the purpose of that going to be other than as a thing in the bundle, because it's not a newspaper anymore, it's a bundle. What is the approach going to be?

I have no idea, by the way, if the bundle is working, but it does seem from an outsider to be improving, at least in its sort of artfulness of presentation. You know, I mean, maybe it's just because we're beyond the grousing about things that have been taken away or segmented off or like how this affects my subscription. But, you know, it's not as, it's sort of like a website redesign. It's like, you give it some time and it's like,

okay, now I understand my cooking's here and the games are over here, the podcast vertical is a separate, you know, is a living entity into itself. But even so, even if that's exactly where the athletic is, it doesn't, it still doesn't seem to jive with like what the New York Times general philosophy. You know, they're not going out there and, you know, buying some sprawling true crime podcast network that produces like 10 shows a day, you know, I mean, they're still methodical and it's still about being the best in the business, at least, you know, to them at what they're doing.

And, you know, in retrospect, valuations and, you know, user clicks and everything else of the athletic aside, it does seem like it would have made a lot, it would have been a lot more of a straight line to create New York Times sports, even as a separate entity without buying the athletic and building it into something that could be comfortable

within the New York Times environment. It's funny. I saw Andrew Marchand at the New York Post tweeting something about that. What if you just spent like, I don't know, 25 million or 10 million and just went out and got, I don't know, much less that one million and just went out and got a whole bunch of sports writers who were very eager to be New York Times employees and built your own thing. Was 500 million really the price of admission, whether we think the athletic is great or terrible or somewhere in between, was that the price of admission to getting into sports? Not kill your own section.

Beef up your own section. Bring in somebody with a vision for your own section. But now you've got this huge website, which in its original iteration was overwhelmingly people covering the day-to-day nuts and bolts of sports. The thing the New York Times, and again, here's another irony, got away from. So we're not in that business. Well, now you're back in that business.

We know after this recent round of layoffs and reorganization, that the Times was thinking, well, like, made us say, why if we take some of those people from beats that may not sustain the audience and will turn them into general interest feature writers? Convert them to this other job. Well, that's what you already had. That's the Times sports section we're just coming out of. We had that.

So is that really the way to go here either? And again, I just haven't heard anybody answer the question of what is the athletic? going to be under New York Times auspices. Maybe the New York Times remnants of the New York Times Sports Desk need to send another letter to the bosses and see if they can get a response. Nobody at the athletic I've talked to understands what it's supposed to be. No, I mean, it would just be, it would just be wild, not unbelievable, but it would just be a wild turn of events if they acquire the athletic, 18 months later, shutter the Times Sports

desk, and then go about trying to retrofit the athletic into whatever the vision should have been, which would almost inevitably mean firing two-thirds of the people that work there and re-envisioning it and probably hiring all the people you would have hired if you had just started from scratch like, you know, Marchand suggested, right? I mean, it's very bizarre. Also, not for nothing, but you mentioned writers who would love to work for the New York Times. I mean, if the sections of the Times and sports in particular have sort of been more siloed than ever in some ways,

you don't want to push that even further by like by yeah you acquire the brand of the athletic but are you hiring people as New York Times staffers no you're hiring them as athletic writers that's not silo that's like kind of no no insult but to someone who dreams of writing for the times you feel like you're being ghettoized or something to write for sports right which is probably how they felt for a while but you do lose all of that right you could have how many how many people would have just been so excited to be one of the the the 20 founding staffers of the new New New York Times, New Look New York Times sports section that are now just, that don't get that bent, that will never get that benefit.

It's really, really, really strange. And like I said, I still want the person at the New York Times is like, I've got an idea for sports. Sports is hard, it turns out. Programming a sports section or a sports website is hard, right? And it takes the kind of vision it takes to program the daily news report of the New York Times. You know, I really think it ultimately, especially when you're talking about that many people as they have at the athletic, it requires that kind of big sweeping vision. You know, it's not like the New York Times as politics coverage is like, hey, you covered Trump and you cover Biden and we'll put somebody on to Santa's and you cover Congress. They have to do lots of different kinds of things at once, do a podcast, do all these kinds of things, right? Sports is the same thing. So will the person who has figured it out at the New York Times, raise their hand? Anyway, RIP. the New York Times sports section

and our thoughts with the people who are now off to other jobs inside that paper. And by the way, I still can't believe that. We're really not going to have Tyler Kavanaugh-write baseball. We're not going to have Jenny Vrentis just be an investigative unit to whatever she wants to investigate about sports. We're really not going to do that.

They have to do something else or do it under in the business section or whatever the plan is here. I just don't understand that. You think there's like one open seat in the travel section that all the sports writers are just clawing over each other to try to get to? Like, what would be the ideal? 52 destinations in 52 weeks?

Yeah. That might get some attention. Like, I'm in on that one. I want to, I want to raise my hand for that job. I didn't want to lose my old job, but if that was an alternative, maybe I'd be interested. Traveling around the country. It beats, you know, going and send a ballpark, ballparks all day. I want to quickly mention the incident at GQ, David, that we might also have missed

during the press box of summer vacation. This deserves mentioning. Two weeks ago, GQ published a column, and that's the important word here, column, called how Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zazlov became public enemy number one in Hollywood. It was written by a writer named Jason Bailey,

went through the GQ editorial process. It was posted online. And then Zazlov's office called to complain about the story. GQ decided revisions needed to be made. A version of the piece with the revisions, which was less mean, went up.

Jason Bailey, the writer said, you know, that's not my article and I don't actually want my name on that anymore. And then the piece got taken down completely. By the way, if a piece ever gets taken down, isn't that just an invitation to all of the world, to all of reader do?

to please read this column. Is there any better invitation? Could you do any better with a social media treatment than they don't want you to read this article? Was it taken down? Do we know? Was it taken down because, like, because Jason Bailey said, that's not my piece? He said, yes. Or is it possible that Zazlov's team was still unhappy with the product?

And that was part of the calculus too. That's according to stories by Will Summer in the Washington Post and Ben Mullen, New York Times, that Bailey ultimately said, that's it, right? I'm open to, you know, talking about something about this, but this is no longer by, first of all, it's already gone through edits and stuff. We've already posted this column. You know, in the old days, publishing kind of meant something.

You published it, right, it's out. And nowadays, there's all this, you know, wizardry that can happen afterwards when somebody gets mad, but there was way too much wizardry in this case. And he's like, nope, not my story anymore. The original column is archived online. Again, I guarantee you read it. It's really helpful for people like me and David who,

when we hear the word media mogul or studio head, we just kind of look down at the ground and try to think about something else. If you don't know a lot about David Zazlov, you start to understand why public opinion and opinion in Hollywood has turned against him. This is the guy renamed HBO, or at least presided over the renaming of HBO is HBO Max, the guy who didn't release Batgirl, the guy who gutted much of Turner Classic movies,

the guy who hired Chris Licked. Oh, there's a name to be the head of CNN. He hasn't had a lot of Ws. I saw it today that someone discovered his PayPal was public. Was that real? I saw those tweets. Well, I don't know if the tweets themselves were real. I believe the original reporting,

such as it is that his PayPal account was discoverable, or Venmo account, sorry, was discoverable. I believe that was real. And then, yeah, the writers who had their shows yanked down from HBO Max were like requesting giant sums of money and payment, you know, I mean, as just gags. But yeah, it's, I will say, and I pay, you know, a good bit of attention to this, but just coming in, when I saw the headline, even, it was like the least shocking thing in the world. I mean, it was, like, this is just a, I just assumed it was just a kind of an explainer piece because I would take it for granted that David Zazlov is, is public enemy number one. Yeah, it's one of those where when you read it, and again, the archive version is online. There's never been a better time to read Jason Bailey's piece on David Zazlov.

You're like, this is a piece that is written like a column that's written like a think piece. It has a few lines that are mean in it. It is not an overly mean column. It deals with lots of things that have happened publicly. Apparently, Zazlov's office argued that he did not call for comment. You don't have to call about things that have happened in real life. You do get to interpret those events as a journalist and have opinions about them. Also, it was interesting, and this was in Mullen's New York Times piece.

GQ went to the writer, Jason Bailey, and said, we want a piece about quote the most hated man in Hollywood end quote it was their idea yeah it was their idea I was just didn't this feel like very anachronistic in a way the whole glossy magazine gets crossways with Hollywood like we're covering Hollywood and then Hollywood gets mad whoa whoa whoa didn't want to make you mad and that just feels like something we would read read about 20 to 25 years ago in the Graydon Carter era. I mean, and also,

by the way, Variety reports GQ editor-in-chief Willis is producing a movie at Warner Brothers. Yes, all that. Will Summer reports GQ parent company as major Warner Brothers Discovery shareholder. Plus, there's the normal glossy magazine thing where you want people from the movies to be your

cover subjects, talk to you, do profiles, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, and who knows that agreed to which David Zaslov would have been able to hamstring that sort of thing. Potentially a lot, I guess. I don't know. It just seems odd to me that one that we don't have like a term or a plan of action

for stories like this after all the ones that we've covered and all the times that we've seen this sort of thing taking place. It almost should be more commonplace and just skip all the revisions and the public fracas. It just seems like we should just be accustomed to, you know, like whatever the publisher just getting one whammy a year or something, you know, just coming in and being just like, nope, that's going to mess up my golf,

my golf group, and then everyone just being like, okay, we get it, move on, read the archive. Is this the, like,

wait, so Mulligan is actually the word you're looking for. Oh, yeah, Mulligan is right, his golf game. Right,

that's perfect. Yeah, I mean, but, but it's also, I don't know. I mean, it's not,

first of all, we should just say, you know, editorial side of GQ is not a monolith. Like, it makes total sense that, like,

someone was just like, yeah, let's do this piece. And then someone higher up or just separate. We published what? Yeah. But we don't have the answer to that, but we do have in this very modern synergistic world. We do have the answer to like how can you're the editor of this magazine section share in the profits of a movie that's being created based on a story that that editor helped Shepard through several years ago or whatever. I mean, we figured out the important stuff, right? Just not the incidental stuff of like, how do you deal?

deal with it when a Hollywood mogul demands that you retract something that you've written. I mean, this really just shows which, you know, where we're motivated in life, right? I mean, listen, more power to him for the, you know, guy who's presumably not making a ton of money as an editor to get to cut us in some profit somewhere else. But, you know, they figured that out where there were probably some HR strictures at some point in the past. They're not going to figure out actually how to deal with, you know, a story like this. No, no, and it's always the freelancer who bears the brunt of it.

The freelance writer, not the editor of the glossy magazine, and I will maybe dispute your character say she's not being paid a lot of money. Are we sure about that? It could be paying any lot. Are we sure about that? Coming up at 30 seconds, what the latest round of ESPN layoffs means, and a big goodbye for one, Jeff Van Gundy. But first, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week,

where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious, but all of media Twitter made it at the same time. send your nominees to at the Pressbox pod where they are always, always gratefully received. I've not said those words in a couple of weeks and had to kind of fight my way through them there, David. Speaking of Hollywood, some big news.

So the writers have been on strike. This week, the actors union, SAG Afterra, led by one Fran Dresher, what a second or third act she's having, said they will also go on strike. It was a very overworked Twitter joke to acknowledge the

striking actors and writers by posting a picture of a glamorous celebrity with a less glamorous celebrity because actors mere writers. I saw Beyonce and Ed Sheeran. I saw

Barbie and Oppenheimer side by side. If you reacted like you did when you saw pictures of the host of the press box, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, the notebook dump. Let us talk about those ESPN layoffs.

It happened two weeks ago. This is either round two or three of the most recent round of ESPN layoffs. Talk about depressing. And this time, David, the people affected were the people you see on your TV screen. Max Kellerman, Jeff Van Gundy, Susie Colbert, Todd McShay, Kishon Johnson, Jaylon Rose, Steve Young, Matt Hasselbeg, June Lee, Nick Fidel, Ashley Brewer, Neil Everett, Sports Center anchor left.

We can talk about those individuals in just a moment. But this really is the max player era of ESPN in full relief, isn't it? This idea that we're going to build around five or six really, really highly paid individuals.

Yeah. And if you're not one of those individuals, if you are Max Kellerman rather than Stephen A. Smith, you might be in trouble. There might not be room for you at the new ESPN. No, I mean, and Max Kellerman is sort of unique example because he got, you know, I'm sure the history books will say that he was, you know,

tossed through the barbershop window by Stephen A. Smith in this old thing. But like it's wrestling reference. Bill made that same reference, except he said super kicked on his podcast today. So we get the facts right here. Press box. Uh, yeah. the business model, as you lay it out, I mean, is pretty self-evident. It's not, it's, it's not really that we're only building around these five people or six people or however many it turns out to be.

It's just sort of like it's, it's the disappearance of the middle class, the vanishing of the middle class, right? We don't need to be paying anybody to be like a big name if you're not one of the top, one of the actual big names that we're making, that we're, that we're, investing in, and not just financially, on a daily basis. Certainly when you see some of the contracts, the very biggest of the big, the people that you're talking about have gotten, it makes a certain amount of sense that you would have to take that money away from somewhere else. And even though there have been massive layoffs on the lower levels of the ESPN pay scale, there is a sort of limit to how many people you can lay off from those divisions, right? And so the cuts have got to come from somewhere.

And they just sort of, you know, shifted the scales a little bit and where they, you know, and how they're going to allocate their resources. And I don't know. I think that all, almost all of the people that you named are people who I love and people who I, you know, who I will continue to watch whatever they do moving forward. But it's not, you know, just from a pure robot brain sort of perspective. It's not crazy for, it's not unthinkable that a company would look at its books and say, you know, the decisions that we made from 1990 to 2010 don't reflect our current values. Now, how do we, how do we adjust moving forward?

Especially a company that's been told by its parent company, Disney, that you got to chop a bunch of jobs off. Well, there you go. I mean, we've talked about this before and it's just gets so boring. But it's like, you know, you can't cut a percentage of jobs or reach a, you know, just to kind of. bottom line or concrete bottom line in a more abstract financial setting and make even good philosophical decisions. You know, I mean, it's sort of ridiculous. I mean, you see the way they made, some of the decisions they made, and we'll talk Jeff Van

Gunney specifically, but a lot of the, we don't know all the details, but a lot of the assumptions around Van Gunny is that he was just making a ton of money. A lot of these people, the reason why we're like familiar with their names, not the reason why, but we're familiar with their names. And ergo, they're probably making a large sums of money. Yes. And whether or not the decision was to try to get people to renegotiate, I don't actually, I don't actually buy that. I mean, not that it's really been reported, it's been theorized. I'm not sure that they really asked them to renegotiate. I think that the decisions were made and the value is in writing them off. You know, it's not on just not necessarily, maybe they're one or two where they said

come back for a lower amount. But that, that, that, that cuts into the right off. The point is just to be able to say, we're, we're, we're saving this much money, this calendar year, you know, and that, and by tossing salaries out the window, it's, it's halfway hocus pocus, but it's, that's just the way that they're operating. That's because they're being forced to buy the corporate parent. There's a certain awful symbolic value, I think, from a corporate point of view. Yes, you're right. And saying, this person, instead of coming back at a $500,000 a year or whatever, reduced rate that we would throw at them. It's just gone from us. And we're going to figure out how to do the same amount with fewer people. I mean, Kellerman is so fascinating to me,

not only because of the Marty Genetti comparison, but because you and I would recognize him as being a star at ESPN. He was a star. He has his own television show. If he's on first take, he still has his own television show. He's been hosting the morning radio show on ESPN radio, which seems a massive radio show, yeah, which seems all kinds of dune. But, Like, and again, under the Max Player era, that level of Star just doesn't really exist anymore. We could find a few people that do it, but as like a big category, which it was under Skipper, again, under different economic times, different world, different, you know, motivations from Disney, all that stuff. That was a big category. It's funny because one of the greatest things about Matt, I think one of his more positive attributes in terms of the ESPN mission,

is the way that he evolved, right? I mean, he went from a sort of very specific personality, a very sort of narrow, you know, orbit, and then expanded that into being this kind of national commentator with like hot takes on everything. I mean, he wasn't just a take machine like some of his contemporaries are, but he fit in. He made himself into a modern sports star

in a way that you might not have expected watching him 10 years ago. But that's not. the current ESPN model, right? It's not watching people grow up to a level and overachieve in their jobs. It's hiring the people from outside who are already there. Right? Totally. Totally. And in some sense, there's no room for you to grow at ESPN. They might actively not want that to happen because it actually makes more sense for them to let you go like they did with Stephen A. Smith and hire you back when you've gotten to that higher level. So you come in fresh. You come in. Is this kind of fully formed figure and you don't have the baggage of what you've been doing on your

climb for the past seven or eight years. You know, I mean, it wouldn't shock me at all to see Max Kellerman come back in a few years to ESPN and be, you know, the new Greenberg or whatever, just to have, he could do, he can do, we know he can do anything, right? But in a certain way, it, it, it, it, I feel like they feel like it reflects poorly to promote from within, rather than look at this new slugger we just signed on the free agency wire. Well, I think you're totally right. And I think there's totally, with Jimmy Patero,

there's absolutely been, we want the Markey Free Agent. We want Peyton Manning to be a part of ESPN. We want Joe Buck and Troy Aikman to be a part of ESPN. We want Pat McAfee to be a part of ESPN. People who already, as you say, big names, big, boldface kind of names. And I think that's,

part of what's depressing to me about this era. You'll never see me say, ESPN's dead, man. This is the death of ESPN. It's over. You know, what a cheap headline. What a cheap tweet. There's still lots of great stuff on ESPN. There's lots of great people doing work at ESPN. See that Seth Wickersham, Don Van Nata joint that just rolled out. Come on. There's lots of great stuff there. I would never say that. But to your point, it feels like the system where you could come into ESPN and be the next person is being closed off before our eyes, both because of that

shopping at the top end philosophy and also just because there are so many fewer jobs and fewer slots now. You know, it's like in the old days, like, hey, Dan and Keith aren't on SportsCenter anymore. That's okay because Stuart Scott's coming along and Scott Van Pelt's coming along and they'll be a guy and it'll take me a while and I'll be like, eh, it's not Dan and Keith, he's not boomer. I don't know how I feel. Then I'll watch him for a couple of months or a year and be like, I love this guy.

He's great. Awesome host, right? It feels like that's not going to happen with the same regularity anymore. That they're just not going to have the numbers. You know, ESPN was both the major leagues and the farm system at the same time. We know this from Grantland. We were the farm system, baby. We were AAA getting into the majors, you know, and you feel like you could find that person.

Now that's Zach Lowe and Barnwell and some of our pals. like that's like, is that going to happen at the new ESPN? No, but it'll be interesting to see if it happens at the top, right? I saw who, I saw, let me pull it up. Oh, Charles McDonald at 4Verts. Yahoo writer tweeted, I'm not joking when I say Stephen A. Smith might have the strongest job security of anybody in the entire country. I agree with that if we're looking in the very, very near term.

But the way that these layoffs happen and just the way that these things, I mean, media goes, I don't think he has the strongest long-term job security because he's making a ton of money. What if another round of layoffs happen? What if they need to find $50 million somewhere? You know, I mean, he is right now the most insinuated, just, you know, he is, he is a made man, and he's wonderful at what he does. But I said it when Pat McAfee got hired, that in some, that he's getting all this sort of access to, to viewers, to mainstream media, and to some extent, he's trading in security, not necessarily job security, whatever. He's going to find a way to get paid one way or the other. But he could have done his old job for the rest of his life. Now,

he's got to wonder if his name's going to come up every time the axe comes down, right? You make a lot of sense. When I first saw Stephen A make comments about that, it could be me next. Yeah. I was like, this is a person who is looking to somehow make himself the story of a day when a bunch of his colleagues lost their jobs. I was like, are you really going to make this about you today when all these other people left, but you're right. You know, if it's all about a number and ESPN has to get to a number, then presumably anybody who's not involved with literally the most important things that that network does, which going forward we know are going to be showing live sports, especially the NFL,

college football probably in second place. Maybe. Maybe you could be on the list. You know who's really fascinating to me was Jalen Rose in this whole thing? Jalen Rose did great stuff with our boss Bill. magic combination. Jalen Rose then goes up to ESPN ladder. It's kind of the kind of person we're talking about.

He's on NBA countdown. When NBA countdown gets rebuilt around Stephen A. Smith, the show reminded me of the Houston Rockets when James Hardin was there. Everybody on that set, just like everybody on the court with the Rockets, was watching Stephen A to see what he would do. It was like the structure of the show turned everybody into PJ Tucker or Eric Gordon. You're sitting there going, I might be a good player. I might be able to make a couple of shots here, but I have to wait and see what he's going to do because that's the way

ESPN's built now. So if I'm the best commentator on earth or the worst commentator, I'm still doing exactly the same thing. I'm just sitting here. You just watch that show. Everybody's just watching him. Greenie's watching him. They're like, this is the show. Yeah. And we're going to come in maybe a little bit later and pick our spots here. But that's again, that's the way. it's built. And it turns out it's built mostly around Stephen A. I do want to talk to you about Jeff Van Gundy because I think that one caught a lot of people by surprise. You pointed out that he probably has a very big salary at ESPN. He's done that. He's gotten that because he's been around a long time. He's done 17 straight NBA finals on national TV as a color commentator.

And he's, you know, even in a hypothetical, whether or not he was ever actually going to return to coaching along the way. There's always the potential counteroffers are not like, oh, you know, Fox is offering me $750,000. The Houston Rockets are offering me $10 million. What should I do? I also want to learn more about that because I always thought that he was basically done with that.

And I don't know if that just came up over the years enough to goose his contract a little bit. But he always seemed to me to be effective at his job because he wasn't one of these coaches who was trying to get back in the game. it wasn't the Sean Payton thing where it's like one year on Fox where I say absolutely nothing controversial because I'm just waiting for my next job. You felt like he was, I mean, mostly it was about the refs in his case, but he often seemed to be critical like I don't really care, right? I'm here to be a commentator. This is my job now, not to set myself up for the next professional opportunity, but I've no doubt that they were paying to keep him away from the NBA to some extent. So 17 NBA finals, that's the most in NBA history by a huge.

margin. You know, the NBA color commentator list is not a great category in sports broadcasting, mostly because the NBA is a play-by-play announcer's league. It just moves so fast. So when we think about the idea of NBA announcer, it's Mike Breen, it's Marv, it's Ein Eagle, it's that group. If you wanted to make an argument, or if anybody did, that Jeff Van Gundy is the best color commentator in NBA history or one of the best, I'd listen to it. I don't think that's crazy.

He's not John Madden, but he may be the best at his job that's ever done it. I don't think that's nuts at all. If you want to argue Hubie Brown or whoever it is, okay. But I'm like, you kind of got rid of a guy who was at the top of his game in terms of being a commentator. I know no doubt that in our circles like NBA Twitter and the ringer and stuff he probably polls better than he does with people who are very casual basketball fans he doesn't have that Tony Romo crossovery

thing I think that a lot of announcers have but you didn't just cut a guy who was expensive or cut a guy that was okay it's another NBA announcer we'll get somebody else and he cut a guy who was really really good yeah absolutely just really good at what he did and that's just it's weird

to me. Bill and Rosillo talked about this on Bill's pod that that, you know, I think Bill said that ESPN, obviously at least in the past, really valued having the being the absolute best, having the absolute best person in the business doing what they're doing.

And so it seems a little bit bizarre that they would look at Van Gundy and say we're fine without you, knowing as they surely do, that he's the best. Especially on big ticket items like the NBA. If you're if you're ESPN, right, what do you want the best on?

NFL, college football, where you have the national championship game and are going to have a huge chunk of the playoff, the expanded playoff and basketball. To me, that's where I'd want the absolute best. You've got it in Mike Breen. You do. You got it in Kirk Herb Street. You know, you could look at all

Joe and Troy, right? Right there at the top. So it's just weird. And I know, like, you know, I'm much bigger Jeff Van Gundy, the announcer fan than I am of Mark Jackson the announcer. But in a way, I think the last couple of years, I sort of appreciated that Van Gundy on his own may have been a little serious for that job,

a little basketball nerdy for that job, and having Mark Jackson there kind of took the piss out of him in a humorous way a little bit. Yeah. Wasn't always a fan of their griping at each other and messing with each other. But I do think that might have lightened it up a tad, again for a general audience coming in

that wasn't, you know, just basketball nerds like the people we love to pal around with? I mean, I think this was a strictly salary decision. I think we can talk about it and talk around it and I just think it's a little bit of a fool's game to try to make sense of it beyond that. Yeah. Having said that, I mean, maybe the, maybe the,

maybe they looked at him and said, he is the best there is it what he does, but we want, we want a Tony Romo. you know, and he's not going to be that. So let's figure out what ex-player can do that job. I mean, maybe that's it. If you really want to go all in with the NBA, then maybe you need to achieve,

you've got to find your Tony Romo, you're John Madden or whoever. That said, Jeff Van Gundy is one of one, and ESPN is just idiotic for letting him go. That's what I mean. Like, you know, even when you have job cuts that are about something other than quality, you very rarely see the best guy at his job get cut. That's what happened here.

Can we do a little bit of Brian's summer vacation album before we go? Please. Wait, music album or picture album? Oh, this is a picture album. I was thinking of like old school slides, you know,

that was having you over in my living room with shag carpet and maybe a fondue set out there and we're looking at pictures of far-flung locales. family and I were in the UK for two and a half weeks. My wife, Christine, our two kids. We always bring our moms along when we go on these trips, her mom and mine. So it's very much a Swiss family Robinson style expedition.

Everybody's going. And the whole time I had this notebook writing random stuff down. I had a page. It was like stuff to talk to David about that filled up very, very quickly. And I'd like to give you a few of the notations from that page. number one, is it time to retire the phrase stealth MVP? Because I was at LAX dude and I saw a copy of a magazine with the actor Rebecca Ferguson on the cover.

And the cover line said Hollywood stealth MVP. Wow. Now in journalism, stealth MVP means the actor who agreed to do the interview with us. Yes. That's what it means. and if you got Brad Pitt he wouldn't be the stealth MVP

he would just be the MVP or Tom Cruise but if you get anybody but the Stephen A. Smith Pat McAfee level actor they are the stealth MVP stealth is also a weasel word too because you could say you know the movie's real MVP but that would that might

snub Brad Pitt right or whoever the higher the higher touted star is on the whole thing but stealth MVP when it's used in sports would be the person who's deserving of ESPN, I mean ESPN, the person who's deserving of MVP recognition, but not on the top three list that people are normally touting, right? Oh, Jimmy Butler's having a stealth MVP season, no one in, in darkness. Nicole Yokic used to have stealth MVP seasons, and then he got all the MVP awards. So I'm not really

sure how stealthy you can be as an MVP candidate in a sport like the NFL or the NBA, where people are paying attention all the time. But it doesn't really make a lot of sense regardless outside of the sports world because an MVP is who you say it is. You know, no one is ranking the most valuable players of Oppenheimer. And then you're just like, well, but toiling is darkness over here. Well, some of it.

Coming soon to a culture website near you, Oppenheimer MVP's ranked. I think, you know where this really went crazy was with succession? Oh, yeah. because they were doling out all the PR goodies. And people didn't get Brian Cox. They didn't get Jeremy Strong. Went all the way down the list.

And it was like, aha, we got the 17th ranked person on the show, stealth MVP. Yeah. I guess me at the ringer can take a lot of credit for this because we did the succession power rankings every week. You take the sports concept,

you slap it on whatever movie or TV show that people are talking a lot about that day. It shows a sort of ironic commitment to the beat, you know, but we don't all have to be using all vocabulary at all the time, you know, at all times. The other thing I wrote on the talk to David about this page, I was at LAX during the whole rush of Vladimir Putin mutiny. Is this a coup news cycle? And naturally, I wanted to know the latest. I could not find a television at LAX that was playing CNN International. Oh, yeah.

Remember when that was every television at the airport? And you'd be like, is the cowboy game on? somewhere? Can we get the cowboy game on that's not just in the Chili's 2? Can we get it on in the general terminal? There were no CNN international anywhere that I could find. When did we just stop showing CNN at the airport? Yeah. Well, now what do they show? They show Fox a lot, and they just show like whatever like HGTV or just some like, you know, nothing show. It's very strange. I was at a regional airport not too long ago. I won't name any names here. But it was a smaller airport than I was expecting it to be, judging by the city, and had to get to the airport

early to deal with some flight stuff and went back to the, to the, to look for a TV. I got to kill some time. Where can I, is there a TV I can sit nearby or in front of or whatever? And the only TVs in the whole place were at the central bar restaurant and like the center of the hub. And there was a big, you know, there's a big bar tables all around. Everybody knows what the space is like three or four TVs across the back of the bar. None of them were working.

Like they were all just like a blue. screen. And I was just like, is nobody else having a problem with this? All the seats were filled. It's like, why are we here? Like, this is crazy. I love how you wouldn't name the regional airport, so it's not to embarrass it. I love the city a lot.

I don't want to do them any damage. Number three on my list is a former book cover designer. Can we agree that British book covers are better than American book covers? Yes, but, well, okay. Yes, absolutely. And I do want to say some of the greatest book covers. cover designers in the world are British and in terms of international appeal. I mean, you know, Gray 318, who are the other obvious ones?

It's been too long because I went down this list. But you're talking about the sort of just general aesthetic of British books, not about just like the, oh, you know, just like the, oh, you know, I love this book cover in America. Oh, it turns out the designer is British. You mean the general sort of like minimalist, clean aesthetic of British books? Yeah, like, is there a British Brian and David who come to America for a couple of weeks? And like, finally, the American book covers. Look how cool these are.

Or is that just a one-way street? No, I don't think that there's a lot of British readers who come over and just, like, run their hands over the cover of a James Patterson book. And they're like, look at the embossing. You know, look at the gold foil. Yeah. You and I may just be sick. That might be the takeaway here, but. No, I do think that there, I mean, listen, there's something, British publishing is different in

million different ways. A lot of times they don't have hardcover editions the same way we do. And so you kind of go to a, you know, it's a whole different marketing plan. But also in a more readerly country, you have to kind of hit a broader audience with every at bat. And so sometimes the result is something a little bit more clean, more simple, more, abstract. And those, I think, that kind of speaks to our taste. Because when you would find that sort of thing. And he used bookstore in America, you'd just be like, look at this. Like, look at, why is this edition of the Android's dream of electric sheep so much cooler

than the one that I have, you know? Or like, why is it? I mean, it's, it's different. And that's part of the initial appeal. But the cleanliness and just sort of uniformity of it, I think, there's definitely, for someone with a million books in their home, don't you wish that you just had some sort of series additions of a lot of the stuff that you read? I mean, a lot of this stuff is just innate in us.

Totally, totally. Semi related, can we start the British phenomenon of the charity shop here in America? You know what I'm talking about? Well, it's like it's the general equivalent of like goodwill. But when you find like an Oxfam charity shop, a lot of times it'll just be a bookstore, just books. And you go in and it's not just James Patterson and Nora Roberts and those kind of books. It's like, oh, here's every Graham Green book in here. and they all cost two pounds.

And they have an awesome cover. We don't do that in quite the same way. Again, if you go into a goodwill, there probably will be books in there. There might be one or two gems in there. But I was, every city, I mean,

it's like, holy mackerel, dude, I had to send the biggest box home because I was just buying out. Of course I want, yes, I want this.

Yes, I want this book. Well, they have like restore. They have, and obviously, like, you know,

housing works does that in New York. You know, I mean, they're definitely like not-for-profit at home in store, home stores, bookstores, all kinds of stuff. But yeah, that's, I mean, there's certainly room for more of that. I think the big problem is in big cities is just, you know, the resellers get there first. Someone is going to get there before you and buy every single book and put them up on eBay for, you know, 75 cents more than what they just paid for them.

Dude, it was amazing. Like the old, you know, orange spine penguin edition. Two bucks. Yeah. Great. Lastly for you, I found a new tier of journalistic. fame. Okay. You know I'm obsessed with this. The greatest fame tier that's ever been reached is when Michael Lewis

profiled Barack Obama, who was then the president of the United States for Vanity Fair. And all the pictures, the magazine shot for the profile were of Obama with Michael Lewis. Oh yeah. One of the all-time, one of the all-time journalistic moments. The commander-in-chief of magazine writers, Michael Lewis. We were in Bath, in England and we went to the Roman baths. And the famous site there,

and they had an audio guide, of course, which you can put to your ear and push the button when you go to the various points of interest in the Roman bath. Of course, there was a channel, a regular channel for adults. There was a children's channel. So kids could also have their own audio guide as they went around the bass. That was really neat for our kids.

And then there was a channel on this audio guide at this very famous historical site devoted entirely to Bill Bryson, the noted travel writer. And it was Bill Bryson talking about the Roman bass. Wow. Bill Bryson has written a million bestsellers. Yeah. He's kind of famous as an American living in the UK,

which he's done, I believe, for most of his adult life. But he's not an archaeologist or historian. And he was just doing like Bill Bryson material about the thing. So you'd go in and there'd be this big carving of a Roman god. And he'd be like, he reminds me a little bit of Father Christmas. You know, it was like a line straight out of a book.

He even used the very Bill Bryson word, higgledy-piggledy. I'm not making that up in describing one of the features of the ruins there. Now, this is a new tier of fame and power. You're the audio guide. Yeah. This is, this is like you've been invited to to emce the Comic-Con panel of the subject on steroids to use your favorite term.

Right. Or more recently, you get to host the official podcast of the premier HBO drama. Yeah. Right. We've seen that with Carr Swisher and everything like that. But no, no, but you get to do the commentary of the Roman ruins. And it's just you. Your sensibility.

You're just going around pointing things out. Maybe we're really missing this lane. We should edit this out and talk to Bill about it. But just people who love, not us, people of these podcasters that have so many listeners that people just love to hear their thoughts on everything. They should just record audio tracks everywhere they go and have those available. Is Amazon going to hire Bill Bryson to do a Thursday Night Football audio feed next year? Can we get the Bryson cast going?

I would listen to the Bryson cast. Speaking of a feature that is never higgledy-piggledy, it's time for David Shoemaker guesses, the strain pun headline. Yeah. Our last headline about a new Beatles song made with an assist from artificial intelligence was AIM the Walrus.

Today's headline comes from me. It's from the Guardian, the July 4th edition I was reading there in the UK. It's a story about our animal friend, David, the octopus. Story by Monica Davis notes that when an octopus had its arms severed. This octopus had been put in a bucket, presumably ready for eating. The severed arms, quote, began to crawl out of the bucket they were in, according to

a marine biologist, and even reached over the rim of the bucket. So we're talking about an octopus losing and bidding goodbye to its arms. What was the Guardian's, strain pun headline? Is it not a farewell to arm? I don't think about the features of the octopus arm. Beyond that, what does it have? At least in our popular imagination. Yeah, yeah, yeah, uh-huh.

More popularly known as. Suction to say goodbye, suction to, that's good. It's a suction, suction cup. Remember, it's bidding goodbye. Wait. Not suction, but what's a, what's a more, what's a more, uh, sucker? There we go.

Suckers, uh, uh, uh, bye bye bye bye. See, see, see, see you, see you, see you sucker. See you, see you later, sucker. See you later, suckers. Yeah. That's great. We need to bring that phrase back into American life. He is David Chumacher. That's a great title. I mean, it's a great headline. It really is. Brian Curtis production magic by Erica Servantis. Coming up next Thursday, July 20th on this podcast, a reporter whose work David and I have cited many a time, Aestead Herndon of the New York Times' The Runup podcast.

Yeah. It's going to be here talking about that podcast in his career. I cannot wait to talk to him. But first, Shoemaker and I return Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. It's great to see again, David. See you Monday. See you later, Brian.