The Press Box - Trump vs. Scarborough, Listener Mail, and Rob Mahoney on Empty Stadiums

Episode Date: May 28, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss Trump’s latest allegations against Joe Scarborough and the supporters “urging him to stop" (1:35). Then listener mail, including the question “Will we ever again get a 'DAVID…' opener from Bryan before the intro music?” (19:05). Lastly, Curtis is joined by Rob Mahoney, sports writer at The Ringer, to explore what arenas and stadiums could sound like without a crowd (33:30). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week, and David Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, guys, it's this Kelly, and welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. Launching this week on our podcast network is a new show from Van Lathen and Rachel Lindsay called Higher Learning. Two times a week, they'll be dissecting the biggest topics in black culture, politics, and sports, and wait into the most important and timely conversations. The first episode is out now, so make sure to subscribe to Higher Learning with Van Lathen and Rachel Lindsay on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Ryan Curtis and David Shoemaker of The Ringer here. This is the press box.

On today's agenda, we'll answer your listener mail, including the question, when is the David? Intro coming back. We'll fill you in. Also, the ringer's very own Rob Mahoney stops by to talk about what NBA games are going to look like on TV when the Lee's come back. Will Jeff Van Gundy be ejected for bagging on the refs? Plus, David guesses a strain pun headline in the overworked Twitter joke of the week.

But David, we got to begin with. Donald Trump versus Joe Scarborough. Now, if you use the phrase, this is a new low even for Trump, you have to turn in your political pundit card. We're all out of new lows. So let me refrain before you like this. With 100,000 people now dead from coronavirus,

there aren't many things Trump could have said that would hijack the news cycle for two days, falsely insinuating that Joe Scarborough was involved in the death of a woman was one of them. How's that? Yeah. Frankly, it's not, I don't even think it's a new low. I think if you lined everything up,

I don't know that this would actually reach the bottom or the top of the scale. I do think that the tone deafness and just the implicit mindlessness. What's the right tone to insinuate? I think that doing it at the time that he did it, you're right. amplifies the terribleness of the whole thing. And it just shows,

I mean, I don't know how much of the Trump electorate is out there waiting to be convinced one way or the other, but if you weren't already convinced by

the way he's treated the coronavirus epidemic, if you, you know, kind of believes his mumbo jumbo on that front, I think this should be a pretty clear

indication that his mind's not on the right thing. Yeah. I did see Liz Cheney, one of the many Republicans who has come forward to denounce Trump's Scarborough stuff. And she said that she did mention this is during a pandemic.

Now, I understand that. That does, as you say, up the ante. But when is the right time to do something like that? It's never the right time. Yeah, if he were doing, if he had done this in January, that would have also been terrible. And as we'll see in a minute, he's been doing this for quite some time. Not to defend our president here. But there would definitely be some lefty assholes on Twitter.

If Twitter existed back in 2001, there would have definitely been some liberal assholes on Twitter who would be making jokes about Joe Scarborough being a murderer. You're right. And that's the funny thing about this is this story was kicking around for a long time on the internet, like especially in the early 2000s. We'll get to that just in a second. Let's back up if you have not been following this. Trump tweets this on May 12th. When will they open a cold case on the psycho Joe Scarborough matter in Florida? did he get away with murder?

Some people think so. Why did he leave Congress so quietly and quickly? Isn't it obvious? What's happening now? A total nut job. The tweet appeared to be referring to the 2001 death of Lori Closutis, 28-year-old aide who worked for Scarborough at the time, and implied, of course, that Scarborough was somehow involved in that.

But authorities determined 16 years ago that she died after losing consciousness from an abnormal heart rhythm. She had collapsed. She struck her head, unfortunately. She was discovered in Scarborough's office in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, lying on her back, according to a 2001 police report. Scarbro, meanwhile, was 800 miles away in Washington, D.C. Will Summer, new friend of the press box, who reports on conspiracy theories, waiting with this on Twitter, I checked out a conspiracy theory forum with 20,000 members

to see how they're handling the Trump Scarborough accusations. The top post accuses Tim Closutis, this is the husband of the woman, of all kinds of crimes, this really appears to be headed to Sandy Hook's Seth Rich territory thanks to the president. Wow. That's really interesting.

I was nosing around, I think, and saw some of this. I do think that there's a distinction between Sandy Hook and Seth Rich, and I really am reluctant to make this argument now, but bear with me. I mean, Seth Rich was a convenient, conspiratorial political tool, right? What Sandy Hook and this Joe Scarborough incident have in common

is that the target of the conspiracy theorist attacks become the people who are trying to get to, like, to push the conspiracy aside, right? That the husband of the woman who's unfortunately died has come forward and said, please Twitter delete this tweet. This does not need to be out there in the world. It's untrue.

And that's when the conspiracy theorists turn on them, right? Well, you must be worse than all of them. You must be tied up in this. You must be a criminal. It's really, really unfortunate. And it shows, you know, I mean, I guess it doesn't even need to be said, but it just shows how just silly some of the,

or how blatant the politics and these conspiracy forums are now. Trump has kept up these lies. he had a tweet on Memorial Day weekend. Remember when we had the guy standing up in the Rose Garden the other day saying, Mr. President, in one of your Mother's Day tweets, now we're on to Memorial Day weekend tweets,

several Republicans, as we mentioned, have come forward, Liz Cheney, Representative Peter King, Met Romney, Cheney had a quote here. I do think the president should stop tweeting about Joe Scarborough. We're in the middle of a pandemic. He's the commander in chief of this nation, et cetera. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. I believe he was asked about a Wall Street Journal editorial that also told Trump to knock it off.

Here was his response. I haven't read that editorial. I was not here with Joe Scarborough. I don't quite know about the subject itself. I don't know the subject well. Now, two things about that. How much do you have to know about the subject to think the president should knock it off? And number two, do you think Kevin McCarthy is a lot of?

going to retreat to his office and study this issue and then come back with a more absolutely absolutely not absolutely not if you want to know how the White House is handling this or spinning this here's press secretary Kaylee mackinany from a Tuesday press conference United States and he's accusing somebody of possibly murder this is different he's he's not a private citizen he's the president and Joe Scarborough if we want to start talking about false accusations. We have quite a few we can go through about Mika asserting. I'm asking about the president's allegation. And I'm replying to you and saying this morning, as recently, I believe it was this morning or yesterday, Mika accused the president of being responsible for 100,000 deaths in this country.

That's incredibly irresponsible. They've dragged his family through the mud. They've made false accusations that I won't go through that I would not say from this podium against the President of the United States. And they should be held to account for their falsehoods. I mean, I would like to say that was a masterclass in straw manning and deflection, but I don't think she did either of those things very well. She just did them insistently and loudly. Also, we've outlawed the term masterclass. So, yes.

Your point is taken, but the whole statement, yes, is off limits. Sorry. She deflected so hard, she ran into a straw man and didn't and never quite recovered from it. I don't know how much time. I don't know how much Kaylee McInney really matters to us because clearly, I guess to me, it's shocking that in an understaffed under everything White House, they somehow have time to do like massive amounts of oppo research on the person that the president is accusing of murder. I mean, really, this is what the conspiracy forms are doing to the husband, right?

I mean, as soon as someone, instead of accepting that you might have done something wrong, you just double down and work even harder to prove not the thing that you accused someone of, but that there's anything to point at them and accuse them of else in the world that might stick better. Yeah. And that might indicate that what you're insinuating they did is bullshit. So here are 10 other things about Joe Scarborough that might distract you from that question. I almost don't want to give the ridiculousness of this any more time. But I do think there's one question that's really interesting here.

which is why is Trump doing this? Yeah, I was wondering this too. He is not running against Joe Scarborough for president, just in case anybody got confused. Joe Scarborough will not be appearing on the ballot. He's not in the finalist to be Joe Biden's running me. So that's not happening. He is, you know, if you could imagine, like Trump's maximum fantasy being executed here,

like the police reopen a quote unquote cold case against Joe Biden. Like, so what, right? Like, what are you talking about? But I thought Jonathan Chate had the best theory, which is when Trump goes after people like this, they tend to turn into Trump supporters. So take for instance, Ted Cruz. Remember what Trump said about Ted Cruz's dad?

Oh, yeah. And the JFK assassination? Who's a super-flex? fan of Donald Trump right now or at least a super anti-anti-Trumper right now. Ted Cruz. Remember some of the stuff Trump said about Ben Carson? Same thing, right? Ben Carson's in the cabinet right now.

So I think part of this is that Trump's experience is telling him, if I do this, I will bring this person into my orbit. I completely believe that that's a possibility. I would just like to enter one contrarian opinion into evidence. Please. Back in 2017, as you know, Trump tweeted about this situation before, and the line from it says,

he says, will the fake news practitioners NBC be terminating the contract of Phil Griffin, and will they terminate the low ratings Joe Scarborough based on the quote, Unsolved Mystery, unquote, that took place in Florida years ago? I want to draw specific attention to those quotes, because, as we all know, Unsolved Mysteries is the name of a television program. And then if you go back to the tweet that sent all this into motion, he uses the term cold case

and he capitalizes it. There's no reason to capitalize cold case unless you have just been watching cold case on a quarantine binge watch, all right? And I don't want to get too deep in the weeds here, but later he does say he doesn't encourage the Florida investigators to keep digging and use forensic geniuses.

Forensic geniuses, I mean, my mind immediately, goes to CSI. Maybe that's a reach there. Forensic files, right? That's a show. Listen, Trump is Trump is not just like us, but he is trapped right now,

except when he goes to Florida for launches. But he's stuck in the White House too. So maybe he's just watching a lot, just way too much TV. Yeah, well, that's normal though, right? Trump did not need the pandemic to start watching way too much TV. Well, maybe he's tired of watching the

news channels because it's too much about the pandemic. And so he's going to CBS on demand. Yeah. So you think Trump was watching Godfriended me and then it got canceled and he got mad. Yeah, exactly. Went back to the archives and found cold case. Robert Stacks unsolved mysteries like from our childhood. I think you're right. I mean, if you're just like a really just incredibly undiscriminating consumer of television writ large, right? Yes. Not talking about a streaming service. I'm not talking about quality to just anything that's on, you will find tons of just unsolved mystery shows, right? Oh, yeah.

You find that kind of like, you know, MSNBC things and 48 hours investigates and all these things that are just kind of still just playing into the ether of different places. There is a definite chance Trump is a consumer of that. Absolutely. Semi-related story, David, Twitter started fact-checking Donald Trump this week. Oh, yeah. They were not fact-checking him about this. they were fact-checking his also over-the-top and false claims about mail-in ballots and voter fraud.

So all of a sudden you get this little blue exclamation point at the bottom of a Trump tweet. According to Nick Korsani of the New York Times, that then takes you to a moments page where there's a Politico article, a link to a political article, and a Twitter written summary of the fact check. So this is a question that's been bubbling around. Wait, Trump is the president. Trump puts false thing on Twitter Should Twitter remove the tweet or add a fact check? What do you think about that? Well, first of all, I'm not quite,

I'm not entirely sure that this is unrelated. I think that this was, you know, on the verge of happening regardless. And I wouldn't be surprised if behind the scenes, the Scarborough tweet sort of pushed their hand a little bit. but I do think it's an interesting way to sort of I'm not sure how compelling I mean Tim I can say as an old man that like Twitter's in-house fact check at least just visually was not didn't I don't know that would have changed my mind but I'm not I'm guessing for a lot of younger people who are social media you know for whom social media is a primary form of communication it might have been much more compelling and certainly it's a much more compelling way than outsourcing to or doing, you know, whatever Facebook has tried in the past, right?

You know, my initial reaction is, is that I hope it works, you know? I mean, I hope that, I mean, and I think that more importantly, and we've seen the way Trump's reacted to this, we can talk about that, but I think more important almost than spreading the truth, because that makes Twitter a kind of a publisher and editor, right? And that becomes problematic in its own way. But I think the more important thing is that it would discourage sort of deliberate falsehoods from purveyor such as the president. Yeah. I mean, maybe.

I mean, maybe Trump is a bad example of this because what would discourage Donald Trump at this point? But yeah, I mean, Sam Biddle tweeted this. What is the Venn diagram of people who think Trump's tweets reflect reality in some way and people who are willing to give serious consideration to an insanely mealy-mouthed disclaimer plus analysis of the Twitter fact check team? Yeah, that's kind of what I was feeling. So, you know, right in a way, it's like, I don't know if this is like Twitter doing this for Twitter, right?

So I can say we did something, right? We put a fact check on this. Never mind that this is settled law with people and this is probably going to actually change no one's minds. But we have, you know, when the scorecard of Twitter.com is added up, we will have fact check Donald Trump, right? We did not totally fact check Donald Trump. Yeah, I think that probably, I'm sure that's the motivating factor, or at least one of the big ones. But I wouldn't discount, I mean, I'm not sure that Venn diagram is really very big, but I do think that as blindered as so much, so many of us are. I mean, so much of the American public and even voting public are to, I mean, we just, you know, there's so many reports about how we experience all news through a sort of tunnel vision.

that's just like really where we are very specific to our political affiliations and don't see much outside information and whatever else. I do think that there is a weird power to just the little exclamation point icon being below something so that when you read something and you're taking in new information from someone you admire like President Trump in the same inhalation, it is being questioned. At least, you know, even if you don't click through that there's some question being given to it. because there's a lot of people in that imaginary Venn diagram that you're right that would believe everything he says completely, you know, and maybe this will give them a moment's pause, probably nothing. Speaking of Twitter, David, it's time for the overworked Twitter joke of the week. Yeah.

Segway. Where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod. David, a tweet from WLP in South Florida. Until it can host games and shows again, the Miami Dolphins will be turning a hard rock stadium into a drive-in movie theater. Drive-in movie theater.

It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, that will be the Dolphins' best drive all year. Thanks to Joe Knight. Here's a report from the New York Times as Peter Baker. The White House says Trump will sign an executive order, quote, pertaining to social media tomorrow, but provides no details on what it might say or do. This is part of Trump's war on the social media platforms, as we've seen.

It was an overworked Twitter joke to write. It is now illegal to ruin a ban by changing a letter. Thanks to ASG. And in other online news, David, did you see Mark Zuckerberg come out and contra Twitter say that social media should not be a fact checker? Yes. Cameron Winklevoss, you'll remember, from the social network also had an opinion.

Oh, no. He tweeted, fact-checking is a euphemism for editorializing, which is a form of censorship. And that's a fact. Cameron Winklevoss weighing in with essentially the same opinion as Mark Zuckerberg. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write. I assume he's putting this on the record for when he says he had the idea before Mark Zuckerberg, thanks to Scott Tobias.

If you found a reason to drag the Winklevai in a new decade, And during a pandemic, congrats, you made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. In the notebook dump, David, let us do some listener mail. If you're new here,

we do this every Thursday. We got a note from Matt Cox, who's been watching the Bundesliga on Fox and FS1, kind of turned into America's weekend morning programming, and I guess a weekday morning programming too. Listen to one of these announcers, David, who is clearly a fan of the press box.

Is Delaney, I think. because John is playing on delay his position next to Maudahoot. I think that is exactly right. Anyway, thanks to the world soccer commentators. We appreciate the listen. This one, David, is from Wesley Bulch. Many people watch Brady and Manning in the match two. What other activity would you like to watch people participate in outside their normal job?

A cable news anchor bowling league? A journalist ping pong tournament? A podcast host game of cornhole. Well, I would definitely sign up for the cornhole tournament. Sure. Podcast cornhole could be a real, real moneymaker, or at least a real great way for us to justify, like, drinking outside. Man, that's a really good question.

What would I like, I mean, athletes playing other sports is always funny. I mean, it doesn't need to stop at golf if it's just like, you know, football players bowling or. soccer players playing basketball. There's a lot of them. I mean, there's a lot of options there. Would you watch that, be honest,

soccer players playing basketball? I didn't watch the golf thing either. I mean, I don't know. Can I use this just to make a point about the golf thing for a second? Yeah. Because it had, what, it was like six million viewers or something like that.

And I saw some tweets and said, you know, when you present golf properly, you really can get an audience. You know how you get an audience for golf? Have the two most famous NFL players that the last 25 years play golf. alongside Tiger Woods. Now, is that going to happen at Colonial in a few weeks?

And it was awesome. I love the match. I did watch it. I watched almost every minute of it. Kevin Clark wrote a great piece about it for The Ringer. You should read. It was awesome. It is really, really hard to replicate something like that,

unless Tom Brady and Peyton Manning will be doing something else in humorous fashion. I would like to feel, I got to figure it out. I got to figure it. What is the simplest game, the simplest task that just drives people into absolute states of madness. Like anger. Yes.

And then pick the people who you would like like most to be angry. Like different kind of like if you had ex-presidents competing in a round of boggle, like that could be just fantastic. Yeah. I was going to say writing a ringer piece on deadline. I'm not,

I don't think anybody would watch that. This is from Declan McLaughlin. E-sports and gaming have been on the rise since a pandemic. Do you think this trend will continue in a post-pandemic world, or will it exit the mainstream as quickly as it entered? Asking as an esports journalist to a couple of traditional guys. I respectfully declined to answer. I mean, I don't know that any prediction I really could have had about esports

any point in the past would have been, well, it might have been right, but it wouldn't have been right based on any sort of legitimacy myself. What do you think? I think it's gotten a little bit of a pandemic bump like everything else. Did you see that like irasing that the NASCAR drivers did before? actual NASCAR came back and that did like, I think a million viewers on Fox, something like that. You know, I think we are. But you know what?

If you were trying to build a sport like that, you absolutely take advantage in moments like this, right? This is when you show yourself to a lot of people. The thing about e-sports I've never understood as a purely as a television property, you know, if you're talking about YouTube and all that stuff, I'm all in. But it's something that's going to get a look on TV is the kind of people who subscribe to cable are not the kind of people generally speaking that like e-sports, right? It's just a totally different audience than

that platform, right? People that have, the people that are still paying for cable are people that like forensic files. David's time, it's Donald Trump, right? It's not people that traditionally like that. So I think there's a little bit of a strange thing there in terms of growing in that way. Yeah, I mean, and also I don't want to overgeneralize from

my perspective of parenthood, but I think that there's, you know, obviously the Eastports audience is much younger than these other sport audiences we're talking about, uh, on average. And I don't think we can really, uh, I don't think we should overlook the number of potential young esports fans who are, uh,

whose parents are just begging them to go find, to find a way to occupy themselves, uh, during the pandemic. I love this question from MV hunting knife. What would have been worse for either of you, graduating high school or college during COVID-19? Ooh. This is easy to me.

What would have been worse, graduating high school or college? High school. Go on? We would have actually missed the stuff at the end of high school. Like the last four months at Pascal, and you and I are going to desperately try to avoid any incriminating details here, but the last four months at Pascal were pretty great. And I would have hated missing those sort of rights of graduation.

I really would have. I don't really remember the last four months of college. That is not a I was drunk joke, though I was also drunk. But I don't remember really anything I did during that period. Other than up, college is over. I'm taking some kind of easy classes, time to go get a job. But I intensely remember my senior year of high school. I have intense memories, but very few of them.

I'm sympathetic to the argument that you miss those great beats, is a great moments. And I have a nephew who's in that exact position and is really down about it. You know, he has been, I can't, I don't, but on the flip side, I can't help but imagine that, like, with a couple years' distance, it's not going to be, I mean, I feel like in a couple years, it's going to be cool to say, like, I was one of those kids. You know, Obama spoke at my graduation. It was on the internet, but, like, I was of that, I was of that year, which is a lot cooler than the alternative. Also, separate and apart from the actual matriculation, If coronavirus was going on when you were graduating high school, I mean, sure, the last thing

you want to do when you're 18 is spend more time with your parents, but at least you would have had home, right? I mean, you would have had a comfortable place to be quarantining for months and months and place that you're used to. You can go watch e-sports in your bedroom. Whereas when you graduate college, I mean, I was, you know, my rent in Waco, Texas was laughably low, but I wasn't exactly saving, putting it in the bank, putting money in the bank. So, like, I don't know how far my bartending money would have taken me into an epidemic for paying rent. And I probably would have ended up back at home anyway and way more unhappy. Anyway, it's never fun. It would never be fun. It's not fun for anybody. And, uh, yeah, it sucks. I was trying to see if I

could tell a story about our last couple of months of high school. I remembered one. It was a pool party involved you, but you know what? People are still alive. We can't, we can't, we can't that yet. This is from Andrew Kowski. If each of you could choose to be a regular contributor to one TV news show, cable or Sunday, which would it be?

Ooh, this is too much pressure. If I could be... You know what my secret one always was? What? CBS Sunday morning. Go. Because I never dreamed of being a cable pundit.

like all those you know that's like that's a reward you get when you become a big political writer is it the cable channel can just summon you to the studio at all times that sounds horrible to me i mean i understand that's the price of getting famous and that's how you make money and all that stuff but that sounds like a freaking nightmare that i just have to go put on a suit or go standing from my webcam and talk to you know i don't know i just fill in any host even the good ones at night. That sounds terrible. CBS Sunday morning. Yeah. I can go somewhere in America, report out a thoughtful, kind of, you know, nice, low-key kind of story, a kind of rippling brook or sunrise will kind of be the bumper

into my story. I'm in. Yeah. Oh my gosh. That's, I mean, you're right. I mean, there's a lot of options here. If I could just, if there was, you know, if there was a bubble I could fill in on the Scantron that was just like, I want Chris Connolly's job, then yes, like I would choose that one, you know. Wait, which one? Just, you know, showing up a couple times a year

with that same music and bubbling Brooke, whatever, behind me, just talking about some, just, you know. Wait, is he on that? No, no, no, I'm not saying that specifically. I'm just saying he has a little bit more freedom. Yes, he has that kind of job. That kind of job. and sort of, you know, literary breadth, potential literary breadth for the way that you present yourself.

Sure, sure. I mean, that would be really great. I think that, man, I mean, I agree. I wouldn't want to be like on call to do hard news. It's not even hard news, right? Like, you know, if you could beam me back to like CBS Evening News 1985, Brian, a volcano erupted, get on a plane and go stand in front of it and say, it was a dark day here at Mount St. Helens.

I'm up for that, but like have a take on the political news of the night. You know, oh my God. That just seemed horrible. I mean, would it be easier? Rather than do it sincerely, would it be easier to choose like Fox News's red eye and just go to a parody of like information of opinion, new journalism? That might be dead last on the list, right? Or maybe Jesse Waters contributors.

I was about to say, I'm moving Waters world up because I don't even know what I have to do. I think I should have to do some funny man on the street stuff. This one's from Chris David. This is almost worth a whole topic someday. So let's do it. What would an ex-president Donald Trump tweeting all day if he loses the next election look like? And would it be more corrosive to American politics than him being president? I'm fascinated by post-presidency Trump, whether that's in a year or four years from now. Because all these things like this Joe Scarborough thing that we talked about earlier, how big of a story is that if Trump is not the president of the United States, right? Is that just some weird? I mean, it would be a

story, right? But Trump being president is the reason a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with American politics, nothing to do with his policy, his conduct of the office gets to the top of the news heap. What do you think? I'm really fascinated by it too from a slightly different direction. I wonder if say you're the producers of Morning Joe or you know pick any kind of talk show. I wonder if Trump, once Trump is gone,

if you actually do take the advice that everyone's been giving each other and ignoring for the past four years, which is just like if you ignore the crazy stuff, maybe it'll go away. You know, and I wonder to what degree people will just choose to ignore Trump post-presidency because, well, I mean, because frankly

we've been telling ourselves that for so long, but also because you just end up giving oxygen to these things. you know, I mean, the flip side of that is just because he's not president anymore doesn't mean that shit won't drive ratings even for shows like Morning Joe and everything else. Oh, sure. That, I mean, it will still be a tough call and I would be surprised if it happened. I just think, I think him raging about like Republican politicians, him sort of talking about who am I going to support in a particular Senate race or something.

I still think that's when he'll be really able to command everybody's attention because he will have a decent amount of control over lots and lots of people in the world. But by which I mean voters. Yeah, but I wonder how much he's actually going to be interested in that, right? I mean, right now he's, well, even before the quarantine, he was, you know, largely quarantined in terms of the information that was circling around him and the things that were affecting his life. By that, I mean, he was quarantined in the presidency.

I wonder if once he's out and gets a little bit of time to decompress if he's not just going to be go back to where he was before when like once a month he would tweet about Obama being born in Kenya but like the rest of the time he was just congratulating people on TV and like you know talking shit about someone who who we found out later like you know let their mara loggo membership laps great stuff heraldo yeah i think we might get that trump back uh sports writer adams zalanka sorry over the washington times asked this will we ever get a david opener for Brian before the intro music. I noticed those went away when the pandemic hit in the U.S., but holding out hope they can return soon.

Are you going to answer? Well, I was going to say, I thought we should bring him back. I think it's time. We almost brought him back fairly soon after, like, you know, about a month into the pandemic. Yeah. And then I think didn't in that moment for no particular reason, and then it just sort of, I don't know, I think the gravity of the situation just kind of rises and falls at different times. but yeah, maybe it's time to bring them back.

Maybe it's time to bring him back. I think it's a nature is healing moment for this podcast. I mean, listen, Brian, you can ask me my opinion. All that has to happen is for you to ask a question. I really have no, I have no dog in the race. And I have no, I don't, I mean, I don't have any power here. If you, if you ask me a question to start the show, I am contractually obligated to answer it.

Coming soon, David's name said in a weird and sort of unsettling way at the top of this podcast. All right, David, over the last few weeks, we've been able to Al Bundy ourselves on the couch and watch a little NASCAR. We've watched some famous men play golf. Now we're starting to see major sports events inch their way toward our TV screens.

But here's the question. What will empty arena or empty stadium sports look like on TV? I talked about that with the ringer's very own Rob Mahoney. All right, Rob, so everybody, and by everybody, I mean lowly journalists like us and the actual people who make television are trying to figure out what sports TV

is going to look like when the major sports come back. You have a really interesting piece up at the ringer.com today about how the warriors are planning to play the nets in an empty arena on March 12th. The game never happened, but the warriors and their TV crew prepared like it was going to happen. What kinds of mad scientist ideas did they have for an empty arena broadcast?

Well, I think they were somewhat limited by the time, right? I mean, it's announced on the morning of the 11th that this game is going to happen. They have, you know, I guess 36 hours or so to get all their ducks in a row. And so from there it's kind of a mad dash. So it's not quite as mad sciencey as I think we're ultimately going to see just because when you put people in a neutral site arena in a bubble type situation, not only adding to the, you know, taking all the fans out of it, but all of the ambiance of a state. standard NBA arena, really, and a standard NBA broadcast, you just have to do a lot more from a

broadcast perspective. So I think this was, this piece kind of looks at a starting point, right? It's in this very specific situation, given the only real context we have of an NBA team and its surrounding apparatus, preparing for one of these games, what can you do with that? Where can you take it? And I think ultimately we'll see it stretched even further. You were in favor as I am of getting fairly crazy and fairly creative during this period? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think really there's it, you know, we talked about this in the piece, but it comes down to kind of a philosophical question of, do you want to make the broadcast and the game experience as similar to normal as possible or do you want to accentuate all of the weirdness of this stuff? And to me, that's really the only option from a broadcast perspective. Because if you try to play it straight, if you try to play it as if everything is normal, I think people will see through that critically, emotionally, like something will just feel off from a viewer perspective. And so the more you can kind of throw at the wall to show, to just show the distance, to show the scope, to show, frankly, the empty arena of it all. I think you need to call that out or else it's going to seem a little disingenuous.

So here's the push pull, I think, though. The networks like ESPN and ABC, presumably where some of these games are going to land, just need the NBA to come back so much, right? This is an economic imperative, not quite an existential problem, but we're getting there, right? At some point, need sports to come back. So I think on the one hand, the people sort of making these decisions are going to think, okay, let's be creative. Let's do cool stuff that we could normally do.

On the other hand, they're going to be like, we need to have a very recognizable NBA basketball product that people are going to like that's not going to turn anybody off because we need every set of eyeballs we can possibly get. What do you think about that? I think there's some truth to it for sure. And some of it is, you know, I think the power of sports in a lot of ways is its recognizability, is the idea that. that you know the players, you know how, you know, all the rules.

It just feels like a very familiar format. And so the more you deviate from that, there is going to be a little bit of a reaction, a little bit of a shock. I think we see it any time that the broadcast is tampered with in any way under normal circumstances, you know, any kind of visual aid that's added. There's just a huge backlash to, you know, I think sports fans as a whole are obviously very dogmatic about a lot of things, their broadcast being one of them. But I think, you know, as the NBA is showing on the competitive side, you know,

toying with its playoff formats and things like that, if there ever were a time where there would be more of an allowance for this kind of thing, I think it's now. And so if there is going to be room for experimentation, I think this is certainly the window to do it. And that is one of the unspoken things about this, because the commissioner of a league is ultimately kind of the secret coordinating producer of all the league's content. So if something gets on the air that Adam Silver doesn't like, Adam Silver is going to call ESPN and be like, please don't ever do that again.

and in all likelihood ESPN is going to be like, sounds great. So, you know, if you consider that, I'm much more confident that Silver is going to be a lot more permissive and a lot more open-minded than say Roger Goodell is going to be when and if the NFL starts in September. So, you know, he'll be the one maybe saying, okay, let's do cool camera stuff. Let's mic the players maybe a little bit more than we normally would.

Let's allow you to kind of create a sort of different TV broadcast than we would if we had normal programming. I think that's what makes it in terms of a TV product different from any regular sport season or playoff or postseason we've ever seen because it's going to be this living thing. There's going to be a lot more feedback from within networks, as you were describing, from teams, from the league itself,

reshaping this thing as they go. And it's really rare, especially in leagues like the NBA and the NFL, that we get that kind of Wild West feeling of no one really knows what they're doing. I think, you know, maybe some front offices aside, you could argue when it comes to draft time or something like that. But in terms of the way that Brodga is produced and put out into the world, this is a really interesting throwback to a time that a lot of basketball fans and NBA fans never experienced firsthand where the NBA kind of had to figure it shit out. A couple of notes from your piece. You talked to Mike Breen, voice of the NBA on ESPN.

And Breen had said back in April on real sports that he didn't think he was going to be calling games from an arena when an end. if the NBA came back. Yes, he said he was going to do it in a studio. My bet is that Mike Breen will be there when this comes back just because the NBA is going to have, okay, we, we have like, you know, a couple dozen people that we want inside this bubble. And Mike Breen and Jeff Anguddy and Mark Jackson will be among those people if they want to come. Just because, again, as crazy as you want to be, I think you do want it to sound. as you do want to have a lot of the broadcasts, it sounds fairly normal. So having Mike Breen Courtside is part of that.

Did you get a sense of where his thinking is in terms of whether he'll be there or not? Well, now I just kind of want to come up with the guest list of the dozen people we want in the bubble, along with the NBA teams. Oh, we've been calling this bubbleworthy. This is the new measure of power in NBA media. I could be talking to somebody right now who's bubbleworthy. I don't know, you know, because I got a list, right? It's, it's woe, it's windhorst, you know. I think Chris Haynes is probably on the list.

It's kind of like if there's a nuclear disaster, you know, and you have 12 people, like, who are we going to put in the underground bunker? That's the bubble list for the NBA. No, it's true. And I ask Brene about that, too, if he would want to go. Because I think, you know, especially if you're a broadcaster, if you're someone who's not participating in the games, your presence in a lot of ways is somewhat optional. You know, you're not essential personnel, as it were, to run an NBA playoff.

But I think as far as media goes, you hit it, that Breene is a, you know, kind of first ballot first tier among that group because he gives the game it's kind of familiar texture. And so if you're going to have all these weird factors and experiments, all these different, you know, avenues you're trying to explore and you also want to have the energy in the building and the energy in the broadcast to come across, I think guys like Breene are really essential to that. Because to me, when you hear his voice, you think of an NBA playoff experience. And there's so many going to be so many visual and audio indicators that this is not normal.

and this is not the NBA playoffs, that having that, I think, could go a long way. Yeah, he's not quite the vice president in this scenario, but he's like the secretary of the interior. You know, we do need you. We do need you in here. Another very funny note from your piece. And this is something that always entertains me is that local broadcast crews, especially radio people, local television have because of new stadiums and also owners who want to sell

better seats, been getting kicked up higher and higher in the arena. so their broadcast positions get worse and worse. This is the case in Chase Center. They had better seats at Oracle Arena. Now they get kicked up high in Chase Center. If these guys make it inside the bubble, they might actually be court side again and we could have them restored to their good seats

where they can actually see the action a lot better. Justice being served finally. Our corporate overlords of Chase being kicked out, kicked to the curb. And it's interesting in the Warriors case too because, you know, Kalena Azabuki, who's the color comment, for the Warriors. This is his first season doing color. So he's only really known on a full-time

basis that Chase Center environment. So in talking to him and talking to all the broadcasters, there was that constant question of, is my energy level, is my volume, is my intonation going to be altered in an empty arena? And is that going to be awkward at all in terms of that dynamic with the players? And that's kind of the interesting piece of this too, is because I think in a lot of senses we're talking about two parallel experiences. There's the experience of the players, which is going to be weird. And there's the experience. of the broadcasters and the visual element, you know, broadcast to us, you know, as a viewing audience at home. And that's going to be weird in a different way. And then there's these areas where

there's kind of a gray blending of the two. And I think one of them is if the broadcasters are audible to the players and vice versa and that kind of interplay, you know, to an even greater degree than we're used to in a normal broadcast. There's a, um, a whole argument happening about crowd noise, which I wrote a little bit about today. I think it's probably a hundred percent chance we're going to get some kind of level of ambient noise in a broadcast, as we've already seen with Bundesliga. But we are also going to be able to probably hear the players a lot more, as you point out in your piece today.

I go back and forth on this. On the one hand, there's going to be a dump button that is going to be in heavy rotation because it's like, man, I'd love to hear what Draymond Green is saying on the court. Yeah, you would, but you know who doesn't want you to hear that? the FCC because how are those guys going to be able to even if they're told okay we can hear everything you're saying it's going to be really really hard for them to sense themselves that's number one and number two you talk about hearing them like call out defenses and stuff like that i'm interested in that though i do suspect that maybe the ringer nerd basketball

hive is more interested in that than your average fan tuning into a laker game how much you do think that will be palatable to a mass audience? It's a great question and one that I admittedly have a hard time separating myself from the bubble of being very deep into that kind of nerdery. So I think it could be an opt-in type situation where if you're watching a broadcast and you can, you know, if you can hear that stuff if you're looking for it, that could be a good situation where you, you know, you still obviously have the commentary from the broadcast. You still have, you know, the sounds of the players moving and the dribbling. There's still a lot to listen to other than players calling out coverages or whatnot.

So I think it'll be there in some respect, almost whether you want it to or not. You know, the NBA, you know, kind of what separates NBA basketball from all other basketball is the way that the court is miced up, right? There's just a different audio experience to an NBA basketball game versus if you see a high school basketball game or a summer league game. There's just a distinctive quality to hearing the rim, hearing the shoes, all that element. So there's already some of that. Again, I don't know how you, you know, take away tens of thousands of fans still have

that kind of authentic piece of the experience while not taking proprietary things from the teams that they want to protect while not pissing off every corporate sponsor the NBA has by making their players look like assholes. It's a really really fine line and I'm glad I don't have to make that decision. It's a little bit

like the Goodell Silver thing, right? Because I just feel NFL teams, football teams generally are so paranoid. There's probably like zero, there are zero scenarios unless it's something kind of goofy like the XFL where they want you to hear what the quarter is saying to the coach. I don't know that the NBA cares all that much because I feel we see

huddle cams all the time with Steve Kerr drawing up a defense or drawn up a play and that that just goes out over the air all the time. So I don't know that they would be as protective about the secrets of it, right? You know, to me, it's almost, is this going to be discernible to the fan? Or do we have enough time, like, for Van Gundy and Jackson to say, okay, let's take 30 seconds and tell you what they're talking about and explain it to you average person to really make it pop on a broadcast. And they certainly could. You know, Jeff Van Gundy and Mark Jackson have taken on, they've just become stickier and

stickier, I think, over the years. It's just kind of worn into them. Them? I know. No, no. But both of them and especially Jeff Van Gundy can really brilliantly break down those kinds of nuances of why things are working or aren't, these different elements. I mean, he's a brilliant NBA coach.

So having that degree of, you know, not only being able to see the play calls, see the development, no, oh, they've run this this many times in the game previously. It's been working. It hasn't been working for these reasons. I think you do need an element of translation, just like with advanced stats, just like with any kind of, again, deeper kind of secondary level of knowledge of the game or details. You want that kind of translation work done, but they could certainly do it. And I do agree that the NBA in particular is not quite as protective of its state secrets, so to speak, just because you have things like, like advanced scouting, which are just like endorsed spying already. You know, teams are already in, you know, teams are already in each other's arenas, documenting play calls. They know what other teams run. They know exactly what's coming. You know, players and the other teams are aware of this stuff too. So there's only so much to guard.

But again, the huddle, to some respects may be kind of a sacred place in that, you know, especially when you're talking about, you know, we need one shot to win this playoff game in what is already a really strange situation. Yeah. we may not get like here's the here's the here's the here's the winning shot i'm drawing up on my on my whiteboard right now breen also brings up a really funny thing in your piece which is let's say mark jackson and van gundy and van gundy has done this maybe once or twice in his whole career are bagging on the refs or bagging on one of the coaches and because it's an empty arena those people can

hear them bagging being bagged upon am i saying that right being bagged upon what happens then Do you think? I mean, each dynamic is going to be really interesting in itself. I think the refs in particular are an area of just totally new ground here. Because we're used to hearing some stuff from the players, some stuff from coaches that'll get caught on the mic. We really don't hear a lot from the refs, and especially as their interpersonal relationships with players go, and now you're going to hear a lot unless you're just really holding

down that delay button, really wearing it out for, you know, non-dream on green reasons. So that part of it's going to be really interesting. I do think there's going to be some awkwardness there. you know, especially when, when you think about what is the role of a broadcast commentator, especially the like former coach, former player type of commentator in the booth, a lot of it is second guessing what's happening on the floor. It's why is this player in? You know, why did you let this lineup go longer than it should have and not get them rest?

Why did you call that play? It's all inherently stuff that is challenging what happens on the court. And when those players are active participants in that conversation, I'm hoping, I'm hoping we get a little bit of fireworks at least. Could it be amazing if Jeff Van Gundy gets run during? an NBA game that he is calling rather than coaching. Wouldn't you love to see that? What a turn of offense that would be.

One more question for you, and this is more like media broadly defined. You talk about this in your piece, which is when you go to an NBA game or just watch one on television, there are tons of music elements happening inside the stadium. These are largely to entertain fans and keep everybody's attention kind of in one place during a game. But as you point out, players really rely on this stuff. And if you were to take away musical elements, that would be weird to them. Tell me what kind of role that plays in their psychology and maybe what you would guess the NBA is thinking in terms of the production in stadium of the game. I think it plays a big role. And some of it is with all this stuff

in conceptualizing what this game could look like, one thing I kept coming back to was you kind of want to avoid this uncanny valley situation where you get too close to the NBA product as normal that it becomes so obvious that the fans aren't there to the players. You know, if you have everything else, if you have all the defense chance, all the prompts, you know, it gets a little weird that there's no one in the audience, no one participating in this, that one piece of it has gone in a really eerie way. But I think music is something that will be there. And that will help, for one, cover some of the issues we've been talking about in terms of the awkward, you know, can so and so hear so and so what's being picked up on the broadcast from an FCC perspective.

It'll clear up some of that stuff because it'll just be muddled by the noise. But the players want it. I think overwhelmingly, every player I've spoken to, every player I've read comments from about the no-fan experience. Music comes up a lot for just that reason. It gives them a level of comfort. It gives them a level of rhythm. And the cases we've seen in which teams have tried to cut it, players have pushed back really strongly that it's something that they rely on.

I would be shocked if we don't have some kind of music element in the arena once games start to come back for the NBA at least. It's so funny because one of the truly out there ideas for football and baseball telecast is to put a musical score under a game. I wrote about this a little bit today. It has been tried in the NFL amazingly. And essentially what you do is you have a play and the play is normal. But when you go to the slow motion replay, you put music under it that matches what has. happens. So if it's an 85-yard broken field run, we're hearing a big, lusty theme of a, you know, of an action movie maybe. And if the quarterback is getting destroyed by the edge

rusher, maybe you hear a sadder piece of music. But the funny thing about this is NBA games are kind of already scored. They're just scored inside the arena instead of in the broadcast. And I could also imagine if, if this is the no-fan reality we're facing, the, the, the, audio engineer can just turn up that sound within the arena a little bit, not so it drowns out the announcer, but can can kind of give us that score a little bit more since we're not going to hear the fans. You know, I'm open to this idea, but I want them to be scoring it live. I want John Williams, like, scribbling things down as the play develops. He has a whiteboard. We're going to do this. We're going to go here in the orchestra pit.

We're going to go right here. How incredible would that be. But I think you're right in the way that NBA games are scored. You know, if you talk to people in Game Ops, in arenas, there's a lot of thought put into the rhythms of a game when you play certain cues, how you're maneuvering over the course of a quarter. There really is an arc to this stuff. And, you know, especially in arenas where it's more of an organ being played versus just kind of like piping in sound cues from, you know, top 40 hits or whatever. It's already baked into the sport. And that's one thing that I think, again, would be really awkward if you took away, but also would lend itself to a little bit of that experimentation we've been talking about if you do

want to get a little more creative with it, just playing around with that zone. You can read Rob Mahoney's piece on the ringer.com right now. He is bubbleworthy filling out his application right now, undergoing the FBI background check. Rob, best of luck to you getting inside the bubble. Strongest endorsement I could hope for. Thanks, Brian. All right, thanks to Rob for that. It's now time for David Shoemaker guesses the strain pun headline.

Yay. Monday's headline about a renegade salon owner in Texas was, remember the alamode remember the alamode I thought we'd go in a slightly different direction today David you saw that crazy pool party at Lake of the Ozarks

last weekend that got so much run on Twitter yeah oh no I remember that very well I've read a lot about it it was hosted by a Missouri restaurant called backwater jacks one attendee tells BuzzFeed's Lauren Strapegeal

now that I think about it, probably not a great idea, but there is no law when you're drinking the claw referring to White Claw, the popular hard seltzer. No, I thought there was something. I thought my bullshit meter went off when you said Backwater Jacks. This whole thing is a marketing gimmick for White Claw, isn't it? This entire party was Guerrilla marketing. It might have been.

You think so? Nobody says there is no law when you're drinking the claw unless you're under the employ of White Claw. We think a native ad slipped into BuzzFeed somehow? BuzzFeed has been called on the car, but too many times for their own native ad, so they found the best way to get it in BuzzFeed is to just trick them into thinking it's news. This is fantastic stuff. At the risk of more marketing, the pun I want from you, David, is the name of the party.

It's not a headline. This is the name of the party. Your pun word is going to be ducks. Ducks, and the essence of the gag is that the attendees were not scared of Corona. Okay? We were not scared of Corona at all, plus ducks. What was the Lake of the Ozark

strained pun party title? What is the ducks coming from? Well, that's just a word in this. Okay. That's a word in the title of the party. I'm not scared of Corona, David. Oh, okay, sorry. So it's not like we're no sitting ducks.

It's like something is punning off of duck. There you go. Okay. Uh, man. Duck and cover. Ducking out. Maller duck. What if I start you with the word zero?

Zero, duck 30? I don't even know what that means climbing up there zero ducks ducks plural ducks in a row zero uh zero

why can I not think of this we are inching there taking mincing zero uh oh zero ducks zero uh oh zero ducks given wait yep there you go zero ducks given the name of the party was zero ducks given oh that's all okay all right

that's great Great is one word for it. He's David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Chris Almeida. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. We're back Monday with a very special guest from the world of fiction. This is a big David and Brian favorite.

You won't want to miss that. Plus Joe Biden's digital divide. Really looking forward to that segment. Plus more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you, man. I cannot wait to hear one of our favorite writers do native advertising for White Claw. It's going to be fantastic.

There is no law when you're drinking. The claw.