The Press Box - Twitter’s Past, Present, and Future With Peter Kafka. Plus: How to Watch the New NBA Season.

Episode Date: October 23, 2023

With the start of the NBA season underway, Bryan and David address the new ESPN lineup, with Doc Rivers, Doris Burke, and Mike Breen, and discuss where exactly you can catch the game (0:33). Then, they touch on Weekend Audio, including baseball announcers, Brian Anderson vouching for the sport, and Joe Davis calling Altuve's home run in the ninth (11:19). Lastly, Vox’s Peter Kafka joins to talk through his upcoming podcast, ‘The Twitter Fantasy,’ that dissects how the platform has evolved over the years and to discuss what is currently happening under Elon's supervision (32:20). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Peter Kafka Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What would you do if you got scammed? Would you suffer in silence, or would you do something about it? Well, I got scammed once, and this is the story of what I did. I'm Justin Sales, the host of the Wedding Scammer, a true crime podcast from The Ringer. And for seven episodes, we're hunting a comment. A guy with a lot of aliases, a guy who's ruined a lot of weddings. And with the help of some friends, I just might be able to catch him. Listen to The Wedding Scammer on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

David? Yes. Tuesday is the opening day of NBA season. I've heard about that on some podcasts, yeah. Veritable content Christmas here at the ringer.com. Let's start off with some notes on how to watch the NBA this season. We've got a new ESPN number one announcing team. For the first time in a very long time,

Mike Breen is back. Thank goodness. And in place of Jeff Van Gundy and Mark Junkney and Mark Jackson, both of whom got laid off. We have Dorisberg and Doc Rivers. What do you think of the new ESPN number one team? Well, I'm optimistic. I like all the people involved.

You know, I wonder how much of this year, I guess, will be occupied with fans saying, I miss Jeff Van Dundee. But separating that part out. Yeah, it'll be good. Here's the way I think that manifests itself. We know Doc Rivers is good at announcing. That's not an issue here.

He called the 2004 NBA Finals with Al Michaels, which now seems like 900 years ago. But that happened. Yeah. But he is a prized coaching candidate and will be the most sought-after head coaching candidate when this season ends. Yeah.

So it's always interesting when you hire the ex-coach. especially the ex-coach that wants to coach again. And I think the question to ask, and I don't want to bury him before he starts, but the question to ask is, what are you going to get from him in terms of talking about teams he might work for, players he might wind up coaching or wind up coaching against next season. I mean, we were a little spoiled with Van Gundy because not only did he not want to coach, he's like, I'm going to piss off Adam Silver by talking about the ref. sure.

I'm all in, baby, on this announcing thing. So what does it sound like when somebody is probably going to be on an NBA sideline next year? It's interesting. I mean, Doc, judging by his, you know, at least from where I'm saying, my perception of his demeanor, his personality as a coach. And certainly from interviews I've heard him give, uh, since during and since his coaching time, doesn't seem to be too concerned about making a bad impression. Although that might, I mean, who knows how that's going to actually play itself out? Because it might be a situation where it takes as one person saying, hey, just watch what you say out there. It might affect your job, you know, your employment thing in the future.

And then as someone who has never cared about it before, it might just totally wreck him. You know, like it might make him totally just incredibly boring. But, you know, it's really hard to project. My hope is that, you know, he'll be his. you know, brash is sort of, you know, as one could hope he would be.

Because honestly, I mean, I guess if he's just like, this team sucks because the owner doesn't care, I guess that could probably get him in some, that might knock out a potential employer, but then that might encourage the employer

to prove everybody wrong with hiring doc. It's interesting in this business. I feel you get a lot of the appearance of total honesty that is in truth, 85% total honesty. strategic honesty strategic honesty yeah and I know that because I have a lot of journalists

that will text me hot takes about ESPN and New York Times and other places that they might one day want to work but those journalists are not saying those kinds of things on Twitter or in any public forum I'll take a pass on that pick an easier target if I want to crawl out on that limb in public

yeah by the way I say the same thing about Bob Myers on NBA countdown this year Bob Meyer is going to be running a team next year. Chances are, probably so. So how is he going to talk about organizations? I guess I might be a little scarred by Sean Payton's one year on Fox when he said absolutely nothing. And then he's now coach who he did for Broncos. Well, maybe he had nothing to say.

Maybe that was a problem. He was out of ideas. Well, he had something to say, but it wasn't until he became coach of the Broncos and then talk to that reporter from USA Today. Yeah. I think they should go totally the opposite. I think Doc should just go totally the other way. Every single game should begin and end with a one to 10 scale. How much do I want to coach this team next season?

He's saying this out loud on the air. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And then just proceed from there. I like full disclosure, ex-coach. Yeah. And the whole conversation should just be like, oh, you know, that Palo Banjarro,

that guy would be a ball of the coach, wouldn't it? And Doc would be like, well, yeah, as long as he doesn't get too full of himself, you know, and just start the process now. Raises his eyebrow like the rock. Yeah. Because the camera moves in for a close-up. The ESPN's got a new second team as well,

Ryan Rucco, J.J. Reddick, and Richard Jefferson. And if you're betting on who is sitting in the big chair, if Doc Rivers goes back to the NBA, I would put my money on Richard Jefferson. I also want to spend a moment, David, talking about how to watch the NBA in the future. Because right now, they are negotiating new contracts that will go into effect after the 24-25 season, the Wall Street Journal

reports. It was really good journal article that I read about this by a mole Sharman Isabella Simonetti. And what's interesting is, for most of this century, it has been ESPN and Turner. Those are the two places you find the NBA. Well, there's some cost cutting going on. You might have heard in the media industry. So in order to make the big bucks, the NBA is like, okay, we need to bring in ESPN and Turner probably one more time,

but also Amazon and Apple and some streamers. We need to have a presence in those two places, but as the journal notes, maybe it gets smaller, slightly smaller, and some of those games are carved out for streaming. Which feels in the short term like totally the logical monetary play. It feels like it could happen, what happened with baseball this last year where

everybody's mad because they can't figure out where the game is. Yeah. On a given Thursday night that we could just repeat that one more time in slightly different context. But it is interesting. I remember one time reading about the 1987 NFL deal. And they had the same thing. Their broadcast partners, like, yeah, NFL, eh, this is a different time in American

society. We're going to pay you a little bit less. So the NFL said, you know what? We're going to put our games on cable. We're going to give eight games to ESPN and create this Sunday night football package, just what it was at the time. And then we get the money. This feels a little bit like a repeat of that, does it not?

Well, yeah. I mean, the NBA is weird. I think that the consistency of having ESPN and TNT as the broadcast partners for so long has been a benefit, you know, I mean, as far as just finding it, as far as just kind of the general feeling, if you're a casual basketball fan, that, you know, there's NBA TV

on one of the channels that I have, one most weeknights, you know? I mean, you know where to find it. Or, you know, you can find it. And also, you know, I mean, the NFL is, well, I mean, I would say in a very general sense, the NFL is moving in the NBA's direction of being a sort of divisionless league,

a league where, you know, the lines of division. don't matter that much, except they do matter in TV rights, right? And that's not traditionally been the way that the NBA has done their business. So it will be interesting to see how they divvy it up. Amazon

said this week that they wanted to create their own version of Thursday night, the NBA version of Thursday night football for it over the NBA, which is just the weirdest. Yeah. Note to Amazon. Aim higher. Yeah. But it is going to be, I mean, the lesson they should learn is that NBA broadcast is defined

by the studio show, right? I mean, because you're not going to unless you're in the bidding for I mean I don't know how they would do it unless you just get basically the flex game you know like once a week but you're not you can't mess with the schedule so on any given Wednesday night or Monday night even if you got the best game or Friday night if you got the best game available what would that really mean I don't I don't I don't know so it's still probably going to largely be defined by the studio show and a lot of that has to do with the talent a lot of that has to do as we've discussed a million times with the producers and creative types letting the talent be the best they can be.

Give them time, give them opportunity, give them help. But and I think just the general broad, I mean, I think, listen, Amazon did fine this year by making their NFL broadcasts feel comfortable, feel familiar. I don't think that's the move for the NBA. I think there's some elements of familiarity that'll be important. But I think having something more unusual is going to, would be to their benefit. I totally agree. And if I'm them, I'm like, can I get my hands on Charles Barkley in some scenario where Turner didn't renew the NBA? It sounds like he's at Turner as long as they have the NBA.

Okay, I didn't get Charles Barkley. We're going off road here. This is going to be something really, really different than just here is a plausible NBA pregame show post. Nope. open Twitter during an NBA game and pick like the 50 voices you think are funniest and then just invite them all to a cattle call.

You know, I mean, Jason Concepcion, welcome to the NBA on Amazon. Yeah, I mean, Jason and Shay have a new podcast. That wouldn't be the worst video content. Like, just do something interesting, you know?

Coming up on today's pod, we got weekend audio from pumping up major league baseball to some surprise play-by-play from Jim Nance, we've got reporters questioning the bona fides of a Chargers fan, USC football versus the media. Again. Plus our pal Peter Kofkin stops by to talk about Twitter on the one-year anniversary of its purchased by Elon Musk.

What is its future? And do we really have to call it X? All that much more on the press box. A part of the ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, and producer Erica Servantes. here. David, let's start with a little weekend audio if we could. I want to take you

to Dateline Phoenix, Arizona first. This is last Friday, and there were two big laid in and comebacks in the league championship series. Oh, yeah. Houston Astros beat your Texas Rangers. The

D-backs beat the Phillies. And so as he signed off from the latter game, Turner's Brian Anderson took a moment to stand up for baseball. Yes, baseball the sport. See how you think this plays. This is going to go down as one of the all-time great days in postseason baseball history. Entering today, teams down by two or more runs in the eighth inning. Oh, and 24. The Astros with a snatch them back in Arlington, Altube's home run, and the Diamondbacks with a snatch them back against the Phillies here in.

game four. What a day. Baseball is not boring. Baseball is great. Baseball is not boring. Baseball is great. Did B.A. succeed in putting over baseball? I don't think the goal is to mention the detractors, right? Or to mention the specific insults that are being leveled against it, you know? You wouldn't like go to a, you know, show up at a wedding and see the groom just be like, you know, present his bride, be like, see in this dress with all this makeup on? My wife is not ugly. She is beautiful. You know, I don't think that would be exactly the right move. Baseball is not an increasingly small part of American culture. It's a big one. Yeah, yeah. I had the same little bit of a tense up when I first heard it, but then I thought, you know what, baseball at this point in history,

shouldn't we just be putting it over every time we can? And the old sports still got it. Yeah, the old sports still got it. I also thought you might want to hear a good old-fashioned home run call. Here is Fox's Joe Davis calling Jose Altuve's go-ahead Homer. Oh, my God. For that aforementioned Astros Rangers game on Fox. The old one.

That was great. No notes. Just the amazing stuff. Yeah, and the thing that always gets me is, like, if you watch enough baseball, you can tell by the way the ball comes off the bat that it's going to be a home run or pretty close to a home run but imagine having to do that

and get your voice right to that spot instantaneously you can't start out down here he has to be right here when the ball comes off the bat and still have room to grow right it's so good it's yeah great point you have to get to like 8.5 when the ball hits the bat

so that you can get to like a 12. Yeah. Especially for a late inning moment like that. And also, I mean, just like, not for nothing. Ultimately meets the moment again. I mean, it's just like that's, it's a big story, right? Which, you know, obviously they played out in discussing

throughout the game or whatever. But like at that moment in time, just to sort of get the main storyline in there too. It's impressive. Next up, I want to take you to Dateline Columbus, Ohio, where we have some further evidence to consider about the question that's gripping a nation. Is ESPN's Reese Davis a professional wrestling fan?

You remember on college game day a few weeks back when the Rock surprised Dion Sanders? And Davis did that classic surprise wrestling announcer bit. Yeah. Whose music is that? My God. Well, this weekend, Davis gave us an answer to the question we'd been asking. And the context here is he's talking about the University of Iowa winning games very ugly. You know, when I was a kid, I loved professional wrestling.

I don't remember if it was Jerry the King Lawler or Rowdy Roder Piper. Oh, yeah. He was questioned about some of a scrupulous activity in the ring, and he said, let me tell you something, Mr. Television announcer. What? They don't ask me how I won. They ask me if I won, which seems a lot like the tweets on X you get from Iowa. fans these days. It's not about

how, it's about if. Wow. So we can check that box. Reese Davis is or was a wrestling fan. Can we get some quote sleuthing from you about whether that should be attributed to

Jerry the King Lawler or Rowdy, Roddy Piper? That sounds like Piper. Do you have a lot of like fake wrestling quotes that you encounter? Where does he, where's from? Muscle, Sholes, Alabama. All right.

So it is conceivable that he was watching Jerry the King Lawler in Memphis. That was the single biggest data point that he was a wrestling fan, first of all. Like, yep. Yeah. Matches up. Do you have a problem with fake wrestling quotes? Is there a lot of stuff like P.T. Barnum's. There's a sucker born every minute.

But it was said by a heel wrestler somewhere along the way. Wait, fake wrestling quotes, like someone just makes up a quote and attributes it to the pro wrestling of their youth? Well, something was said and people remember something that might have happened, but it turns out it didn't actually. It wasn't actually ever said or nobody can find the video. No, it's wrestling. Whatever your memory of it is counts as truth because it's not like anybody else remembers. The wrestlers certainly don't.

It's all just their version of reality, the fake reality too. All right. Finally, David, Dateline, Pebble Beach, California. CBS's Jim Nance lives in Pebble Beach part-time. and he strolled out on the courses last week wearing some Jim Nance weekend wear perhaps some of that Vineyard Vines collection and he started commentating

on a normal person's golf shot so great so he's Jim Nance is doing Jim Nance at the Masters but for a normal golf shot there's a lot of wind in this recording but you should be able to make out the familiar dulcet tones And that's coming up after golf.

David Lorenz continues to lead the AT&T Pebble Beach Proam by one over John Rom. He's on the T of the 7th. Doddy, that's a good-looking golf swing. Protecting that lead here in the final round. Let's go back over to 18. So many parts of that I love.

First of all, he's talking to CBS's Doddy Pepper, who I don't believe was present. Right. But he was keeping up the idea that there would be other CBS. announcers whom he might be talking to. Yes. You also heard the network plug at the very beginning,

which awful announcing noted like he was plugging another show on CBS. Yeah. And then the kind of weird part at the end is he threw it to 18. That's my favorite part. That was by far my favorite part. So the only strange part is that Jim Nance is always at 18. Yeah. The Jim Nance was kind of throwing it to himself.

you think sportscasters writ large would be just happy to do their act for the exploits of normal people? Yeah? Yeah, sure. I mean Joe Buck doing that during the pandemic weren't people like sitting in videos. I was going to say, I think Joe Buck did that. He was doing, he was making home videos.

I'm sure, you know, Al Michaels would be happy to be commenting on anything but the games the NFL is throwing out of this season. So, you know, that would be, that would be a definite, yes. It's got to be the announcers though, right? The play-by-play guys. Not the color guys.

I mean, sure, there's some color guys that could pull it off. But not all the color guys are in on the, or sort of like in on the joke so much, I guess. Like they don't realize to what degree. I think it's almost like if you're Tony Romo, you would want to listen to a Tony Romo impression before you went and went out and tried to beat, do it for something.

Does that make sense? Like, Tony Romo would need to listen to someone making fun of himself to really get what the keys are. For the play-by-play guy, they know the jokes because it's the things that are on the script. It's the same things they're forced to say all the time.

It's the things that just roll off the tongue. Maybe Collinsworth could do a passable Collinsworth. We saw a lot of... Or we could just get Bill to do it. Yeah, exactly. But when Madden used to do those like self-aware Madden bits late in life, was he...

Was that funny, do you think? Like, I don't remember it well enough to say the answer. Was he doing a good job of being Madden when he do like a commercial for like, you know, Tofact into NACTA. Motor oil and be just like, boom! You're like, what, like, is that? I think, yes, I think he could dial it up on Q.

Yeah. And would make it sound like John Madden. You hit on a question that just has informed so much of my work over the last 20 years, which is how self-aware are announcers. Mm-hmm. And the answer, as far as I've been able to determine, is extremely or not at all.

depending on the announcer. Another way to answer the question of will announcers do their bit on cue is to be a very sick person like me and visit sportscaster cameo. This is an actual section of cameo. Yeah. Some big names on here that might surprise you.

Kevin Burkhart, Ariel Hawani, Beaumani Jones, Trey Wingo, Tom Pelliserow of NFL network All these people can be yours David For one low price I don't if you can send him in a video

Yeah I mean I think that I was thinking about that When you pose the initial question But it doesn't quite do the same thing Unless they're commenting on an actual video Or they're even better But it was so great about the nancy That he's doing it in real time That he just wanders up you know

Like we should just have a Someone should start a new site It's like cameo, but it's like for the good of the world. Or we just put together like a tip jar and Jim Nance can just go through his life narrating people picking up oranges at the grocery store or whatever's right in front of him, you know? My birthday's coming up,

and if you want something to get me a Howie Schwab cameo right at the top of the list. A couple more quick things before we get to the overworked Twitter joke. I don't know if you followed the controversy with the Chargers fan from Monday Night Football this past week. People didn't see this. Chargers playing the Cowboys.

And the ESPN truck found this very demonstrative, very excited Chargers fan. Her name later revealed was Marianne Doe. And she was so TB perfect that some reporters immediately started asking if she was a real fan. Yeah. It had a really uncomfortable Alex Jones

crisis actors feel to it. And this was all over Twitter. This was not localized. There were just a lot of people that were immediately like, that is not a real fan. Yeah. Mike Florio wrote this on his blog. Watching the various clips,

something seems to be off. First, she's in a suite. It's just a little much. Also in the clip of the celebration, look at the guy behind her. He seemed to be trying too hard too. Here's the giveaway. People who are in the same space during a football game

don't celebrate alone. They celebrate together with hugs and hollers and high fives that often missed the mark. So further sleuthing turned up a picture of Marianne Doe in a Vikings jersey. Yeah. And then she had to explain, you know, I moved from Minnesota to Southern California. So I was being a diehard fans like you, diehard fans like you would never have to deal with that. But that's a fairly reasonable or, you know, plausible explanation.

Well, that's my first point here is that sports fandom doesn't necessarily work in a hard and fast religious tech. kind of way. You know me. I only root for teams that I grew up rooting for or schools that I actually attended. In this case, school I actually attended.

That's it. But some other people, shall we say, are just like, I have that, but also I like sports and wearing sports stuff and cheering for teams.

Yeah, I mean, it's like, I'm not like, listen, I'm not a Philly sports fan despite the fact that I live closer

to there than any other major city now. But there's a, shop that I walk by, that I go into once a month or something, which is the greatest collection of vintage Philly gear. I mean, they have other teams, too, but it's just so much Philly stuff. If I find the perfect vintage Philly Sports t-shirt that fits me well and feels good, like, what am I not going to buy it? It'll be good. You know, like, I'm going to buy it. Yeah, you were always a little bit like the Mitchell and Ness homepage of sportswear. I'd come in,

you come into the apartment. I'm like, wait a second. Now, I know you're a Mavericks fan. You are a genuinely legitimate Mavericks would ever make one good piece of clothing. Yeah, that would be a whole different thing. You'd be strutting ass in a Brooklyn Nets hat. And I'd be like, wait a minute. I'm not going to wear a green or blue hat around. Black hat.

See? It's normal sports fandom. That's how it works. And by the way, whenever one of these stories starts, I always think of the fact that sports reporters should all be required for one game a year, whatever they cover, to spend it

in the stands. You must sit in the stands instead of in a TV studio or in the press box and actually see what real fans are like. I take my son to Dallas Cowboys games, went to a couple last year we're going to go on again on Thanksgiving this year. Dude, you just never seen anything like it. People are weird. A lot of times they've had too much to drink. They're all fired up, but they're just, they do weird things during the game. It's inexplicable. I do, I do weird things during the game when I care about the outcome. Yeah. Like I do really weird things.

When I was in college, I just remember this. It would be like, this is before going viral was even an option. But, you know, Texas would do something dumb. Imagine that. And even before Surrender Cobra was a thing where you were putting your hands on your head, you would do stuff like that in the stands. Oh, yeah. As a kind of improv performance for your fellow fans around you that you didn't even know.

Yeah. you're all doing actorly looking things because you actually care about the game and you're also in this weird collective experience slash performance. Totally.

That's how real people do it. Real people unlike sports commentator. Just give it a whirl, folks. You will see all kinds of things out there that don't look like what it looks like in the press box or in the NBC studio. I promise. One more story for you, David.

USC football. You remember, this is the gang that suspended that reporter Luca Evans for the crime of being a sports writer. I remember. I regret to report that you do not have to hand it to them again. Oh, no. Because after USC lost to Utah on Saturday, those wily Utes, they brought zero players to talk to the media after the game. Remember, college football is a little different.

There's not like an open locker room in the NFL where you get to go ask a question to anybody. So the guy who drops a punt, I'm going to go ask you, what happened on that punt, lost your team the game. College, you were at the mercy as a reporter of who they bring out

and allow to talk to you. Lincoln Riley, USC coach brought zero players after they lost to Utah. Nobody. So the next time you hear the coach say that I'm a molder of men, that's what this is really about.

It's not about winning games, about molding men, taking them from teenagers and turning them into, into fully formed human beings. So the fully formed human beings have to answer questions. You said like Will Arnett in 30 Rock when you were doing that. I'm going.

Okay. I want to do it some more. I'm sorry. When my kids lose a board game, they're not allowed to just like throw down the pieces of clue and walk out of the room. They have to sit in there and deal with it. Part of what you're doing, right, when you're molding those athletes is teaching them that they have to answer

a few questions in the press after it was. It's really not going to be that bad. By the way, the New York Liberty of the WNBA did the same thing. Similar thing after losing in the finals of the Aces did not bring out certain players. Really? Come on, guys. It's that bad?

By the way, isn't the best thing about playing board games with your kids learning the rules that you never knew when you played them as when you were a kid? Yes, 100%. You're just staring at the rules of clue and disbelief. You know, it's just like, how did I know this before? This game would have been so much more fun. I can't tell you

how much I agree with that statement. I did not know how to play clue. It turned out. Yeah. I thought I did. And weirdly like our whole generation was the same. Like, my wife and I didn't, neither of us know the right rules. We just know the ad hoc rules or whatever. We're just like, wait, you really are supposed to do that? I know.

And instructions were included before the internet area. It's true. We just never read him. Nope. Some only in journalism for you. Great. The Sion of a banana empire was elected president of Ecuador. I love when journalists try to come up with new family words or $100 family words like patriarch, matriarch, paterfamilious. Potterfamilius is a great one.

Sion is the name of a car, so, you know, that is used elsewhere, but sure. Shoemaker Perre. Peret. No one has ever said that out loud. in America. In America. Thanks to Douglas Bins for that one. Republicans, David, you might have read in the house are trying to pick a speaker,

but they are at loggerheads. Classic political journalism word. Thanks to J. Rod Stan account. And this one gets double points. Anthony Blinken's Mid-East tour where he's visiting the various governments and heads of state was called, quote, shuttle diplomacy on steroids. Thanks to Paul Henry.

Coming up in 30 seconds, we talk about the gruesome present and dodgy past of Twitter on the one-year anniversary of its purchased by Elon Musk. But first, and very appropriately, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag

that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to ask at the Pressbox pod where they are always gratefully received. This week's runners up, David. Former Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver

McCull Hardman got traded back to Kansas City. It was an overwork Twitter joke to post an old photo of Hardman and say, here's a mock-up of what it'll look like in a chief's uniform. I always love that gag. Thanks to Aaron Whitelaw. Big Martin Scorsese old guys still got it

moment this weekend. It was an overworked. Twitter joke to write, if you seek killers of the Flower Moon, be sure to stay through the end credits. Thanks to Mitchell Tyler. And this week's winner, David, and speaking of

the house, Representative Jim Jordan tried and failed and tried and failed some more to become speaker. It was an overwork Twitter joke to call him Air Jordan, H-E-I-R,

followed by error, Jordan. Thanks to Timothy R. If you thought a joke that worked for Michael Jordan, worked for a rep who doesn't occupy the same error, congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke

of the week. All right, in the notebook dump, David, let us bring on one of our favorite reporters. Peter Kafka covers media and tech for Vox and hosts the Recode Media podcast in normal times. But David, these are not normal times.

So on Wednesday, Kafka will release another podcast offering in his Land of the Giant series. It's called the Twitter Fantasy. It appears on the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk's acquisition of that company. Peter's here to talk about all things Twitter or eggs or whatever we should call it. Peter, welcome to the press box. Thank you, gentlemen. Long time, first time. We're calling it Twitter, by the way.

We already saw it. So we had a listener, Jason McGenzie, ask about it. that. Because there's been a lot of tortured the thing formerly known as Twitter in the press. You are going Twitter. If you're a copy editor and I love copy editors, you can go with Twitter or whatever you want to call it. That's fine. In the real world, we're calling a Twitter. So we make a head nod to that reference to the beginning of this podcast and then we can just move on and keep calling a Twitter like the rest of the world does. And I bet you Elon Musk still does in the middle of the night. Let's start with the president. We'll work backwards.

Elon bought Twitter one year ago this week. What have we learned about what he wants to do with it? My guess at the beginning was he did not know, and I feel very good about my early prediction. I don't think he knows still. We still don't know what he really thinks, right? And I think he doesn't know what he thinks, and it seems to change periodically. We can see what he's done, which is, on the one hand, strip most moderation attempts away

to make it this what he believes is a global town square for better and for worse. He's also said almost from the beginning that he wanted Twitter to be a subscription service, where basically if you wanted to use the thing, you'd have to pay some amount, and he has yet to really roll that up, but we see him continuing to come back to that idea, that this may actually be a service that you can use for free, but it'll suck, and if you want it to suck less, you may have to pay for it. So I think he's headed in that direction. I mean, the real question is, for me, is, is Twitter what he thought he was buying?

And if not, what is it? And if, and question two would be, is there going to be another Twitter? But I can answer that one. No. Well, what he, I mean, thought he was, I mean, we went over the name change. There have been times where it just seemed like he, I mean, this is pure speculation, but where it seemed like he wanted to buy Twitter, re-bred into X, which is obviously been a part of his sort of mental portfolio for a long time.

time and just sort of use it as a launching pad to be another online finance operation, to be sort of a just broadly defined internet hub for all of your daily needs. And if whether or not it was the initial inkling of the plan, sort of like the Twitter would sort of be a jumping off point for more things. Are there still things like that on the horizon? He will say that. and his CEO, Linda Yakarino, will say things like that. There's no evidence that any of that is going to happen. And he may well, again, he may well believe that this is a jumping off platform into something else, just like we're also going to go to Mars on Elon branded rocket ships.

But I think the easier explanation is he is Twitter's most addicted and most popular user, had complaints about the way it was being run and figured the best way to fix it was to own it himself. You have a line, Peter, in the first episode where you say that Twitter is not dying because of Elon Musk full stop. It dug its grave even before he bought it. So what were some of the early shovelfuls of dirt that were heaped on Twitter by its founders? I mean, the fact that they had five CEOs in 15 years and the two of those CEOs were Jack Dorsey is a good indicator of the turmoil at the very top of the company that existed from the very beginning. they were always conflicting ideas about what Twitter ought to be. At some point, I think capitalism interceded, and the people who were funding Twitter decided,

oh, this ought to be Facebook, meaning it'll be as big as Facebook, generate as much money as Facebook does, and thus be worth as much as Facebook. And it obviously failed in every respect compared to Facebook, and that's ultimately why Elon can buy Twitter at what was a discount price of 40. It was actually, it was not a discount price. It was an overpayment of $44 billion. But just a fraction of what Facebook is worth. If you say you're going to be the next Facebook and you don't deliver that,

inevitably, Wall Street's going to go, we're not really very happy with this company. Someone like Elon can buy it. That's the very short story. Okay. But if it wasn't, if it was already in bad shape, I mean, does that mean, does that make the case for Twitter to be viewed as sort of a utility, as we've sort of keep coming back to in the acquisition days. I mean, obviously, this is going to get into a huge, you know, philosophical conversation about the tech industry and everything else, you know, like when is good

enough enough. But like, what is the most ideal form of Twitter? I mean, Jack Dorsey, who turns out to have some flaws as a leader and as a thinker, from the very beginning, said, Twitter should be a protocol, and this is going to get nerdy. But basically think of email. No one owns email. But you can connect using email to anyone's computer, using any software. That's not a very sexy business. But maybe Twitter should have been that.

And now that's what Jack Dorsey says. It should have been all along. The problem with that is if you want to build that service, then you don't take on a gazillion dollars in venture money. You don't float the company on the public markets. But that's a pretty interesting argument. I don't think we're ever going to get it. And I think even when Dorsey was running it, he was exploring the idea of saying,

maybe this shouldn't be a for-profit company. Maybe this should be in a trust somewhere. Maybe we should hand this over to a benevolent buyer who would run it sort of as a nonprofit. Those things are very hard to do when the ship's already in the ocean. You talk on the pot about early celebrity Twitter, which you had some interactions on. What did that look like? We all forget this, but it was wild to be able to interact on a keyboard with a famous person, or even in my case, a semi-famous person, Sebastian Bach from the band. What was the band?

Skid Row. I already forgotten it. Thank you. Once jumped into my tweets, or maybe I jumped into his tweets. I can't remember. But people would engage with you. And at the time, that seemed like one, really cool and two really novel. now the idea of interacting with your favorite celebrities may not be appealing to a lot of people.

But this idea of flattening that curve, flattening the graph that you could have direct access to famous people or even non-famous people was a really big deal back then. If you look around right now, there are, I think most people who are using Twitter or commenting externally on Twitter are talking about Twitter's functionality in, wartime in time of international conflict. Now, this could be also another big question. Obviously, there's been a lot of incidences over the past decade of Twitter being a sort of instrumental force in different ways in various international conflicts. But specifically right now, if we look at what's going on in Israel and Palestine, what is Twitter's role?

And how is it different under Elon Musk's era than it would have been otherwise? So the standard thing you're supposed to say about Twitter under Elon Musk in a war right now is because he's removed sort of any guardrails that protect people from misinformation and he's gotten rid of his trust and safety team that Twitter is objectively worse at covering the war. And I think that I think that overstates sort of what Twitter, Twitter's utility in an event like this would be where it's not just people on Twitter who aren't getting it right. It's people from the biggest news organizations in the world are struggling to cover this stuff in real time. And even after the fact, I mean, we're recording this six days after that explosion at a hospital in Gaza. The New York Times has now apologized, essentially, for their initial framing of the coverage. Times also has a story saying we still don't know what happened there, which is deeply unsatisfying. I think it's probably responsible, truthfully.

And the point is Twitter is not going to help. us get to the bottom of that any faster than anything else would. So I'm a little more, I don't want to be nihilistic about this, that there's no truth. And who knows, we may as well go swim around and misinformation on Twitter or TikTok or telegram. But I'm not quite as anguished about it as other people. This stuff is hard and messy, and I don't think that social media is going to solve it for us. Quick follow up. Does Twitter, though, in a general sense, it's not just in this era, make, I mean, it makes us more aware of these issues to begin with, right?

I mean, I feel like I don't know where the conversation about that, about the, the hospital bombing would be happening if it weren't for people on Twitter on whatever side they're on. Oh, I don't know. I'm on threads that's happening there. I'm consuming a lot of TikTok and there's a raucous back and forth there. I don't spend any time on telegram because I'm in the U.S., but most of the rest of the world is on telegram. I don't think this is all a matter of Twitter opening our eyes to the world. You note also, Peter, that Twitter seems more important and always has to its users than perhaps it does to the outside world. How has that lingering misperception affected the course of Twitter as a company over the years? So to get super meta, right, like we're all on Twitter, you know, and we talk about this in later episodes, you know, for a very long time, Twitter was a great assignment desk for news media. Again, there's some downside to that. Donald Trump figured that out pretty well during his tenure that he could literally sort of change what the chiron's were on TV by what he typed into Twitter.

So I think that because it has been viewed as essential by so many journalists that we have overstated its essentialness. I'm stumbling over it. So the problem in a lot of ways is us as the people making and listening to this podcast. Because we have lots of followers and we have a lot of response on there. So this must be the center of the action. And also that we privilege it, right? And we write sometimes very lazy stories about something that's happening on Twitter. That greatly distorts your view of the world.

It has taken me, I've been on this thing since 2006. It's taken me a long time to realize that my job is not being on Twitter. That I can do other things. Can and should do other things in addition to being on Twitter. But when you're in it, it's very hard not to get, not to pull yourself out of that. It's very hard to pull yourself out of that vortex. Amen to that.

So what is what does the future look like for Twitter? What do you, what do you think the next step is for Musk or just the company more generally? I think it lingers on for a long time. You know, you can't trust anything the Twitter officials are saying about their user base, but they're saying it's essentially around the same as it was when Musk came, when Musk bought it, we all can tell that there's certainly a significant number of people like us who use Twitter less, that there's less engagement.

But if you expand and talk to other people in different versions of Twitter and people I know who are in video game Twitter, say that discussion is as robust as ever. We've talked to a lot of black users of Twitter and some of them are quite insistent that they're not going anywhere no matter what. And in terms of a business, you know, Elon Musk has cut three quarters of his of his expenses by firing everyone. He doesn't need a lot to keep the thing going. You know, he may have terrible advertisers, but if he has, you know, a billion of them instead of $5 billion or a billion dollars worth instead of $5 billion, he can probably keep the thing going. He's got to renegotiate some debt. But he can do it.

If he wants this to be his personal play thing and sort of not much more than that, I think he can do. that for a long time. And again, back to the war. I mean, you know, you saw the Supreme Leader of Iran, I may be butchering his title, was immediately getting on Twitter slash X to a pine about the October 7th attacks. People are still treating it as if it is an important place to discuss things, whether or not that's actually happening. That includes, by the way, Joe Biden, who's, you know, doing clapbacks during the Republican debates. You know, I'm sure he'll get around to doing it on threads, but it's still happening on Twitter even in its diminished state. And I think it can consist, I think it can sustain that state for a long time. Wait, that's a sign of Twitter's

currency that Joe Biden has adopted or the fact that Twitter is over? Because that could go either way. I think, as with all things, Joe Biden, it's somewhere in the middle. It's that there's no other place to do that, that where you're going to reach some concentration of opinion makers. All right. Finally, Peter, in the first episode, you get through Twitter's Foundings, this pile of VC money that builds up and up and changes the expectations of the company. Give us a little bit of a preview if you could about where you're going from here with the series. One thing we wanted to make do is make sure people understood why Twitter was a thing,

which meant it was fun for a lot of people, that it had a lot of value for a lot of people. So we talked to people who actually used Twitter, especially back in the heyday about why it was fun. We talk about how unpleasant people showed up on Twitter to make it less fun for everybody else. we definitely get to the Trump era. We have some really interesting conversations with the people who were making real-time decisions about whether to keep Donald Trump on the platform or not,

which I found very compelling. I've been covering this stuff for a long time. I hadn't heard that stuff discussed out loud. All right. The Twitter fantasy is available Wednesday at Spotify and other fine podcast outlets. We only ask our favorite guest to do this, Peter, but would you like to stick around

and help David guess the strained pun headline? I'd be delighted to do that. Yeah. All right, here we go. He's got backup. It's time for David Shoemaker and Peter Kafka. Yes, the strained pun headline. Last Monday's headline about the Broncos playing lousy football in front of Taylor Swift was the Errors Tour.

Today's headline comes to us from listener Jim Wolverton. It's actually a pun that appeared as a Chiron on FS1 to celebrate the start of the NBA season, James Hardin. has mused aloud about being traded away from Philadelphia. This has brought his team season to a screeching halt. It has stopped things in their tracks. I want you to think of hit ESPN shows as you ponder what was FS1's strained pun headline. ESPN shows?

ESPN hit shows. What's the hit ESPN show? The jump? The, the, more elemental, told them the jump. Oh, Sports Center? No.

Funny people going back and forth. No, I know. Pardon. Harden the interruption? Oh. The interruption. So good. Was it hardened colon the interruption?

Because I would really be into that. I don't believe it was quite that sophisticated. This was, yeah, harden the interruption. But I guess points for FS1. You know, I'm sorry I couldn't contribute, but it was a way to watch this in real time. That was, you were my good luck charm.

I haven't done that well in months. That's great. Usually it's much more excruciating, Peter. Two of the best minutes of podcasting is watching David think of a pun while I sort of spur him on. Huge thanks to Peter Kofka. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Braction Magic by Erica Servantes.

David, I'm trying to get McKay Coppins to come on with us next Monday. Oh, please. Give us a little behind the scenes of how he got to Mitt Romney's apartment. to hear Romney discourse on everything. We'll have that, I hope, plus more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.