The Press Box - Vaccine Day in America. Plus, Author Ken Layne on ‘Desert Oracle.’

Episode Date: December 15, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker unpack the response to the news that the Pfizer vaccine has been cleared in the U.S. (2:12) before breaking down ‘Sunday NFL Countdown’ in We’ve Got Notes (19:00). Then writer Ken Layne joins to discuss his book ‘Desert Oracle,’ and his experience in the desert (45:45). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, the Brooklyn Nets Kyrie Irving, who wasn't talking to the media, announced on Friday, I don't talk to pawns. My attention is worth more. What I want to know is, as a sports writer, how do you feel about being called a pawn? I feel seen. Finally, finally, someone has identified me for what I truly am. I mean, you'd be offended by it, right? But you kind of feel like this is less of a direct attack and more of a sort of philosophical statement coming from Kyrie, right? And not a particularly just one.

I just feel like he's, you know, if he expanded upon that, he'd probably be talking, you know, in terms that only, you know, Kierkegaard or Elrond Hubbard would understand. On the chess board of life. exactly. There are kings and there are queens and there are bishops and they're rooks and then you get all the way down to sports writers

and their pawns. Like the first pawn that's taken in a game of chess. Exactly. I like how Mina Kime said that Kyrie has obviously been watching the Queen's Gambit like the rest of us. And so just the first analogy at hand. Players have called sports writers

kind of weird names for decades and decades. But hey, you know, pawns. I got it, you know. He's semi-apologized today on Monday and said he wasn't talking about any sports writer in particular. So if you're a sports writer covering the Brooklyn Nets or even if you're not, feel free to disregard the statement. You are not a pawn. You're a rook. You're a bishop in this business.

Coming up on today's show, we consider the first images of the coronavirus vaccine being administered in the United States. We've got notes on ESPN's Sunday NFL countdown plus Ken Lane of Desert Oracle. All that and more on the press box. a part of the Ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. David, it is Vaccine Day in the United States. At 9 a.m. this morning at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens, the Pfizer Biointech vaccine, which was just approved by the FDA on Friday,

was given to an intensive care nurse named Sandra Lindsay. Can we just spend a moment talking about that amazing people? a video? Please, yeah. To use a word, we used a whole bunch when we were talking about this topic last week, normalized. There was something so reassuringly normal about the whole thing. Lindsay had her sleeve rolled up, and Dr. Michelle Chester, who was administering the injection, was swabbing her arm. They asked Lindsay, how you doing? She said, I'm feeling great. and then all these cameras start clicking while she looks ahead stoically.

And by the way, has there ever been a person in history who's like, I need to look completely stoic while this vaccine is being administered to me so that people watching at hope will not be frightened. She looks ahead. She gets the vaccine and then everyone just starts applauding. Yeah. So right.

So it's like, it's like, well, it's like your old bit about the 4th of July. It's like, why is everybody clapping for the fireworks? Like, nobody can, no one is doing the fireworks can hear you clapping, right? But it's like we're clapping for the existence of the vaccine, right?

Not for this woman, uh, bravely taking the shot in her arm. Although, I don't know what's happened. And we talked last week, we were joking around about with someone acting like it was really hurting them or, you know, there's obviously a lot of statistics about people being reluctant to take the vaccine that I sort of pooed slightly last week. I'm, I think I'm a little bit. shocked that that this is actually

like it's sort of actualizing people's reluctance to take the vaccine it's it almost feels like it went from a fake news story to a real news story and don't get me wrong I know people are very reluctant to take it but is it

I mean listen it's a big moment in time I get it we're celebrating the beginning of the vaccine but I find it hard to use the word normalizing as you did when as you said, there were a thousand photographers taking pictures of someone. It's not normal of the photographers there, right? It's like, this is something out of black mirror. Like, top, I mean, there's, I don't think there's any more straightforward way to say it.

It seems really weird to me that we're having to put so much. I mean, and you showed it. I mean, you sent me this as someone tweeted it. The, like the first response, at least when, as I'm looking at it, is someone saying, like, now I think I'm going to pass on the vaccine. This is on Twitter. On Twitter. Yeah.

The whole thing is just very, very surreal. This is, it almost feels to me, and this is, I mean, I'm as bigging as conspiratorial as anybody who's resistant to taking it, I guess, but it almost feels to me like making a story of people's reluctance is sort of giving them a permission structure, like we said the other week, to decline the vaccine. I mean, it just feels so strange right now. Yeah, well, I mean, to your earlier point of having that sort of media moment, we're all going to watch this woman who was perhaps the first woman in the United States to receive the

vaccine this morning. We're all watching it. Andrew Cuomo was watching her through video linkup. And then right after everyone got finished applauding, he did a little Q&A. Let's listen to Governor Cuomo and Sandra Lindsay. You didn't, you didn't flage. I take it that Dr. Chester has a good touch. She has a good touch and it didn't feel any different from taking any other vaccine. Great. Dr. Chester, it all worked the kid from your end? Everything worked perfectly. Thank you. And you're feeling well? I'm Governor Koma. I'm feeling well. Kind of a very, you know, necessary politician exchange there. Like, I just have to ask them a question. Yeah, I think more than the actual moment, more than the photography and more than the applause,

but it just strikes me as odd as one that we needed her to speak at all. I mean, it's great. She'll be interviewed later on. But in the moment, this is not some like, you know, she presumably did not just land on the moon or do anything of that level of gravity on her part. And then that it even, you know, warranted a moment from the governor of New York. Like, I guess to me, the appropriate response from the governor of New York is like, this is going to be fine. Can I just do my job instead of being on TV?

Yeah, but wouldn't you say that... I understand that it's not, but go... Wouldn't you say that Andrew Cuomo being on TV is kind of the nature is healing moment here? Like everything... Okay, everything's good. Andrew Cuomo is once again appearing on television. Okay, well, we got it, right? Normality has been restored.

No, I mean, if they're going to do it up, then it shouldn't be Cuomo. They should get James Gordon in there. Does it be like, you know, just ask her how every, the second by second playbook by play of what that felt like and make it funny and heartwarming for everyone. That, David, believe it or not, turned out to be one of the less stage vaccine rollouts across the country today. Oh, great. Because Jared Polis, who is the governor of Colorado, decided to stage the vaccine's arrival in his state like it was the reveal at the end of a reality show. Oh, no.

Polis was standing in a warehouse or something waiting for the FedEx guy to show up with the vaccine in a box. I wish I was making any of this up, but I'm not. Listen to how that little made-for-TV moment went down. So we are about to welcome the vaccines, the very first vaccines here in Colorado. Any minute now, we're going to hear a doorbell. Is that that's not a doorbell?

It's a knock, but okay. And then we're going to, of course, let the vaccine in. Oh, there we go. This is the Pfizer vaccine. Arise being here in Colorado to end the pandemic. Do we have to sign for it? You bet you. All right. Unless you don't. I'll sign for it. My lord. As Chris was noting before the pot had had a real Ty Pennington move that bus feel to the vaccine arriving in Colorado. Yeah, absolutely. Um, by the way, he, he asked, if he had to sign for the vaccine, like just like for the FedEx form.

So I just, I sort of wondered like, what if he had missed the FedEx guy? And there'd been that note on the door and you never know whether you're supposed to go to the FedEx office or if it's still like out in delivery. The package won't get back to the FedEx office until some point at night. And then probably they'll get that. They won't even be there.

Yeah. I guess the joke would have really been on him if he asked to sign and it turned out to be COD. Does anybody? I don't know if Chris knows with that. is. Anyway, you have millions and millions of dollars to pay for the vaccine because Pfizer wants this money right now. One of the big challenges we talked about last week of framing a day like today is that this is a good news story, historic good news story, but it's happening in the midst of a historic bad news story. And CNN, Sanjay Gupta, took one stab at that today,

quoting Charles Dickens. He said, it was the best of times. It was the worst of times. the same day that a truly extraordinary scientific feat is realized, we are still experiencing a devastating amount of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Some of the same hospitals tasked with administering the vaccine are also stretched to the limit with patients. He continues, remember, it takes a while for the vaccine to benefit mankind. In the meantime, wear a mask and be kind. What he's doing there is really hitting the essential, cognitive of dissonance of a daylight today. It is a cause, David, for celebration. Today is a huge, huge, huge day. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel. With that said, the media is also

trying to deliver a message of because we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, this means you should not be stupid. Exactly. This means you should wear a mask. You shouldn't feel hopeless. Like, oh, this thing's never going to end. I don't care anymore. I'm just going to go out and live my life. No, no, no, no. You should be. cautious right now because there might be happiness ahead of us but we don't want

excess badness to happen in the meantime. Sure and this is when I mean if you're in the media you're trying to thread that needle this is when maybe you're you know you get a little bit of a little bit circumspect about the whole enterprise right?

It's just like if you don't actually have the vocabulary to you know say yes but as part of your job then you know maybe you should have figured that out at some point in the past. But yeah, I mean, it's tough. It's a, it's a tough line to walk because as, you know, we've discussed, it doesn't really matter.

If they're successful in threading that needle, that still doesn't mean that people are going to follow their suggestion. Yeah, and you could already hear the bad arguments, right? Remember the earlier bad argument was, hey, you know, you said millions of people were going to die and there's only hundreds of thousands of people that died. And you're like, yeah, that's because we all socially distanced and kept inside and took these precautions. and those same knuckleheads are going to say today,

hey, you know, look, there's a vaccine. It turns out it's everything's fine. Yeah, yeah, but we don't want to all get sick before we get the vaccine and make other people sick. That would be a really, really bad outcome of the next couple of months. New Jersey is having popular TikTokers do PSAs about best COVID practices in the meantime. That seems, I guess, promising for a certain slice of human beings.

humanity. Newsmax and O-A-N in the fringe conservative networks are not, for the moment, trafficking in anti-vax rhetoric. That is still kind of a fringe of the fringe thing in right-wing world. So that's good and probably staves off some real bad news. I was also amazed by this Julie Bosman story in the New York Times. We've talked about on this podcast before how obituary desks around the country are writing more and more and more obituaries over the last couple of months.

She talks about this particular phenomenon where families write the obituary of their own loved ones. And, you know, in cases where, like, she writes in suicide or places are sort of certain diseases, family members would often leave the cause of death out of the obituary. Well, now they're not. And they're writing these obituaries that essentially work as PSAs. This is one for Shirley Flores, post-Mobile. and mother of three in Los Cruces, New Mexico, Bosman writes.

The obituary read, she died a very painful, lonely death because we weren't allowed to hold her hand and sit with her. Please take COVID-19 seriously, protect yourself and those you love. So those things sort of act as the, you know, warning, right? And you read though, where do you read those? Facebook, you know, people sharing them from legacy.com, those kinds of things, local newspapers. And maybe that works a little bit as a kind of.

way of planting in the media this idea that we should be extra careful right now. Yeah. I mean, I think that's really effective too, because like you said, I mean, you mentioned Facebook. I mean,

most people now encounter, you know, obituaries, especially people they know in those sorts of situations. And of all the places in the world where they, I mean, of all the sort of formats that can cut through whatever partisanship or, or just general online,

uh, idiosyncrasy, an obituary presumably is like the most reliable in a lot of ways, right? I mean, you're most inclined to believe, even if it's a friend, to take someone at their word about the cause of death, about the existence of the virus when you're kind of putting it there in post for posterity. Yeah, remember we talked about how Democrats discovered when they boosted Fox News stories on Facebook that got people's attention because they're like, oh, Fox News is saying something positive about. about a Democrat. It would sort of stop people in their tracks. I bet the obituary in your Facebook feed is like that times a thousand. Because you're like, that stops you in your tracks, right? And you click on like, oh, what happened? You know, who who passed away and maybe it gets

your attention. Sure. I think our best messenger here, though, is Sandra Lindsay, the nurse who got the coronavirus vaccine maybe before anybody else. She had obviously thought about her remarks today to the media, listen to how she just encapsulates all of these ideas, all these messages we think should get out there in one very handy 45-second soundbite. I want to instill public confidence that the vaccine is safe. We're in a pandemic, and so we all need to do our parts to put an end to the pandemic and to, um, to, um, to, um, to, um, to, um, to, um, not give up so soon. There's light at the end of the tunnel, but we still need to continue to wear our mask to social distance. I believe in science. As a nurse, my practice is guided by

signs. And so I trust signs. What I don't trust is that if I contract COVID, I don't know how it will impact me or those who I come in contact with. So I encourage everyone to take the Can she just be on cable news every night saying a version of that? She's the best messenger of all. Yeah, I mean, it was a nice speech. I'm so, maybe I should stop being so skeptical of the presentation. But, yeah, I mean, she's, yeah, we do need more sort of regular people explaining their experience, you know?

I mean, that's, it's a, I mean, obviously she's a nurse. She knows more than a lot of regular people, but there's just such an authenticity there. We will crowdsource the message. Check your Twitter feed. Check Instagram. Check Facebook. Your friends will be telling you just how painless and safe the coronavirus vaccine is. All right, David, 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 at the press box pod where they're always gratefully received. David, this was a holiday tweet from CNBC, quote, study buying little kids. things like toys can make them happier. Buying little kids, things like toys can make them happier. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, did a little kid write this? Thanks to John Jackson Smith. I think either one of our sons would have come up with that tweet on their own

as a way to get a few more presents under the tree. David, two seemingly unrelated stories from last week. The Supreme Court of the United States rejected the last ditch Trump lawsuit out of Texas and and experts crack the cipher of the zodiac killer. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, tough day for Ted Cruz. Remember the whole Ted Cruz zodiac thing? Thanks to Steve Smith.

And remember last week we had a bit about James Hardin here at the overwork Twitter joke of the week. Biden was promising a million shots in 100 days and James Hardin had the same philosophy or something like that. well we have another ts n reports that the rocket's guard will need to test

negatively six straight days before he can attend practice you know test negative six straight days before he can attend practice it was an overwork twitter joke to write if hard needs to go 0 for six they should just tell him it's game seven oh that's really mean

see fan if you did our politics meets coronavirus meets basketball stuff for us here at the ringer congrats you made the overword Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, time for the notebook dump. And I think we should do one of our favorite segments here on the press box.

Let's do it. This is where we watch an episode of a TV show that you and I had not watched closely in a while. And then we give our notes on that show. We play characters that are somewhere between a big footing network executive and an NFL assistant coach who's running the tape back on Monday morning. Now, previously we did Meet the Press in 60 minutes. Today we've got notes on ESPN's football pregame show Sunday NFL countdown. Now my first note, which I may not have remembered when we decided to do this last week,

is that countdown is three hours long. Yeah, yeah. It's not really meant to be consumed for three hours, is it? one would assume no, although I think one of the things that I kept coming back to, both consuming Sunday's episode and sort of reminiscing about, you know, the previous iterations of the show, was that Sunday morning, well, it's just a very different time. It's a very different space to be viewing sports media than just about any other time you would watch it, right?

the closest thing would be maybe sports talk radio and you're driving to work in the morning or something like that, but it's, but it's different. It's the weekend. It's lazy. It's, it's, I mean, and I don't mean that necessarily literally. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's really, there's a real immediacy because it's this preparatory element to the entire, to a day of watching football. And it has like a level of specificity, but also expansiveness. It's, you know, it's trying to prepare you for this giant slit. of games and also put the games in the weekend context of the whole season. It has a lot of stuff it's doing. All that's a very long way of talking around the actual answer to your question.

It's not supposed to be watched. I mean, there's no three-hour pre-game show that you would ever say someone's supposed to watch the whole thing. I think what sets it apart from maybe some other pre-game shows or other really long sports shows or whatever else is that it's maybe more meant to be watched from start to finish, but sort of absent mind. Right? Like, it's a different sort of viewing than we're used to with other shows. Yeah, there's a little bit of an ambient noise aspect to it on a Sunday morning. Kind of like you have an NPR show on on a Sunday morning in your house where you're making breakfast. Exactly.

And you hear like 10 to 20% of it. And of that 10 to 20%, you really pay attention to about 5% of it. Like really lock in and take in what you're doing. No, I completely feel that. I was struck watching it. And I have been watching, like you, pregame shows my entire life or half watching pregame shows my entire life, how the visual vocabulary is exactly the same as it was in 1985.

There's always, there is always going to be B-roll of a quarterback warming up in an empty stadium or a quarterback getting off the bus or walking through the tunnel. We are always going to throw to network reporters who are standing outside a stadium. And if it's December, that network reporter will be wearing like a knit cap. That is happening. And the other bit of visual vocabulary is that at some point in the middle of the pregame show, for reasons I don't quite understand, we will get up from the desk and we will just go stand 10 feet over to the right. Yeah. And we'll just do a segment standing up.

Like Randy Moss is standing up right now. This must be important. And we'll do that just like exactly two or three. times maybe once per hour during the whole show. And that will be mandatory across all pregame. You could never change those elements. You could never do a pregame show that does not include those things at some point or not. Right.

And those sort of mandates are more obvious more than ever, now more than ever, because we're in the COVID era where, you know, you don't actually need to have your reporters at the stadium. I mean, you know, presumably there's something that they're accomplishing by being there in person. But on Sunday's show, there was a moment where Diana Rossini was reporting outside of the Bills Stadium. And I think they threw it back to Sam Ponder, who was like, wow, the last time we had you there, the Bill's Mafia was giving you like Jello shot. You know, like, but pointing out how weird it was for her to be standing. And well, in that point, you know, utter isolation. Again, she's probably, you know, there's things that she's doing inside the stadium or interacting with people. But it is, you know, it is throughout the show, you could see that there was a very delusation.

deliberate choice made to make it feel as normal as possible. And that's what all TV is doing right now. But I think it kind of stood out in this one more than anything because you're right. I'm sort of checking the boxes of comfort and sameness, right? I mean, it's, well, there's comfort. I guess those are two different things. And then sameness, which is maybe my biggest overall, my biggest overall note on the show is that it felt a little bit too same, too much alike everything else ESPN does now, right?

Is it to me what always made Sunday NFL countdown, and this is not a commentary on the show's quality overall, but what made Sunday NFL countdown special, literally, was that it felt so completely different that everything else on TV, and maybe this is just a kind of a blissful glory year period of sort of like our 20s and 30s when SportsCenter had evolved to a certain, to a sort of robotic loveliness. and some of the afternoon shows were getting more of a character and like, you know,

like Berman was just, just so Berman and he made NFL Countdown such a unique thing. But, yeah, I mean, the NFL Countdown, I mean, the most, to go back to your point, yes, these shows can never change.

I mean, there's a certain amount, there's a certain skeleton of these shows that never change. So when they're talking to each other from, you know, Maybe the table's bigger, but the conversations are basically the same thing. Maybe they're, you know, maybe the, the, the, the illustrators or whatever they're using are a little bit further away from the conversation. But yes, it's all very, they kind of hit their beats no matter what the game, the year, the decade, it all feels familiar.

And speaking of hitting their beats, the cast here is the hostess Sam Ponder, who had this really fast rise up the ESPN ranks. the analysts are Randy Moss, Teddy Bruske, Rex Ryan, and Matt Hasselbeck. Their whole sort of presentation on air to me was about hitting beats. It was about we're going to do football conversation at a slightly higher plane than what you see at Fox and CBS. Yeah. Fox and CBS is about big stars and it's about hijinks and laughing and cutting up and having a great time. We're going to do some of that. but this is going to be about doing a little more X's and O's,

having our stars be a little more prepped, right? And maybe forsaking megastardom of the kind of Berman variety for people who are just going to talk about football on a little bit of a higher plane. Agre with that? Totally. I mean, I think everybody,

justifiably, I mean, what comes to your mind when you think of like Fox's NFL show is just like, laughter, right? It's the sort of he-ha element of the whole thing. And that's, and I'm, and I'm sure that the directors of that show would prefer there be more laughter than less. You know, I mean, it's the sort of, that's, that is the, it brings you in. It makes you feel like you're part of this conversation that's going on way. On Sunday NFL countdown, I mean,

you can probably count the laughs on one or two hands, but, but the laughs almost all, I mean, there, there were, there were contrived knee-slapping moments, Rex Ryan's birthday celebration, etc. But most of the laughs that came out, well, organically, I guess, is a, you know, you can say, your mileage may vary. But the organic laughs came out of like some really sort of in the woods or, you know, like deep, like inside baseball moments. You know, there is like, like, like, you know, at the end of a, at the end of a fast-paced film study, someone else's voice will chime in and just be like, man, was that block legal? You know, and you're just like, I don't know. Am I supposed to know whether or not that?

block was like, I have no concept of the legality of that block, you know, whatever. But like, they're, they're just chuckling away at it, you know? And, uh, yeah. So it, overall, that it was more significantly more serious, more like information driven. I mean, not always data driven. There was a lot of, you know, let's go to Rex Ryan for what the coach would be telling his quarterback right now. Let's go to Teddy Bruske for what you want your, what, what the locker room is, is, is, is, just saying right now, but, so it's not all data. This isn't all, you know, Sabre metrics, but certainly information driven in a way that no other pregame show really is. I think you and I would say in theory that we are in favor of that. We want more sophisticated

football information than cutting up and hijinks and stuff like that. I felt countdown was right on the line of too much information. And information that sometimes was, was coming at me so fast that I got a little bit lost in it. Mm-hmm. And also information that made the hosts look like they were really trying to hit their marks. You know, the old cliche in the NFL about like a quarterback is thinking too much. It's a young quarterback and he's thinking about what he's supposed to do rather than just playing football. Sure.

There were moments of watching all of these people where it looked like they were thinking, what am I supposed to say here? Mm-hmm. what is the pre-researched fact that I either dug up or was given that I am supposed to unveil when they come to me here? Rather than just, this is what I think about the Buccaneers offense. There did seem to be a lot of verbal crutch. All of them had this sort of verbal crutch of actually restating sort of what you were getting at there. Oh, I got a film package prepared on this very subject. Or, you know, as I was reviewing the film, you know, like whatever, it was like setting up.

like a recited, you know, a can recited piece of information. Yeah, and it's not just the speaking. It's also the graphics. I mean, and all the other, you know, information you're being fed at the same time. Now, this is not specific to the show or to this network or anything else, but the level of just inundation of information that was going, I mean, it felt like, I know there's a lot of shows like this, but if you would watch, if you had looked at this even a couple years removed,

this is a level of information overload that only exists on like the the red zone channel. You know, I mean, it's like there's so much happening at one time or like a stock show on CNBC. You know, it's just like there's so many competing tickers with information and everything like that. And then the graphics come up and they're moving at a different pace and they're trying to title the segment that's happening without actually like, you know, identifying it as a concise piece of material. Yep. everything was there was a lot to take in and I think that that's

you know there's obviously a deliberate nature to that to really appreciate everything that they're that they're giving you you would have to dedicate yourself you have to fully engage with

the show to really get everything you want out of it and there's also an element to which they have a lot of different audiences here right I mean everybody from you know somebody's grandfather to the most dedicated

better or fantasy football player of the youngest generation, right? I mean, there are a lot of different people watching this show, and so there's a lot of different information they're trying to, they feel the need to convey it once. But it's interesting, I think,

going back to my original point, which is, to me, Sunday morning is not a time, I mean, for me, is not a fully, is not a time for full immersion in the product, and to sort of appreciate everything they're giving you, requires an incredible level of immersion.

Yeah, I thought it was very produced. You know, it often have these things where you see like a highlight and then a Tom Brady clip from his postgame press conference. And then it would go to Ponder and she'd be like, did you know in their last seven games the Buccaneers have done this and the fact is on the screen? The level of responsiveness of the graphics was just incredible.

I mean, and that just tells you how kind of prepare, I mean, how produced everything is. But yeah, I mean, every minor point would have like a related graphic. It was sort of stunning. It was a little bit much for me, to be honest. I probably could have cut that by 30% and been really happy, just with the information overload and the sort of graphic overload and just the,

even their outros when they were going to the break. It was sometimes as music, it sounded like I was watching the Sunday morning gospel hour, you know, because it had all these like testimony players going to the screen going, wake up, wake up, it's time for NFL countdown and this sort of soaring music. I do want to just track back to a point you made about 30 seconds ago, which is who are pregame shows for in 2020? There is a little bit of fantasy info,

hard news info there that comes from Adam Schefter, who gets these little 30 second shots and little duets with Chris Mortensen on that show. But a lot of that information you could find on Adam Schaefter's Twitter feed. Is the point of these shows that ESPN needs to, have something called NFL show that runs for three hours before football starts to make the NFL happy. We know they're chasing more NFL rights and to make money themselves. Or are these shows about taking editorial chances and being interesting and really trying to create a compelling product that is going to tell you something about football that you don't already know? Well, I mean, I don't know if this is the same, you know, if you meant to blanket this end with the first one.

But the, but the, you know, I think there's a third option, which is, I mean, there's, there's an audience just for people who are waking up and getting ready to watch football. You know, it doesn't, like, it's, it doesn't have to be the full number two, but it doesn't have to be quite as pandering as the, you know, the first option you gave. But it's a good question. I mean, I don't know the demographics. I don't know who's watching this show, but, but it does feel like, I mean, and listen, everything that we've said, even the, even the stuff that might sound negative shows an incredible

level of dedication and effort exerted to make this show what it is, right? To make this show the best version of what it is. I don't know. I mean, I don't know who the audience is anymore. And I mean, obviously, it's, you know, the dedicated all-day football watcher is probably the, you know, the target. But like I said before, that can mean a lot of different things. That can mean, you know, the person with three different fantasy teams versus the person who just loves football.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, who's a pretty casual fan, you know, in terms of the players and stuff like that. Yeah. And I do feel, I mean, I feel that in all of television right now, but I do feel when I watched countdown in pretty much any pregame show, that pull, right? Are we going for this younger audience that's very online? And are we going to like try to tell them something about fantasy plays today and daily fantasy and stuff that they, information they can really use, really cater to them. Uh-huh.

Kind of a little bit. Or are we going to people who are in their 50s and 60s who watch DSPN forever, who love the NFL and just kind of give them a, hey, here's who Stefan Diggs is kind of piece, which appeared, by the way, during countdown. It's a really interesting question. And I'm not, and I'm not sure there's any great answer to that question at this point. And probably when we talk about editorial chances and figuring it out, the single most important thing is just having a show called NFL.

before actual NFL football starts for a variety of reasons. Can I bring up a pet peeve I have? Please. With TV that reared itself on countdown. I call this monologue battle. This is something that happens on TV, it happens on podcasts, it happens on David and I's podcast when we don't catch ourselves doing it, which is that a person will just say a long thing into the camera,

and then it goes to another person, and they just say another long thing that is not related to what person A just said. And on count out that it goes to a third person and they deliver another long monologue. And everybody's trying to kind of spit out the facts that they've rehearsed and get it all in. And as a TV viewer, I'm kind of like, I really have trouble following the plot. Yeah. Like, it's all smart. It's all interesting.

But it's just like, what? Listen to Rex Ryan here. He'd been set up by Sam Ponder to talk about the Tampa Bay. Buccaneers offense and how it can run more efficiently. Here's what he said. Mel Moore with what Tom Brady wants to do. What do you think they can do differently today to get this thing right in? Well, Sam, I mean, Dan's report was amazing.

When you hear Harrison Smith an opponent saying they're more prone to throwing the ball down the field, they know it's not the answer. Today, man, let's put Tom Brady underneath center. And guys, you know it better than anybody. Nobody prepares better than this guy. This time of year, nobody plays better than Tom Brady. So to me, put it in his hands. Bruce, let's go right here.

But, man, run the football too. So it starts with Brady being underneath center. I think we'll see that today. If he's underneath center, good things will happen. Whether it's running the ball with Ronald Jones or the play action, the use of play action, let Brady have an opportunity to get his team into the playoffs. It's not going to be easy today because this. Minnesota Viking team, man.

I'm telling you, obviously, you want to see a team that knows what they're doing? Watch the Minnesota Vikings. So, tough game today. Now, on behalf of all sports fans, what? What? Did he just say? No, I'm still, I'm just still a real laughing.

The idea of monologue battle, as you called it, as if there should be like a remake of 8 Mile, but it's Max Kellerman coming up or something. Yeah, it's Max Kellerman and Rex Ryan. The, uh, it, I mean, we do. this. Everybody does this. I mean, it's a bit, it is, it does seem weird to show that it's this

carefully produced, right? And Rex Ryan was the king of the, I put a video package together when he, you know, I'm sure a nice team of people who are capable of putting these things together, but you see how deliberate everything is and then you just sort of have to riff, you see that the end result is riffing on sort of, just scatter shooting on like three different subjects all under the guise of whether or not they can fix Tom Brady on the fly this week. And the subjects included put the ball in Tom Brady's hands and run the ball more, which are actually contradictory instructions to Tampa Bay. And then he said they should also put Tom Brady under center.

And then he also said the Vikings offense is really good. And the reason I call it monologue battle is what happens when you get a big ball of yarn like that is the person who talks next doesn't know what to do with it. Yeah. They can't answer it. And so they start to try to answer everything he said. And again, I say this from experience because you and I do both of us do this. We'll uncork a long answer.

And then you look at the other one's face and they're like, uh, do I have to just try to track back and like answer all five weird points you just made? And then you stop having a conversation. You become very sympathetic. You become very sympathetic to debate tactics like, you know, whatever. about the emails or like what about hunter Biden you know it just at least you get to at least you get to propel the whole thing forward absolutely

and monologue battle is is just rampant and it it just sort of happens over and over again and it's all and again like part of this is right is these people on Sunday countdown are really prepared like they know this topic is coming and they have like three or four things they want to say so but what happens is they stop talking to each other it's not like hey Rex what's wrong

with the buck's offense here's what's wrong and randy moss says actually i disagree i think tom brady should do this and then the third person says you're both wrong they should just throw the ball down field whatever it is right say what you want about first take and shows like that they have very focused arguments we know what we are arguing about here or we know what we're discussing here but again if you listen to television listen to podcasts and i'm going to shut up because i'm doing it right now i'm doing it right now you will hear monologue battle everywhere Yeah. People not talking to each other, people doing almost Shakespearean drama where someone comes to the stage and speaks and then someone else comes to the stage and speaks.

Mm-hmm. I hate it. It's weird. But you got, so you have, you know, how many people were on there? Five people sitting around that table? Was it funny? And then, and all of them have done an obscene amount of work to prepare for this and they kind of all want to get all of their stuff in, right? I mean, that's not necessarily doesn't make the best content, but it's the show.

The show is supposed to be exhaustive, and they all want to, you know, let you know how much work they've done. And so you get, you get what we just heard. Two more notes that we'll get out of here. One is that I would love Sam Ponder to be an opinion person on this show in addition to being the host of the show. Because if you've noticed on pregame shows, they let the pundits play the host. Like Randy Moss was doing outros into commercials on this show. Yeah. But they rarely let the host play the pundit.

They should let Sam Ponder take aside in these football arguments. I want to hear what she says. There's a degree to which she's involved. And I don't mean she's not on full pundant level. But the way that she steers the conversations is certainly a form of punditry. I don't mean that like all journalism has a bias or anything. But, you know, there were times where the way she asked the question, I think sort of said more than some of the actual punditry that going on. But I agree. I mean, letting the, letting the players, you know, throw to commercial,

I don't know if it's true, but it always seems like a, like a, you know, that something that Terry Bradshaw sort of invented by like insisting on more roles in his contract negotiations, right? And more screen time or whatever at Fox. Is that a real thing or is that something I've just sort of imagined over the years? I don't know about the contract, but when Terry Bradshaw started doing highlights, that was the moment that the lines began to blur. Right. Yeah, I, I agree. I mean, I, and there's, I mean, I thought Randy Moss was really spectacular. I like Hasselbeck. You know, I think Rex Ryan in, you know, and Teddy Bruske, in doses or whatever.

But there is a sort of, well, I'll say sameness again, but in a different way. There's a sort of like sameness. So there's a certain sort of monotony that sort of takes over some of the punditry. And I don't think, I think having Sam Ponder more involved, would definitely be beneficial, especially because the shows that this is like, the shows that this is, that it reminds me of, I mean, ESPN is, seems like it's sort of inching towards a wider platform for host pundits, right? I mean, it's more, this felt certainly more like the jump than it did like NFL countdown from 10 years ago. So why not give the host more power on that front?

Final note, and I think this is part of the age of social distancing. But what do we think about ESPN using a giant round Jedi council in the Star Wars Prequels style table to put all their hosts and pundits around. This one of all of the

COVID area gigantic tables bothered me the least. Maybe it's just the average shoulder width of the people who were sitting around it, but it felt or maybe just the scale of the studio. it all felt like it like it sort of matched up. It just looks funny to me.

It does look funny, especially when they cut to Adam Schafter or whoever. And they're just like in the tightest camera shot in the smallest room of their house with the most things crammed in behind them. Morton said like 15 footballs just sort of randomly placed in the space behind him. It did it feel at that moment you realize how kind of different the whole thing feels. But yeah, it's, I don't know. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the table.

The space, though, felt weird, right? Because we went from like the sort of dignified, you know, man-cavey soundstage. And maybe it's more man-cavey, maybe it's more musty than man-cavey in the old era to now just sort of feeling very much like, more like get up. You know, you can see the, you know, you can see the river in the background. Well, we built the studio. So we better show you some New York. bay scenes, right? I mean, that's what that is.

And it's always funny to me. It works a little bit more on get up, I think, which is more of like a morning chat show. Yeah. But I'm just watching those. Like, why am I watching all these boats going through the river

on an NFL morning show? I don't, it's not bad, but it's just kind of funny. All right, David, in the interview slot today, Ken Lane,

you know I'm from Wanket, from the All. He lives in Joshua Tree, California. and in 2015 he started Desert Oracle, a print-only publication that concerns itself with fantastic tales of treasure and desert fauna, basically stuff that you and I think is really, really cool.

He is one of the true originals in journalism, as you will hear. Here's Ken. Ken Lane in his publication, Desert Oracle, once got a great compliment from the New York Times as John Herman. Herman said, I didn't hate myself for one second while reading this publication, publication. Every journalist, Ken, should aspire to that kind of praise. In his Joshua Tree Base Quarterly Lane has covered everything from the late night radio talk show host Art Bell to a

disappearing Boy Scout. And he has collected those stories in a new book called Desert Oracle, Volume 1, Strange True Tales from the American Southwest. Thank you for coming on the press box, Ken. Oh, thank you for having me. I want to talk about your history with the desert first. You go to high school in San Diego, you get your driver's license, and then you start heading out to the desert with your pals? Or alone. My pals, when I could convince somebody, but often just myself, you know, just on the back roads and the two-lane highways, listening to country music, AM and weird talk radio. What was striking about the desert for you at that age? The expansion. of it, the lack of fences and borders, really. I had come from New Orleans, which is a great city,

but it's small. It's kind of oppressive feeling. You can't see anything. There are no mountains. Every time it rains, you know, your house sinks another foot. So it was, it was very, it was very, cinematic. The first time I saw the desert was in movies as a kid and things like the Ten Commandments and Star Wars and Lawrence of Arabia, that kind of thing. And then you get out there, especially if you have the quiet of being alone or being with some people who know when to shut up, which media people, we often don't know when to do that. But sometimes if you're with people, who can be quiet and just kind of enjoy things and have your own little desert art movie, just being out in the middle of nowhere for no particular purpose.

So the desert is one of those things that actually lives up to the cinematic vision of the desert. It does. In fact, without the weather and the lack of humidity, if you're not used to lack of humidity, after a little while, your skin starts cracking and you start feeling like your body is kind of mummifying, right while you're still moving around. The living atmosphere of it,

the creatures you come across, just the intensity of things, is very different from normal life. And even when you're in a desert city, they've put in all this infrastructure to try to keep people from dying in the streets, you know, walking from their office or the casino to the parking garage. So you're somewhat insulated, even if it's 110 in the city. You told the San Diego reader that you made a resolution, I will live in a desert wilderness and be a writer.

Why was that attractive? I did not. Well, that was to the San Diego rear. That was specifically about San Diego. I lived in my high school years in San Diego. And it did not suit me. People love San Diego. If you ever go to San Diego,

like every other car has a bumper sticker about how much they love where they are, which is, that's great. I'm glad they enjoy it. But I did not. To me, it seemed like kind of the end of human culture. The dumb malls everywhere that were built in dry rivers.

So when it rained every four or five years, everything flooded and everybody was surprised. What is that? The tractomes, the kind of ignorance about the world, especially being next to this international border city. And being an international border city itself, but being totally unaware of it. So that sends you out to that at least it plants the dream of going out to the desert and someday of being a writer. I have pretty much since I first gave it thought, I wanted to be somewhere where I could get up and not see a neighbor's house and where I could see nature instead of people. And that's just like a personality disorder. You know, some people have it.

And in the old days, those people, they'd shuffle them off to the monasteries or something. Go to Egypt and live in a hole in a cave on a pile of bat guano. But in our time, you've got to kind of figure it out yourself. So a lot of people I know who had similar inclinations, they became park rangers, conservation workers. Yeah, yeah, those kind of jobs, right? I think a lot of journalists would have a couple of beers and say they'd love to create something like Desert Oracle.

But what is involved in actually going through with it and making a publication like that? It's a small business. It's a business. my my parents had a business a family business when I grew up so I got used to that I got used to my mom doing accounting at the dining room table at night and my dad having to get up in the middle of the night and go fix the refrigeration at a restaurant because it was open and it was his business and nobody else would do it you know a hourly worker wouldn't do it but a mature business

you have to do it. And I guess I just decided that's a normal way to live. So you do your own books, you're your own janitor. I design everything, which I love a lot more than bookkeeping. I assign the little bit of freelance that's in there. I deal with a handful of contributors. I sell the book. The way I got it in the stores was I took it around. and kind of went in there, you know, got into character, go in the door. Here it is. And most bookstore managers, and that's the door. But now and then you'd come across somebody and they recognize that there was something

unique about it. And I say, we'll take 10, see how it does. And I feel great. Driven four hours across southern Utah that day or something, going into hiking stores and a little. independent bookstores and then you get one. So there's a lot of little stuff like that. During the pandemic, I think probably a lot more people have had these ideas because you realize when you're sitting in home, like, well, I'm already doing it. I've made an office in my house.

I have to run everything. I have to run the tech. I have to keep the lights on. I have to do all these things that a company used to do, things that human resources and IT and stuff would do. And now I'm just here and I have to do it all. Why not do it myself? They're going to lay me off anyway. I'm in media. Yeah, Desert Oracle is a little bit like substack, except the terminally low-tech version of substack, come out quarterly, do it on paper, et cetera.

Yeah, I mean, low-tech in the sense that it's intentionally a print publication, and I don't put the editorial online, but the way that it's sold and the way everything works is the way things work now. So I do it all on my computer. If I didn't have broadband, it'd be very difficult to do. I couldn't talk to you if I wasn't in one of the small parts of the Joshua Tree area that has broadband, because we'd be on weird Mojave Wi-Fi that's over the air, internet that goes out when the wind blows. How do you do things like decide how big this thing is going to be? Because it's about in periodical form, it's about the size of like a postcard, large postcard.

How do you go about picking that? Yeah, that was intentional. There were a couple of things behind that. For one thing, a lot of desert books that I collected of mid-century and going into the 70s, they all kind of had the same scheme. You know, they'd have like yellow covers. And then usually one, sometimes two colors. This one has two because this is a Stanford University Press.

But usually it would just be books would have one color. And the color was a cheap way of showing this is a desert book. So you could get like Death Valley off road trails or old mining camps of Joshua Tree or Inyo County. or something. And they would be fairly small because they were made for your glove compartment of your Jeep. So they'd be about like about the size of a greeting card. And you'd put them in your pocket or you'd put them in your glove box or up on the dashboard. And I used to have a pile of these things on a dashboard of my old international scout. And I thought that's a, it's a good feel because it's practical. It really does fit in your pocket. In fact, I measured desert.

Oracle, it will fit in a pair of jeans pockets, like regular Wranglers or Levi's or whatnot. And the other thing that I was thinking, six years ago when I started Desert Oracle, was, well, people aren't reading too much anymore. This was the time when you'd seen it happen between about 2011, 2014 or so, that you'd get on a train or an airplane or something. if you were in the city. And all of a sudden, over this couple of year period, instead of having newspapers, magazines, books, everybody had the thing, the phone. And they weren't necessarily, as soon as the cell speeds got a little better, they weren't even reading on the phones. They were watching TV shows. And I remember going back to Gawker.

And I believe it was 2013. And I always loved going back for work trips because that would be like the hit comes into the city. And I get to see all the interesting city things. And I got on the subway from Brooklyn going into the office on Elizabeth Street at the time. And it was a further. I hadn't been in the city for probably eight months or so. And everybody was watching shows. and a couple of people had headphones splitters,

so they were watching shows together on one tablet, one iPad or something. And I thought, if I'm going to make any inroads with people who are, say, younger than 50, I better make it comfortable so it feels like they're kind of holding their little phone. So that size also worked well for that. So it's a weird trim size.

I pay extra for it because it's not one of the normal trims sizes. And so that means the paper costs more because there's a little more paper waste and they have to run it on a separate machine and reset it. So it's a little bit more trouble, but it stands out. It doesn't quite look like anything else. And when you mail it, it's in an A7 envelope. That's like a greeting card wedding invitation envelope. So it feels like something better when you get it in the mail. It's not the size of a bill and it's not the size of a catalog. It's a happy. It's a happy. medium between the two. I love in your first issue, you did some real estate listings in the back. And these were, these were real, I believe, missile silo near Roswell, New Mexico.

And the silo is 10 stories deep and has been remodeled as a home with a kitchen bath, et cetera, $295,000. That's a good price for a silo. It is. My thought early on was because whenever I went to a small desert or rural town, a small town anywhere, First thing a lot of people do, and I do it too, is you'd pick up the local paper, the Mountaineer Gazette or whatever it was called, and go right to the back to the real estate ads and start dreaming about living there. I could do this.

I'd get a quarter acre here or maybe get three acres here for 180,000. And all you got to do is put in a septic tank and you can have a toilet and it's like civilization. So I thought early on that maybe realtors would be interesting. in doing advertisements in the back for desert properties, kind of retreat properties that were geared especially toward people who would be interested in Desert Oracle. So people who are interested in nature and conservation, in quiet, in history, that kind of thing. As it turned out, real estate ads have totally gone to online and it wasn't necessary. So I did not continue that. But if I ever got some letters or emails from realtors saying,

hey, we got just the kind of properties we'd like to sell to your readers. I think it didn't because it's a kind of journalism in itself, you know, those property listings or give you a sense of the place. Absolutely, especially missile silos. And the other one I loved was the underground bunker near Barstow. Oh, yeah. Certain romance to that as well, you know. That's not a lot of people would volunteer to live in Barstow,

but if maybe you had, it seemed like a thing that of Elvis had found that maybe in his last years when he was going back and forth between Palm Springs and Vegas, be a good place for Elvis to sort of drop in and do some of his occult rituals, need some chicken. How did you, how many subscribers did you start out with in 2015? Well,

I started with zero. It was a brand new publication. Within, and here's the hypocrisy of this, he got off the internet thing, is only because I knew people on the internet, primarily through Twitter and things like that, that there were some initial subscribers. And those subscribers were mostly media people, media people being the people that used to be influencers before that became just a class of consumer. So I probably had 200 subscribers by the time the first issue mailed, which I mailed out of my house. And it went up incrementally.

And then the LA Times did a feature, a front page feature, what they call a, oh, they've canceled this. It was a wonderful thing. Column one. Column one used to be kind of an in-depth thing. as a Deborah Netburn and their science reporter did a column one on Desert Oracle when the second issue was out before the third issue came out. And that was a fun thing. I remember going home and looking at the computer and PayPal was processing my subscriptions at the time, all of them, and watching, oh, another 10 minutes. Another one came in.

So that added probably 500, 600 subscribers. in the course of a couple of days. And then I thought, all right, I can manage this for a little while. I can't on this amount, but at least you can see kind of a light at the end of the tunnel. And so it's kind of steadily gone up since. Now you have a few thousand now? I have, well, this is another funny thing about the media coverage. I had about 3,700 on the last mailing, and we've added about 1,000 this week.

So now we're going toward 5,000, which when you're a very small operation, I have one day a week, part-time help here in town. Megan, if you subscribe, that's who writes back to you and says you don't put it in your your zip code or something, who works from home now, like everybody. And with one kind of mostly unpaid full-time person, myself, and then one day a week from Meg, then you see like a thousand subscribers come in. It's not like Quibi or whatever.

You know, a thousand subscribers come in. You said, okay, that's doable. because I've got these expenses. I've got these fixed expenses with printing. I've got this and that, postage, whatever. That looks all right. Our subscription prices are good right now. I feel like every journalist keeps two lists of stories.

They have the stories their publication will want to print. And then they have a second list of stories that are stories they actually really, really want to write. And when I read Desert Oracle, it feels like it's entirely from the second list. That's exactly what it is. And to prove your point, a couple of the pieces and early issues were things that I managed to get into Gawker or The All, where I worked for a while with Corey and Alex Balk. Because I would always come in with this stuff. I remember going to John Cook, who's at Business Insider now, Investigations editor.

I think. And I said, look, Art Bell is coming out of retirement. And he's going to have a show on Sirius XM. And John's like, Art Who? And I said, he's like, you know, truckers listen to him on the highways about UFOs and stuff. It was great. And so I want to go out there for a couple of days and see if I can talk to him. He doesn't like to come out of his trailer in the desert. And it made no sense to anyone else but me. So those kind of things I would kind of hang on to. And if I did manage to write a little something about that for somebody, I had those all in a folder, kind of about, you know, stories I liked. And then I could expand on those and write more. And it's, you know, if you read the magazine, I don't even have leads. You know, I hate leads for features. You don't.

There's no, there's no peg, you know, you just go right into the thing. Right into the thing. Right into the thing as if you're telling the story at a campfire. So when I started doing live events like campfire stories, it was so easy to do because I was already writing that way. And I realized, I'm kind of, I'm doing it in sort of a old Western storyteller sort of way, where you just drop right into the story and you fill it in as you go. You don't start with like a cute anecdote that you're going to wrap it up with at the end. And it was, you know, it was, it was such a relief. I don't have to write leads. No one's going to say put a lead on that. Let's, uh, I want to talk about a few stories that spoke to me. I want to start with Art Bill.

He is, was the host of a show called Coast to Coast A.m., which ran really late at night. He died in 2018. You call this show uncomfortable, laughable, utterly paranoid, completely of its time and occasionally terrifying. What was, what was the pull of coast to coast A.m. AM for you. All of that. It was theater of the mind and it just brought you right in. Late night radio has always been different. It's always been for the oddballs for the insomnia acts, for the graveyard shift. And every big city over the years, going back to the 60s, really when the kind of paranormal late night show started happening. They had this kind of formula,

and it was a combination of sort of a dry host, and then these callers who could be anything from pranksters to lunatics, to religious fanatics, to people who were really spooked. And in the right environment, what was so great about Art Bell is, especially at his peak in the 90s, you could be driving across the desert, just this kind of forlorn, dark wilderness.

You haven't seen another pair of headlights and a half hour. Your eyes were kind of watching for cops hiding somewhere or wildlife crossing the road. And he'd be on six or seven different AM stations that you're pulling in from different places. You know, Salt Lake, Las Vegas, KGO, I think, up in the Bay Area. Los Angeles Station, KFI, he was on there.

So depending on where you are, you just kind of go through until you found a good signal. And then you listen, and it'd be half sort of laughing at how dumb it was. Somebody would be in there. Well, Art, I figured it out. What it is is these railroad depots. They're actually alien ship depots. and the entire Transcontinental Railroad was built as a ruse, you know,

and you're, what the hell? But then somebody would call in, and it would just be kind of, you'd feel like it was random, but it was really Art Bell, who was his own engineer, he didn't screen, and so the callers just came in,

and he was very deadpan. He'd be kind to people that he believed. He'd be kind of dismissive, but still polite to the people, he thought he was trying to put him on. And he took no guff. But then somebody would get on there with something that just made your hair stand up, you know, in the back of your neck, especially if you're out in the middle of nowhere.

So I remember driving once and this guy was calling saying that he was flying over Area 51. Yes. And in a small plane, you know. This is a famous call, right? to the coast to coast. Oh, it was, yeah, there's, it's, it's one of the YouTube greatest hits. And this was 97, 98 or something. And a lot of those famous bits came from that era that was like peak art bell.

And it's suddenly you're part of the story because you're out there too. And you're driving and you don't know what's going on. Or maybe you're in a little cabin or a tent with a little radio that you're trying to fall asleep too because the sounds are too weird outside. And you're drawn right in. So it was a beautiful kind of theater. Yeah, you noted two things that I loved about that show too in your piece. One is that he had separate phone lines for east and west of the Rockies,

as if the Rockies were the true dividing line of America, which I really appreciated. And the second one was he would be talking about UFOs or the shadow people or, you know, mysterious creatures, and then he would come back from break with Abba's dancing queen. Oh, yeah. Oh, I loved his bumper music. Which just felt so just amazing when put together. And hearing, by the way, hearing dancing queen in the middle of the night is a kind of a spooky experience of its own, you know, right up there flying over the alien. Especially on like a bad AM signal where it's kind of echoing on itself, sort of ghostly.

It's like these spirits. and he had a lot of famous bumper music like that. I mean, Ava was one of his favorites, but you'd have this, and they were songs from kind of his heyday as a music DJ. He was a music DJ in the 70s, and in the 80s he kind of transitioned. So his musical knowledge stopped

when he was no longer a music DJ. And so there were these odd little time capsules that would come in. And it also made it, There was something that made the use of the pop music very atmospheric in the sense that it made it seem every day. He wasn't playing spooky music. He wasn't playing things that sounded creepy or weird or whatever. It was just like, yeah, this is part of life.

I'm a weird old man sitting in a trailer in Perump, Nevada, listening to Abba. And now we're going to talk about reincarnation and shadow people. Another piece I really liked. Will you tell us about the interest in subterranean caverns in Death Valley? Oh, this is, this is, Ned, the most interesting thing to me in researching those stories, and I'd known a little of the folklore, you pick it up here and there, about not only subterranean remains, ruins under Death Valley, but in mountains throughout the west. There's this idea of these underground chambers where there's stuff going on.

In researching the Death Valley stories, and there were two main threads of that in that piece. One was a couple of miners who were looking for a lost mine at Wingate Pass, Wingate Pass in the Panama Mountains south side of Death Valley National Park. and they claim they slipped into a hole in an alluvial plane, which sounds kind of goofy until you've ever tried to climb an alluvial plane. It's just debris and dirt and dust and rocks. And there are holes, and you'll step wrong.

I mean, they usually don't go to another civilization, but they'll go down long enough to break your ankle. And so they fell into this kind of depression and then realize that there was a chamber, a slanting chamber, that went off from it. They go down there and report that they found evidence of a lost civilization. There's like these warriors clad in strange gear, kind of Egyptian in nature. And they see gold. There's gold spears.

And there's chambers that looks like they have horse stables in them and everything. So they come out and they try to get people to go help them. and they hire this guy to do a press conference in Los Angeles. And it appears in the newspaper and on the wires and they try to get the Smithsonian to buy their discovery. They can never find it again. But that story eventually gets repeated on a TV show called Death Valley Days when Ronald Reagan was the host. And there's a guy named Charles Manson in prison up in the Bay Area. He sees this show.

He puts it in the back of his mind. And that's where he takes the family as they're sort of prepping for helter-skelter. And it's where he takes them to Barker Ranch in the Panama. It's right by Wingate Pass. I mean, you could walk in half a day. That's where they hide out. And that's where the sheriffs and the National Park Service Rangers, California Highway Patrol, find the family, take them to the courthouse in Inno and Independence in the eastern

Sierra and later connect it with the murders in Los Angeles. The stories end up echoing the Greek stories, the Greek mythologies of going into the underworld and recovering souls. I mean, Powell, who did the surveying of the Colorado River, he thought it was the same story. And Manson's idea is that they're going to commit these murders and start this race war, and then he's going to take him and his followers into one of these subterranean caverns. Right. hide out while it all rages around the United States. Yeah, and it's a paradise. You know, it's a paradise under the desert.

He's telling them all these stories. He's having these visions. He sits and meditates at Devil's Hole, where the endangered Devil's Hole pupfish is, one of the few places where there's waters sloshing out of Death Valley and gets these kind of channeled messages of what he thinks is down there. So then he drags some of the family around, some of the more gullible ones to the hot springs around Death Valley and tries to get them to dive

into the hot springs to see how deep they go. Of course, it's hot. So they dive in and they get their skin is burning and they come out, I'm sorry, Charlie, we can't do it. So they start tying rocks to ropes and trying to lower them to see how deep it goes and where it's going to open up and where there's oxygen. Because he said there's going to be magic trees. There's a magic. There's a magic tree that has a different fruit for every month of the year and you get full nutrition from it and it's from some sort of alternate god or whatever. You also did a really important act of service journalism, Ken,

which is tracking down the locations from the first Star Wars movie. Oh, I love doing that. Yeah. And I'd always assumed, even as a Star Wars person, that most of those shots came from Tunisia when George Lucas and company went there. But they got what they could get out there and then they came back, and it turns out that a lot of those really iconic visuals came from California. Yeah, and this struck me kind of deeply because I was a kid when Star Wars came out in 77, 78.

And I saw it in the movie theaters in New Orleans. I see it about once a week at the little neighborhood theater because it was air conditioned. was a dollar. So by the end of that summer, I knew like every word of that movie. That and smoking and the bandit. That was the other big hit in the south that year. And when I got out to Death Valley for the first time, it was in Death Valley when I was probably 17, 16, something like that. I remember standing outside while the car was getting worked on my International Scout. The PVC valve was leaking. So oil was burning on the back of the engine and it smelled like the whole engine was going, but it was just the valve and a leap.

So they're fixing that at Baker off the 15. I'm standing there and looking at these mountains and it was freezing cold and the sun was coming up. And I said, I want to wake up and see this. Why do I have to wake up and look at the neighbor's power boat on a trailer out of my bedroom window. And it resonated in a way that seemed like I'd been there before. And so just a few years before Desert Oracle started, this book came out about the making of Star Wars, like a big compendium of recollections from crew members and things like that. And that's where I saw that a lot of these shots that I, like you, thought have been done in North Africa because all the press about Star Wars was like they made the desert planet in Tunisia. There was no mention of the

Mojave Desert of California, of anything like that. And a bunch of those scenes, including when they're looking down the robots and Luke Skywalker and Alec Guinness are looking down at the space port town where they're going to find the canteena and space transport. That's Death Valley. That's from Christ. So if you're in Death Valley, go up to Dante's View, which is the same place or very near the place, opposite side of the same road, where Zabriski Point was filmed. And there's a real place called Zabrisky Point.

You look down and they filled in a bit of what the town would be with, I guess, like a mat painting. But it's Death Valley. And then where the robot R2D2 gets captured, they shot that in a canyon on the artist's loop, the drive south of Pernas Creek that every tourist does. You drive out and there's little canyons. So it looks like it's the middle of nowhere,

each of these scenes, including the one with the sand people on their elephant. It's a real elephant. And it turns out they borrowed from a wildlife park in the Bay Area and hung Palm Franz all over it. That's how they got there and put like big horn horns on the side of it. And all these places are just feet off the road. And so, you know, you think like, oh, I'm going to have to go march miles and miles to try to find this location.

They were in a bunch of trucks. They didn't march any distance at all. They parked. They got out. And the Jawa's that take away R2D2 were the children. of Park Rangers. That's amazing, which is amazing. Yeah, you said that in the book

and I thought that was incredible. Yeah. Imagine being able to tell your kids that. I'm one of those. I don't care. I don't care. I'm playing Minecraft. I want to ask one more for you, Ken.

This may be a little newsy for Desert Oracle, but it's a Desert Oracle kind of story. What did you make of the monolith that was found in Utah? I think it's one of those stories that comes up now. and then that people put together in newsrooms far away from where it happened. And people like goofy stories. It's fine.

I don't want to whine about it. But I'm waiting for the Hulu documentary or whatever comes out of it. The long-form podcast. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's it seems, it feels like a scam. I know organically, people are putting them up in different places. because it's fun.

You can see what they look like and they don't exactly match. It was, whoever did it, it seems to be involved with a gallery in New Mexico, but whoever did it, it was clever,

and it, people love mysteries like that, and especially after all the terrible news we've had for most of a year, it is nice to see something trending that makes you kind of, to smile or shake your head or something and not just, you know, weep and despair. So I'm fine with it. I think it's fun. It doesn't really have anything to do with the desert other than

that's where they dropped it because it's cinematic. It looks like the 2001 opening with that little Red Rock Canyon around it. There you go. All right, get Ken Lane's book Desert Oracle, volume one right now. You can also go to Desertoracle.com to subscribe and get new issues when he puts them out. Thank you for coming on the press box, Ken. Oh, thanks for having me on the press box. All right, it's time for David Schuemaker. Guess is the strained pun headline. Light applause from David.

You sound like everybody after the nurse got the COVID vaccine. Thursday's headline about a KFC lifetime movie was Love Me Tenders. Today's headline comes from Steve Bonifero. It's from Vox. The piece is about museums, David, and how they're dealing with two huge challenges. One, the pandemic. Can't go to a lot of museums. and to some of the larger questions about inclusion and diversity that were raised this year.

So museums have got challenges. What was Vox's strained pun headline? That's not a lot to go on. What am I working with here? Is it played at the museum? Would you say? Played at the museum. Wow.

Done. Yeah. Plight at the museum. Oh my gosh. See, that just. He just swooped in and grabbed that one. Chris Almeida didn't need much to work with. Not at all.

Speaking of Chris Almeida, David, we're saying goodbye to a friend today. Chris Almeida is moving on. Sounds that sounds and sounds too much. Chris Almeida will be taking an experimental vaccine. Chris Albaed is leaving the ringer. You've heard to say his name at the end of every one of these shows because he provides an invaluable service.

He helps us write these segments. He does tons of research on these segments. What you don't hear is when David and I screw up a fact, Crystal Madele will pop onto our Zoom call, actually, you know, France is in Europe, David, or more likely, Brian. So we edit those parts out of the show. But he plays an enormous role in this podcast and has, and we are going to miss him desperately.

It's true. it was uh i mean this has been this show's been a work in progress for a long time but i can definitely say i mean it still feels like the beginning in a lot of ways but we wouldn't be where we are at all without almeda without with out with out chris you know being our backstop being our researcher being our writer being um uh are you know puppeteer and more to the point yeah uh uh and And, yeah, we're really going to miss him. So open invitation, Chris, to come back, guess the strain pun headline, save us from ourselves.

Anytime. I'll be sending plenty of listener mail. Don't worry. Oh, there we go. Listener mail. You go right to the front of the line when you've actually worked on the show. So that'll be. All right.

So with the final time, he is David's shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Chris Almeda. Sniff. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. On Thursday, David Axelrod is here. You know him as a CNN analyst and Obama campaign guru. He was also a very, very good and very successful political reporter in Chicago.

We're going to talk to him about all of it. Plus, of course, more work more than takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Ryan.