The Press Box - Who Won the ESPN-NFL Deal? Plus, the WaPo Exodus Continues and a Report From SummerSlam

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Hello, media consumers! Bryan and Davis recount their trip to Part 2 of SummerSlam last night (0:20) before tackling some headlines, including ESPN and NFL moving forward with their proposed blockbuster media deal, more heavy hitters leaving The Washington Post, and an upcoming Kamala Harris book (22:00). They also discuss Bryan's brief time in used-book heaven at the Brattle Book Shop in Boston, and offer a remembrance of his Uncle Rod (44:15). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline! Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David ShoemakerProducer: Kyle Crichton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Danny Kelly, and it's officially fantasy football season, which means the ringer fantasy football show is back with the latest news from around the NFL and everything you need to get ready for the fantasy football season. So join us at the ringer fantasy football show on Spotify or on our new YouTube channel. David? Yes. You and I went to SummerSlam last night. Night two of SummerSlam. Yeah, we saw half the show.

We took an Uber to MetLife. aka home of the New York Giants and New York Jets. We had some paper tickets. Oh, yeah. Somebody reacted to the photo I posted on Twitter and said, are those actual sports tickets of your in your pocket? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure you know this from going around and covering all the games

and stuff that you've done. But every wrestling event, it's all up to the stadium. So every time you go, it's a whole new thing. What app you have to download? what, you know, if it's a ticket master joint or if it's like they have the stadium specific app or whatever. But it's been a while for paper tickets, I think for me

too. You know, there was a period of time where you sort wandered up and there was someone nominally in charge who would reach into an envelope full of tickets for your comps and give them out or whatever, you know. But yeah, this was this was old school. This was like you're waiting in line at the

at the staple center for, you know, some magical tickets to appear. Or to take it back any further when you go up to the box office at Reunion Arena and so I got like two for the Mavericks and they give you two of Michael Finley's

personal tickets that he returned because nobody wanted them. That actually happened to you and I. We should know for people. I think that was you and someone else. I had such an amazing time last night. First of all, I love any sporting event that starts in daylight

and ends at night. There's nothing like it. And I turned to you during the John Cena Cody Rhodes main event and was like, just look at the way these guys are lit. I will remember that match because it was a great match. Plenty more on that over on the Ring of Wrestling Network. You will enjoy all of the details there. But I think the image in my mind of sitting next to you

will just be how that looked like an old-fashioned photograph of a great wrestling or boxing match. Yes, it absolutely did. I mean, listen, they have the, they do this a lot, WWE. They've got the lighting and staging and everything down to a science, but they change things up for the big events. To me, the real treasure is the daylight stuff, because it is unusual.

We were talking some yesterday, but one of the, like, old man gripes that I have about pro wrestling is that every, they spend the vast majority of their time in pro basketball arenas, and they're all exactly the same. Like, so every Monday night, every Friday night, it looks exactly the same. You know, there used to be more character. They used to, you know, if you want to go run in whatever,

the Bay Area you had to play the Cow Palace or, you know, whatever. Like there are all these places with some history and with a different setup. Now it's all the same. But, but man, in the daylight, that, I mean, that's just a unique look every time. My favorite part of the event was the way you and I talk to each other during a wrestling match. Longtime listeners of this podcast know that David and I became friends at age 14 because of professional wrestling. And at that moment, we started speaking to each other in a very, very particular way that continued last night. It's part podcast, watch-along, mystery science theater 3,000, part impressing each other with specific references to things that happened in wrestling.

decades before. Yeah, callbacks for sure. It's part imitating wrestling announcers. Well, everything we do is about,

I'd say, it's 75% in some Jim Ross inspired drawl. It's like, my God, David, they're getting out

the Slim Jim branded tables. Yeah, exactly. And then there's an over layer of actual commentary

about the match. Yeah. Because this is a good wrestling match. Is this a disappointing wrestling match? Yeah, and a lot of those things are matched together, you know, just like, like, God, King, that didn't go according to plan or, you know. A little botcha mania here, King. And just like, we got a five-star classic on our hands, guys. Yeah. And what I love is in addition to the any night spent with you where you and I are just like having a great time and is, you know, just doing it like the old days in the Lory's side, that's

incredibly fun. But I just appreciate the fact that you and I don't say, hey, we're going to start talking like this. It would be more awkward if we did. Exactly. It's like go to a Spotify playlist and be like, track one. Here we go. Shoemaker and Curtis are back at it, man. That was so much fun. By the way, we had a guy sitting behind us last night that I have to mention. He was doing the, I'm appreciating the spectacle in front of me and also trying to show off my insider knowledge of the wrestling business. Yeah, I was able to ignore most of this, but go ahead. And he was yelling out kind of jokey things every couple of minutes.

Yeah. And all of these. Hey, guys. Hey, this is my least favorite type of fan, but go ahead. This is a smart fan. I believe that's the term in wrestling for this. Mm-hmm. But he would yell out something and then it would completely bomb with all 60,000 people in attendance.

And so he would just yell. yell it again like five seconds later. And you and I are looking at each other like, no, no, no, that's not how you handle this. You handle this the Brian and David way, where only we are hearing the annoying comments. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, listen, it's hard to stick a really insidery joke in a crowd like that. You're much better off just playing straight, just being like, yeah, it's cheering for the heroes and booing the villains. Or maybe you reverse it, you know? But like, you try to get too insidery. I think everybody's just sort of exhausted,

but then insider knowledge now. We'll talk about more about Unreal later, as you said. Let's do that right now, because speaking of insiderdom, there's this new show on Netflix that has notes of the F1 show Drive to survive, but it's about... Notes of hard knocks as well, yeah.

Notes of hard knocks, but it's about wrestling. It's called Unreal. They put five episodes out, and you and I had a chance to look at this, And the idea here is that we're not just going to tell you about pro wrestling and show you the matches. We're going to show you the behind the scenes writer's room. Wrestling has a showrunner. Wrestling has writers, just like any television show.

Decision makers, yeah. Decision makers. And so we're going to show you those people picking who's going to win the wrestling match, how they're going to win, what story is going to be told over a number of weeks or a number of months. Yeah. It's, I mean, one could imagine if you're a diehard fan of some TV show, everybody, you know, would love to get a window into the writer's room if you love a show. There's certainly some shows that have been big where they kind of have podcasts that emanate from the writer's room or like the writers reacting to the shows, that sort of thing,

and you get a window into it that way. But at the end of the day, the stakes are relatively low, right? I mean, it's a lot of time by the time you're hearing that, and in this case, by the time you're seeing the show, the decisions have already been made. You've already seen the fallout from it. But what separates for wrestling in all the weird sort of subtle ways that it's sort of better than what you would compare it to. What separates wrestling from a TV show is that like there are real human beings whose careers and feelings are at stake in all these decisions. You know, it's like, hey, let's put CM Punk in the main event. And then the conversation just goes sideways. And they're like, but what about Jay Uso? You know, and then all of a sudden they're

figuring out a way to do that. And tell people the consequences of that. So if you, if you don't give somebody what they call a push. If you don't put them in the bigger matches or the main event, they sell fewer t-shirts. Their career is adversely affected. In this case, they kind of split the baby because they ended up putting Sienpong in a different match, which was the night one main event. And then J.U. So got the title match, which was not technically a main event, although I guess they probably said it was a main event, even though it wasn't last either night. But yeah, if you don't get that, I mean, listen, wrestling is such a weird, because it really is like there is real competition you're competing for the fans

adoration or hatred you know you're competing for TV time you're competing for that exposure but at the end of the day it's not just like you know open mic night where like you just you decide who cheers who got the most cheers you have someone has to make the decision of how much screen time somebody's getting you know what position are you are you in who who's the guy that you're in the ring with because that can make a big difference about your reaction as well. So, you know, those decisions actually really do matter. I occasionally meet people who are not like us.

They're not in the wrestling bubble. And they say, look, I love the idea of a crazy over-the-top spectacle, the camp that is pro wrestling. Mm-hmm. But why should I care about a fake fight? Yeah. And the purpose of the show seems to be to answer that question for people. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of kind of purposes for the show.

people like us have been doing this forever, but fans forever have had a bunch of different answers over the years. But it basically blows down to like, well, why do you care about one of John Wick's fake fights? You know, like why do you have a vested into like when he pulls out his gun? Do you just take that opportunity to go to the bathroom?

Like I don't think, no, that's the part that you're there to see, right? Like you want to see him win, how he wins, what he overcomes? You know, everything that's been told in the movie up to that point

leads up to. the fight that you and now you care about seeing someone get their comeuppance or you know him prevailing over evil or not or losing and having to regroup and and try again in act three um and that's all to say nothing of the fact that these guys are just and women are incredible athletes so we're at a we're at like a real i bill talked about this with cody roads a little bit in his podcast last week uh we're at a real pinnacle of just like athleticism and the ability to tell stories in the ring. I mean, I guess you could make the case that the storytelling component might have hit its peak at some point in the past or that it's always been, you know, at its, the best of the best

is always kind of as good as it can get. But in terms of what you can actually do in the ring, the, the gymnastics, the, you know, just the flips, the moves, the pain tolerance. I mean, we saw a number of people get slammed through tables and ladders and whatever else from high, from great Heights last night. It's, this is as good as it's ever been. 100%. I mean,

you and I looked at each other dozens of times last night with mouths open like, oh my God. Yeah. That thing just happened, a few feet in front of us. Do you think that the modern podcast

discourse where something happens in House of the Dragon and then we have a big moment, a national discourse, if you will, where we get mad at the showrunners or we congratulate the showrunners for what they did?

Do you think that has normalized pro wrestling? It's a good question. I mean, I actually think a lot of it, I mean, to some small extent, comes from the pro wrestling discourse where you just get mad at the people making the decisions. And wrestling, it's just a little bit more, it's always been a little bit more of a vibrant conversation

because it's live, right? If something happens you don't like, it's not like, man, they made a bad decision six months ago when they were sitting in an office in Los Angeles. No, it's like, no this this guy who's in charge of the stories who I know and remember as a wrestler made a really stupid decision last night and he has time to course correct right now if I just complain loud enough right um so it's it's a much more of an intimate conversation

uh an urgent conversation i should say um but yeah no i do think that that in a lot of ways the curtain has been pulled back in writers rooms and everything else i mean we didn't know what a showrunner was five, six years ago or whatever, and now it's just like everybody knows who every showrunner of every show is. And yeah, I mean, in a lot of ways, wrestling is professionalized over the past decade or two. So there's all these people and all these different roles

and you can kind of go one to one understand what it is that they're doing. And yeah, I think that helps. I think that helps pull the curtain back a little bit. Honestly, I think, though, the most important thing about a show like Unreal is in the same way that like hard knocks or whatever, We'll spend an episode with the, whatever, the rookie special teams guy who's trying to make the team,

and it shows you him in his real life and you meet his family, and then you have, like, a human interest in him. There's some of that. But really what takes wrestling from a, from a hobby to a passion is that second degree knowledge about the wrestlers and what goes on behind the scenes. And we diehard fans have been reading this stuff online, you know, like we know all the rumors. we know whatever, you know, whatever else. If you care enough about wrestling, you'll get into it. But what this show does is allow the casual viewer to have those conversations immediately. Like, you know what's at stake.

Because it's cool. Like, I want to see, you know, like I like Jay Uso. I want to, you know, if you're watching this when they're filming the show and the lead up to WrestleMania, man, I love Jay So he's getting these great responses. Like, they should make him a star or whatever. But you don't really have, but the deeper conversation, and it's really not that much deeper, but it's like Jay Uso has been with this company forever. He deserves this opportunity.

at all he's done, you know, whatever. Or you might say, oh, there's backstage, you know, you have to make the decision between CM Punk and J Uso and you kind of argue about the merits, you know, who deserves to be in that spot. And this brings anyone who wants to turn it on into that kind of level of that second degree of fandom. We're all dirt sheet readers now. Absolutely.

Last note here. On Thursday, David, we got another installment of our favorite think piece. politics is like pro wrestling now. Oh, no. Donald Trump is bringing back the presidential fitness test of our Reagan-era youth when young Brian and young David

were forced to do a sit-up and do a distance run around the elementary school playground. I haven't even pulled up what the criteria was. I remember being terrified of the pull-ups. Like, I knew I could not do a pull-up. None of us good.

Was it one pull-up? Was that the bar? I'm pretty sure it was one pull-up. Yeah. I read that the original fitness test involved a softball throw. And according to Wikipedia, that was supposed to mimic young boys throwing a grenade so they could later serve in the military. What? We were a little bit out of that era by the 80s.

Well, Donald Trump, in addition to bringing back the fitness test, David, put together a new presidential council on sports, fitness, and nutrition. and that council, and here comes our think piece, includes Triple H, aka Paul Leveck. Do you think Hulk Hogan would have been on this council had he lived? You would think there would be some disqualifying elements to Hogan, but no, he would have definitely been on it, yeah.

Lawrence Taylor's on the council. Yeah, true. Put it that way. By the way, this whole list, Nick Bosa, Gary Bettman, Gary Player, Tony Romo, Anika Sorenstam, Harrison Butker, he could have guessed that,

Bryson DeCambeau, and this quarterback of the Miami Dolphins who Donald Trump struggled to pronounce. And Tua Tag Ovalia, the quarterback who is really, he's been fantastic. He's been, when he's not injured, he's great.

He's got to stay healthy. And he's a great guy. Well, he did get the Tua career trajectory correct. He has struggled to stay healthy. I also love this tweet from Stephanie McMahon, who is, of course, the wife of Triple H, a.k. And the daughter of the embattled slash canceled Vince McMahon. She tweets, I'm so proud of you, Triple H.

You have talked about the president's counsel on physical fitness since we first got married over 20 years ago. Now, David, given all the great successes in Triple H's life and career, was he talking about this council for 20 years? That's, it seems like a weird thing to be true, but an even weirder thing to make up. So, yes, I imagine, you think he's just out there just like looking at kids running around on the playground when he takes his kids out and he's just like, these boys have such skinny arms. if only they were forced to do a pull-up. If only I could be the Arnold of the 2020s. Oh, my God.

Someday I'm going to be WWE champion. I'm going to gain creative control of the company, and I'm going to be on the president's physical fitness council. This was the end game the whole time. He's going to have a whole generation of pro wrestlers now. Everybody's got to learn how to take a back bump and be flipped or whatever. Hey, before we get off of this, do you want to touch on the lack of the press conference at SummerSlam this weekend?

Okay, so WWE paper views are now known as premium live events had official seeming press conferences. Yes, after all the big events, they would have a standard press room, table, Triple H would come out with his glasses on, read a sort of statement, take some questions, and some of the winners of the night would come out, sometimes the losers, and answer questions from the media. Sometimes occasionally they'd use the opportunity to put over a storyline, you know, someone would be answering a question, someone would come hit him with a change, you know, that sort of thing.

But for the most part, it was a pretty state affair. I mean, it wasn't a lot of national media in there as mostly wrestling journalists, you know, people who write for the internet and whatever else. And not surprisingly, you know, if there was ever anything controversial that was raised, Triple H or whoever was there answering the questions, usually was prepared and did a pretty, straightforward job of deflecting it and moving on. Not a lot of comeuppance. not a lot of actual information coming out of those things.

Well, this year they didn't have one. This is the first big PLE in which there were no press conferences. And frankly, as far as the broadcast goes, it was a, it was a blessing because the post game show that they have out in the parking lot of the events was much better. They didn't have to keep cutting to press conferences, not knowing what was going to be said. It felt like a real, you know, studio post show, right? it felt this and this is what they've been building towards. So night one, I was just like, what a breath of fresh air.

This is an incredible broadcast. Then after night two, and I have it from good word that people, some of the people who are on screen were asking themselves these questions. It's like, did we just cancel the president? Are we doing this postgame show just so they won't have to answer questions about President Trump and Brock Lesnar's return? Brock Lesnar, of course, made a shocking return the end of last night. and he's so implicated at the Vince McMahon lawsuit

that's still going around. Do your research on that. So it was an interesting place. I mean, I don't know, I can say with great certainty that nothing would have come out of a press conference that would have been newsworthy, but at the same time, it's sort of an interesting, it's sort of a bad look to cancel your press conference

and then just have, do something super, you know, something that a lot of people would see is problematic at the end of the show. We all have sports TV brain where we process images without really listening to what's going on. You and I watch a football game

and if we leave the TV on, we eventually see the quarterback answering questions in front of a Dunkin' Donuts logo. Yeah. And we're just like, oh, this is what's happening after the football game ends. And the wrestling press conference seemed to be scratching that itch.

Oh, the wrestling matches over and now somebody sitting down and answering questions from reporters. Never mind whether anything was interesting, anything interesting was said or whether the questions were about the performance in the ring or about the person's real life. It's a very weird tradition. I did love us wandering through the MetLife parking lot and hearing Joe Tessator's voice from like 200 yards away.

Oh, God, yeah. You know, like, there's the post-game show. Joe Tess has got this thing under control. All right, coming up on the press box, David, the ESPN NFL network marriage is official. What does each side actually get out of the deal? Plus, David, people are still leaving the Washington Post. Kamala Harris wants you to buy her memoir,

a used bookstore you need to visit right away, and a few words about a family member I lost over the weekend. All that much more in the press box. A point of the ringer. Podcast Network. Happy August media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, and producer Kyle Crichton with you. David, a media merger of sorts that we have been talking about

finally got over the goal line on Friday. Or at least the reports came out on Friday. Andrew Marchand writes in The Athletic that the NFL and ESPN reached a blockbuster agreement that will place many of the league's top media holdings with the sports network in exchange for equity in ESPN that is potentially worth billions. Let's talk about what each side gets out of the ESPN NFL network deal.

First ESPN. Marshan writes that the worldwide leader, quote, is expected to have access to red zone, NFL network, seven more regular season games, the NFL's fantasy football business, as well as the potential to integrate special features, including betting, and potentially more assets. Now, when he writes access, what that means is that ESPN is going to get to offer features like Red Zone on its soon to be released direct-to-consumer app. For me, the question about the ESPN app has always been like, wait a second, who's paying $30 a month for just ESPN? As good as that is, aren't most of us sports fans full stop and we want all the games? We don't want to have to, you know, shop around $30 here and then try to buy everything else la carte.

But if you can offer Red Zone as part of an ESPN app or sell Red Zone through the ESPN app, that's a big deal. Marshaun also notes like, look, if ESPN goes to cable companies, satellite companies, YouTube TV, here in the waning days of the cable bundle and says, hey, if you want to re-up with us, you're buying ESPN, you're buying our sister networks. You're buying the NFL network and you're buying Red Zone. That gives them a lot more negotiating leverage. Because even though the cable era is ending, there is still money to be squeezed out of it. Absolutely. And ESPN ain't going anywhere unless they squeeze that money up. Also, ESPN gets something very important out of this deal, which is they get into a deeper relationship with the NFL.

So Steve Bornstein's an old president of ESPN. And he used to say that the NFL was ESPN's quote, crack cocaine. Those were his words. ESPN just bought the dealer. Yeah. And when the NFL tears up these contracts in a few years, they're going to be in a great position to re-up. Do you think insofar as that access goes or that purchase of the dealer, as you put it? The street quarters.

like part of the deal that with Monday night football I think Bill was talking about this time and time again has been it has been that it'll like part of their deal is that that whatever package gives them Monday night football allows them to run the highlights on all the shows that they run that's part of the same thing. Do you think that this makes it more likely that Monday night football will go elsewhere that it doesn't need to be a part of ESPN?

Is it all baked in now? Or does it make it make it more likely that it stays since they have this intact, this, you know, this more, you know, this more powerful relationship. Option number two, that it stays and when all this gets resorted in a couple of years, the ESPN has even more NFL games.

Okay. And better NFL games. Or put differently that they're able to keep their great NFL games away from Netflix and Amazon. Mm-hmm. Which is just as important. because we know the streamers are coming in. And ESPN and all the networks,

you know, this is like the word. I think existential is both an only in journalism word and a very overused term in media. Keeping NFL games is existential. Yeah. That's it. You lose the NFL, you don't exist. And I would say that about ESPN,

and I would say that about NBC and CBS and Fox and everybody else. What's the point? If you don't have the one live, thing that everybody wants to watch, right? So I believe Monday night football is there to stay. ESPN's got the Super Bowl in a couple of years. Plus, not only do you get some NFL network games now under your control because those were part of, you know, the NFL gave itself games, but you're in business with these guys.

And then to me, the interesting question is, what does the NFL get out of this? Because on the one hand, and Marcian points us out, they have said, for years, we don't want to be in the media cable business anymore. Yeah. Like that feels very 2003. Let's start a cable network that'll be devoted to this single subject. Yeah. But they're not selling their assets to ESPN in a clean business transaction.

They are then getting equity in ESPN. Yes. So now they're hitching themselves to a. bigger media entity, a more important media entity than the NFL network ever was. And that brings us back to those rights negotiations. Of course they're going to give themselves better games now. NFL owners will be making money, losing money, invested in ESPN success. So what can we do to prop up ESPN?

Well, we sell ourselves better inventory. Yeah. Or, as I said, the same inventory. Is it problematic for the league to be invested and it's the outlet that covers it? And by the way, and have that outlet, which is now purchased its in-house propaganda arm. Everyone will deny it.

We're going to have weeks and months of people saying, look, nothing's going to change at ESPN. Yeah. And we're not going to have a situation where Roger Goodell is going to bring Don Van Nata into a wrestling ring as Vince McMahon would do in the old days and fire him. That won't happen. But here is what I guarantee will happen. Slowly, there will be fewer people at ESPN to dig for things the NFL doesn't like.

And there will be fewer places in the ESPN universe to publish such things if and when that tiny, handful of people find them. There's some subtlety here because I think you and I watch television and read Twitter and we're like, man, you know, there's a lot of ESPN personalities who are really going at Jerry Jones this week for the way he screwed up the Micah Parsons deal. That doesn't matter at all. Nobody cares about that.

Jerry Jones doesn't care. Roger Goodell doesn't care. Nobody in the NFL finds that dangerous or harmful or anything. You can go on first take and blast Jerry Jones for 20 minutes. Nobody gives a shit. that drives interest in the Cowboys in the NFL. Yeah. It's the real investigative reporting,

a tiny, tiny percentage of what ESPN is doing now and really has always done. That makes them mad. And the only test will be what happens to that. And again, I think it will be subtle. I don't think it's going to be, oh, we didn't renew so-and-so's contract. Oh, you know, an owner reached out and we killed a piece.

I don't think it's going to happen. I think it will be subtle, subtle, subtle, subtle. and it will just kind of go away and be replaced by debate show segments, Adam Schaefter, Wojbombs, and, you know, people standing at Cowboys Training Camp be like, here's the thing that happened today. All those things drive interest in the NFL. They make you want to watch games even more, if that were generally possible. But so problematic, absolutely it will be.

How could it not be? Totally true. What about the existing betting partners of the NFL? Do you think that they're sports betting partners? Are they worried about bet ESPN's encroachment into their turf? Were they worried before about bet ESPN's encroachment? I don't know. I am interested in the talent part of this too,

because you have people like Rich Eisen and Peter Schrager who have already crossed the rainbow bridge from NFL network to ESPN. Kyle Brandt showed up on Good Morning Football. this week in a sports center t-shirt, according to awful announcing. You know, it's not going to be great news for people because you're just going to be duplicating a lot of functions.

Yeah. Mergers never result in more people getting jobs. It's almost always cuts, especially behind the scenes. Sure. But it will be fun to see people like Kyle Brandt all of a sudden be available. Yeah. For ESPN shows.

It's like a crossover. Yeah, that'll be exciting for, a certain contingent of fans. By the way, just for a future episode, can we just do the wrestling dream thing, like the WCW versus WWF dream card? Could we just say who from the two sides we want to see arguing

against each other on first take? This is like Goldberg and Steve Austin. Yeah, exactly. Finally getting down in the ring. Yeah. We could put Kyle Brand and Peter Schroger together. Oh, wait. It happened for years and years.

On the Washington Post, David, I knew this would happen. You and I would do a segment last Monday. about all the people leaving the post and we would inevitably leave people out. We did because more people left the post. Dan Steinberg, longtime editor in the sports section and also writer,

for those of us that got to know him through DC Sportsbog, he's going to the athletic, where he's managing editor of their NFL operations. Stephen Goff, 40-year run writing about soccer and other things. Gone. Joel Ockinbach, there's a byline I read a million times, started the post in 1990. Anne Hornaday, 22 years as film critic, William Branigan, former foreign correspondent who joined the paper in 1979.

Eric Wimple, post-media reporter, who took the buyout and is now going to cover the media for The New York Times. See, this was a funny part of the post-Exodus. they were offering buyouts to staffers of a certain tenure. So you could take the buyout and then go compete against the Post at another publication. Yeah, it's like the Damien Lillard deal, right? Go back to your old team. Exactly, except these people aren't washed.

Name that really stood out to me, David, Sally Jenkins. Yeah, of course. Sports columnist at the Post leaving for the Atlantic. Sally's been at the post she wrote in her goodbye note since she was 24 years old that she did other things in between. It wasn't a straight shot all the way.

She's just to me one of my favorite sports writers. Two summers ago she wrote this great feature about Chris Everett and Martina Navrilova. And if Sally just did feature, she would be annoyingly great at them. But what she was

able to do at the post that impressed me even more was to be a national sports columnist. Yep. That is an incredibly hard job to do in 2025. Witness the athletic trying that out with various writers. Think how many of those columns have actually punched through versus how many of Sally's columns punched through.

Because even if you're incredibly talented and smart, you are fighting against all of social media. Yeah, everything. thing you write is you against the world. Exactly. And like you and I, appreciators of journalism, connoisseurs of journalism, I'll read a tweet and be like, actually, that was better and more timely than the 800 words a columnist could have written.

And that columnist could be me. Yeah. I'm sorry, the tweet kind of said it. There's really nothing else that's worth sitting down and spending a few hours on. Mm-hmm. She figured it out. And she figured it out because she knows what she thinks. She's not afraid to say it.

She's a really great writer. And she was like a classic newspaper columnist in that she had already covered everything for so long. She had this great institutional knowledge of sports. Call her a columnist on steroids, David, if you will. So when you wrote something, it wasn't like, here's somebody having an opinion. It was like, here's somebody who knows stuff. witness her column about John McEnroe from last month, where she was just crucifying him for being lazy as an ESPN analyst, not knowing how to pronounce names, which is great. That'll never be in a Sally Jenkins collection of classic columns, but it was incredibly surprising.

Unless you start getting lazy, Ryan. Well, that's true. I'm with you, man. We've talked about this a number of times every time we do a post segment. I would still bet on the Washington Post having a springtime. New talent comes in, young, hungry talent, they replaced those bold-faced names. But I will say, we've seen this happen in newspapers before. L.A. Times during the Tribune years lost so much talent, never came back.

Yeah. The Washington Post, if you remember, 2006 to 2012 were thereabouts, they lost it. ton of town of town. That's when Mark Leibovic and Peter Baker and Susan Glasser and all these people walk out the door. And it took them years and years and years. Plus the election of Donald Trump and Marty Barron getting the top job to come back. You know, the New York Times always ends up when the Washington, you know, when another paper started sitting down the, the top of the top, a lot of the time end up at the New York Times. But it does seem like every era, every mass layoff from a big site that the Atlantic gobbles up just a disproportionate number of the people.

Is the Atlantic just have a giant masthead or I mean is it just like ever inflating or are they just or are they just like you know just are people just leaving the business after they work there? As my old boss Jack Schaefer loves to tweet the Atlantic

is hiring all the journalists. Yeah that's the goal. I was reading Jeffrey Goldberg's memo about Sally and I'm like basically it boils down to we want to get Sally Jenkins. Yeah. We see the opportunity. We have the money.

Yeah. It sounds great. Yeah. And let her do whatever the hell she wants to do. Yep. What a position to be in. Yeah, it's amazing. In media. A couple more quick ones for you.

Did you see that Kamala Harris has a book coming out? Yes. It comes out September 23rd. It's called 107 days, which is the length of her presidential campaign. I want to talk to you about the economics of this. Okay. Because if you look at liberal Twitter, which is to say Twitter,

you will find people being like, nobody wants to buy this. Why would anybody pay for this? But I'm correct in saying she got millions of dollars for this book in all likelihood. One would assume so, yeah. And will a book like this sell even if the kind of people

you would expect to buy such a book are mad at Kamala Harris or mad at Joe Biden? Yes, there are as many caveats as you want to name here. I don't think they get to the bigger question, but, I mean, a book by Kamala Harris will, I mean, regardless of the fact that she is a very, I mean, obviously is American a subject and author as you could get, she has such incredible international name recognition that they will sell sub rights into different countries. You'll probably make more money off of this book on the international market than you would make off of 95% of, you know, just general American fiction or nonfiction. Every single library in the country will buy one or multiple copies, which is not nothing.

Again, it doesn't necessarily happen with every book. School libraries, stuff like that. I mean, just it's, there's a lot of money to be made in a very just sort of behind the scene sort of way. And, you know, there is a big market. There is, regardless of how mad your social media may seem, there's still going to be a big market of, you know, Kamala Harris fans, people who are still fans of her, fans of the establishment, people who invested a lot in her during the campaign.

I mean, I still think there'll be a lot of people. Will it earn out, whatever? I mean, it just depends on what the advance was. You know, there's some metrics that will tell you that, like, some of the books like Hillary Clinton's books didn't necessarily earn out. I'm sure I mean, I'm sure you could find someone arguing that. You know, book publishing is a weird world. I mean, not unlike the movies or whatever. You try to make your money back,

but the most important thing is the money that comes in, it helps keep the lights on. You know, I mean, you can be laying out all this money, but the return, you know, the advance is based on a, on a, on a, royalty rate that might be significantly higher than the norm if it's a really big name, but traditionally 10, 12, 15% for these books or whatever.

And so all that, the other 85% is going in the publisher's pocket. And then, yeah, I mean, and the prestige that comes with publishing a presidential candidate, I mean, there's only two a year, I mean, to a cycle, right?

So I think that the various publishers sort of relish in that as well. Reminds me a little bit of Hillary Clinton's 2016 memoir, which was called What Happened? Yeah. Without a question mark. Yeah. And Hillary Clinton had some serious go-away heat that was as big or bigger than Joe Biden's in 2024. And yet, she had a story to tell.

Yeah. Like Kamala Harris has a story to tell. Kamala Harris is going to do all these shows, and here are the details inside my campaign. Here's what I was feeling. Here's what you don't know about this very strange, very quick run for the presidency. That's, you know, that's the stuff of intrigue, of book sales. Yeah. I did notice she went on Stephen Colbert's show to make this announcement, which just felt like one more for the road for resistance 2.0.

Yep. And speaking of late night comedians, David. Okay. I've been sitting on this for a few weeks for you. somebody in the wake of the Stephen Colbert episode called up Jay Leno. And I want to read you Jay Leno here as aggregated by variety. Jay Leno says, late night TV hosts, quote, alienate their audiences with political jokes. Quote, people wind up cozing too much to one side or the other.

Why shoot for just half an audience all the time? As you can imagine, everybody got mad at that tweet. Yeah. And it reminded me as a reader of sports journalism of Yankee writers or any baseball writer going to spring training and spotting goose gossage or some former player on the side field and be like, hey, come here, come here, come here. Yeah. And just like putting their recorder in front of them and being like, feel free to go off on baseball as it is played today. Yes. And then I will get the cheapest story out of that.

Mm-hmm. Goose Gossage versus somebody accused of PEDs, and you're like, all right, here we go. Yeah. I mean, that was absolutely the late-night version of that story. Yeah, absolutely. All right, David, coming up in 30 seconds, a bookstore you need to drive to right now. But first, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag. It was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time.

Send your nominees to at the Pressbox pod, where they are all. always gratefully received. David the Hollywood reporter told us last week that Foo Fighters and Nine Inch Nails have taken each other's drummers. Sources confirmed that Nails' Elon Rubin has been tapped as the Foo's next drummer. Two months after the band parted ways with Josh Fries.

Freeze, meanwhile, is replacing him in the nails. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, this was not the trade deadline deal I expected. Thanks to listener Don Steele. If you found that more compelling than any transaction reported by Jeff Passon, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week.

All right, David, we have to talk about used books. Because when you and I met at age 14, we bonded over wrestling. Yeah. Little did we know we'd have so much more in common, like used books or long-canceled sitcom. But I went down to the Brattle Bookshop in Boston last week. Told you this is the one that appeared in the movie The Holdovers.

Yeah. I met our friend, our listener friend, Zach Marconi, who has worked for decades at the Brattle Bookshop. He gave me a wonderful tour of not only the store that you can visit, which has several floors, by the way, in addition to the corrals outside. But the basement layer where he prices the books. It's so cool.

And dude, there were stacks of hundreds and hundreds of books. And Zach has evolved to that level of bookseller perfection where he can just look at most books and be like, that's a $3 book. That's a $5 book. That's a $10 book. That's a $15 book. No need to consult eBay or, even get online.

Though I noticed he did have these cool volumes in a little office he uses there would be like the Captain Cook bibliography. Wow. Like a hardbound and it was every book, every piece of ephemera published about Captain Cook or about Charles Dickens. And he could use that if there was an addition that came in that he wasn't familiar with, stuff that would be expensive. Yeah. So he showed me some of the treasures in there.

which included an original script for the Marx Brothers, a night at the opera. Oh, wow. This was a script that was rejected because Groucho didn't think it was funny enough. They have that. That's going to be $1,000 and more. They sold a copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune with the headline, Dewey Defeats Truman that was signed by Harry Truman.

He signed it, it was a mistake. David Foster Wallace, they had a galley of Infinite Jess, they had a Harry Houdini signed picture. Oh, wow. I say this to you, friend to friend. You and I have been to many, many used bookstores. We have very high standards in this department. This was a top three used bookstore for me ever.

God. Okay, I guess I got to go now. It was top three because it had the upstairs downstairs, and I'm not talking about the basement here. you and I like a bookstore where hey there's there's racks of books that are like five bucks there's a nice hard bag 10 bucks and then there's the high end stuff yeah that's what I want I want everything and man Brattle Bookshop it was fantastic anyway thanks to Zach for listening to the podcast and for being uh and for helping run such a fantastic bookstore

final note for you David unfortunately I was out last week and that was because I lost a beloved member of my family over the weekend. Rod Miranda, known to me and to you and to everybody that knows me well as Uncle Rod. Yeah. She's just 68 years old. Uncle Rod was a relative that I think people listening to this podcast will be familiar with. He was the fun uncle. Yeah.

He was the cool uncle. He was the youngest of my mom's three siblings. And he and I were 20 years apart in age. So at family gatherings, we would occupy the same young guy space in everyone's brains. And I cannot tell you how many times throughout my childhood people would be like, hey, Rod, I mean, Brian? Or hey, Brian, I mean, Rod? Yeah. And this is not like when my grandparents are getting really old.

This was my entire life. We were just kind of the same person. By Uncle Rod worked his entire career at UPS. Yeah. He was a residential package driver wearing the Buster Brown uniforms with his shorts. Mm-hmm. Remember how the UPS driver became an unlikely sex symbol of the 80s? Oh, yeah.

That was Uncle Rod. He later graduated to driving the Big Rig 18 wheelers. that's what I remember he would almost always work nights he would drive from his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico to Arizona in the middle of the night or drive to Texas

and then he would turn around and drive back and that was a day's work and in the old pre-cell phone days all he had out there at night was a CB radio and the radio in his truck, which would pick up shows like Art Bell's coast to coast a.m. And you can just imagine

being out there behind the wheel of this truck in the desert. That AM station baby ain't coming in super clear. No. Sometimes it's not coming in at all. And you're just alone on the road. And as you know, I was obsessed with everything about his job. Oh, of course. I was obsessed that everyone at UPS had a handle or a nickname that they would use on the CB. Yeah. And that his was hot rod. I was obsessed with him telling me about things he saw on the road at night. Everything from car crashes to just weird shit he'd seen.

I was obsessed when I went over to his house in Albuquerque with him showing me the Teamsters catalog, which has some awesome windbreakers in it. Didn't you have some stuff from the Teamsters catalog? or remember, are you not supposed to acknowledge that you would receive that? I might have some UPS clothes that I've inherited over the years. Okay. I would just, when I saw, you know, him around somebody like you or our friends, Robert or Brett, I'd just be like, just start telling those UPS stories that you told me. Just like, please, I'm put a quarter in the machine.

I want you to just tell everything you've ever told me to my friends. Because it was so cool. My Uncle Rod did not aspire to be a father figure for me. but he was in certain aspects a father figure. Oh, yeah. He would just swoop into my life to perform these amazing gestures. Summer after second grade, he takes me to my very first professional wrestling event. Look where we are now.

Summer after fourth grade, he piles me into his Ford truck. Rod was a Ford guy back when you had to pick Ford or Chevy. And he drove me from Albuquerque to Los Angeles so that we could go to Dallas Cowboys training. camp together. And his Ford pickup, David, had the bubble over the back. Oh, yeah. And I spent huge amounts of that trip, those hundreds of miles on the highway in the back under the bubble.

Kids do not try this at home. Rod was a very no seatbelts kind of guy. When I turned 21 years old, I was in college in Austin, he flew to Austin so he could celebrate my 21st birthday. Yeah. That was Uncle Rod. And I think the memory that I would never ever forget, the one that I always cherish is summer after fifth grade. My dad had just died.

Rod comes to Fort Worth, swooping in again, and he sees that I have a basketball hoop nailed to a tree. And he's like, Kurto, call me Kurto. This will not do. I need to build you a proper basketball goal. I mean, putting the cement in the ground and get the fire. fiberglass backboard up and we got it. And he builds this goal for me. His initials and my initials are still in the cement.

And I used that basketball goal to work through grief like nobody's business. When you and I started at Grantland back in 2011, I wrote a whole piece about this, people want to read it. But I was just sitting out there by myself slamming that ball against that backboard. And Rod did not intend that as a profound gesture. He did not know I was going to do that. But with people you love, particularly people that are older than us, I find that small gestures in our minds become profound ones.

Yeah, it's true. Rod was a huge Cowboys fan. And when I saw him in the hospital last week, he's quizzing me about, you know, the Cowboys. And I don't mean like, hey, how's Dad can do this year? I mean, like, backup quarterback Joe Milton. Yeah. He asked me if the Cowboys are going to re-sign their kicker, Brandon Aubrey, in the final year of his contract.

I mean, we had like an hour of just us talking like we would have been talking if everything was okay, which is just fabulous. I was sitting there in the hospital and I'm looking at him and I'm thinking of that cliche that you always hear when someone dies or there's a tragedy. People say, hug the people close to you. Tell them you love them. That is an extremely worthy cliche. That's a good kind of cliche. I did that with my uncle in the hospital. Told him I loved him, told him I would always love.

But as I was sitting there, I'm like, that is so inadequate those words. Because you could tell somebody like that that you love them. You could write the longest substack post in history explaining exactly why you love them. And they will never understand. Yeah. They'll never understand the extent of it. And how much somebody like that meant to me. and how much he influenced my life.

Yeah. I told you this last night where at the rest of it, I was like there have been so many times over the last couple weeks where I have seen like Cowboys News. Tyler Guyton didn't tear his ACL, good news. Yeah. And I would just pick up my phone to text him about that.

Mm-hmm. That doesn't matter. Like, you know, Micah Parsons' salary dispute, it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. but somehow the act of texting him every bit of information like that and vice versa. Yeah. It has this profound meaning in our lives.

Yeah. The security that comes from that, you know, just the sort of routine and also just the kind of shared secret, you know, community, like secret language, secret knowledge. Totally. And the fact that that person's always there to get it

and always there to write back to you. Mm-hmm. They belong to you in some way. Yeah. So anyway, if you have a moment, spare a thought from my Uncle Rod, and for all those people in your life, for whom saying I love you doesn't begin to explain things. All right, David, deep breath and let us transition.

It's time for David's Shoemaker guesses, the strained pun headline. All right. Last minute, that was kind of a downbeat. All right, David. I'm still recovering from a moment. Last Monday's headline about Beck performing with a local symphony was, Can't Get Here Bassoon enough.

I want to thank the dozens of press box listeners who sent the headline about the hot dog spill on the highway this week, being the worst nightmare for consumers. Thank you so much for sending that along. But today's headline day comes to us from Alert Listener Soroco. It's from the Guardian Australia. And is a headline about recycled toilet paper. topic I know you've spent a lot of time talking about. Okay. On your other podcast.

Yes. It says Australia suddenly flush with forest-friendly, recycled toilet paper firms. Did you just say flush? All right, go ahead. We've already done one pun. Flush with forest-friendly recycled toilet paper firms. And this article, David, is kind of an explainer.

It's giving you a sense of what the market looks like there in Australia. For toilet baby. What was the Guardian Australia's strained-pun headline? The poop? I mean, what is the phrase? The poop is good. We would have accepted that. That's not quite the way they went.

The fush, the wipe the roll. Let me give you a few words here. The state of. Oh. the state of what distinguishes one kind of toilet paper from another the state of

you have it the state of the state of ply the state of ply oh state of play okay that took me a minute to understand those clever devils at the Guardian Australia

he is David Shoemaker I'm Brian Curtis Prodexamagic by Kyle Crichton Joel's here Thursday David I will see you not next Monday, but next Thursday, because we may have a very special interview next Monday here on the Pressbox podcast. One of those interviews we don't say, we don't talk about until it actually happened.

Because that would be bad luck. Sure. That would be bad luck. Special interview show next Monday. Shoemaker next Thursday, David, cannot wait to talk to you with more lukewarm takes about the meet. See you then, Dave. See you later, Brian.