The Press Box - Zach Lowe Leaves ESPN and the Kelce Backlash With Jason Gay. Plus, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac on Elon Musk and Twitter.

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

Hello, media consumers! Bryan sits with not one, not two, but three guests this week. First he speaks with The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay and they they discuss the following: Zach Lowe getting laid off by ESPN (1:47) How everyone has been covering Travis Kelce’s bad play (20:45) A possible Kamala Harris podcast tour (30:30) Then he speaks with Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, the authors of ‘Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter,’ and they get into the following: Elon changing the block feature (35:20) Turning Twitter headquarters into a long-stay hotel (44:23) Elon removing journalists’ verified check (49:00) Twitter/X losing it’s value (59:59) Plus, David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis Guests: Jason Gay, Kate Conger, and Ryan Mac Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the summer of 1999, thousands attended what would be the final iteration of the Woodstock Music Festivals. But unlike its namesake, Woodstock 99 was not about peace and love. Joining me as I dive deep into this story about music, mud, violence, and tragedy. From Spotify and the Ringar Podcast Network, I'm Stephen Hayden. And this is Breakstuff, the story of Woodstock 99. Available Tuesday, August 27th. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox.

Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Brian Waters. Coming up in just one second, we're going to talk to Kate Conger and Ryan Mack, the authors of a new Elon Musk book. But first, let's bring in today's guest host. He is one-third of the sports reporters, which is not to be confused with the newly relaunch sports reporters. He's a Wall Street Journal columnist. If Netflix ever reboots Mr. Belvedere,

It's essentially to play the put-upon sports writer dad. Jason Gaye, welcome back to the press box. It's been quite a while since I watched Belvedere. Was Uker an ex-sports writer or a put-upon sports writer? That was my memory. Okay. And I think he wasn't in all the episodes. And so he was a sports writer who had help in the house.

Well, he was away a lot. Maybe a sports announcer, which would have been a little more on the nose. Maybe. Okay. You've done television. I'm grandfathering you into whatever this is. Well, it's a pleasure to be here, as always. Thank you, Brian, for having me.

Well, it's so nice to be here. And let me tell you, 48 hours before every edition of the press box, we think, what are we possibly going to talk about today? Yeah. And then we're like, oh, my God, it's a story that at least on media Twitter is blotting out the sun. Today, it comes in this form that ESPN has, laid off Zach Lowe. NBA writer, NBA podcaster, former teammate of mine at Grantland.

What did you make of Zach Lowe's career ending at ESPN? I mean, stunning. I mean, stunning on the face of it. Disappointing for what it says. And kind of tacky, to be honest with you. I mean, you were talking about somebody who, you know, obviously has had a very distinguished career, you know, kind of a groundbreaking career in its own right.

And, you know, it's pretty universally regarded as somebody who has been thoughtful, professional has always represented this company with great integrity and professionalism. And to kind of unceremoniously dump him a couple of weeks before the NBA season begins, it feels pretty tacky to me. And, you know, Brian, I speak as somebody who's been laid off before. And it sucks. It's a tough blow. That said, I don't worry too much for Zach.

I think he will be a very much in demand individual if he's not already, which I suspect he is. I think he will have multitudinous options. Maybe he could stay in media. Maybe he could go into basketball. Maybe he could be your colleague, Brian. If we believe the betting houses of the internet, the ringer is the leader in the clubhouse. But I got nothing to go on there. But I think he'll be fine.

The truth of it is, and I'm. I'm sure you would agree here. This is only a tiny, tiny fractional bit about Zach Lo, what this is really is. It's a story about what's happening at ESPN and the evolution of that place. And what it says when somebody who is, again, sort of, you know, just widely appreciated, admired, has been quite successful, you know, no longer fits into the future of what this place is. And, you know, there we can sort of pick apart at what's happening. And, Brian, this is a topic that I know you have discussed multiple times on the show. But like, you know, ESPN, it's a majorly influential organization, is at a rather radical crossroads here, right?

Where they are trying to figure out, you know, the existential future of ESPN, what it looks like in a post-Cable universe. Now, we still have cable television, still have great many people who are paying to watch cable TV. but the good old business of having people who wanted ESPN paying for ESPN and people who didn't care about ESPN paying for ESPN is increasingly anachronism in the over-the-top cord-cutting world. And that's the riddle that Jimmy Patero and all the suits at ESPN have been charged to find out. And what they're betting heavily on, as we both know, are live rights, right? You know, games, games that we need, games that are critical to our lives. and that's what we will pay, that's what we will subscribe for.

And I don't disagree with that. I think that, you know, at the end of the day, the most compelling reason to watch a television network devoted to sports or sports themselves, whether it's the U.S. Open, SEC football, basketball, and so on. But Eastman has always been in all these other parts, too, Brian. I mean, you worked for the company. I mean, it had things like Grantland.

It had little, you know, corners and corridors and, you know, side offices and things and places. And it wasn't just one thing. And I feel what it's happening is they are really kind of stripping it down to the bolts here in terms of trying to figure out what is going to work for people to subscribe. Because that's really the only game here. And the irony of this is that, you know, as much as this is about cost cutting, I guess I've seen it characterize that way. We are living in the era of the super compensated ESPN star. Like, people are being paid at that network in a way they have never paid in the history of the network.

And that's actually not the case that, like, say, ABC television news, CBS News, NBC News, where salaries have come down significantly. People at ESPN have never been paid in the way that Joe Buck has been, Joe Buck and Troy Eggman got paid to come award for Monday Night Football. The way that Pat McAfee's show has been licensed for ESPN usage, the way that Stephen A. Smith presumably is going to be compensated when his new deal is done. These are these hyper-compensated superstars, and it's a real choice. It's saying that these are the most significant plays for us right now in terms of personnel, and we might not need all those contiguous parts and individuals that we've had historically, all the little things that make the network go. And I think that this is what this story is.

Unfortunately, it's really not about Zach. The corners and corridors thing, I just completely agree with that, and that's in a way, the most striking and for me personally as a reader and a consumer disappointing part about ESPN now because it was this big golden corral buffet of stuff. And some of the people you're like, I hate that person.

Every time they come on my television screen, I want to be like Elvis and shoot it out because I'm so, so angry right now. But then you'd find this person that was on the website on ESPN radio, was on TV, but maybe not in a featured spot. And you're like, oh, yeah, that's my guy or gal. That's great. That's why I'm here.

That's my entry point. And, you know, to the, to the idea of ESPN's long-term strategy, ESPN has a Super Bowl in 2027. That's right. They're going to be here. They're going to have tons of games. That's right. But I do think when you reduce the number of people, the number of entry points to the network for sports fans to come back to and to come back to ESPN when it's not just a huge game

that ESPN paid billions of dollars in rights fees for. That's dangerous long term. There's got to be a downside and we have to be seeing more of the downside now when people like Zach walk out the door. Absolutely. I mean, I remember, and I'm going to paraphrase here, when John Skipper was talking about Granlin years ago, him saying that there's a case for a big brand, name to have alternate identities, to have this, you know, quote-unquote mothership. I mean,

again, ESPN is in no, what's the way I want to say? They're not star for self-regard. This is a news organization that refers to itself as the worldwide leader, okay? But, you know, and the mothership and, you know, these sort of big sort of Battlestar Galactica, Death Star type of analogies. it's good to have other little things. It's good to have other little birdhouses in the product that draw people and bring people in. I'm not comparing grand house to a birdhouse, although it was a dynamite birdhouse, Brian, and you did a great job. Damn good birdhouse.

With that birdhouse. I just don't think that there is an appetite for that kind of thing now. I feel like everything has to better the ball, better the ball in terms of, you know, birdishing the relationships with exempt. existing contracts, existing leagues, the sports rights, if you're not in the business of serving somehow NFL product, NBA product, college football product, which are the sort of central stool points of what this is, I'm worried, you know? So let's talk about Zach in those terms.

Zach Lowe is an NBA writer. ESPN just renewed NBA rights for $2 billion plus, right? So he serves a product that they're really interested in and one they've done. just crazily invested in. Zach Lowe is not niche. Zach Lowe has 977,000 Twitter followers. Not at all, yes. So he is not some, you know, yeah, it's a really random guy who writes that stuff on

a website. Nobody likes it but me. He's mainstream. Zach Lowe has a podcast. Agree. Which is a medium I am using to speak to you right now and a medium that can be monetized and capitalized to do business with. And I understand like people were valued differently in the Skipper era.

words people or words dominant people were valued differently. So there's an idea of contracts here and stuff like that to explore. But to me is like whenever somebody leaves ESPN, we're always, you know, listing these reasons why they left. Well, you know, sports center's not a big deal anymore. Well,

they're doing, they got rid of their sports. They're not useful. That's not Zach. He's not that at all. Yeah. Yeah. No,

I mean, listen, there's no question that he contributed greatly to the coverage. I mean, there's, I don't think that anybody, within that company would disagree with that. I think it's a question, again, of what they have chosen to prioritize.

And again, it is this, the actual live coverage itself, the sort of social virality that revolves around the talk shows and sort of goosing the internet on a daily basis and sort of having arguments amongst themselves about, you know, whatever the topic du jour is. and a little less interest than sort of the dense, harder stuff that people exact it. Yeah, but it's just so funny because if you and I got on here,

as Zach, the 10 burning questions of the NBA as defined by the first take, Kiron, he would give us five minutes on each one of them. And they'd be great. It wouldn't be like, he'd be like, no, no, I'm sorry, I'm beneath such a question,

Jason and Brian. Like, he played that game. He's not Kendrick Perkins. but he can play that game just fine. We should also point out that this also speaks well of what his future presumably will be, which is that nobody wants to go through what he's going through. But, and I say that again, as somebody has been through it, it's never been a better time to be a hot shit NBA free agent in media

because of the reorientation of the NBA contracts. And I suspect that he will be a prominent part of somebody else's coverage plan in the near future. I assume so, of course. Now, it's funny. It's funny. I was talking to Bill about this a little while ago. There's this thing we do with ESPN where whenever there's a big layoff or another layoff, we always go, well, but ESPN still has.

And then we name a universally loved person. Yeah. That is still the network. We name Amina Kimes. We name him Wright Thompson and Seth Wicker-Sham type. That list is getting smaller and smaller every day. Sure. We should just know.

Zach was on that list. Sure. I still have Zach Lowe, still have Bill Barham. Barnwell, man, that list keeps shrinking and shrinking and shrinking all the time. Sure. And I don't think that they have a clear idea of how that, you know, intellectual community transfers over to the sort of future product of an OTT ESPN, right? And even things like Stephen A. Smith first take, Pat McAfee, I get why someone will subscribe to an ESPN over the top product because what are they called flagship? We're supposed to

flagship because they want to watch SEC football. I get that entirely. Are they interested in subscribing for talk cover, you know, talk show programming? I don't know. They're giving it away over the, you know, throughout social media. I mean, you effectively don't have to watch the, you know, channel to find out what they're saying all day. You know, it sort of exists in this other free medium and social media.

I just, you know, I think it's a little bit of an experiment, but again, it is getting consolidated around a few individuals. And it's a big bet. I think their answer to that would be right. So, okay, so what Stephen A. and McAfee give us is television innings eating to the extent that that's still valuable, perhaps less so than it was once upon a time. Then we can also, with McAfee, put them on YouTube. With first take, we can make it a podcast. We can just reach people wherever they are. Yeah.

I still think, and again, I am. not sitting in that boardroom at ESPN and no one has ever asked me to sit in that board room. But I still think that even if you develop that as your future over the top product, big sports rights and some guys who are reaching people in various ways, there's still ways to make money by like, well, we want a really good, robust podcast network. So we have lots of people. We'll use those people on TV. You know, we'll use them as part of our coverage. I don't know. I agree with that. And not to sound like a Wall Street Journal columnist, but, you know, It's diversification.

You know, it's spreading your investment across multiple investments, hoping that, you know, the majority of them pull in a positive for you and not betting too hard on a few specific things because that leaves you in a vulnerable position. They're not alone in this, Brian. I mean, you know, obviously every media company is facing headwinds. Every streaming outfit, save maybe Netflix, is facing, you know, ex-essential. headwinds in terms of what they're going to be two, three, four years down the road. I expect there was going to be an enormous shakeout in terms of how that's all going to

work. We seem to have lost the, what were we calling it, the Spooloo, the ESPN, Hulu plus NBC plus Fox, whatever that was, has been knocked down. I don't think any of us have a really strong feeling for what the universe will look like other than, as you point out correctly, you know, having the NFL, it's like life insurance, basically. You know, it really is. It's relevance insurance. And actually, I feel like that was part of the dynamic of the NBA contract because, you know,

I think that they all overpaid for NBA rights. But to have NBA rights is to ensure your social currency and relevance. At least you have this. You know you will have. have some kind of cultural cachet because you have this thing going. Now, whether it will justify the price that you've paid for it, who the heck knows? Obviously, a different calculation for Amazon than it is for ESP or NBC. Totally. And I think, and I think if I were them, I would have made that bet. I would have gotten those big sports rights because that makes me essential, sort of the

anti-Zaz strategy of acquiring rights. But then once I send in that cash cheers check for those rights, I'd want the best people reacting to the programming that was just on my television. So got Scott Van Pelt on that late sports center and he's talking to Steph Curry in the locker room. Okay, that's cool. I want the guy whose podcast you just have to listen to immediately after the game. Zach was on that short list of people. Like game two of the NBA finals. Oh, yeah, I want to hear what he has to say.

Like that would be my core. That would be my roster. Let me ask you a question about, you know, if we're going to do a little overstating here, what do you think this says about the appetite, the corporate appetite for the nuanced middle of talk? You know, Zach was obviously an important ingredient of their television product,

their podcast network, but he was not the guy, you know, he had things that irritated him and, you know, he gets, you know, upset about.

But he's not the person coming in, you know, from the top rope. He is a rather nuanced, analytic type approach. to understanding basketball. He is not a yeller. He is,

you know, is there a lane for that in the world that we're occupying increasingly? I think there is because to me, when I hear the language of Zach Lowe, it's just the language

of sports podcasting. Yeah, that's true. Or the language of a big chunk of it. You know, again, I say this from inside the ringer network, but this is not supposed to be like obscure. It may be handled.

a different way than first take than a segment on there where you are coming off that top rope. But it's not obscure. It's not it's for the masses. Again, 997,000 Twitter followers. Somebody was reading his stuff. No, for sure. 100%. Don't misunderstand. Like, I mean, but you're talking about the corporate appetite for it. So I would just say, but to answer your question, I would think, like, yes, there should be a corporate appetite for really popular sports podcasts that are in a slightly different key because it's a podcast. because you're listening to it while you're driving or working out or something, that your mind is, you know, your mind is just in a little bit of a different headspace

than what's working on television? Do you think there's an economic reset that's happening here? I just think, I think they're just, I don't know. I mean, I think part of it is like they're trying to make a number. I mean, that's probably the most obvious part of it. But I think they're trying to guess about what the future looks like. Right. And they're trying to guess what the future looks like, not as John Skipper.

is ESPN where you'd put certain people at the front of the line, but is Jimmy Pataro's ESPN, which is just a different place. And I don't, I don't understate the fact that Jimmy Pataro is playing a very, very, very different hand of poker than the people who came before him. It is not the same thing, right? If Jimmy Pataro wanted to start Grantland right now, he could not do it. That would not be in the budget. It's not possible. It doesn't matter whether he wanted to or not. He could not do it. So he's making different, tougher choices than the regimes that preceded him. I totally get that. He is, but at the same time, he's also making very strategic choices to load up on certain things. Like ESPN spends quite a great deal more,

I assume, on the NFL than it ever has in terms of talent in the booth, in terms of the quality of games. I mean, they really went to bat the last contract to try to get. I mean, that includes the Super Bowl. But, I mean, wasn't there a whole back and forth about just improving the product that ESPN was getting from the NFL? Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I mean, that was where all the, we got to repair a relationship stuff came from. Right. And they're putting all the top, top people in all of it, whether it's, you know,

Ben Powell, Greenberg, Stephen A. Smith, you know, making everything, is sort of moving around that nexus. And, you know, obviously the NFL has been a pretty safe bet programming-wise. I don't dispute the wisdom of it. but at the cost of what is the question here. All right. Topic number two, Jason, the Travis Kelsey backlash. It's not just for vaccine skeptics anymore.

We've been hearing some murmurs about Travis Kelsey's level of play. Chris Collinsworth had a little bit on Sunday night football this last week. Todd McShay on our own Ringer podcast network. Oh, yes. But what kind of shape he was in by going to the U.S. Open? things like that. What do you make of the Travis Kelsey backlash as it's manifested itself? First of all, the honey deuce is only about 495,000 calories, Brian. I don't think there's anything to worry about having a couple of while you're watching a U.S. Open men's final. I don't think

we should be in the business of calorie shaming Travis Kelsey. I feel like this is like an argument that was like Han Solo on the wall of Jabba the Hats' lair. Like we were all ready to have this last year as soon as the chiefs sputtered and went out of the playoffs, but it never happened because the chiefs just kept on winning. And then Kelsey contributed greatly to those last few games. I mean, everybody was just kind of lying in wait to nail this guy for somehow being distracted because that, of course, is one of the all-time predictable news cycles of the distracted off-the-field athlete who's just overly committed, overly extended. And, you know, it's hard to think of somebody in Kelsey's territory here, given the nature of his personal relationships

and the stuff that he's been doing. I just kind of feel like, you know, the chiefs are 3 and O. Even now it's kind of a stretch to say that like he somehow has cost in the team. It's just kind of a statistical argument. His statistics are down. Team is winning, but his numbers are down. And it kind of feels like, well, we really have wanted to have this argument. So now's the time, you know, because, you know, if they go and run it off again,

we're never going to be able to have it. part of this is exactly what you're saying. It's a narrative challenge for the world of first take. We need to talk about the chiefs. We can't just say, hey, the chiefs would just won two Super Bowls in a row and they're awesome again. We have to do something.

We have to, we have to, because this is the only way to analyze the chiefs right now is what could possibly stop them from winning another Super Bowl? So we have to be like, you know, they're three and oh, but they could easily be two and one or one and two. right and you know the Travis Kelsey Patrick Mahomes connection is not what it's been in previous years

yes with the interesting ripple here because I was going to ask you you know you are a cowboy fan you remember very well the Sturman drong that happened around Tony Romo's Cabo weekend with Jessica Simpson before the playoffs you remember that you don't have to remind the kids about that one But unlike that scenario, Travis Kelsey is very much a part of this media operation. In fact, it has a media operation which dwarfs many of the existing terrestrial media operations legitimately. And so that's an interesting dynamic too, where you're both the story but also the storyteller. And credit to him for actually being able to build this with his brother, where they were both active players. Have you ever listened to New Heights at any length, Brian?

I've listened to a little bit of it. I wouldn't say a ton of it. You know, it's one of those shows that gets aggregated a tremendous amount on social media. So any sort of like quip-y-quip thing happens where something funny says, you know, you see it repeatedly or your Instagram Reels or TikTok, whatever. It's actually a pretty good show. I enjoy listening to it. I think they're actually fairly wonky and granular talking about football. I mean, Jason Kelsey as a retired center is not a perspective that you typically find in booths. in NFL games, although the other night he was in the Monday Night Football booth and

though it was an Eagles game, I thought he did rather well. It's a pretty good, robust football show. I don't know. I mean, it's like we should all be so lucky to be distracted in such manner. I mean, I would like to see where we're in this debate, you know, at week eight. Was this partly a stress test of how much we are willing to accept a football player, as a pop culture celebrity outside of football. That's right.

We all say we are. We say we're not that 90s sports columnist. We're not Peter King when Cam Newton told him he wanted to be an entertainer and an icon and King's head just completely detonated on the spot. Yes. We're like, we can accept that. We're 2024 kind of people. But then what happens is you watch and Travis Kelsey is not crisp out there on the field.

And you're like, but there is an argument. here, right? There is, there's not nothing here that your mind, we do want you to be locked. We want you to be your best self, right? We want you to be locked in on this to some degree. So I feel we're just a little bit at war with our own sports writerly selves. Right. Well, remember, we also had this, a different version of this conversation last year, when the Swift relationship became increasingly public. Like, everyone sort of bent over backwards to appear very sort of modern and sophisticated about it saying like, oh, this is great. You know, it's not a distraction whatsoever.

And everyone kind of like was on their best behavior. And now you kind of see a retrenchment of old style, you know, sports coverage and, you know, distraction police and all that kind of stuff. I feel like we were kind of going back to the old knee jerk. By the way, isn't there a slot for Jason, for Travis Kelsey here, which is you are the. quarterback's occasional tight-in pal. I mean, that's what Gronk was for Brady at the end. Heard all year, sitting out all year, and then he'd be like, you know what?

When the big games come, I'm ready. I'm ready to catch touchdowns. I'm not ready to bet against that. You know, I saw that Ravens game last year. That's exactly what happened. You mentioned the Jason Kelsey in the Monday Night booth. There was also a semi-related Jason Kelsey backlash. Oh.

that we can twin, as the newspaper editor used to say, with the Travis Kelsey backlash. He's on Monday night football. He's wearing a green jacket. It's a pretty exciting game between the Eagles and the Falcons. Very exciting at the end. Yeah. And we start talking a lot about Jason Kelsey and the announcing kind of stops.

And Jason Kelsey had already been all over the broadcast because it was in Philadelphia. And man, there was backlash to that, too. Mad Dog Russo taking a swipe. on ESPN. God bless. Chris Rousseau. Kyle Brandt. We're getting a little something in there

in the NFL network. Kelsey had to go apologize to Falcons fans on New Heights. Yeah. What a moment. Do you think this is the high watermark or interoffice alboing at ESPN? Because in the old days,

very frowned upon. I mean, we don't have to get into it. Wait, what? Very, very frowned upon. I never had to be experienced with that. The type of stuff that flies nowadays is interesting. It's very, very telling. And it does show you the power that those people have that made the club, you know.

But also clearly, clearly an executive decision that to let the fur fly is good for the overall. Undoubtedly. I think that to a degree, but I also think the executive stance is, I'm a players coach and I don't tell those people what to do, except in the most, except in the most extraordinary Jimmy Kimmel and Aaron Rogers situations. And even then, I tell them what to do behind the scenes. A vicious crackdown there. Oh, my God.

Yeah, what a crack down that was. Then I tell them behind the scenes. I think it's more like, I hired them, they do what they want. Yeah. That's what it is. By the way, the Jason Kelston thing also proved to me that for all the innovations with the Manning cast and some of the things they've done on Ammon, Amazon, viewers are very reluctant to mess up the way a football game is called in the booth.

Sure. As soon as we add an element and get away from Joe and Troy, everybody kind of tenses up, even though this is a 50-plus-year-old format. We don't like it. You know, I have to say, I didn't hear what Rousseau said, but I watched that NFL, that Monday Night game with the Falcons and the Eagles. and I was right there riding shotgun when Kelsey was in the booth. And I was like, this is a pleasure. I mean, this is a guy who literally was the head of this offensive line last year, knows everybody, trained his understudy.

The depth of knowledge that he was providing about the Eagles, I didn't feel that they were asking Jason Kelsey like his favorite chicken parm sandwich. I mean, they were really going deep on the Eagles in an interesting way. I didn't find it to be somehow detracting from the podcast. I mean, from the phone podcast. I think the moment when he started talking about how happy he was to be at WrestleMania, how he'd been a fan of the product for so many years.

I was like, okay. And maybe the third time we talked about the New Eagle Center. I'm like, I'm one of those people who appreciates all 22 guys. But folks, let's get back to Jalen Hurts. You're also a cowboy. Yeah, but there's also a little bit of, you know, NFC East agitah that percolating through your veins. Let's not ignore that.

It's not unheard of. Let me tell you that, Jason. It's been a bit of bouncy September. You think? All right, topic three for you. Kamala Harris, Jason, is looking for voters. She's looking for voters that she doesn't already have. One way she's going to find voters is going on a sports podcast.

There was some speculation. It might have even been something here at the ringer. But we learned from Max Tanny of Semaphore. It is the All the Smoke podcast that Kamala Harris will be recording an appearance on. What do you make of the Veeeps sports podcast vote getting operation? I mean, I'm an avid listener of the press box when I'm not on it. And I believe Brian Curtis and Sugar Sean Fennessee spoke this into existence. This was a literal topic of conversation last week. Was it not? I don't know if all the smoke was among the candidates discussed, but I know you talked about

Bill, I know you talked about other options for them in terms of like a non-political environment. You called it. Isn't it funny that after all the angst about Kamala Harris not talking to the press and there were some angsty segments on this podcast, full disclosure, that she is going to wind up having visited all the stations of the media cross by the time we get to November 5th? She did the sit down with Dana Bash, which is your proper network. sit down. She did the Stephanie Rule injected into my veins

resistance media interview. Came out yesterday. She did action news in Philadelphia. Talk about old school. She did Wisconsin Public Radio. Yeah. Which sounds like Jason's next hit after he gets off the press box.

Here to talk about sports and so much more. She did art. She did art link letter. She did a column in the New York world. She's kind of done everything. And I think now, you know, here we're getting to October, right? Nothing's off the table. More podcasts.

Howard Stern, who had Joe Biden on and we surely have Kamala Harris on. I think we're going to get to a point where she's kind of has done everything. Right. Maybe not the hardcore, you know, excuse me, Madam Vice President, but if I may have a follow-up kind of interviews. but she's done, she will have done almost every interview under the sun. And isn't there some calculation also that if a selection is a little, you know, asymmetrical, that the ripple of attention you get for it, like, whoa, whoa, all the smoke, what's that? And like, that draws people into the show and gets the hit that you're actually looking for.

You're not actually trying to get strictly the all the smoke audience. You're trying to get value at. And can I speak as someone who's, has spoken to both of those guys for a story in the past. Hats off. I mean, kind of a major moment for that podcast. I don't think that they had anywhere near these kinds of ambitions when they began it. And they really have built something here.

And for that to happen, I mean, it has to be gratifying. Absolutely. One good point I saw on Twitter from Benji Sarlane, who's going to be on this podcast next week. Tim Walls got the job as Kamala Harris is running mate by doing viral cable news hits. And yet he's the one that kind of feels like he's on the bench media-wise. I thought he's like telling me how to tune up a car. Like I always see these things where the hood is open and he's telling me about a carburetor. But I can never tell if that's like Minnesota Gov walls or like old stuff, vintage walls or if it's new walls.

That was actually a recent hit on Click and Clack or right. Sorry, not recent on Click and Clack. He's really visiting the stations of the media cross. He is going to the Michigan-Mnesota game this weekend, Jason. Big Ten country. Your country. I mean, this is something else. I hope he enjoys 10 to seven football.

All right, before you go, I got a quick update on Mr. Belvedere here. This is straight from Wikipedia. The breadwinner of the family, George, that is the dad, Bob Euker, is a sports writer in the pilot he worked in construction. So a little metaphor on sports writing there. So there was a note, presumably between the pilot and the first episode, maybe he should be a sports writer and not in construction. We want to make less money. I was going to say, who's more likely to have help?

Yeah, I know. Oh, my God. He must have had one of those newspaper jobs in the 80s. It was just rolling in dough. All right, Jason Gay, Wall Street Journal. Come back soon. Thanks for coming on the press box. Pleasure. Thank you.

All right, let us bring in Kate Conger and Ryan Mack. They are the authors of the new book Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. This book is great. I wolfed down 400 plus pages that are packed with scenes from Twitter's goon-infested San Francisco headquarters. Character Limit also has more text messages between powerful people per page than any book on the market. market. Kate and Ryan, welcome to the press box. Thank you so much. Powerful people per page. That's an acronym we use in the business.

Before we dive into the book, I want to ask about a few things that Elon Musk has been up to this week. He announced he's changing the block feature on Twitter. Why does he want to change the block feature? So this is kind of funny because historically, Elon Musk has blocked a lot of people, including Ryan and many other notable figures. But lately he's been on this kick of wanting to juice engagement on the platform. And I think that the move to get rid of the block button is probably a part of that. It's going to allow people to continue to reply to posts and see more posts even when, you know, the person on the other side has tried to like limit that access or doesn't want to be in contact with them. So if I block somebody, they can see my post and they can reply to them, but they can't DM me.

That's the line we're drawing here. Basically, and I think I'm not sure exactly how they're going to set this up, but I think you might not be able to see the reply anymore, but they could still post about you. So it's just kind of lessening the impact of what blocking would normally do. And it could end up becoming a problem for him. You know, social apps are required by AppStores to give you some kind of blocking functionality. So we'll see how the app stores react to the change.

We should remember why the blocking function is important, right? like this is a platform that enables things like GamerGate, for example, where abuse has been a major issue on the platform. And previous management has understood that blocking and muting is important. And he's kind of undoing all of that. Another headline from this month after the second Donald Trump assassination plot, Musk tweeted, and I quote, and no one is even trying to assassinate Biden slash Kamala. And then he added a thinking emoji. after studying several years worth of Musk Post, what did you guys make of that one?

I think that's just a classic case of him saying the first thing that comes to his mind and thinking it sounds smart without realizing the implication of it, how much could get him in trouble. He deleted it, which is actually kind of an admission from him when he deletes posts.

I think of something like him deleting the response to the Great Replacement Theory thing he engaged with. a couple months ago. But, you know, it's, I don't know, in the book, we have him talking about this, like how he doesn't really think about things. At one point, he says he's going to shoot from the hip in real time. And, you know, that tweet is a great example of it.

The book, he traced the evolution of Musk's Twitter persona from self-styled libertarian and free speech warrior to someone who's now giving money to Donald Trump's super PAC, one of the super PACs, and also replying to CatTurd. Why did Musk politics change? You know, I think he hit this radicalization point in 2019, 2020. He ran into a couple of issues that just really started to heighten his interest in politics, I guess I would say. One of them was the COVID shutdowns. He was really upset about that because it interrupted manufacturing at his Tesla facilities here in California.

and, you know, he really kind of went on the war path after that against the state government. The other thing that he was going through at the time was his daughter was coming out as trans and going through her transition. And that really offended him. And, you know, he's now given public interviews saying that that child of his is essentially dead to him. But it was these two kind of things that in his personal life, I think, really set off his reactionary politics. Why did Elon Musk want to buy Twitter in the first place? Great question. I don't think he even has the answer to that even now.

I mean, Twitter, let's remind ourselves, was his favorite toy. It's the thing he coveted the most. He spent hours on there. And by the time he started buying shares in the company, he had amassed a net worth of more than $200 billion. He started looking around and thinking, you know, how can I, you know, use some of this net worth. And, you know, we think about billionaires and what they buy and what they covet.

And usually it's, you know, a super yacht or a sports team or a island. But in this case, Elon coveted a company. And there was really nothing stopping him from doing that, you know, from buying and making an offer. And I think the book goes, is kind of an examination of wealth and wealth disparity. and just looking at this idea of how one man, a single person could amass this much power and wealth to buy a whole ass company. And one way that manifests itself is he buys a whole ass company in 2022, but he doesn't do the due diligence, you write, that he might have done before the purchase. In what ways did he botch the purchase of Twitter? I mean, the whole process was really, really crazy.

and there's never been another deal like it. So he starts off with this offer to buy Twitter for 5420 a share. Obviously, he had to slip in a 420 joke. Couldn't avoid that. And it was a really high offer. It was nowhere near what Twitter was worth at the time, nowhere near anything. It was going to be worth anytime soon.

And I think that he thought the board would say no and reject the offer. and then he could take a tender offer to the shareholders and get a lower price. Unfortunately, the board kind of called his bluff and said, hey, yeah, we'll take it. Thanks so much for all the extra money that you shouldn't be giving us. And so he was on the hook to pay for it and immediately regretted it and tried to backtrack and get out of the deal. But, you know, he was pushing for this deal to happen really quickly. He didn't sign an NDA that would give him access to non-public information about the company. and, you know, overpaid for it as a result.

And then, you know, tried to say, oh, well, they hit all this from me about the bots and spam on the platform and what's really been going on inside the company. They tried to trick me into buying it. And it's like, well, you know, you could have learned all of this had you gone through a normal due diligence process, but he skipped all that. I want to ask you about some of my favorite scenes from the book. One is after Musk buys Twitter, Twitter's San Francisco headquarters is overrun by Musk loyalists that Tweeps call the Goons.

What was Twitter HQ like during that period? Chaos, just absolute chaos. I think to understand this period, you have to understand that Elon Musk really distrusted previous management. He thought they were inept. They were corrupt. And that everything flowed from that. You know, the people they hired, the things they did, the processes that they undertook.

And so he thought, you know, I need. to bring in my own people. Let me bring in people from Tesla from SpaceX, from his tunneling company, the boring company. And these are my trusted folks. They're going to figure out what's right and what's wrong. We're going to go through everything to the last detail to understand how things operate in this company. And it's kind of one of his mindsets or mantras in life. It's this idea of reducing things to first principles and asking like why are things done this way. And when he bought Twitter, there was such a distrust of previous management, largely because of, you know, the lawsuit that happened and the forcing him to buy the company,

that he really wanted to rip things down to the studs and, you know, figure out how to do things himself. And so these goons came or, you know, I shouldn't call them the goons myself, but they were called the goons by the employees, came in and started ordering people around. They had people print out code, you know, for code reviews, which was kind of funny process. where they're like going to the printers and having to shred them because it's a because it's a violation of an FTC consent decree which we can get into and you know like Twitter employees just don't know what's going on they're like why is this person who's from Tesla ordering me around and there was just such a distrust between both parties that

continued throughout the weeks that ensued over the takeover here's another favorite scene what was the scheme to turn Twitter headquarters into a long stay hotel? So this was part of the aftermath of the takeover. You know, Musk was kind of in a little bit of a spiral and he sent out this email to all the employees saying, you know, you need to be extremely hardcore. You need to work, you know, way over time and grind it out so you can like make this company the best success it can be.

And one of the things that he was asking people to do was to stay. in the headquarters itself rather than spend money on hotels when they were coming into town and working these long hours. And so he took a couple of rooms in the building and transformed them into bedrooms, essentially. We have a photo in the photo insert at the book of what this looked like, but, you know, it's like a little bed and a lamp and a side table. And he was wanting people to sleep in the office. And you had to use the Twitter public bathroom. These, these do not come with on suite. No.

There's not a micro fridge. There's not a private bathroom. It's not a normal hotel experience by any means. I'm currently in one if we're showing video of it. Yeah. Ryan is Spartan accommodation right now. Another favorite scene from the book, 2023 Super Bowl.

Elon is in the Fox luxury suite with Rupert Murdoch. And he is very mad about a Joe Biden tweet. What happened? Yeah, that's a funny one. He's at the Super Bowl, and bear in mind, he does not like sports. He doesn't understand them. He doesn't have time for them. But he'll go to events.

Like, he'll show up at a Lakers game. He went to Qatar for the World Cup final. And he went to the Super Bowl as, you know, a guest. He sat right next to Rupert Murdoch. And I think he realizes sports are a massive part of Twitter. I mean, it's still one of the things I use Twitter for or X for these days is like, you know, the community's there. You can't really get anywhere else.

And he realizes that. So he shows up to the Super Bowl. And it's the Eagles, I think, versus, is it the Chiefs that year? Eagles Chiefs. Eagles Chiefs, right. And he actually went to school at UPenn. So he has a connection to Philadelphia. And he tweeted something like Go Eagles, you know, his support of the Eagles.

You know, Joe Biden is from Delaware. He also likes the Eagles. and he tweeted something at himself. And Joe Biden's tweet just gets way more engagement than Elon's. And even though Joe Biden has less followers, and that really, really upsets him. He had been focusing for the previous weeks on why his tweets hadn't been getting engagement.

And this kind of just set him off to the point where he flies to San Francisco directly from the game and calls an emergency meeting to get people to figure out why his tweet isn't getting as much engagement as Joe Biden's. And it sparks this kind of multi-day fact-finding mission to understand why the algorithm isn't boosting him the proper way. And he was right to a point that his tweets were not as visible as they should have been at that point in history?

Yeah, I mean, I think this is, first of all, this is a problem for like super, super high accounts. Like for the average person, this wouldn't have been an issue. but like he could see, you know, maybe he wasn't getting, he was only getting 5,000 likes instead of 8,000 likes that he typically got. And he was trying to understand why. And he thought this was a massive problem. And I think it speaks to a larger issue with him in that he extrapolates problems to his own account to everyone else

and not realize that he is such a unique figure on Twitter. You know, he gets a lot of spam. He gets a lot of weird experiences only because he is, an account with 197 million followers at this point. And yeah, it's just kind of the centering of himself and not seeing kind of the wider picture that caused this issue. Musk comes in and he wants to take away verified status, the blue checkmark away from journalists like the three of us.

Though I know Ryan still has his. Not paying for it, by the way. So he's paying for it for you? Yes. He's given it to me as a kind of troll. I think, but yeah, I have it. So to be clear, not paying the $8 a month. Remind us, what was his thinking behind taking away verified status from journalists and other people?

So his theory was that he could shift the revenue of the company to be more dependent on subscriptions rather than on paid advertising. And he thought by turning the verification badge into something that anyone could buy, he would earn a lot of money because a lot of people would want to buy this. It turns out, you know, not so. many people are interested in a vanity checkmark on Twitter. But that was his plan to make money for the company. And so he stripped checkmarks from everyone who had them and started selling them instead. And part of it was, you know, he's had kind of a longstanding feud with the media.

And he would gripe about the fact that, you know, random reporters with 2,000 followers are verified on the platform. But, you know, someone he thought was more deserving of that status didn't have it. And so he said it was a move to democratize the checkmarks. You have a line in here from Esther Crawford, who was the head of the Twitter Blue initiative, telling Musk, some of your tweets are the reason why advertisers left or paused spending. When you talk about how much Twitter's value has tanked over the last couple of years, how much of that is due to Musk's own posts?

I think it's hard to measure, but I don't. just qualitatively and just talking to advertisers, it's had an immense impact. And quantitatively, we can see the drop in advertising at Twitter or at X over the years. And, you know, a lot of these advertisers will stop spending during periods of kind of his bad behavior. I think of something we talked about this earlier, but his engagement of the Great Replacement Theory, this idea that Jewish people are, you know, it's conspiracy that Jewish people are causing or leading or pushing migration to replace white populations in the U.S.

You know, this kind of crazy conspiracy theory. He engages with it on Twitter. And in the days after, he kind of doubles down. He goes after George Soros. And, I mean, that's stuff that no one wants to be. You imagine if you're a Honda advertising executive and you pull up, you know, Twitter and you see Nazi content or you see conspiracy theories. They're just not going to be for that. And we've, we've kind of reported on this in these periods that he's done these things. Like, you know,

there are just massive drop-offs in advertising tens of millions of dollars, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars that we're talking about here. And that advertising sometimes doesn't return. We're talking about losses. Twitter had about $5 billion in revenue annually before the takeover. I think it's probably close to half of that now, if not less. So that is a huge impact for the company. I want to ask you guys about putting this book together. How is reporting on Twitter different than reporting on other tech companies?

Oh, that's a good question. I mean, everywhere in Silicon Valley, people try to drive this. this mission-driven workplace thing. So they want their employees to be really attached to whatever world-saving endeavor they're on. But I think with Twitter employees really bought into that and we're really invested in the idea of being part of the mission to support the public conversation and creating this platform for social and political discourse.

Most of the people who we talk to, they're really, really. believed in that and it was a big part of why they wanted to work at Twitter instead of going to a Google or Facebook or an Amazon where they could have made far more money. And so, you know, it was really interesting to report in that environment. And it kind of sets Twitter apart from a lot of the other companies in the valley. And I think you see a similar sort of like just belief and focus on mission from the people who are in Musk's orbit as well. These are people who really believe in his ability to save humanity and to do these kind of impossible feats that no one else can do, sending rockets to Mars, all these things. And so it's an environment where everyone on both sides

of the issue feels like it's not just business. It's not just work, but they are serving some kind of higher purpose. How helpful or unhelpful did you find Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk? I actually think it's quite helpful. We didn't interview Musk for this book, although we certainly tried. And Walter Isaacson had access to Elon Musk for, I think, two years or so in reporting that book. So it was useful to kind of check in and see what Musk's viewpoints on things were at different

periods along the way. But, you know, when I picked it up, I was really eager for those to see, okay, what was Elon really thinking behind the scenes? And it's so interesting because he is such a chronically online person that he'd posted a lot of those thoughts in real time. And so we kind of knew what he was thinking already because he'd been so transparent on the platform about it that I didn't feel like a lot of his sort of behind the scenes insights were all that revelatory. I also think, you know, that book was what, it's the story Elon wanted to tell. And you can, you can tell that by the amount he's promoted it after the fact. He's tweeted about, you know, people should read Walter's book. It explains me perfectly. And that kind of gives me red flags a little bit. Not to, I mean, you know, we didn't get that access. Elon did not respond to us in any way. We sent him more than 500 questions for the book for fact checking purposes. But in a lot of ways, we also didn't need to talk to him. it wasn't necessary or in some ways because it would have been nice but we had his viewpoints already from from Walter Isaacson in that book and so we had the other side of the story that maybe Elon didn't want out there and we told it you know and I also think

Walter became a little captured in in the process we have scenes in the book where he is advising Elon on business decisions on business decisions about pricing Twitter blue about what to do with badging and verification for news outlets. And I think that's just a tricky place to be or like it's not a place I want to be as a journalist or my subject is taking my advice or, you know, seeing me as an advisor on decisions that will impact, you know, the company. Like that's just like, it's just strange. And I'm glad we just weren't, we didn't have to do that.

So go back to fact-checking for just one second. You would email Elon a giant list of questions and you would just hear nothing back. Yeah, we, I think we sent it to him. Well, first of all, we were requesting a bunch of interviews first. And this is informed by our own reporting at the times. We just get no responses from him anytime we email him questions for a story. But in the process of doing the book, we still ask for interviews and about, about four or five months out from PubDate, we sent after these interview requests about

518 questions in an email to him and in his advisors. We followed up multiple times and we got nothing. I would think one of the challenges of writing this book is that Elon Musk never says, I'm not going to make news for a few months. So how do you write a book about a story that never stops unfolding? I think this is one of my biggest anxieties about this. book, we had outlined the first two-thirds of it and knew really clearly where those were going to go. And then we just didn't know where to end the book because, like you said, he's in a new headline every single day. And towards the end, it got really agonizing because he would be doing things every day. And we're like, oh, we have to get this in the book. We have to get this in the book.

And we knew at a certain point, we'd have to cut ourselves off from writing and just wait for the book to actually be manufactured and put out into the world. And those couple of months between when we had to put our pens down and when it was released, were really stressful for me. I'm like, what if, you know, what if his plane goes down? What if something crazy happens to him? And we can't capture that. But, you know, that's just sort of the dilemma of covering someone like him that's never out of the news. We added stuff as well after we submitted, like we would tweak things. And the way the book ends right now, it's it's we caught like the Trump turn essentially which was we were expecting him to at some point endorsed Trump but we end it in in March with their first meeting in Florida and you kind of get

the the foundation for everything that's happening now and you know it's it's kind of a great place to end at least you know we don't have to cover every dealing between him and Trump but the reader can piece together. Okay, this is where they met. It's the nice ending of the book. And here's where the launch off point is for everything we see now. But yeah, it was a choice. And I don't know, this book could have been twice as long, I guess, if we, if we kept writing. Another line that stuck out to me early on in Elon's Twitter years, a confidant meets with him and says, after the factor, you paraphrase him saying, he wanted to be liked. Musk wanted to be liked. How does that need of wanting to be like drive what he does and has done at Twitter?

I think it can't be understated, really, how important that is for him and how much it drives this decision making. I mean, Ryan spoke earlier about how he's so needled by the fact that he's not getting more likes on a tweet than Joe Biden, that he has to like stage an intervention to figure out what's going on there. And yeah, I think he's been able to. And, yeah, I think he's been able to turn Twitter now X into a platform for and about him. He's now the most followed account. All of his friends are verified. Their posts are what he sees when he opens the app. He sees a lot of praise from fans of Tesla, fans of his work at X. And so he's really kind of turned it into this Elon Musk praise machine, which is really interesting. It's reflexive to say that Twitter

sucks now or Twitter is dead? How specifically is Twitter worse today than it was two years ago? I mean, the subtitle of our book is how Elon Musk's destroyed Twitter and it's clearly provocative because every time we post an image to X of our book, we get a bunch of his fanboys saying, what do you mean it's dead, you know, or what do you mean he destroyed it? It's better than ever. Like, I can't believe you're posting on X still. Look at, you know, you guys are a bunch of losers. but I also think that like the it's defensible in a lot of ways you know first of all the company is no longer called Twitter it's called X from a financial standpoint as well he bought it at 44 billion dollars he now values it internally at 19 billion dollars you have investors that have marked it down to 11 or 12 billion dollars you know that's a huge loss of

value and then on the platform itself you have users leaving you they're going to places like threads and blue sky. You have things breaking left and right. I think it was something like the Donald Trump space the other day. That was just a complete disaster. That interview for the first half hour where they couldn't get it working. And, you know, I think Kate and I never ascribed to the idea that one day we'd wake up and Twitter would be gone. You know, in those early days of the takeover, especially after the firings, there was like a, you know, a lot of concerns.

that one, like, these people would be gone and the site would just stop working. Well, the site is pretty robust. It has, like, a lot of robust technology. It's been built up over these years by thousands of engineers at the company. And I guess the way we think about it is, you know, a car that keeps chugging along, you know, things are getting removed from it. Like the, the engine might, you know, lose a spark plug or two. But it's just kind of keep, it's chugging, I guess. And we've made this analogy a lot. But the idea that people still use Yahoo Mail. It's a product that people still

use, but it's not growing. It just exists. My grandma still has Yahoo Mail, and there will still be a subset of users that use Twitter moving forward, but it won't be this kind of dominant platform that we once knew. Is there a path to Twitter slash X being

successful or at least less unsuccessful? You know, I think so. Who knows? knows if we'll get there, but right now the company is really a desperate need of revenue. And either, I don't think advertisers will come back. And so either Elon pulls out some new revenue stream and surprises everyone, or he continues to prop up the company with his own wealth.

He's talked about turning it into a payments platform and is applied for licenses for people to transmit payments. So that's still in progress. And, you know, given some of the glitchiness and the problems on the site, I think I would be hesitant to put my credit card information in there at this point, but maybe people will use it. So, yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely a possibility there. And despite everything that's gone on, it's still an incredible platform for breaking news moments, for political discourse. And so I think it will continue to have that stickiness. in that advantage. Last question is for you, Ryan.

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are developing a movie about Gawker. And you wrote the other day, on threads, I might add, it sucks when the biggest story of your career ends up getting subsumed by someone else in the Hollywood machine rewards that. What sucks in particular about this version of the Gawker story becoming a movie? Oh, man, I'm going to get in trouble. This is what you get for posting. I know.

This is a never post. I tell you. I tell Ryan, I tell Ryan not to post every day. Every day I say it. Okay. There's a backstory here, which is before I covered Twitter and wrote this book, one of the, I still think the biggest scoop of my career was breaking the story that Peter Thiel was funding the whole Kogan lawsuit against Gawker Media, which destroyed the company. It was a scoop we had worked on for months and, you know, it took a lot of reporting to get out there.

And we broke it and we were very proud of it. Um, you know, there is a version of that story that was told by someone who wrote a book. I don't need to name them. And that's the version of the story that's being shopped around, um, to movie studios and, um, you know, to celebrities and what, what have you. And I, I, I don't know if that, well, I know, but that, that's, that version of the story, I don't think is faithful to the actual events. Nor do I think should, that should be rewarded. And so I don't know, as, as, as someone, who broke the story initially, it's sad to see that play out that way and for folks who have a lot of power over what gets made or what doesn't get made to engage with a project like that.

But also, no, it's still a long way from happening. And these things don't always pan out and they're not always made. So yeah, that's kind of what I meant by that. All right. Kate Conger and Ryan Mack, the book is Character Limit How Elon Musk destroyed Twitter. The book rules. Kate and Ryan, thanks for coming on the press box. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Brian. All right, it's time for the second weekly edition of the David Shoemaker guesses the strained pun headline. Yeah. Monday's headline about a Mullet Championship and its title belt was main event, M-A-N-E event. Today's headline comes to us from alert listeners, Tim Creedon and Joe Walski.

It's from the Washington Post Metro. section. There's a donut shop in Washington, D.C., David, where musicians from punk and hardcore bands work. Musicians like it because they get to work overnight, because that is, as the old Dunkin' Donuts ads told us, that is when you make the donuts. Time to make the donuts is overnight, and they don't have to do like an office job to pay the bills. So we have these musicians working at the donut shop. What was the Washington Post? Post. Strain pun headline. Music, all night

donut shop, um, pumpkin donuts. Pumpkin donuts is correct. Is that right? Oh, my God. David. My title belt. That's fantastic. All right. That is the press box. I'm Brian Curtis. But I'm actually magic by Brian Waters,

the one and only. Guess what, folks? It's almost October. meaning it's almost one month until the presidential election. And let me tell you something, this is going to be a huge month at the press box. Huge, I tell you. We'll have a full schedule soon, but I want to give you a little taste of what we've got coming your way.

Next Tuesday is the vice presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walls. So Wednesday morning, Benji Sarlane of Semaphore is going to be here with our post-debat reaction show, but that's not all. Thursday in the usual press box slot, Bomani Jones is going to be here.

And you know, we're going to talk about sports and politics and everything in between. It's going to be a hell of a week next week on the press box. And that doesn't even include Monday's show in which David Shoemaker and I will have more lukewarm tics about the media. Have a fantastic weekend.