The Ryen Russillo Podcast - Empathy for Jets Fans, UNC Coach Mack Brown Talks Drake Maye and Texas, and ‘Battle of Ink and Ice’ Author Darrell Hartman

Episode Date: September 14, 2023

Ryen starts out the pod discussing how devastating the Aaron Rodgers injury is to the Jets fanbase and shows empathy towards Jets fans before getting into people turning on Josh Allen now (00:44). Then, he’s joined by North Carolina head football coach Mack Brown to discuss potential top pick Drake Maye, Texas's win over Alabama and life in college football with NIL (13:55). Next, he chats with author Darrell Hartman about his book "Battle of Ink and Ice" (39:17). And finally, the guys close it out with some listener-submitted life advice questions including a wild story involving jungle juice (1:12:02). The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please check out theringer.com/RG to find out more or listen to the end of the episode for additional details. Host: Ryen Russillo Guests: Mack Brown and Darrell Hartman Producers: Steve Ceruti, Kyle Crichton, and Cliff Augustin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

on today's podcast i feel bad for jets fans like really bad it's not going to sound like that in the open but we'll get there little stuff on josh allen and a news tidbit from this story that i cannot get enough of mac brown head coach of unc, coming back to a place where he's already had success, the changing college football landscape, and a little Texas talk for you. And The Battle of Ink and Ice. It is my new favorite book, and Daryl Hartman is the author.

We're going to talk polar exploration and New York City Daily newspapers and life advice. I know it's Wednesday, but I still have to talk about Aaron Rodgers. I feel bad. Jets fans, this is a history that's personal to me, so it may bum you out even more, but I'm telling you I have sympathy for you.

I'll be nice, but I don't know what it is about the Jets fan that I've known in my life, but I've always found that person to be gross. I don't know. I'm not proud of it. That's not what you want to hear after you just lost your quarterback. But again, it's very specific to me because I feel like if you talk to non-Jets fans and you were like, describe a Jets fan, everybody would get it right. They would get it right. And now the reason it's personal to me is I was in school and I had roommates and there was kind of this New Jersey, New York City hybrid thing, which I always thought was kind of gross. I'm not talking about the physical appearance. I'm not trying to be mean

here. I'm talking about the alignment with the New York and New Jersey teams that never really made any sense to me. And I thought it was total bullshit because let's face it, if you were in the New York kind of New Jersey area, you probably rooted for the Giants. And then when the Jets got Parcells back because of the Parcells connection, all of a sudden you guys are Jets fans. So again, I'm going back like 20 years and then they were Rangers fans, except when the Devils got good. And then they were Devils fans again. And I was like, Hey, what's going on with you guys? Like, can I just like the Blue Jays? Well, I guess I have the hats, but that was a personal relationship. Um, it was always the Knicks because the Nets probably never got good enough, even though there's probably a little

stretch of like, is this Van Horn guy going to be awesome? So I know I'm going back years, but that's kind of how I always remember Jets fans is that you're actually Giants fans. And yet when the Jets are good, you're just going to pick a different team to be awesome for the rest of us in all these different cities. If it was like, what if we had eight teams in the four sports? Like, well, I can like them too. I don't know if I'd root for the Boston Braves, but I don't know if I was growing up, if I would just be like, yeah, I'm a Red Sox fan, except when the Braves are good, if they had not moved. That's always bothered me, and I think it's a little fair. I'm sure plenty of Jets fans are like, hey, you guys aren't exactly sweet in

Massachusetts, and I would agree with you, but at least the Pats were really good for 20 years, and this Jets team cannot seem to figure it out, except when it felt like they had figured it out. I remember, I don't know, second half of the season last year, I've referenced it a few times, watching NFL games and just constantly watching that Jets defense going. I think these guys are filthy, like really good. A chance to win games. Just with the defense alone. I mean, we can talk about Sauce, Quinton Williams, Johnson, the linebacker,

was a whitehead who had the three picks. But when I watch Quincy Williams out there just tackling everybody, and then you go back, you're like, how did this guy last so long? And you're like, oh, look at his measurements. And he was small, he was undersized, and it hasn't mattered.

That Jets defense is good enough to carry them through some of the games. And to bring in Aaron Rodgers, that's probably what you thought of his, I don't know if he was even diminishing, knowing him, how fired up he'd be to go somewhere else. He was probably going to have, even by his standards, one of the better seasons a quarterback is going to have

in the league this year. And then he plays four plays. He's out with the Achilles, we know all that now. And just the magnitude, the drama, the part of it where you're like, this is actually happening. Monday night football. He's got Garrett Wilson.

Who's insane. Like think about what that's going to be like Rogers to Wilson and that defense. He's got the American flag. He's running out. It's on nine 11. Four place. He's running out. It's on 9-11. Four place. He's done. There's probably some of you asking, hey, when's this going to get nice? When are you actually going to be nice? The point is,

I feel bad for you. I feel bad for you. I don't know. There were some comps who were throwing around some of my buddies being like, what is as bad as this? And there are a few that are actually really bad. And there's always the recency bias of, is this the biggest letdown ever to start a season? Um, I don't know. I don't want to get into some of the comps that we came up with. And somebody came up with Gordon Hayward. I'm like, yeah, not really. I don't think it's Gordon Hayward signing as a free agent with the Celtics breaking his ankle on an alley-oop. I don't think it's that. I remember when that happened, I was just at home watching the game and I tweeted about basketball. So I made a basketball observation that was, I thought, pretty straightforward. It was like, okay, I wonder what this offense is going to look like. And if Marcus Smart decides that, okay, with Hayward out, expecting him to get 16, 17 shots a game,

if that changes his approach. And you would have thought I endorsed a political candidate. You would have thought I'd said the most horrific, closed-minded thing you could ever imagine with the response that I got. It was like, how dare you, sir? How dare you? Somebody called me Skip Bayless. Skip Bayless's tweet when Gordon Hayward broke his ankle was, a weak East becomes even weaker for Prince LeBron. So Skip found a way to make fun of LeBron after a guy just broke his ankle. I simply wondered what the offense was going to look like. And people were saying we were the same. Multiple people. It was so bad, I even reached out to one. Didn't even know who the guy was. He's a reporter. I was like, are you fucking kidding? He's like, well, I just think the timing of it all. It's a

little insensitive, which is another topic that I will one day unveil where this imaginary line exists when it's okay to do some of this stuff. The reason I even bring any of that up is that it was on Monday night, minutes after. This is why I I feel bad for Jets fans. Everything was on the table for Aaron Rodgers. Everything. People made fun of that dude all night long. No one cared. Zero repercussions. It was okay content to make fun of Aaron Rodgers because let's face it, there's a lot of people that don't like him. I'd even admit, and I just think from a football standpoint, I haven't been a huge fan i've always defended him the player because i think he's one of the best quarterbacks we've ever seen um but i didn't really like his arguments that much of trying to get out of

green bay like my point was always consistent like you're acting like you're with arizona and you're with green bay and other than that final year in 22 it was a really competitive football team that i think the front office actually did a pretty good job. And then this guy didn't even want to show up to camp to work out a new receiver. He's just mad all the time, just mad at everybody. And then finally got his way and got his way out. So I don't know if that was it, because I don't think it was. I think it was other issues, but everybody was okay making fun of a guy blowing out his Achilles on Monday Night Football and destroying the hopes of a Jets fan base that felt like it had real reason to be excited. So there's the sympathy.

I know we didn't get off to a good start with this whole thing, but that's what I wanted to say. A couple more things on that. Before I do that, how many people are going to remember the Jets won that game? Jets won that game. I admit, I was looking around and I was working on something and I look up and I go, wait, this is a game. Close the laptop. You have to watch this. This is actually a game. Josh Allen closes the game out with four total turnovers. Started seeing this stat. He's 0-5 now in overtimes. I went through the overtime. Some are on him. Some aren't. Didn't get the ball back in Kansas City. 94-yard touchdown drive by Brady in one of them. He had a pick in the game against Minnesota. And look, the team,

they should not have been in overtime against Zach Wilson. Turn the ball over that much. That's what's going to happen. But now the number's coming around because what's our Monday night theory? What's our primetime football game theory? If you're a quarterback and you have the kind of game that Josh Allen has, that's worth like four losses because everyone is paying attention to it. And now it starts coming back to one of our favorite things is, hey, maybe we're not shitting on this guy enough. I'm this guy enough. Because this number sucks for Josh Allen. He came into the league in 2018.

He has 84 total turnovers, the most of any player. That's a lot. Despite what Bill's mafia wanted to tell us, which is a really weird campaign, when Allen eventually ascended to a top three quarterback because that's the way he's been talked about now for a couple years and i think it's totally fair i mean the guy was done he wasn't very good his first two years i don't know why bills fans want both like hey you got the guy he's really good like also apologize for not believing in him yeah i didn't believe him because i didn't think he played that well

and so now you're met with the extreme of this where it's like, wait, do we need to change our tears on the fly here after Monday Night Football? I know he had turnovers last year. The red zone stuff was a problem. We thought it was an injury. Other than one year when he had 37 to 10, 37 touchdowns to 10 picks in 2020, he's always going to give you a couple more interceptions than maybe you'd want. We love the running component of his game, but I'm just telling you, there's no way as big as he is that you're going to be able to keep up

attacking defenders. He doesn't even look for the sideline. He's looking for contact every time. As big as he is as many times the defender looks like he loses in that transaction he's got to lose that element of his game um or just bring it out for the special times when needed in case of emergency but instead he's like now just smashing the guys the whole time so that worries me a little bit but that's not really talking about who he is as a quarterback because now it's become a conversation about possibly resetting it when we thought, I mean, hell, even going into last year when there was still some of the Mahomes doubt, it was like, is Allen actually the guy?

I'm not going to update Allen's legacy every week. I'm still a big believer. But yeah, you could put together a nice little TV segment argument and go, wait, that guy has that many turnovers and he did it again on Monday night after a year we were questioning it last season. It's all on the table. It's what's going to happen. I'm not going to do it. But let's get back to Rodgers. I hope he's not done. I hope this is not the way he's done. I would guess he'd probably want to play again. Get through this. The Achilles stuff sucks. This is a tough dude. I think in a way, sometimes he doesn't get enough credit for how tough he's been because we're so enamored with

the arm. His final resume is never going to be, or I should say it this way, his final resume will not match who he is as a quarterback as far as talent and ability. Because there's going to be a handful of other quarterbacks that are going to have a much better resume than Rodgers is going to have. But he's got the individual stuff, the four MVPs, multiple AP first teams. I think he's got four of those. He was maybe going to pass Favre in career touchdowns for fourth all time. Needed 33 of those this year. So not a crazy number, but it's a lot.

It's more than last year. But I was really surprised that there was no waiting period whatsoever and just housing this guy. And so for Jets fans, it was bad enough what you had to see on TV. If you're engaged in social media, you're like, wait, don't we usually get like a 24-hour grace period before we make fun of the guy that just had the season-ending injury and in roger's case that was not it one last thing that i want to add to the content game of this topic i was worried we weren't going to be able to do it anymore. I would sit around at home going,

is it done? Is no one going to suggest this anymore? But man, you did not let me down. Colin Kaepernick was suggested as a realistic alternative to the Jets quarterback problems on social media for like two days. And I'm so proud of everybody that engaged in it um i i want there to be a day in 2026 like arch manning goes down and somebody in like

earnestly tweets out hey kaepernick's still working out can we get a documentary to add to his documentaries on what his workouts are like he He last played in 2016. This isn't even about like every Kaepernick topic in the beginning was a very political one. I've already done my rant where both sides love just trying to figure out holes in the other side's argument. I don't feel like doing my segment all over again, but that means in 2023, when he last played in 2016, people are seriously suggesting Kaepernick, hey, why not? Well, he hadn't played in seven years

would be my starting point. It just, let's keep it going. Let's, like, we already, week one, we got it out of the way in 23. So that means 24, 25, 26. There might be a kid in high school right now who has no idea when he gets hurt in an NFL game six years from now that somebody will seriously be like, look, Kaepernick, I know it might be a kid in high school right now who has no idea when he gets hurt in an NFL game

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It's Mack Brown, head coach of the Tar Heels football team, who sit 20th in the AP, 18th in the coaches. And we spent some time together at ESPN, so Mack, it's good to catch up again. How are you? I'm doing great, Ryan. Thanks for having me on, and congrats on all your success. Oh, well, I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I'm happy for you guys. I really enjoy the Carolina game. I think anytime I look at it, you may not like this, but when I see a non-SEC team look more physical than the SEC team, I'm like, hey,

that's a pretty good start. And people could be annoyed by that, but I think it's a compliment. Here's my first question for you is this, is we know your history. You're at Carolina for a long time. You go off to Texas, do huge things. What's it like coming back to a place that you have this relationship with as a head coach? Ryan, it's a lot easier because you're familiar with boosters. You're familiar with faculty. And the chancellor actually worked with me as a trainer and then a dean that worked on the concussion protocol. And Carolina has one of the top concussion protocol for military and the NFL in the country. And then when I got back, the vice chancellor was a manager for me. So it's nearly like family and either the top boosters are still alive

and doing well, or their sons are, or their grandsons are, and, and, uh, they're all still involved. So I've got so many friends here. It was really like, I never left. Yeah. See, I, I have to imagine like people can talk about, well, he has to understand us and we have to, and that's why like a lot of alums will get gigs where you're like a least, you know, the president's probably thinking if things go South here, I'll get another year where no one's mad at me because they loved him so much as a player and everything. So I'm happy that it's been a good fit. What, what, what does it take to kind of turn it around? How many recruiting cycles, how many seasons, get all the coordinators, get everything dialed in. Cause it feels like you're at that now five years in, but what's your goal when you show

up to a program to go, okay, this is the time I'm going to need to get this going in my direction. Ryan, when we got here, they'd won two games the previous year and three games the previous year. They'd won one power five game. So it was really struggling and tough. And Larry Fedora did a great job here. And at the end, it just drifted off. So we wanted to be relevant again. And that was it. So we won seven. We went to a bowl and we won the bowl.

And then the second year, we went to the Orange Bowl. And it was during COVID. And it was really cool. And we had a chance to beat A&M when they were fifth or sixth in the country. And without four of the best players. So we felt like we were making progress. The next year, we kind of laid an egg. We lost four great players to the NFL.

I didn't think we did a great job coaching with the change, with the transition in different ways to try to utilize different players. And then last year, I thought we did a really good job for us. We won nine. We lost at the end. Oregon and Clemson were better than we were. We still had a chance to beat Oregon, and we came down to the last play with Georgia Tech and overtime with NC State. So right now, we're a lot like the people we play. So like Saturday night, we're going to have to win some really close games, and we're going to have to coach really hard and really well to win

because you've got maybe six, eight teams that are better than everybody else around. Then the rest of us are about alike. And then there's that group of 10 to 25 that can beat each other at any time, and then you've got some that struggle. But with the transfer portal, nobody's without players. They can go find some if they don't have them. So it's really like free agency. Yeah, because one form of the question I was going to ask you was,

you know, you're out for five, six seasons and then you come back, how different it is. Realistically, I could ask you how different it is now compared to just two years ago. So, you know, pick whichever timeline you want, but whether it's what it is now, a couple of years ago, or being out of coaching and coming back, what's different to you? What is the biggest difference? Well, Ryan, I spent five years in TV with you guys, and that was really fun. And I got to see

football out of the box. I got to look back in and see what I liked I did and what I would have changed. And because when you're doing it, you're so busy and you stay in that little box. And if you're winning, you don't usually have turnover with your staff. You don't get fresh new ideas and you just keep trying to produce and do better. I thought I made a mistake at Texas because one time I said, we need to maintain. You can't maintain in any business. You got to get better. You got to get better every day. So coming in here, people would ask me early, what's different? And the biggest difference was early signing day. People were visiting in spring. They were signing in June or in December. February was just obsolete anymore. So I wasn't used to having a lot of official visits in the spring. I wasn't used to having official visits for home games in the fall because you just didn't

do that when I was coaching. So that was the biggest difference. And then came NIL and then came transfer portal. And then came the collision between the two, excuse me, which has been very difficult for everybody. And then roster management's different and then COVID hits. And so it's been a real challenging five years. And my wife, Sally Ryan says, I love chaos. I don't think I love chaos, but I do like to fix things. So there's probably something in between there. And right now, kids need us more than ever

before because there's so many things that are wrong with our sport that are going around. And there's some really great qualities of NIL, but there's a lot of damaging things for your locker room and for kids that aren't getting paid. Maybe some that are and can't handle it. Transfer portal's tough because you're going through it. One time the NCAA let everybody transfer, and now they don't let anybody transfer. So there's probably a fine line that's what's common sense in between those two. But you can have a kid leave at any time, and you've got to replace him.

Or you can have three linebackers leave, and then that room is really thin and you don't have depth. So roster management is more difficult but more important than ever before. I have a rule where if I feel like I've been wronged and I want to tell the person that's wronged me, I may write out what I think and then I'll, I'll give it a day. And if I still feel that way the next day, then, then I it. It appears either you were that upset about the Tess Walker situation where you were like, I don't need to sleep. I slept on it. I'm good. Hit send. Obviously, the NCAA denied the transfer for your receiver who everybody was looking forward. I've

read the story. I know your feelings. There's not really much of a question here other than you felt like you had to let the NCAA know in a very forceful way how you felt about their decision. Ryan, I felt like I had to defend the young man because I thought he was wrong. And our university looked at it hard. We're not against what's happening with the transfer portal. We don't think people should be able to transfer twice. His situation was different, and we wanted common sense in the waiver. And we didn't get that. And that was the

disappointing thing. And I felt like for him, everybody's talking about me calling out the NCAA. I really felt like I was taken up for him because he's a young man that was a top 50 pro prospect. Now he doesn't get to go to the NFL. He's a guy who would have been able to really help himself in the NIL market. Now he really doesn't have a chance to do that. So talking about damages, his life has completely changed. And for an athlete, so much of his life, his identity is with football, as a football player, and that's been taken away from him. So I'm the one that had to sit and tell him twice in a week that he wasn't eligible. I'm the one that had to worry about him at night. I'm the one that's got to figure out what do we do with him at practice? Do you put him on the scout team? Do you let him

work out for pro scouts and try to help him get to the NFL now? How do you keep his head up? He's really shy. He's not a guy that likes the limelight. So we made him honorary captain last week. I didn't know if he's going to drop out of school. I didn't know if he'd ever play football again. A lot of things going through his head.

So I made a decision a long time ago, Ryan, but specifically when I came back, I want to treat every player like I would want my son to be treated. And if my son is in this position, I'm going to fight for my son and I'm going to fight for his rights. And that's what I've been doing. When you've talked about the transfer portal, I think from the outside, we can be like, oh man, you even use the word chaos. I just want a better understanding. Does it mean it's that many more man hours for you and your staff of managing it? Or is it just a different version of management where the hours were always being used before and now they're just being used in a different way?

Whether the NIL falls into that, just help us understand from the outside how different your day-to-day is or isn't based on the new rules. Brian, you're still spending the same amount of hours, but you're having to get a bigger portion of your hours toward transfer portal. You walk out of the spring game, we laughed. If you're having your pregame meal before your spring game and a player doesn't speak to you and the portal opened that morning, that means he's probably leaving. And you don't even know it till it's after and they walk in,

they can get the portal in five minutes. I don't mean to laugh, but I am. I said he didn't speak to me, so he's probably gone. But you've got guys that are being tampered with. You've got guys that are being recruited off your campus, and they'll come and tell you, coach, I'm getting a lot of guys that are trying to get me to come and get money. And now it's done through agents, so it's really hard to catch somebody because the agent is kind of freewheeling. And for years, Ryan, we tried to keep boosters away from kids and now boosters are paying collectives to give money to kids. We tried to keep kids away from agents and now they're getting agents and agents are talking to the collective. So it's just so different. And then you've got to be careful when you, if you're looking for a tight end and

everybody knows you're looking for a tight end and you put it out that we've got to find a tight end and everybody knows you're looking for a tight end and you put it out that we've got to find a tight end and then three tight ends go in the portal. You can't talk to them before they go in the portal. If their high school coach calls you and says, coach, he'd like to go in the portal if you will take him. Technically, you have to tell the high school coach, I can't talk to you about your player until he gets in the portal. A lot of people aren't doing that, obviously, and that makes it more difficult. The one that's even crazier, Brian, is when players on your team are being offered a lot of money by agents of a certain coach somewhere else, and then they've got to look at it. And that's just, that's happening. It's real. And so recruiting changes, your pool changes, because number one, I've told our coaches, let's try to find somebody that wants to be here in school. Because if they're just about money, we don't have money.

We're not paying NIL money up front. It's really illegal to do it. There's ways that people can do it legally. A lot aren't. But if he gets here and he's a great player, then somebody will offer him money the second year too. So find a guy and a family that fits here, that wants to be here and wants to graduate from here

and knows that a bigger part of his NIL deal is going to be when he graduates. And that cuts that pool really down low. Because if you also commit a guy, Ryan, and you're sitting there the week before signing date and somebody with a lot of money that's throwing money around loses who they want, they're going to come and try to buy your guy right before you sign.

So you've got to try to get guys that want to be here, are going to stay here through the signing process, and then are not going to leave if they have a great freshman or sophomore year. Well, one guy who's going to leave, and that's for the NFL, is your quarterback, Derek May. So that'll be a good story, a version of somebody leaving. How does he stack up against the other NFL prospects that you've coached in college? He's as good as any of them. And that's the Colt McCoys and Chris Sims and, and Vince Youngs. And they're just, he's, he's a great player and it's,

he's confident. He's, he's nearly six, five, he's 225, 230. He can run. He's a lot more athletic than people think. He was raised in an athletic family. He was the youngest of four, so they beat him up. So he's tough. His dad was a quarterback in this league, in the ACC, that led the league in passing. So he's been raised right, taught right. His mom was, Drake says, the best athlete in the family and maybe the toughest one. So he checks all the boxes, Ryan. He's smart. He's competitive. He loves to play. He's a gym rat.

I thought he looked great in practice today. He loves playing. We have been running the ball more, trying to get fewer sacks and be more balanced. And somebody asked him the other day, your numbers aren't as big right now. And he said, I'm 2-0. That's the only number that matters to me. And that's who he is. And he means that. And his quarterback rating this time last year, I read the other day, 50 is an average quarterback in the NFL for a QBR,

75 is a pro bowler. He was at 82 this time last year after two games, and he's at 84 right now. So he's playing at a higher level than he did last year, just fewer touchdown passes because we're running the ball much better. And as people start having to bring people down and stop the run, his numbers are going to go back up, but he could care less about any of that. He's just the, he is the perfect person as well as quarterback to, to lead a college football team. The last thing about him, Ryan is, uh, NIL. Um, he's got everybody wanting him for commercials and ads. He pulls the players in for every one of them. He, I saw him a couple of weeks ago out on the field with all the offensive linemen, and he was shooting some commercial but wouldn't do it without them.

Then he got a seafood deal, and he made the company pull in all the receivers with him. That's the kind of guy he is, the kind of leader he is, the person he is. Do you think you would have been able to close Danny Connell back in the 90s if you had NIL money? No. Danny would have been bought by Florida State. His dad was a doctor. We know it would have never gotten this far. I knew there was a Florida State joke in there somewhere.

Yes. I'm glad. It was more funnier for you to deliver it. I know you guys are playing, but what did you think of Texas going into Tuscaloosa and being Alabama? I got to see some highlights when I got home, but we started at 5.15, 5.30. So by the time I got home, it was 10 o'clock. Yeah, you guys had a long one there.

The game was finishing right when I went in. You know, I think in some of the times, and I don't think I'm sharing too much, whether we talked on the air or we run into each other, you would explain to me, like, Texas is a tough job. Like Texas is a tough job. You're there a long time. You want a title. And I don't want to speak for you, but you know, you would even brought up the maintain thing, but I felt like maybe there was a little resentment and like, Hey, I've done a lot of big things here, and now you're in a hurry to change it. And so, again, you can fill in the gaps here, but I just want to spend a couple minutes

revisiting the exit of a program that's taken a long time to get it right. They may feel like they've gotten it right based on what happened, and I think they're really good watching the game on Saturday. But going back to that time and then being away from a job

that's really, really difficult, what are those memories like now from you further removed and now with your own team that's headed in the right direction? Ryan, I had a wonderful time at Texas. 16 years is a long time, and especially modern day. My wife, Sally, says you were there for a presidential term. So that's pretty cool. And I think it is.

I've got tremendous friends there. We have a son and grandkids that still live there. So Sally goes back a lot. I'm just so busy. I don't have a chance to. We have a great charity there every year, the Mac Jack and McConaughey. And it's just an unbelievable thing. So it was a dream to be at Texas.

It is a wonderful job and a great job when you're winning. Not as much fun when you're winning eight or nine. You got to win more than that. But that's why it's a tough job. I mean, but you've got everything. You have everything at your disposal to win. You've got money. You've got facilities.

You've got great players in the state of Texas. You've got players that are really well coached by some of the best high school coaches in the country. So when people would say, why aren't you winning? It's funny. The hardest thing is that when I was there, there were 375 players that would sign with Division I Power Five teams every year. And you got to take 20 of them or 25. um power five teams every year and you got to take 20 of them or 25 so trying to evaluate in that state with so many great players there's maybe 10 quarterbacks and you get to take one and then everybody's going to bash you about all the ones you didn't get there's going to be a lot of them that are really good there might be a hundred you would take um but but that's the more difficult thing you you need to win a bunch. You've got to keep a lot of people that are very powerful and very strong and very successful happy, and you've got to evaluate better than anybody else in the country, and then after you didn't take a young man, I had a young

man at Oklahoma State once intercept a ball right in front of me, and he got up and he said, remember me, and pitched the ball in my face. And I said, yeah, we should have taken it. So that's the world that you live in there because it's just – there's so many great players you can't take them all. And at that time, all of them were warning to come, so it was very, very difficult to try to decide who. I'd imagine other coaches that will listen to that answer are going to have no sympathy for you, though. They're going to say, oh, poor Mack Brown had so much talent around him.

But it's a really interesting point that you make that most people can't speak to. Maybe in Atlanta, you know, and in some of the pockets of Florida and Los Angeles and certainly some of the SEC states, and certainly some of the SEC states, but not as specific to a dot on a map, but that your program is setting itself up to be questioned far more because there are going to be all these guys in your backyard. They're going to be really good somewhere else, and you just don't have the room for them.

And, you know, look, we could sit here and name all the quarterbacks. Towards the end, you're winning nine games, and now when you're not taking those quarterbacks, it's what's wrong with Matt. And that part of it, look, it's the job. So unfair would be wrong. Even if it felt like at the time, like this, this is going to be specific to you feel incredibly unfair. Yeah. I love the high school coaches that if I didn't take one of their players,

they would come to practice and check out the one we did take and see if he was better than the one they had. And then they'd get on you. But it is a great place. It's a great job. Delos Dodds was a dream athletics director for me. Chris Delcani is doing an amazing job there. Sark and Rodney Terry, they've got it turned, both of them. So those two sports are in great shape moving forward. And I'm a Texas fan. People would think I'm not. I really am. I pull for them every week.

I hope they win. I've got so many dear friends there. Austin's a wonderful place to live. In fact, when we left Chapel Hill to go to Austin, Sally said, we weren't leaving Chapel Hill. We were just moving to Austin. And then we came back. So when you get a chance to live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Austin, Texas, your life's pretty good. Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. And I, I loved the

weekend I had, I was there for the, uh, the famous Jordan quote, ceiling is the roof. I was there in attendance. So that's a big part of history for me i got to spend a few days in chapel hill and um you know those those cool uniforms as a kid growing up you're like hey this town is pretty great too so look i'm happy for i'm thrilled to see where this team goes this year and i'm going to end on this because it's a tough business right and i wonder if this stage your life and i don't mean this to be like, hey, I've done this a long time. This isn't about an age thing. It's more about the accumulation of what your resume is as a person. And there's not many people I think that have as high of approval rating as you do as a person. There's plenty of people you've had some battles with and maybe don't like or

disagree. But I think the overall, what does it mean to you when people say, Hey, Mack Brown, he's one of the good ones in a tough business where we don't say that about a lot of people. What does that mean to you? Brian, that means the world to me because, uh, I want to do everything right. And even with the, with, uh, Tez Walker, um, I absolutely feel like my job is to stand by him and stand up for him. And I don't apologize for taking up for a young man that I feel like needs to be taken up for. And coaches know I'm going to go by the rules. I'm not a guy that bashes the other coach or the other team. I usually brag on them. And because that's, I respect them. I know how hard this business is. And somebody asked me one time, what do you want your legacy to be? And I want my legacy to be that I always tried to do what was right.

And I put everything, every minute that I had into every job I ever had and tried to always be positive and help kids. And that's all. I don't need anything else. And that's all. I don't need anything else. But I'm at a stage in my life where I can appreciate the kids and love the kids and enjoy the kids and try to help them. And that's all I need. I want enough games. You got to win to stay and help them or they won't listen. I've made enough money. I don't have to worry about that. So I'm so blessed to be around so many incredible people in my life and still have the energy to do this.

And somebody said, you know, you're getting older. And I said, yeah, if you've got energy, age is a wonderful group of experiences. So I know what I need to do. I've done this. I've been there. You got to just keep the energy up. And I think that's the only thing that really separates, uh, the older guys is, is who can hang in there and have the energy to recruit and handle issues and, and, and take crisis and turn them into positives because you're going to have them every day

and, and take that as a challenge and enjoy it. And right now all that is happening for me. It's one of my favorite stats ever. this the audience is going to go wait what you and nick saban were born in the same year that that means nick's old right is that that uh somebody said the other day that i'm sabered um i'm not old and i thought that sounds better and then someone was cutting my hair the other day, and I said, can you turn it from gray? And they said, it's white, Coach. It's really good looking. So when people are trying to do that,

they're at least being nice, and now I'm listening. Hey, look, it's still there. It's still there. We could have you on for just some college football segments for us. But, look, I'm rooting for you. Thanks so much for the time, and I can't wait to see how the season ends up. Thanks, Ryan.

Thanks for having me on, and glad this is all working out so well for you. Thank you. Thanks so much for the time. And I can't wait to see how the season ends up. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks for having me on and glad this is all working out so well for you. Thank you. It's one of my favorite books of the summer, The Battle of Ink and Ice. And Daryl Hartman joins us now, the author of this book. Okay. I jumped in the cold tub, by the way. Just got out of the cold tub in preparation for this book that is, it's two things. And I love books like this because it's understanding the history of the New York City dailies,

essentially the battle for supremacy amongst the newspapers, and also maybe the final destination on the planet, and that is the pursuit of the North Pole. So I wanted to start with you, which I can't imagine the amount of research you had to go through to get all the excerpts that you had, but us understanding kind of the 1800s and what was happening with the New York City newspaper market. Sure. So New York City by the second half of the 1800s was the sort of headquarters really for national media and international media. And the other thing that was happening was newspapers were getting very profitable. It was going from a pretty big business to a very big business. So a lot of competition here to get the most readers, get the most

advertising, get the news first, and sort of win this giant business contest. And newspapers were media. When we talk about media now, it's very fractured, right? You've got internet, television, cable, radio, social media. Back then, it was really just the newspapers. So you talk about centrality to the way people understand what's going on in the world. It really was all about the newspapers. So they're a massive cultural force as well in the 19th century. So if we try to figure out, because I mean, there were so many papers, as you mentioned, it was profitable. So you could have as many as they had and i love the back story of james gordon bennett their senior yeah new york herald and then junior is really the character here uh it's funny because even

in the pictures i look at his picture i go yup that's exactly who i thought he was um yeah and the funniest thing too i think it's like on the first page, it's just a great entry into the book where he's born. And another New York newspaper accuses him of being the son of someone else because the mom was seen flirting at a beach resort. And then the father who owns the Herald sues that paper for libel and wins a $250 reward. The amount of tro us going on between this is earlier in the 1800s, but the amount of trolling and just like mudslinging going on between the editors of the papers, personal attacks, just a constant thing in this case, like saying, yeah, James Gordon Bennett Jr. The new baby must be a bastard child that actually

did sort of cross a line, which is why there was a libel suit, but it was pretty bare knuckle brawling in those early days. Right. Once again, whenever we think we're different, all you have to do is read history and realize we'd never changed. We're just doing the same things differently over and over again. But let's talk a bit about James Gordon Bennett, Jr., who, uh, as you mentioned, as a character. Feel free to throw in any of the multiple stories that you share with us. Well, so you said his father was an immigrant and started the New York Herald, turned it into a very successful newspaper, the biggest in the United States. The son, James Gordon Bennett Jr., was born a millionaire and was sort of a silver spoon child, was sent off to France to be educated, not that he really took his classes very seriously. He was kind of

the spoiled scion of this big newspaper empire. And he became known around New York City for his sort of crazy bachelor ways. He would get drunk after two drinks and he was up on tables. He was smashing champagne glasses. He would push people around at the bar. One time he accidentally pushed around a guy he didn't know was like the champion prize fighter of the day and got knocked out cold. You know, he was sort of like this, he would cause damage. And then his solution every day was to wake up feeling a little bit of remorse and cutting a check for whoever's restaurant he'd destroyed or whatever, you know, with this sort of drunken frat boy type activities. So this, this is also a real like risk taker and adventurer, which comes into play later on in the story when we're talking about North Pole explorers and this idea of

newspapers helping out and investing in explorers like Bennett himself. He loved he was a racer of yachts. He actually won the first transatlantic yacht race that is to say like his yacht won but he actually went along for the ride in december which is the kind of crazy thing to do so he's and by the way you you share with us that that the the genesis of that race was guys shit-faced at some club yes and they decided okay we're racing to england yeah tomorrow and then his two rich buddies backed out. They're like, oh, wait a minute. What did we agree to?

No way. But Bennett, to his credit, went ahead and did it in December. You know, I think we forget how much history, especially this period, was probably conducted drunkenly at various private men's clubs, you know, and they wake up the next day and they're like, oh God, what have we done? But this is kind of Bennett's personality. He was a big personality. He was kind of infamous around New York City. And he was driving his sort of forehand coaches, which was the 19th century equivalent of a sports car, really. You know, he was fast driving these horse-drawn coaches around

Central Park, at least on one occasion late at night. He was seen doing it completely nude. No one really knew why. He sort of got in a couple accidents here and there with some of his debutante girlfriends. He was always up to something. So he was easily underrated is kind of the point here when it comes to being an enterprising and smart newspaper publisher. But he kind of was that when he wasn't drunk and he had his eye on the ball. He was a very successful publisher of the New York Herald. And I guess if you had to choose one thing for which he's famous as a newspaperman, it's this thing he did in the 1870s, which is to send a correspondent named Henry Stanley into Africa to rescue the most famous African explorer of the day, who is David Livingston.

So this sort of quote that's kind of known in culture, Dr. Livingston, I presume, that's the sort of like climax to this incredible true story of James Gordon Bennett's newspaper correspondent, Henry Sellingham, deep into Africa and somehow finding and rescuing this explorer. A newspaper had never done that before. So this is what turns Bennett and his paper, The Herald, not only into a hugely successful and profitable newspaper, but one that is known for sort of gambling or investing in these expeditions in order to make big news, not just report the news, but actually make the news. Okay. I want to bring in the other newspapers and more specifically the Times and their growth,

but this is a good segue into the obsession a global obsession with the pursuit of the north pole uh give us the reasons in and give us kind of there's also an economic thing here the northwest passage which is you know these ideas of what is possible and then realizing that they might not be. But this book does a great job of kind of reminding us when we don't have a lot of distractions, how obsessed we can become with one thing. Yes, this idea of a single idea that people would pursue for years and decades and risk all kinds of suffering and horrible, miserable experiences to get to. So this book's about the North Pole, but as you say, for a while,

no one really cared too much about the North Pole. They were kind of like, well, why would we really want to go there? This idea of the Northwest Passage through Arctic Canada was much more captivating. And there was a commercial reason. You could change international shipping forever if you could find a way through

because you'd get from Europe to the Far East much easier and you'd save all kinds of merchants, all kinds of money, revolutionize international maritime trade. Right. So people were trying to do that for a long time. Ultimately discovered that it was not feasible. The ice is just too challenging. And yeah, maybe some years you can really push your way through and only a few people will die. But that's no way to predict sort of a commercial plan. So ironically, nowadays with global warming, that Northwest Passage, I think you're going to read a lot more about in the coming years. But at the time that was kind of given up on. And around

the 1860s, 1870s, this idea of getting to the North Pole sort of took over as the sort of holy grail of Arctic exploration. We've got to get to the North Pole. It wasn't because they thought it was going to revolutionize commercial trade or anything like that. It was more of a symbolic thing, especially by the time we get into the main part of my book, which is this battle between the two American explorers. It's really about winning this race to get there and the personal and kind of national pride that's going to come with that. It's going to come with that victory. But it also makes, right, but it also makes a lot of sense as kind of the final corner of the earth that hasn't been discovered. Absolutely.

We should talk about the exploring side. This is a time when there are still a few parts of planet Earth that we have never been to. No one has set foot there, including native peoples. And we just kind of want to say we did it and see what's there. The curiosity component, the mystery of it, the attainment, these are all very powerful kind of magnetic ideas. Right. And even simpler than that, just the fame alone. Like whenever you go back and read about different things, you know, there was, it's almost admirable in a way that man was like, what can I do to stand out? And for most, it was some sort of life in the

military. And that's why you'd have all these guys going back to whatever war you want to pick, being like, I'm going to join up with these guys to hope to have some kind of acclaim, some kind of recognition. You had people coming from other countries, joining other battles. And then when you think of that backstory of like, okay, yeah, a couple of explorers are like, I want to be the first one who's able to do it because if I can, then I'll be able to say like, now I'm famous. And that's basically what we have in Cook and Perry. So give us the Cook and Perry backstories, who these guys were. And ultimately, what I assume at some point was a professional friendship, obviously becoming rivals.

Yes. So Cook and Perry are both Americans, which is important because at this time, it's very much an international competition to get there. Peary is slightly older than Frederick Cook. And Peary is very much like an establishment guy. He's had his ambition set for many, many years. He's a very ambitious guy. He's in the Navy. He's a Navy engineer. And for several decades, he takes every single spare month of leave that he can get from the Navy to try to advance his exploring career and map new parts of Greenland and get closer and closer to the North Pole. And by the time he's really getting close, he's kind of the biggest, most famous Arctic explorer, perhaps explorer period in all

of America. Frederick Cook, slightly younger than Robert Peary, and a bit more of a creative thinker, a bit more of an artistic personality, and not quite as successful as an explorer. He's more of a sort of freelance explorer, and he often will do stuff like guide rich clients on polar bear hunts in order to get himself into the Arctic and do some exploring. They do have a backstory on one of Peary's early expeditions, his first real Greenland expedition. He hires Frederick Cook, who's a doctor, who's a medical doctor by training, to be the surgeon on the expedition.

And Cook totally saves Peary's bacon. Peary breaks his leg very early on, and Cook sets it perfectly, enables Peary to sort of continue the expedition and cover some mileage. But over the years, they become more and more kind of rivals in this pursuit to be the best explorer, to get to the North Pole. And you do not want to cross Robert Peary because he's probably the most like jealous, paranoid, almost like sort of sociopathic uh competitive explorer in the game so by the time peary realizes that frederick cook is trying to do the exact same thing he is trying to do which is be the first person to get to the north pole period's getting

pretty nasty about it and that's one reason this whole controversy in 1909 becomes so ugly because robert peary sort of most famous american, the most well-connected American explorer, refuses to admit that he's been beaten to the North Pole. And a lot of energy is going to fuel the crazy controversy that spills out of this. cook supposedly reaches the north pole there was something going back to 1906 which was then mount mckinley now denali where it was like wait this guy summited this yeah so what what should we have learned you know it's look it's it's information there you know there's somebody who's with him on on the summit that's saying they did it they take a picture um and then of course period media is like no I didn't do that either. You know, but it's obviously

a warning to lessons we learn later on with Cook. Yeah, this is a hot topic still in Alaska, I understand. If you talk to like certain mountaineers in Alaska, they have an opinion about Frederick Cook's claim

to have summited Denali way back in 1906. That was the thing that really elevated Cook to the level of Peary and got Peary worried was, oh my goodness, this guy hadn't been thinking too much about it. It was like, is now credited with summiting McKinley, which was known at the time to be the tallest mountain in North America. And so this, there were rumors about that, very quiet rumors that, well, he didn't really present a lot of proof about that.

These rumors never really made it public until Peary weaponized them. I think it's just an interesting reminder that the world of explorers in the early 1900s, when these guys were rivals, was still very much known as a world of gentlemen, of discretion, of honor. You would never say anything controversial. You'd never question the reliability of a fellow explorer in public. That was the tradition. And the book documents the moment when that tradition gets totally blown up and falls to pieces because what we have is this just sort of battle and fight of sort of jealous credits spilling into the public view in a way that to you and me nowadays feels very relevant this is of course the way we sort of talk about

most things nowadays controversy this person's full of crap you know but at the time um this was a huge paradigm shift in the way exploring was talked about in the way it sort of the aura fell away from it these guys aren't heroic sort of noble ambassadors for the sort of American hero. These guys are very human. They've got a lot of flaws. Yeah, there's some amazing flaw stories that we get there in the end. And before we kind of like get to Cook's disputed claim and then Perry's run to the North Pole, let's bring it back then to the newspapers and specifically the New York Times, which, you know, at that point in time, you know, you know better than I would, but the way you describe it before it has kind of a changing of

the guard, you know, nobody was betting on the New York Times to survive long term, correct? Exactly. So this is also a story of the rivalry between the New York Times and the New York Herald. New York Herald is not around anymore. The New York Times very much is and quite successful. In the 1890s, New York Times had been around a while. It had a glorious past. It was quite respected. It was totally in trouble financially, and people did not really expect it to survive, honestly. It was kind of rescued by this remarkable figure, Adolf Ochs, son of Jewish immigrants. He was from Tennessee. So he came up to New York City from Tennessee. And the guy just was a magician when it came to talking business. And he talked the shareholders

of the New York Times basically into letting him run the thing. And unknown to them, he was bankrupt. He was a successful businessman, but his finances were not in great shape. But he just had a great vision for the Times. We're going to do steady growth. We're going to change the management around. There is an appetite for this type of newspaper. What type of newspaper was the Times? It was actually kind of a boring newspaper. It provided sort of straight up financial news. It was about news. It was not about sensationalizing. And most people thought a newspaper like that would never survive at this time, when news is getting very exciting, very much illustrated, very much about sensationalism.

Ox stood firm and said, you know what? No, we just, straight news, unshaded, serious, sober-minded, almost boring paper, people will read it. And he was right. So this period is one in which the New York Times is not only coming back, but turning into the sort of dominant newspaper that it will become. And James Gordon Bennett's Herald is a bit on the downslide as the formerly most powerful paper, but Bennett's such a crazy dude and he's kind of losing control of it. And no one who's talented ever wants to work for him anymore. So you've got this sort of overlap of the Times on the way up and the Herald on the way down. And this North Pole controversy puts them in a form of direct competition that they have never really engaged in before, because each of these papers has put a financial stake in one of the explorers

who's now claiming to have been to the North Pole first. And there you go. And this is what leads to, it's not just two explorers calling each other out. It's the financial institutions behind them, which are the voice of the daily newspaper saying, no, no, you're wrong. No, no, your guy's wrong. And on and on and on. I imagine imagine that it was it was both um a potential windfall of backing the explorer to be like if you make it then we have the exclusive rights to your account which would then you know there was all sorts of controversy and what could be used what couldn't be used even takes to the courts but it's very much like today where you know ideologically okay wait this is the message that's going to be sold to me from this place.

And yet, you know, other than it being politics, it was just explorers. So that adds a whole nother layer to this story and this fight for the poll and who was there first and who was right, which I want to spend more time on with Piri and Cook. But the motivation behind it is incredibly self-serving. Yeah. Yeah. It's a total business windfall if your guy makes it. If your guy fails disastrously, you can make money off that too. That's the sort of ethical dilemma here. News stories certainly succeed when people die and many terrible things happen. But there's also prestige. I think at the end of the day, we've got to remember there's a human side to this. And both these newspapers are run by men with big egos, and they absolutely want to do the victory lap if their guy makes it to the poll first.

And Ox especially, because he's never really invested in something like this before. James Gordon Bennett has a history of trying to get these big stories with explorers. He succeeded once or twice. For Ox, it's something completely new. And I got to know Adolph Ox pretty well through his letters and the archives and all the research I did. This guy, wonderful man in many respects, loved nothing more than getting prestige and sort of status and admiration from the sort of cultured establishment. And this North Pole story was his ticket to getting that in spades. So they were very much behind this. The interesting thing about the Times at this period, they were trying very hard to be impartial, to be a new type of

newspaper that doesn't let its prejudices or its biases show on the page. This was part of their ethos of news reporting. The Herald was more old school. The Herald is more the old school model where we let our opinions show a bit. We'll get the reader a little outraged, a little emotional because that's what newspapers do. The Times was this newer kind of 20th century model that would evolve. That's less about that. It's just about getting the facts right. So they are trying hard to get the facts right. But when you look back on it decades later, as I did,

you see, yeah, they had a lot of biases still in play that they either ignored or, or thought weren't there. So it's kind of a story about how hard it is to, to, to really be objective about stuff. The subjectivity is always creeping in.

And the times is with Peary. Yes. And the Harold and with Peary. Yes. And the Herald and Bennett are with Cook. And Cook supposedly makes it to the pole first in 1908. And there's another added element to that story where apparently when Peary was getting ready for this expedition and he was planning it all out. I mean, this stuff took forever. And there was also a time, too, that you point out there was kind of a dead period where now the papers weren't because everybody was dying these these ships were sunk no one really knew what was going on they'd send

other people the other guys ended up in siberia at a railroad you know like it's just then it felt like the newspapers were like maybe this isn't the greatest investment you know maybe maybe this isn't really working out and then it picks back up right there's momentum again because it's like look no one actually has been able to make it there. And I think any of the natives that were in the area were like, what's the fucking point of even going, which is even funnier. Yeah, yeah.

Because they're like, why do these guys keep coming up? I talk about how the North Pole had this incredible pull, but you're right. There's certainly periods, especially in America, two back-to-back disasters, government-funded or at least government-in involved in expeditions that put people off like what are we doing this for so it is a longer it is a longer story with ups and downs for sure so cook comes back and says i made it um but there's some major problems immediately and is he in denmark when he comes back yes he comes back to copenhagen first okay um just, you know, I don't want you to share everything with us because I still want people to read the book, but give us some of the initial signs.

Because at this point, people aren't really calling out Denali as much because they're like, wait, and then it all kind of backfills in. But when you're reading about Cook and he's being interviewed by the press and he's meeting with everybody, all the dignitaries, and they're like, it's finally happened, it's finally happened. There's, there's some major problems, but it also speaks to kind of the gentlemanly approach that we thought of exploring at the time where it was like, well, if this guy came back and said he made it to the North pole, we have to take him at his word because that's, that's what we do in our world. Yes. You know, you were expected as an explorer to eventually provide proof,

but that was almost kind of a formality. Eventually is a nice word. So in Cook's case, he was taken at his word, except by this one reporter, Philip Gibbs, fascinating historical character who got an early interview with Cook before the rest of the press really got a look at him and just thought something was off about this guy and the way he's telling the story.

But Gibbs was in the minority. He was sort of a voice in the wilderness during this period. Everyone else believed Cook. They were not skeptical at all. And the other thing we have to mention, Frederick Cook as an individual was a very persuasive guy and people loved him. He had that, he had a weird kind of charisma. And they thought he was trustworthy. He answered questions confidently. He did not seem worried or anxious about any of his answers at any time. And people hated Piri. You know, when we talk about the politics of this, they almost feel like candidates vying to vote for popularity among the public. People really did not like Piri, especially in Scandinaviaavia for various reasons.

And the whole framing of this competition between Cook and Peary would be this tale of sort of entitled establishment guy who's Peary, the Navy man, with this sort of, sort of like official and business connections and just humble Fred Cook, the dude who came out of nowhere and found a North Pole and doesn't really have connections anywhere, but seems like modest and friendly, and we like him. So Cook comes back to Copenhagen. Piri's not in the picture yet. He's off in the Arctic. People don't really know where he is. Let's remember, this is more than 100 years ago.

He can't use his sat phone to give live streams or live updates or anything people are just in the dark about it so it'll take a second but period gets back and says i too made to north pole and you know what frederick cook didn't he's lying um so that's when this sort of rivalry between the two and the idea of the public sort of taking sides just goes into overdrive because they are they are fighting each other right and it's a perfect drama because you come back and then it's they're taking polls and they're trying to figure out and cook meanwhile is raking in the money he's going on all these engagements here he's like no no you need to stop all these things it's it's it's so perfect that you have these two figures where perry's like you guys you idiots he didn't do it he didn't do it and cook's like oh you guys, you idiots, he didn't do it. He didn't do it.

And Cook's like, oh, you know, I feel bad for him. And because people wanted Cook, it was your people wanted to root for Cook is what it felt like. And then then just over I wouldn't say slowly because it wasn't. Yeah, I should say slowly. It slowly falls apart in the way we think about how news would move back then. Yeah, it took a while. One of the reasons it took a while for the story to be resolved, or I should say what they thought was resolved, because honestly, it took decades to really resolve what actually happened, in my opinion. So people like the Cook story. I think this is as relevant today as it's always been. They're like, screw the facts. The Cook story is the one that I really gravitate towards. I want this guy to have won the race. So that's where I'm going to go with it.

But another reason it took so long to figure out what's actually going on here with the facts is that both these guys, especially Cook, just completely stalled out, stalled when it comes to providing the evidence. Like, what were the sort of astronomical observations you made with your sextant? How did you navigate every step of the way? These guys did, or were at least supposed to keep detailed notes and logs about how they got there. This is the sort of evidence that the scientists were looking for, right? And neither one of these explorers provide that evidence. They really dragged it out. And neither one of these explorers provide that evidence. They really dragged it out. Yeah.

And Cook, I mean, was almost diabolical about it. And then he didn't pay these other guys that were in on it with him to go back and rewrite his diaries that he said, you know, wouldn't have made any sense for an explorer to reach the North Pole and be like, where are your diaries? Like, oh, I left them in the Arctic. We'll receive them in due time. And it's like, wait, that doesn't make any sense sense even i as as a non-explorer was like that seems kind of weird that would seem pretty valuable they go back to try to re-rig them and if you just paid all these people off nobody would have told on him while he's making all of this money i'm saving the other twist because i want people to buy the book because you end the book and and it's really i like that you did it this way

because I found myself rooting for Peary because there's all this evidence about Cook being a fraud and then there's a big kind of twist at the end. Yeah, Peary's, there's some twist to his side of the story too, for sure. There you go. There you go. We would just leave it at that. Well, Frederick Cook, just a quick ad. He's such a fascinating, deep, enigmatic character. The guy's like a mystery upon a mystery. But I think there is a very simple moral that also emerges from the story of Frederick, which is pay your bills because he's he ends up stiffing people and it does hurt him very much. And it seems like it would have been a simple thing to take care of. It would have been a simple thing to take care of. Yeah, and it wasn't like he didn't have the money, too. That made it even worse. So these other guys that were in on the conspiracy with him being like, hey, I'm just going to tell on you now.

And then Perry's like, I told you, I told you, interview this guy. And then the papers start dialing it back a little bit. They were in support of Cook, and then they start taking polls again, all over again. I mean, it's so much fun watching it fall apart he's pulling the sort of puppet strings you know he's trying to get the newspapers to report him it's all this is also a story from the early early days of public relations right like both perry and he actually has a pr guy which is a very uncommon thing to have at the time but the behind the scenes sort of manipulation of the press and getting this story placed in this newspaper in this day and then three days later

we'd like a story here saying you know punching a hole in this element of Cook's narrative. It's very manipulative. And you're seeing something that, again, is very common in the way the press works today in its kind of infancy, in its sort of primitive stages going on. And the reason you see that is because these archives preserving all the letters between Peary and his team are still around and they're fun to look they're fun to look at for sure. If you're doing the research. I've left a lot out because I just, I don't want to just go through 300 pages and be like, here, here's the entire book.

But I think one of my favorite parts of the book was the origin of fake news, which is, which you go ahead. You can take that if you want, because when that, when that's true, you're like, Oh, okay. There's, which you go ahead. You can take that if you want, because when that, when that's the spirit, you're like, oh, okay. There's, there's, there's the origin of that. It is. I'll try to be quick about it. You know, the 19th century is full of fake news and the definition of fake news changes quite a bit. Like, first of all, there was a period, a long period, when people just expected fake news all the time. And it was up to the reader to sort of like distinguish what's just a tall tale. The editors's like, well, we don't know. We're just putting this out there.

Fact checking was unknown. So readers were used to just like trying to sniff out a rat or believing a story. It was a very complicated situation to be in as a reader. And there's also this wonderful old tradition of like giant hoaxes perpetrated by respectable newspapers. There's a famous one done by the New York Sun about someone getting to the moon. There was one involving a balloon trip across the ocean. And then later would come out from the newspaper that would just say, oh, we made this whole thing up. And the public would sort of have a good time with it. They're like, oh, you really got us that time. This is sort of a

ploy to entertain people, a ploy to make money, and it was tolerated up to a point. Then you had the Spanish-American War in Cuba, which was just sort of an explosion of kooky stories about what was going on down in Cuba with the sort of insurgency going on there. This was the high point of so-called yellow journalism, these sort of ancestors of the tabloids, which was the battle between Hearst and Pulitzer, the New York World versus the New York Journal. And in this competitive environment, they're inventing all kinds of tall tales to sell newspapers. And the sort of, I guess I would say, end of this little chapter in fake news, again, kind of comes back to the New York Times trying

to be more diligent about avoiding fake news entirely. The New York Times was, like I said, not a colorful paper. It also did not really have a sense of humor. A lot of these newspapers had a sense of humor, and that went kind of hand in hand with this fake news tradition. The Times was deadly serious, for the most part, about getting the news right, providing reliable information, and treating newspaper business and news reporting as a science right so there's no room for fake news in in in this form of modern newspaper reporting but honestly the report talking about the history of fake news is a lot more fun and more colorful than this sort of new model that the times was advancing at the time yeah i mean look i couldn't i couldn't believe it

like wait you're getting updates from the spanish-american war and you know they're fake and everybody's just like yeah and then that seemed to kind of be the line that was crossed where it was like all right enough of this like we this is a real thing this isn't a zoo escape like we need more facts getting out of control like big decisions are being made because the american the majority of the American public believes A to B true because of this fake news and the government's being pressured to make decisions based on this false belief. I think that was an element of what was going on. The Spanish-American War was described as the war that the journal started. I mean, that's an exaggeration,

but it was known at the time. The newspaper, this is Hearst's New York newspaper, the journal, had been so jingoistic and so careless in the way it reported the news that it was sort of thought by many people that it actually led the country into war. That's where we talk about the influence and the recklessness of some of these cheaper papers at the time. That's what we're talking about with yellow journalism. And as you point out, Ox, the Times go the other way.

Their legacy stands and certainly- up a lot better than Cook and Perry. I was researching Cook after I read it and the first line was one of the most diabolical con men of all time. I didn't even say explore. That was the first line. The Times lost totally. I talk about how sober and cool minded they are. They completely lost their cool when dealing with Frederick Cook, it has to be said, which is just an interesting sort of lapse in style among the Times. Like every newspaper at the end of the day is run by human beings and they will show their human colors at one point or another. This was incredible. I really enjoyed it, man. Congrats on your first book and I look forward to whatever your next project is. I appreciate it, Ryan. Thanks for having me.

You want details? Fine. I drive a Ferrari 355 cabriolet what's up i have a ridiculous house in the south fork i have every toy you can possibly imagine and best of all kids i am liquid so now you know what's possible let me tell you what's required. What's up? Life advice. Life advice. RR at gmail.com. So Rudy and Kyle hanging out. Okay. I think these are important follow-ups. We got a million follow-ups on the,

are we dating the same guy page? This is a real thing. It's out there. I don't know. Kyle, were you ever on this at some point? No, I don't,

I don't think so. I like, again, I just thought it was something that happened. Like, I don't know, mid-2000s. It didn't seem like a big... Nope. Okay, still goes strong. I always thought it was a specific city thing, too.

Like, I thought there was, like, a New York City one. Yeah, okay. It wasn't, like, a nationwide thing, but I knew we kind of talked too much about it last time. We got so many follow-ups that were of the same ilk that I think it's important to read one of them. Guys, follow up for the 31-year-old dating the same guy story. Well, that's kind of the title, but if you're joining us, this is your first time listening to the pod. You might be confused.

As soon as the email was read, I knew this was from my hometown based on the obscure NBA reference. My fiance has been on this page since it started about a year ago and scrolls it for entertainment she shares the good content with me and she finds it based on the size of our city less than 500 000 there are 45 000 women on this page is a massive following i'm 30 so i guess yeah to your point, Kyle, this is a bit more regional, the content feed into this one. So I'm 30. This is the Earl Boykins comp, right, too?

No, Mba Mute, I believe. Right? Boykins was just the smaller guy. Great way to remember it, yeah. I'm 30 and every woman friend of mine or my girl is a member on this page the point of the page initially was to identify creepy dudes so women could avoid them a valid concern but for every one legitimate creep the nine other posts follow the same pattern a woman anonymously posts a guy's photo and writes brad red flags or what's jim's story women then dog

the guy right there in the comments where he can't defend himself the most common complaints of red flags are he ghosted me we made plans and he canceled he's a bad texter he's talking to more than one girl some of them are more damning like he got weird or we had sex never talked again or just generally he's sketchy if one of the women members comments something like i know chad he's actually a nice guy all the other women jump on her instantly guys also have no way of defending themselves from what sometimes are pretty serious allegations of character flaws and worse the page is essentially an echo chamber of the same group of women who mercilessly cook every guy who gets posted. We found the original writer's post and honestly, he got off. So he went back and found the guy. He got off easy

and shouldn't worry at all. Most guys who get posted here get absolutely eviscerated for really just doing normal dating things like ghosting after one date or canceling a date. It's a funny page for us to look at because I've not been posted on it, but it's honestly very toxic online environment that unfortunately carries a lot of clout here. Bottom line, our guy with the Mba Mute comp is going to be okay, but there are a lot of guys who weren't as lucky. Maybe the guy that sent in

the email making you feel good on a Wednesday. I remember, wasn't there a big deal? Maybe this is going over my head and this is what they're talking about, but there was a big deal about a website like this in new york city and dudes were like kind of mad about it where it was just like cool we have just like no way to defend ourselves and any girl can just come on here and tell us how shitty we are and then everyone just kind of and it was a lot of people on there uh and it is kind of screwed up it kind of reminds me like i've been

known to dabble in reddit a lot and which is i would never recommend to anyone it's a terrible place and they recommend like you're in it all the time i am i'm way too i'm way too in on reddit a lot and which is i would never recommend to anyone it's a terrible place and they recommend like you're in it all the time i am i'm way too i'm way too in on reddit i mostly use it what are your favorite topics give us your top three reddit topics that you check out well i actually really like the explain it like i'm five one because it'll be like a really complicated topic and somebody who actually claims to be an expert usually is like oh here's how this works here's how like the damn system works and it's just like it's interesting to me but then they'll they'll suggest certain ones and there's one that comes up and i don't want to say it because i don't i don't want to throw it out there at all

but it's basically just like women complaining about guys and all the time it's you know the headline will be like why i why should i just stop dating men and and it's just like one example of a shitty guy and we just get all roped into this like i'm not i don't feel like i'm shitty kyle i don't think you're shitty ryan same way cliff on here i don't think he's shitty i have a lot of friends who are like good boyfriends and husbands and guys but we all get roped into like all guys are shitty and that's all this reddit thread is so this kind of reminds me of that it's like it's it's just like a doom and gloom club for people who are kind of miserable and it's probably gone too far so that it's good to know that like this is really gonna ding you but it does suck to have your reputation just thrown out there because you know i don't

know it's a bummer like i feel like there are a lot of good guys out there it's like being struck by lightning and you just tell the story later instead of dying right so it could be worse i just i just saw something on instagram about a guy who got struck by lightning you know if your hair stands up out of no reason you know for no reason you're like i don't know in a valley somewhere hiking hit the ground i guess apparently because there's a lot of photos of it's a phenomenon of where your hair well i don't know if riscilla is going to do about this but you're if your hair stands up and you're just randomly well it's just it's going to be hard to tell i felt it's going to be hard to tell if you have like my hair probably wouldn't even stand up that much but like you see like if your hair just

randomly starts doing the static thing lightning strike might be around the corner so just for everyone out there just maybe it sounds like you should just hit the ground just wonder if getting on the ground is that much safer like if the light yeah it was definitely just a one guy who commented on this thing that said that and nobody nobody backed him up but i can tell you i'll be hitting the ground yeah i mean if it's a slight improvement on your chances of avoiding lightning then then you do it so you'd like quite a people quite a few people walk away from a lightning strike though which just boggles my mind are you suggesting lightning strike overrated like overrated is bad it's not

that bad dude i'm gonna i'm googling lightning strike survival rate i mean you just see a bunch of uh stories about people who just like this guy got struck by lightning twice and over a seven year period. It's like, God, just not as deadly as. Wow. I think. Wow. I think the counter to that would be that you don't interview the people that die. Right.

Correct. Correct. This is 90% of people who get struck by lightning survive that's what i'm saying i think it's so kyle's right that's incredible kyle is right it's like lightning overrated all right the frank gore of the headline so rudy after we taped the open was like you're a little tough on jets fans i was like no i came back around to their side and i felt bad for him and now we may just have to just market this pod as something else okay i got a couple i have one quick one and then we'll do two regular ones uh hey guys six two 250 pounds i won't brag about my impressive gym stats but i will say that more recently i've gotten into yoga basketball comp

would be a less explosive rassillo in the celeb game dude everybody was more explosive than me in that game uh he says shane gillis outed me i don't know if you i know you know unfortunately i think people's first introduction to shane gillis wasn't a great one i would say his comedy specials are terrific i got to see him do stand up and the reason i'm reading this email is because this exact same thing actually happened to me in a very funny way shane gillis uh look i live and work in a more liberal area of the country had been fairly public to my friends and co-workers about my love for history in the shane gillis comedy special he says that if you're a history buff it's a sign of early onset republican how do i handle this going forward working in my liberal industry do I start swinging on these dorks if

they start giving me a hard time honestly Gillis is right so when he first uh broke out that material where he was like my dad's a huge history buff and that just tells you how much you're gonna be a conservative I was sitting next to big cat and everybody knows that I'm a huge history guy and big cat's elbowing the shit out of me being like dude he's talking about you he's talking about you because there's nothing my closest friends love more than the idea that everybody thinks i'm raging conservative um and look there's some things that i probably political you know whatever i'm not going to go over all this shit again because i can never win but the point is is that i don't know is that true it's a really funny joke and it's Gillis in his delivery like his

stand-up I laughed non-stop for he was on for 17 minutes I never stopped laughing it was a constant I can't believe how funny this guy is for 17 straight minutes um I don't know do you feel like that's true do you guys do you guys read history ever yeah read a big watcher of history uh but you know that's just a problem for me that's not something i'm trying to change but i don't know i i could see it like if if a kid i could see like a cantankerous old man's like his favorite shit is the new the new world war ii doc like i could see that it definitely fits you know uh it was like tonyrano's way to unwind watching that and like you know old 30s movies or whatever I could I could just see I think it

fits a an archetype but I don't think it's sort of like I didn't want to say it that's so mean just never mind go ahead okay I think there is okay to it guys catching themselves sometimes I just don't and i'm like why aren't you catching yourself more i think there is some truth to it i don't i don't again it's like the the reddit thread i was just talking about not not everyone who likes history is some some like raging maga republican guy um are there some sure yes that's like of course the point right right yeah like of course it's a of course, it's a good joke. Right.

It's a good joke. I don't think it's 100 percent. I think you could be pro-choice and love reading about the Northern Africa campaign. All right. There you go. I actually got accused. This is the timeliness of this is kind of annoying. But and I even hate talking about this because I just like, again, as soon as you mentioned

this, like everyone just thinks you're like some agri-republican, which I'm not. But so I one of my very first Instagram posts was a picture of a flag that I bought when I was in a big flag phase. And it was the the liberty or death. Don't shred on me with the snake. It's a sick flag. It's like a, you know, it's a cool revolutionary war flag. How old were you? Well, this was 2014.

So I would have been what uh 25 maybe or so and but again the reason i bought it was because i was going to a u.s soccer match at uh i think i was going to foxborough it was incredible we got these like pvc pipe from home depot built our like you know built the the flagpole and we're just like waving this giant flag everybody at these games waves flags and then like right after that or a couple years after that like the maga crew the tea party crew like took over all the cool civil war and like um revolutionary war flags and they just they just commandeered them and now they're all like you basically can't have them so it sucks but like if so if someone would see that be like oh sruti so somebody commented on this post from 2014 saying is

sruti a maga question mark and and i assume it's because of that cool video that somebody posted they probably found my profile started going through my pictures and they saw that but yeah out of context obviously that's a little bit weird but i just explained why i have it but somebody'd be like oh yeah this maga loser and that's not the truth okay but just full scope here you don't want to make american radio i think i think even american flags just regular now make people some certain people uncomfortable and i think that's fucking insane because i think we've got one of the cooler flags but it seems like one of those telltale signs for people it's like oh that guy's got an american flag out front i don't know it's like what they used to be normal it also is like one of the

biggest things that pisses me off in recent history is like you can't use cool flags and like the come and take it with the cannon flag. It's an incredible flag commandeered by the Tea Party. The don't try to commandeer by it all. It sucks because there's I love history. I love the history of those flags. I think they look really cool, but you can't use them now or else you get labeled as like one of those losers. And I don't want I don't want to be labeled that way. So I just kind of wow.

He's letting he's letting these guys have it right now okay uh moving on we have one that is so aggressive and disgusting and the guy included a photo and you know exactly who you are i'm not doing it today maybe a friday maybe with a warning and you didn't need to send the fucking photo of it it's awful i'm not doing it today all right let's get through a couple more here uh female submission i love when the women let us know ahead of time my boyfriend makes me listen to your podcast and i become quite fond of the life advice portion i asked if my player comp would be kate and clark and he said no a girl can dream though off to a great start so over the summer

my sister 21 years old went to work out in alberta we're from toronto at this place lots of people from all over the world go to work so we meet a lot of people from australia the uk europe she started a little summer romance with a guy from england 25 years old all summer i would hear from her uh is about this all summer I would hear from her is about this, all summer I would hear about this guy. So obviously I was very curious to meet him. After knowing him for a little less than two months, she invites him to fly home with her

and spend two weeks at her parents' house with us. I'd already planned to go out there for a few days to see my sister and then flew home with her and now him too. Shortly after arriving, I came to the realization that those two are the most annoying couple I've ever met in my life. There were several instances during the time which I had the misfortune of being in their presence,

but I will only share the important ones that will paint you the best picture of it. This man specifically is incredibly childish, but my sister doesn't help. On our trip, we went canoeing and they damn near tipped the boat over and continuously splashed around with the water until we were all soaking wet. And I just had to bite my tongue. Okay. They don't like to canoe or they don't take it seriously uh in the airport on the way home waiting in the bag check line they decided to sit on the floor and soon after started wrestling on the floor of the airport a worker had to come up and tell us to leave or stand up in line properly because they were obstructing the walkway and being inappropriate the embarrassment ryan the embarrassment they constantly play fight and actually broke my parents' couch by

wrestling and throwing each other on it. They are so loud and always drawing attention. We went to visit my brother at his job at a very high-end golf course. And on the way to his accommodations, they started a pillow fight in front of very important people. They were laughing and screaming and literally hitting each other with pillows. My brother and his coworkers are pissed. Their favorite activity is breaking the peace. My father works from home and needed to leave phone calls to ask them to be quiet. They are also late to everything

to the point that it's disrespectful. Everyone is constantly held up by them, specifically me, because I've narrowly escaped them some days. At my brother's place, we actually had to leave them at home because everyone got fed up with waiting for them the whole weekend. They sleep in until noon every day. Multiple times, my father's had to knock on their door and yell at them to try to get them awake so we were not late to pre-plan things. One morning, the boyfriend refused to get up until 6.15 even though they had a train to catch at 6.30 that my father was graciously driving them to, to go on a trip that my parents paid for as a gift.

Needless to say, my father was not pleased. Another day after my father had to get these two out of bed before we were late at a family gathering, this 25-year-old man got hold of the water guns that were there for the small children and all hell broke loose. He was spraying everyone. He did not discriminate against age adults. Everybody was wet. Five-year-olds were

doused in the face until tears no one was happy i actually had to hide the guns to get the terror to cease on top of all this he's just so annoying i don't like him she can do better how do i tell her i will not survive if she doesn't break up with him dramatics aside i need this man gone hit me with your best advice here gentlemen well yep you got us convinced this guy sounds like say no more here's the problem here's the here's one of the biggest first problems is your parents let him sleep in the same bedroom so they're in massive hookup phase sorry uh obviously the play fighting the play fighting is just sexual tension leftovers and the father should have said hey like even if it's not true

like when i was young i remember i think i had to spend the night because the fucking boats weren't running so i had to stay with like a girl who i was kind of seeing in college and like the dad immediately was like hey you know you're sleeping on the couch and i was like actually i prefer it like i think it'd be weird i'm like all right shut it down let's's go. We've known him for 10 minutes. So that, I think, should have been the first thing, even if they don't believe in it. Maybe if they didn't believe in it,

they didn't have the heads up or they didn't know or whatever. But the fact this guy's just sleeping in, spooning with your sister all morning is part of the reason why this guy's getting way too fucking comfortable. Now, granted, the other reasons you brought up clearly he does suck but um you know and here's the other thing she's 21 he's 25 he lives in the uk she lives in canada it's not gonna work it's not going to work so you're it's gonna suck but it's gonna be okay it's like a bad movie eventually it will be over i have two friends that are completely platonic just dudes two like we're the we're three of the

like only white dudes in the crew and they are so much kind of alike each other that i kind of end up getting rap like a bad rap as in like oh he's watch out kyle might go through a wall this weekend it's like no it's those two guys but i'm just the other white guy but whenever they get together they're always fucking wrestling they we've lived in two three houses together they've been in they've been through a wall every single time like a man-sized hole uh they're just it's i don't know they kind of rile each other up or whatever so i could see like it's been there's been times when we're like planning something we're like fuck eli and dylan oop i said it they're gonna be there and uh and i don't know i guess maybe they're gonna be there and uh and i

don't know i guess maybe we should put these guys over here or maybe we'll you know it's always a it's always a thing so i can see the annoyance of that uh being like a dude that's just coming into your world now attached to your sister i could see what'd be worse but um yeah right this will probably change i mean the only thing is if you if this doesn't change and you wanted this to kind of stop you just have to start treating them differently instead of just like saying stuff you have to just like oh why didn't we get invited to that thing it's like oh well because this isn't like a restaurant that you can't wear shoes to you know what i mean like we just we just wanted to make this easy for you and uh they'll have to she'll have to start seeing that she's being left

out of things because of this choice otherwise it's just gonna be like yeah yeah yeah we'll keep it down we'll keep it down because it just you know they're probably laughing at the rest of the world a code red yeah exactly a social code exactly that's the only way that's they're gonna it's without you explicitly saying but then being left out of things it's gonna be the only thing that'll get them to perk their ears up just to just to clarify how would you describe the relationship yeah what do you mean the relationship i said platonic so i was just like it because these people were you know sitting in bed all day but these guys always like no it just sounded like there may have been a pluto reference in there just people are honest

now about pronunciation wait did i not say platonic you thought i said plutonic it sounded like i was like does he think it's plutonic and now you you've you've redeemed yourself so quickly kyle we can just go good yeah because that's not going to be a fun game if every time one of us there we go mispronounces a word that we just start doing it to each other but now everybody's on it after the uh it was nipped in the butt which it just wasn't you know yeah and then that one guy had the the follow-up that was perfect even if you don't like the content we're all trying to make ourselves better make each other better so yeah that's the win yep um do you have anything saruti or do you want to just get no really quickly i would just say um i think you have you obviously should as the brother bring up to your I have two younger

sisters like if they were dating an asshole like I would be like this sucks like you shouldn't do this but you don't you don't have a lot of those so like make sure I mean you should definitely use it here but you can't just do it to everyone or else it's become white noise but obviously I think you and you have to do it early like make sure you know early like hey I don't there's nothing that's going to change about this guy I think think he sucks. Feels like it's too late. It feels like it's almost like a puppy that was allowed to do this in the house for a year. And then it's like, OK, you know, I think the social code read and it's not going to work out. Exactly.

That's the point. I just think you have to change the way you treat them. And they'll she'll get the idea and be like, oh, this isn't fun anymore. Last one here. Hey, guys, college athlete. Awesome. Nice. last one here hey guys college athlete awesome nice 6-2-2-0-5 pickup combo would be JaVale McGee mixed with a splash adjacent kid it's a lot of stuff a lot of stuff to have in your game you might two more opposite guys to be like yeah I'm a mesh of these two he might have been going for that might have been going back here's the deal. The guys have an annual jungle night with the team.

As I'm sure you can imagine, it gets pretty weird. Let's just say your boy visited the jungle juice cooler a few too many times and acted like a massive asshole. Some of those dudes are just rotten who make that jungle juice. They know what they're doing. Just rotten.

It's bad. As a guy who's made it and like looked in horror on the other dude who's like look what else i found i'm like oh my god you just put that in there so uh it's uh yeah because you can't really drink like it's just it's too much and again everybody's young and they're kids and they're throwing kool-aid mix and everybody's got red mouths like smashing bottle rocket popsicles you know and you're just like all right i mean you think back to it i mean honestly i should just stop talking because everybody's going to do it you're just going to do it you're going to think it's hilarious to be like oh my god you put another bottle you're like yeah well cool like it tastes like shit although you know again the hangover with that much sugar for an adult

and that kind of booze it would just be like hey i'm taking a week yeah we're doing word with yeah yeah right how many how many personal days do i have so uh i can't i can't speak to this experience nor do i ever want to again drinking this shit but everyone's gonna do it because it's never do i ever want to again drinking this shit but everyone's gonna do it because it's the first time you're out of your house um and the person you're right the person that makes it knows they're like oh it's the worst when there's like eight guys doing it and then you're just like well what the fuck was that he's like don't worry it's already in there not like that not like a sinister shit but it's just like come on man that wasn't enough okay all right so let's get to his examples of acting his words as a massive

asshole me and one of my good friends uh one of my good boys began to rip each other's wine shirts it's good fun it was good yeah it was good fun that's exactly what he said kyle exclamation point i was like what's wrong with that then another one of my buddies, not core guy, not core guy, went to rip my shirt. And I laughed and went to rip his. I figured that's how the game worked. I'm going to tell you, I'm on your side so far. A couple dudes ripping each other's shirts off. Love that.

He's not trying to be a dick or anything. He was not happy at all and said, I broke a few of his buttons. All right. See, I have a problem with this other guy. Are you serious? Two guys rip each other's shirts. One guy's shirt's ripped. You go over, rip it to him, and then you think you're rip-free.

Now I know what you're going to say. His shirt was already ripped, and then you're probably going to be that guy that's like, oh, my aunt was sick. She actually got this for me last Easter. It's actually a nicer Hawaiian shirt. Hey, maybe don't wear that to the Jungle Juice party then. No, he's making those things up to try to make

the other person feel bad. I'm just... I already know who this character is. You paid to play. You lost and want your money back. Sorry. Right. I don't understand why it's okay for you to rip the other guy's shirt if you don't. And I know there'll be a few emailers that'll suggest, well, if the shirt was in fact already ripped. But no.

Hey, Jungle Night? It's Jungle Rules, dude. Anything goes. All bets are off. No shirt safe at Jungle Juice Night, yeah. Right. I just blew it off, kept hammering the cooler. Sometime later, he was still acting upset about it. And for some reason, this

prompted me to exclaim, grow the fuck up, Benjamin Buttons. Fucking perfect. What a line. I want to hang out with this guy. Some guys are in the shower like, God, I should have said something else. He's not going to have that moment.

He's going to be like, nope, that was perfect. That was perfect. That's peak performance in the moment. It's just awesome because it actually makes no sense. It just has the word Buttons in it. And then he's thinking the movie Benjamin Buttons, which is about an entirely different topic than hawaiian shirts and yet although whenever i see like a really old looking baby old man baby face i'll be like dude benjamin yeah exactly it's perfect never gets old or does it so uh nice i love the line it's perfect it doesn't make any sense i don't know that you're

gonna have a better line than that in your college career so i think looking back on it people should be like remember when you said hey kevin remember the narc bit so all right uh as well as some other expletives i don't quite remember saw him today for the first time at a team meeting. How do you recommend I blow this thing over? He seems pretty pissed about the whole thing, and I don't care a ton. But I like to minimize the amount of relationships I have on the team. I think those are good goals. By the way, I'm not usually the dickhead drunk.

Does anyone ever admit it? I don't know. The ratio of people who are like, I'm the worst versus the ones that actually are i'm the guy that takes it too far yep that's me i fuck up every night what are you guys doing thursday i'm pretty ripe looking at looking to screw things up and lead into some daytime apologies on a friday what's what's good and then we'll maybe hit it all right stop talking all right so uh i don't typically act like that so that might be part of the reason he's bothered by the whole thing love the pod all right we're gonna take your word for it um that because you're not captain of the

cooler the jungle juice got him guys have been there before happens the best of us uh i'm just on your side i'm just on your side i also need to know what team it is he didn't specify what kind of team basketball team this early could be a problem fall sports are back i feel like soccer 62 205 why this doesn't seem like a basketball move to me, though. Oh, that's right. He's too tall for soccer. And as we've heard from soccer experts forever, that NBA players who are 6'4 wouldn't be good at it because they're too tall. Yep.

Direct shot at Cerruti's forehead. I'm not even going to... Kyle, take us through this. It just doesn't seem like a basketball team, right? I think this has got to be all white guys doing this. I don't know. I'm not making any blanket statement, but I just don't think.

You just did. I guess I did. I mean, it smells like a white guy activity is what I mean. This is a lacrosse activity. Yeah, I can see lacrosse. White guy lacrosse activity. A couple of linemen. I don't know.

Maybe a couple of linemen on the football team. I don't know. Look, if he got that mad about this, but then you yelled at him, I don't know. I mean, it really comes down to how badly you still want to be friendly with this person. And on the team, it certainly raises the stakes. I like that you're going to be proactive about it. You just say, hey, man, the cooler got me. The juice got me.

You want me to pay for your shirt? My shirt was ripped. You went to rip mine. I thought we were ripping yours back. Real simple math. I like you. Not that much. I told the emailers, I don't really like you. You know what I sent into the show. I was like, I don't really care that much. But, uh, I just don't know. I just don't know if at this age you're some people will never get there, but I just don't know if this age if you're 19 or 20 they're like hey let's talk about the incident the other night yeah let's get on the same page this is kind of par for the course put this behind us but this is not i mean no this is not this shit's supposed to happen that's what i mean this is supposed to happen and he may not understand that you do you feel a feel a little bad, but I don't know.

Maybe you could have a, is there a neutral party? Is there somebody on the team? You'd be like, hey, what's going on with Benjamin Buttons? Is he still mad? Give me the scouting report. Get a little advanced scouting, understand his moves, and then you're more prepared when you go to meet with him. Be like, all right, why is he actually that mad? So, you know, instead of being confrontational, be like, hey,

I screwed up because when you went to rip my shirt, I thought I could rip your shirt, which, by the way, we all agree with you on. I didn't realize that the rules are only the first two shirts are allowed to be ripped, not the first. Hammurabi's code. Yeah, so be super condescending. That's what you have to do. You have to be super apologetic, but in a totally dick condescending way to make him seem like the total asshole. Be like, oh, yeah, I didn't know the rules were just like everybody's shirt can get ripped but yours like and so this will help that'll yeah this will turn yeah i mean well

it doesn't sound like he cares about him at all so like not a core guy he's obviously kind of annoyed by the like the guy that was mad in the first place so like it doesn't seem like he's like that afraid of losing this guy as a buddy all right so i would just say hey sherman if you want to buy your shirt i'll buy your shirt but like i didn't know that we were just there rules about who's sure and then your buttons forever just so you know i think i think you should see a button exactly i want to see a button sticks i think that's what i would have taken it the other way but you know this isn't my life so uh it's easy for me to say i think the team would get it to masking tape with masking tape over his jersey name and just writes buttons on it.

B-buttons. Yeah, B-buttons is even better. I think the team would get it. I think they'd be like, man, what are you upset about? Even if he brought it up, if the other guy brought it up. Yeah, but that's just going to make him more mad. If the rest of the team's like, wait, you're mad at him for ripping your shirt after you ripped his? And then the Benjamin Buttons thing.

Now, granted, you said there's some other stuff you may have said to him that you don't remember. So you could be dealing with missing evidence here. And it could all come back on you. Or you just apologize to the guy. It seems like you care more about smoothing things over than the ego of I should or shouldn't have. So you're actually more mature than most people would even be in this situation the fact that you seem to care about something you don't actually care about right so just go and apologize to the guy be like hey what's up you need to borrow a shirt let me know and change his name and your phone to b buttons

yeah you have to do that definitely they probably don't text that much yeah probably not okay that is life advice thanks to kyle thanks to steve thanks to cliff uh excited about today's episode back on friday the ryan rossillo podcast ringer spotify We'll be right back. Must be 21 and older in present select states. FanDuel is offering online sports wagering in Kansas under agreement with Kansas Star Casino LLC. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit fanduel.com forward slash RG

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