Today, Explained - Can we enjoy anything anymore?

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

It felt like everyone came together for a brief moment after the US men and women won gold in hockey, but not for long. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Andrea Lopez-Cruzado, engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Tatasciore, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Members of the US Olympic hockey team receive a standing ovation as President Donald Trump delivered his State of the Union address. Photo by Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Until now, mobile phone companies have worked very hard to ensure their phones do not start fires. But we found one company that dared to go in a different direction and make a phone with fire starting as a feature. On the Vergecast, we talk about all the greatest and weirdest phone concepts from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Plus, after years of legal battles, Google and Epic are now best buddies, contractually obligated to not say mean things about their app stores anymore. That's this week on the Vergecast wherever you get your podcast. A couple of Sundays ago, I joined millions of people around. around the world to watch Team USA face off against Team Canada for the gold medal in men's hockey. Not going to lie, I wanted Team Canada to win.

And as you surely have heard by now, they didn't. So rough day for me. But a great day for so many friends of mine. One of them, my pal Katrina, texted our group Sunday night. You should have seen me weeping tears of joy this morning. I texted back, I wept the other kind. But over the course of the following few days, Katrina had buyer's remorse. The joy faded.

and was replaced by a different feeling altogether. On Tuesday night, she texted again. Sean, if it makes you feel any better, basically every single last drop of joy that I received from the men winning the gold has pretty much been eradicated. On today, explain from Vox, can we enjoy anything anymore? Let's start with the hockey of it all. Here's Sean McIndoo.

He's a hockey guy at The Athletic. The joke in hockey is that there is... No sports fan has hockey as their second favorite sport. there are the diehards and then there are the people who don't pay any attention they don't care they don't get it and that has always been a problem for the sport how do we get more eyes on this product how do we break out of just being a product that is loved by the diehard fans and sort of break into the mainstream into the pop culture world and what have you and that's why the olympics is such a great opportunity because when the winter olympics comes along everybody's watching every single every single

sports fan, even people who don't watch sports, get involved in the Olympics, and hockey is one of, if not the marquee events of that. And on top of that, you look at what's happening in the culture with heated rivalry, this show that comes out of nowhere about hockey, among other things. What are you doing? I think you know. It becomes this popular pop culture phenomenon. And so if you can get, especially Canada versus USA in a gold medal.

game, this classic rivalry, what a wonderful opportunity, everything is suddenly set up perfectly for hockey to have its breakthrough moment that it's been chasing for decades. And a spoiler, if you haven't gotten to your pre-recorded Olympic highlights yet or whatever, but they did it. They did it. It was nearly perfect. We all want to see Canada versus the USA in the gold medal game. And not only do we get the gold medal game, but we get... Three skaters aside in overtime, sudden death.

Sudden death overtime. And we get Jack Hughes, a former first overall pick, who had been high-sticked in the face late in the third period. He's missing teeth. There is blood dripping from his mouth, and he scores this immortal goal

that immediately goes to the top of great American hockey moments, great American sports moments. And he's smiling and he's got the flag wrapped around his shoulders with the missing teeth and this great photo. I mean, you couldn't script it any better

to be a feel-good moment for the American sports fan. And how quickly do things get weird? I'd say you got about five minutes to enjoy the whole thing. Maybe a bit more. I mean, I would say everything is great. right up until the point where Team USA leaves the ice.

And then, like any sports team that has just won a huge game, they get into the locker room, and that's when the party starts, and that's when, from at least some perspectives, everything starts to go wrong. The coaches are there and the people who work with the team trainers or what have you. But usually that's it. Sometimes you might have family members in there,

But even that is a little bit dicey. In this case, you had the players and the officials and the trainers, and then you also had Cash Patel, the FBI director. Let's go! Let's go! And hockey enthusiasts. And apparent hockey enthusiasts. Now, why was he there at the Olympics? I'm sure there's political statesmanship reasons why maybe that made sense.

Why is he at the hockey game? I guess he's a hockey fan. Why is he in the locker room celebrating? I mean, I double check. He was not on the team. He did not play a single shift in that gold medal game. So why he is there. And when I say he's there in the locker room,

he's not just there to pop in and say, hey, good job, boy, shake a couple of hands and get out. He is chugging beers. He is wearing somebody's gold medal. Somebody has put their gold medal around his neck, and he is wearing it. For the very concerned media, yes, I love America. and was extremely humbled when my friends,

the newly minted gold medal winners on Team USA, invited me into the locker room to celebrate this historic moment with the boys. Greatest country on earth and greatest sport on earth. Fist punch emoji, hockey emoji, American flag emoji. Right, it's very unusual to see the director of the FBI celebrating a gold medal win in another country during the Olympics. And I guess also trying to prove that he likes beer more than Brett Kavanaugh. We drank beer.

I liked beer. Still like beer. It's less unusual for the president of the United States or any country, really, to congratulate gold-winning athletes. But even the president's call to these hockey players in the locker room gets a little funky, yeah? And that is always going to set a certain percentage of the audience. on edge. What is this guy going to say? How is this all going to be perceived? But as part of offering his congratulations to Team USA... I have seen hockey goalies have slightly worse games.

He makes a comment about inviting them to the White House, which again is fairly standard, and then says something along the lines of... We're going to have to bring the woman's team. You do know that. Absolutely. I do that. I do believe I probably would be impeached, okay? And this is, this has been referred to in a few places as a case of him making a joke. It's certainly a joke-shaped statement. But a lot of people, for obvious reasons, perceive that to be a dig at the American women's team,

or at least the suggestion that they are somehow lesser than. The men. It was a laugh heard around the world. Social media ignited. Women expressing why they felt a sting in the team's decision to chuckle rather than push back. For the record, the U.S. Women's Olympic teams have brought home three gold medals since the sport was introduced in 1998. The men, on the other hand, just won their first gold in 46 years. 46 years.

Okay, so just to speed us along, what happens next is that the men from Team USA go and visit the White House a couple of days later, which is not super weird. Then they attend the State of the Union, which is a little more weird, but then something very weird and very of this particularly cursed moment happens. What happens is they take a clip of a player named Brady Kachuk,

who is a player on Team USA. He's a good player, one of their better ones. When Brady Kachuk is not playing for Team USA, his day job is he is the captain in the NHL, the Ottawa senators and if you check your maps Ottawa is not in the United States Ottawa is in Canada and that introduces this whole other element where up here in

Canada I will I will put it mildly to say Donald Trump is an extraordinarily unpopular figure just just to give you a sense of how this plays up here what they had put out there was this video in which they had taken footage of Brady Kachuk in the aftermath with his gold medal and, you know, looking happy and excited, and had digitally altered it to make it appear that he was saying very insulting things about Canada. Canada, we own you, Lilbrough. We don't want Canada as our 51st state until they learn how to play hockey. This is something that the White House has done repeatedly to people who have

been arrested by various federal law enforcement civilians, but here they are doing it to a Team USA gold medal athlete. Now, he seemed annoyed that the video had been put out. He didn't completely disown it or attack it. He sort of tried to thread that needle in that hockey player way of wanting this issue to go away. It's crazy when things got on social media how fast they go. And just, of course, I would never say anything like that. But again, there were a lot of folks who would say, okay, Brady, you didn't say any of that.

You didn't deserve to have the White House do that to you, but this is the risk that you run when you allow yourself to become part of this political story, when you allow yourself to become, as some people would describe it, a political prop. Do you think some of the goodwill that hockey had gained at the Olympics was squandered by all of this political stuff that happened in the days after? Absolutely. I mean, this is hockey's breakthrough moment as far as pop culture in the United States. And yet, it just kind of all had this shadow over it. Now players who typically don't get asked about politics have to be asked questions. And you had Jack Hughes. Again, this is the guy with the missing teeth who scored the winning goal.

And instead of being asked, you know, how did it feel in that great moment of your life? being asked that and also how do you feel about the women not going they got they got busy schedules too I mean we I know we're getting like everyone's given us backlash for all the social media stuff questions like that a lot of hockey players aren't comfortable with and and and whatever answer you give is going to look bad to somebody and so it just kind of becomes this mess and again it's that feeling of in today's political climate certainly We just can't have nice things. Maybe not, Sean.

But maybe check out the P.W.HL. If you're looking for a nice hockey thing, when we're back on today explained, is everything in politics now? Hey, everybody. Estead Herndon here. I wanted to let you know that Vox Media is returning to South by Southwest in Austin

for live tapings of your favorite podcast. Join us from March 13th through March 15th for live tapings of Pivot, Teffy Talks, Professor G's Markets. where should we begin with Esther Perel and the special live taping of Today Explained, hosted by yours truly. The Vox Media podcast stage will also feature sessions

from Brneigh Brown and Adam Grant, Marcus Brownlee, Keith Lee, Vivian 2, Robin Arzone, and more. Visit Voxmedia.com slash Southby Southwest to pre-registered and get a special discount on your South by Southwest Innovation badge. That's Voxmedia.com slash Southby-Southwest West. Hope to see you there. Today, Explain is back. I am Sean Ramos firm, and is it just me or is everything politics now? Here's a list off the top of my head. People were looking at who Olympic athletes followed on

Instagram to figure out if they voted for Kamala or for Trump. Bad Bunny tried to unify not just the country, not just the continent, but the hemisphere with this halftime show. But, of course, there need to be another one for, I don't know, people who still like Kid Rock. The Kennedy Center, a place for liberals and conservatives and young and old to celebrate the arts, to see movies, to watch operas, is supposedly going to shut down for two years for what? For politics. And we're going to make it unbelievable far better than it ever was. Actors at the Berlin Film Festival who wanted to talk about their movies were instead constantly being asked about politics. And so as artists, I'm always interested in doing things that are apolitical.

Well, I don't think I am in the position to really talk about the political. situation in the U.S. Beyonce posts a photo on Instagram with the Puerto Rican flag. And people get mad because she hasn't spoken up about politics, about Palestine. The drummer for my favorite new band, Gis.

Wins a Brit Award last weekend and makes no such mistake. Instead, he gives a very brief acceptance speech where it seems like he checks off the boxes. Free Palestine. Fuck ice. R. IP, Mandy. Let's go, Geese. Thank you.

Megan Garber, you write about the intersection of culture and politics for the Atlantic. Does everything feel political to you, too? It does. It really does. And just listening to that list, I found myself getting stressed out. I felt my heartbeat raising. It really does. I, you know, I don't think this is new. Politics and culture have always been intertwined with each other, have always been kind of muddled and tangled, you know, in ways that kind of belie the politics here or culture there. kind of framing that we usually have, but I think things have become so much more extreme in recent years. And it is hard to think of anything really in pop culture that doesn't somehow also become political in the end. And is it fair to just blame Donald Trump because he seems

to just want to be everywhere and have a take on everything and call out everyone? I think to some extent, yes. And I think definitely with Hockey Gate, if we can call it that, that way. That was definitely, I think, caused by Trump himself in the sense of he is someone who does not recognize the traditional division between culture and politics. You're going to win bigger than ever. And to prove that point, to prove that point, here with us tonight is a group of winners who just made the entire nation proud. And he's someone who has a very specific idea of what it means to be presidential, which is very different from what previous presidents often had. And I think also,

So, yes, he likes to be the center of attention and likes to start a scandal even in situations where one probably did not need to be started. So it is Trump, but it is more than Trump. I think also a lot of the trends that we're seeing right now have to do with basic changes and huge changes in technology. Oh, we can blame Donald Trump and technology? Tell me more. You know, when you were listing all of these cultural and political events, I was thinking of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian scholar. Do you know him?

You know, I grew up in Canada, so they beat Marshall into our heads at a young age. Love it, love it. That is a great education. Yeah, so Marshall McLuhan, the scholar who is, I think, most famous for the aphorism, the medium is the message. The telephone as a service is a huge environment, and that is the medium. And the environment affects everybody. What you say on the telephone affects very few. Which basically means that, you know, the technologies we use to communicate,

the mediums we use to communicate like TV and newspapers and magazines and radio and the like, they're much more than technologies alone. They're much more than machines. They're much more than things we use. They are also things that shape the way we see the world, that shape our information implicitly. What you print is nothing compared to the... effect of the printed word.

However much we talk about technology as things that serve us and tools we use, when it comes to the communications technologies, they're on some level using us to and, you know, just informing the way that we see the world and thereby shaping the world as they go along. Okay, so the medium has changed dramatically in the past few decades. Marshall McLuhan didn't get to see how much it would change with the advent of the internet, but how is that shaped the message? Yes. So McLuhan was writing in the 1960s. So his reference points were television especially, but then also newspapers, magazines, radio, that kind of thing. I think why he is so relevant right now is that so many of his insights apply to the Internet. One of the effects of TV is to shorten the amount of time that people can pay attention to anything. There's a new kind of humor that exists in America called the One Lone.

We used to have jokes, stories, but no more, only one-liners now. You know, I think of something like social media, for example, and the medium there is a flow of information, one kind of news feed that puts everything together. That is how most consumers get their news on social media, just that one kind of flow made of infinite scroll and information that could be personal. and about the news of the day and about, you know, your puppy that you just got and, you know, so many different things combining into one feed. And that is the medium.

But the message is everything is one, right? Like the divisions that used to exist on, say, newspapers, on TV, you know, where you had kind of news versus opinion as very separate ideas and you had arts over here and sports over there and international news over there and everything kind of in its place, we no longer have those divisions. We no longer have those categories on social media, on the internet in general. They really do converge and collapse into each other. And I think that does explain a lot about why culture and politics are themselves collapsing and blending together, because that is the medium kind of having its way with us. But as I think you said, culture has always been

political. I remember in the Nazis, people were mad at Britney Spears for supporting George W. Bush and the Iraq War. Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that. What feels like it's changed since then?

Is it just that instead of saying, I don't like Britney Spears anymore, I'm going to change the station when she comes on the radio, you can just go to her Instagram and call her out directly and embarrass her maybe in front of all of her legions of fans? Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.

And one thing about social media is it makes, it turns people into content consumers, but also content producers. And so, you know, there's this sort of obligation, or implied obligation, at least not everyone has to do it, but this obligation to share your opinion and to have a take and to always be sort of adding your own content to things. and having your own opinion about things. And that I think is one of the core features of social media, that sort of interplay between we are like passive consumers of events, of scandals, of culture, of politics, whatever it might be. But we are also active creators of that in some ways and at least creators of responses to what's happening.

So there's always this back and forth between taking it in and putting something out there for other people to consume. You know, just to bring this back to where we started on the show today, Megan, with my friend Katrina, trying to feel proud to be an American, trying to embrace Team USA and feel great about their gold. And then immediately having that feeling corrupted by politics, are we going to get back to a place where we can just share in those big cultural moments and feel unadulterated joy? Oh, I hope so. I want to say yes. I mean, I don't see us going back to the situation that was. I don't see us going back to a place where, you know, culture and politics were relatively distinct propositions. But, but, but, but I also don't think we have to just give into the trends that exist, right? And, you know, assume that the way things are right now are the way things are going to be. To go back to the technology of it all, historically, when, you know, we're going to be, you know, assume that the way things are right now, and, you know, assume that the way things are right now, When big new mediums have been introduced, people have had to kind of navigate their way through them and around them and sort of to figure out new boundaries and expectations when it comes to how those mediums will live in the culture and in their lives.

And I think that fact alone is very positive and it's an opportunity for us to do that navigation. And I think especially with social media, we are producers as well as consumers. So we do have a lot of say in, you know, what those standards will be and how we can find joy together. That was Megan Garber. She's got a book called Screen People, How We Entertained Ourselves into a State of Emergency. Check it out if you've been feeling like you're in a state of emergency lately. Miles Bryan made the show.

Amina Al-Sari edited Andrea Lopez Crusado fact check, David Tadishore, and Patrick Boyd Mixed. I'm Sean Ramos for him. Everyone else is Danielle Hewitt. Hadeemawaddy, Kelly Wessinger, Peter Ballin-on-Rosen, Ariana Aspuru, Dustin DeSoto, Jolie Myers, Abyshi-Artsi, Estead Herndon, our executive producer Miranda Kennedy and our King Noel. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. The show is a part of Vox Media Podcast Network. For more, podcasts, visit Podcasts. And to listen to our show, sans ads, sign up at vox.com slash members.