So it was only when I saw a number of guys coming down the middle passage of the ballroom, obviously, you know, with with rivalry and machine guns, that I realized something extraordinary was going on. And I hit the deck along with everyone else in the room. Welcome to the Powers That Be daily, Puck's podcast focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood and the players who run it all. I'm Peter Hamby. It's Monday, April 27th, which means it's Media Monday. John Kelly and I were in the room on Saturday night with Donald Trump and thousands of other journalists for the White House Correspondents Dinner Panic at the Hilton. And we share some thoughts on the chaotic scene that obviously became the biggest media story in the world. After that, we chat about the NFL sending their big guns to Washington to explain to lawmakers and Trump administration officials that the league remains committed to broadcast television, as some members of Congress express concern that more and more NFL games are moving to streaming, limiting mass market access for fans. We also discuss Warner Brothers Discovery shareholders voting to approve the merger with Paramount Skydance, but also slapping CEO and President David Zasloff on the way out with a symbolic vote. We'll discuss all that and much more on today's episode of The Powers That Be. United Health Group is bringing in-home treatment directly to patients, closing care gaps, identifying risks earlier, and improving patient outcomes. In 2025, patients received over 19 million home visits. Learn more at unitedhealthgroup.com slash commitment. Happy Monday, everybody, and welcome to the powers that be. We recorded this episode before the mayhem of Saturday night at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in Washington. I'm joined today by John Kelly to talk about it. Of course, we were both in the room. There have been 151 mass shootings in the United States in 2026 so far. There were three mass shootings, in fact, on Saturday, one in New York, one in Pennsylvania, one in Indiana. But official Washington finally got to understand on Saturday night, even though nobody died, thankfully, what it's like to be trapped in a room, terrified, not being able to call your loved ones or text them for those of us who didn't have cell phone service. And there's a lot of feelings going on out there. John, I didn't want to talk about our feelings on the show necessarily because there's lots of postmortems by the time people are hearing this, but it was traumatizing and it can be traumatizing even when nothing bad happens. We should also say this is the third assassination attempt on Donald Trump, which is absolutely crazy. John, we were there when Trump and various administration officials were escorted out. The way I want to do this really quickly before getting to the rest of our show is just sort of our little play-by-play because we were sitting at the same table when the dinner started and very quickly kind of got separated. You know, I at some point wanted to go outside to get in touch with my loved ones. I didn't have service down there. You went a different way. And so let's just go back really quick for people who might be interested what it was like in the room in those moments. I was sitting at the same table with you and heard some commotion and then saw the people come in with the long guns, Secret Service, et cetera. I did not hear gunshots. I had a friend who was sitting at the Axios table closer toward the back who did hear gunshots and has like a history of hunting. So he knew what a gunshot sounds like. Did you hear gunshots? I did not, Peter. In fact, actually, Dylan said afterwards that he did, But in retrospect, maybe I heard some sort of clatter. I was facing the stage and facing the middle passage where the Secret Service ran down. So I was looking over your shoulder. So it was only when I saw a number of guys coming down the middle passage of the ballroom, obviously, you know, with rivalry and machine guns, that I realized something extraordinary was going on. And I hit the deck along with, you know, everyone else in the room. You know, what's funny in those moments is that no one really set it down. You just sort of do it. And I agree with everything that you said that all things happened. And in fact, I think actually within the first 48 hours, a lot of the media and there was a kind of facile because there was a moment of panic where no one knew what was going on. I think people started to look up very quickly and realize that they saw that Russ Boyd was taken out on the Axios table. Bobby Kennedy Jr. was taken out. Obviously, the President of Diaz was taken out. And the Secret Service was obviously in charge. I mean, a very quick moment, it went from being a scary scene to probably a recognition among some of us that we were probably in the safest room in America, just given the power of the security personnel that was in there. And it was a fascinating moment, Peter. But when I think back on it not so long ago, there's almost a metaphor for the media industry where you look up and you realize everyone's covering the same story. And they all belong to one of X number of dozens of media companies. But there they were all on their own phones telling the story individually to their own audiences. audiences and you sort of understood in a very real powerful way the fragmentation that's happened to our industry and saw it in in very very real time i just want to say one other thing too about this um because i there is a sort of you know sort of vache conversation about the um the the seriousness of the threat and obviously it's a scary moment also you know juxtaposed with the fact that the security personnel, you know, behaved bravely and everything worked out there. It's worth remembering, you know, I have kids who are 12 and almost eight. Lockdowns are unfortunately, tragically, a very normal part of school life these days for little kids. It was interesting to see what happens when adults in the center of the media go through this unusual task itself and how abnormal it is just a you know something that we should all recognize um i i juxtaposed that you're right we we went a lot of people tripped it off in different directions afterwards but our pal dylan had a very long tweet that he sent out on sunday morning pointing out that at the bar that dylan and i went to and a couple other people afterwards to get a bite to eat they wouldn't even put on trump's press conference right they wanted to put the flyers game on so we live in a world in which there's so much fragmentation and uh there's actually very little um uh broad interest in news compared to what there used to be and um compare that to the the sort of um you know extraordinary tunnel inside washington itself and you recognize that we live in a lot of different americas now man yeah no i saw dylan's tweet and people sort of getting mad at it like it's okay that people like don't care about politics all the time this bar you guys went to i believe it was like a block from the white house look if you're in philadelphia or cincinnati yes literally a lot you don't have to watch the trump thing on tv you don't have to put it on tv at the bar or the restaurant but it was like the whole at least much of the city was paying attention to this although he also made a good point and i felt this afterwards my friend sam and i went to a bar kind of on 18th street now it's morgan and we walked in and there were like six people who had gotten out of the building your point about security is is well taken i just still think about the fact that al-qaeda and isis had a habit of doing those double tap things where there'd be like one shooter one bomb and then a second person would come in so i kind of wanted to actually just get out but whether or not that's true um we walked in this bar and it's adams morgan on a saturday night and there's just people in their 20s and 30s partying i look like there was like a bachelorette party near us and then we straggle in it started to rain a little bit wearing our tuxedos and there's like four or five other people in there who had left and we're just getting a drink and then going home uh this couple we said next to was like i'm just i'm just going to go home and see my kid the meta narrative about the media is very interesting also i'm glad you brought that up i almost forgot about it because i'm sort of piecing it together back in my head the there were several people who got up on the dais after Trump and Vance left. And by the way, some of these people, I'm not clearly remembering, but some of them were, you know, legacy type people like a Jonathan Carl type who would be up there and he's good with his phone, um, sort of doing a selfie video, like the first person reporting And there were like six journalists standing on stage in ball gowns and tuxedos it was this weird like technological fantasia where they narrating what going on and by the way i don't know if they're recording it or they're live streaming it or they're just recording a video to post to twitter or whatever um that was happening there's also a video that people are kind of making fun of of olivia reingold from the free press who's like under her table as this is going on, but she's like filming herself, which like speaks to the sort of Gen Z millennial impulses. She's filming herself reacting. And then Christopher Hooks, another journalist, retweeted and said, tip for younger reporters, point your camera at the thing that's happening. So there was that. There was also a Substack new media party happening across town that's sort of like a protest event of this dinner. I guess that was lockdown too. But when I finally got in touch with Katie, my wife, she was watching on TV and getting all the news in real time on Twitter and television and some of us in the room who didn't have service like the people watching on TV in many ways knew more than the people in the room and that's an exception to that I think though is we were sitting right next to the CNN table and I was like literally just talking to my friends like Caitlin and Phil Mattingly sat down to dinner and then turned around and they were actually doing reporting when it was happening And look, people on Twitter and media world like to self-congratulate. None of these people were heroes for going back to the White House, but they really did their jobs very well across the board. The people who had to, especially Weja who Weja Jang, who's the White House Correspondents Association president, who not only dealt with this, but also the cross pressures of this is Trump's first White House Correspondents Dinner. and she works at CBS News and there's all this scrutiny on Barry Weiss and the gang. And so she just was an exemplar of poise. But we were in the ballroom for a moment, John, before we got separated, where Ouija came out like once or twice and was like, everyone stay tight, we'll have more information. Come back 10 minutes later, the dinner's going to go on. And then I just had to get out of there because I needed to make some phone calls and stuff. And then it was like canceled and there was like a flood of people leaving. but it was there were people in the room who had access to the internet who had the news who were doing some reporting and then like the other half of the room didn't have anything and so we're just going around asking people what'd you hear what'd you hear what'd you see and you know it was uh the capital of american journalism all of them crammed into one room being journalists that was fascinating to watch but it's also to my earliest point um i've been in situations that were false alarms but there were mass shooting scares very large scale in one case one a movie theater situation the this movie theater thing that happened to katie and i in santa monica as you point out the first people to flee the theater when the scary man in movie theater stood up with a backpack in the dark and started screaming were the middle school and high school kids who bolted because they had just been trained in these situations to get the f out and the The subterranean ballroom of the Hilton simultaneously could be the safest place in the world. But also, you do feel a little trapped. You do feel a little trapped in there. So it was freaky. I don't know what else we need to say about it, John. I'm glad we got our event in beforehand. The future of the dinner is notionally in question, not just this year. Trump and the Correspondents Association say they want to reschedule it for 30 days from now. We'll see if that happens. but Sarah Fisher wrote something in Axios that maybe they'll cancel the dinner forever I don't think that's going to happen but man things have really changed though since before Trump political violence is a matter of reality now and there's obviously questions about journalists getting in a room toasting the free press while Donald Trump is sitting there possibly about to attack the free press there's all of that backdrop but I just wanted to talk to you today just to get your little thoughts on it. There's so much to talk about. Any other closing ideas from the boss man? You know, the one thing that stands out for me is that every narrative I think that we've heard out of that room besides all the false flag stuff, which is obviously totally nonsense. Oh, yeah. But all the other narratives, I think, were actually, none was hegemonic, but they were all true in space. But when I think back on the moments afterwards, and as you say, Peter, we were in there for a while right like yeah we just came on and then she came on again uh we thought we were gonna have to stay and then we realized we were gonna go obviously you know that's what the protocol should dictate but when i look out across the room there were a number of different cohorts there were people who jumped into action because that's what they do right and i understand that and i respect it there were people who jumped into action because i think there was some sort of um uh coast playing or grandstanding that they wanted to do and and um and that's also part of a personality type. There were people who were sort of sated at dinners with a lot of bottles of wine, knowing that there was time to kill, and that's okay too. But I do feel it's important to say one thing here, because there is, people respond to it in different ways, and I can't tell anyone how to feel. But I have to tell you, after the initial moments, I never felt that my life was in danger at all. I thought we were in an incredibly safe space. And there is a certain amount of self-reflection that's really healthy in moments like this. And they could help the profession and it's totally normal. And these are all people who are doing a job. And I certainly understand that. But I think that when you go beyond it and you get towards more existential questions about what this means for the dinner, for the association, for all that, that are unhealthy. Yes, you are totally right. We live in a time of extraordinary political violence. We live in a time of an unpopular president. We've gone through this before. But it's important to remember that the guy who was coming in there, he was going after the administration. And I just don't think it's useful for the industry for this to turn into a long, drawn-out moment of self-reflection. And it's probably a two- or three-day news cycle. I think that's understandable. But I think beyond that, it'll be useful if the media returns focus to Iran and a number of other domestic issues that we're focused on here. It makes you recognize on some level, Peter, and reporting is a matter of empathy. Trump and the administration deal with these sort of violence threats on a daily basis. It's part of their job. i just want to tell everyone john uh is doing some bathroom journalism right now recording this in a uh amtrak bathroom i cite bathroom journalism because uh wolf blitzer was taking a leak when this happened and and it's got some good details just by being out there in the hallway john thanks man big night weird night but i will talk to you soon and now let's go to the rest of our episode John and I talked about the NFL going to Washington and Warner Brothers discovery and how the merger is going after this. Here's a shift worth noting. Better health care is care that meets patients where they are. United Health Group is bringing it directly to living rooms. This is a win for patients managing chronic conditions. And here's the interesting thing. By closing those care gaps, administering in-home exams, and identifying risks earlier, more diseases can be prevented and patient outcomes can improve. In 2025 alone, UnitedHealth Group patients received over 19 million home visits. Learn more at unitedhealthgroup.com slash commitment. Hi, my name is Lloyd Lockridge, and I'm the host of a new podcast from Odyssey called Family Lore. In this podcast, I'm going to have people on to tell unusual and sometimes far-fetched stories about their families. I've heard my whole life that she invented the margarita. And then we're going to investigate those stories and find out how much of it is true. He gets a patent one month before the Wright brothers. Oh my God. Please follow and listen to Family Lore, an Odyssey podcast available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows. happy monday everybody and welcome to the powers that be if it's monday it's media monday of course i'm joined by the boss man john kelly we're going to talk a little warner brothers discovery paramount skydance news including uh the shareholders over at wbd approving the merger is mostly a pro forma vote you knew this was going to happen on the glide path to this merger i don't see any hiccups road bumps ahead maybe john has some ideas but first john let's talk about uh I mean, this is a banger of a puck article. This is the intersection of media sports and politics Jeez even Wall Street probably He wrote last week about the NFL sending some of their top executives to D to lobby, not officially lobby, but communicate their message to lawmakers and power brokers in Washington that amid concerns that the NFL is migrating to streaming, that broadcast is at the heart of their strategy. It always has been. It always will be. There are plenty of lawmakers, who am I thinking of here? Mike Lee in Utah is a good example, Republicans, but also some antitrust Democrats who don't like big companies, you know, bilking consumers out of more money, who are complaining that the more the NFL sends its rights to places like Amazon or send some games to YouTube TV, the more this stuff happens over streaming, that one, plenty of viewers will be left out in the cold because they don't know how to use streaming. streaming uh it's just taking eyeballs away from broadcast but two you know it might drive up prices eventually and of course all of this comes against the backdrop of the nfl reopening ahead of time it's uh negotiations with broadcast and streaming partners john do you think the nfl has a real problem here or will just going down to dc and shaking some hands just sort of solve it for now. You know, I assume that a lot of this work is being orchestrated by Jeff Miller, who is one of the quartet who went down there along with Hans Schroeder, who is the sort of capital B big business NFL executive. And Miller is a very smart person who comes out of the sort of public affairs world. And I think that what they're doing here is responding to a little bit of perceived threat, Peter. You know, there is a feeling that, as we've discussed previously on the show, that, you know, indomitable forces like Murdoch are sort of behind the scenes, you know, agitating that the antitrust exemption isn't bulletproof. And so the NFL is really, really good, as we've said many times before, at telegraphing their wants and needs. And so what they did is they telegraphed and reminded lawmakers that the NFL has been a pro-broadcast business since day one, which is obviously true, and we've discussed this before as well. Like, football's ascent in America came from its, like, telegenic natural wonders, you know? It was the—just think about it on the most fundamental level. Like, the game is fit for a screen. You can see the whole thing. That's not true with baseball or hockey. I guess it's true to some extent with basketball. But like football and broadcast television are, you know, are like the sort of peanut butter and chocolate of America. But what they are doing is recognizing that they have that they have more options than broadcast TV. And I do think that this is where the argument does become facile. Right. Like they are working with broadcasters that all have streaming arms. arms. And we also know, Peter, that broadcast, most people do not receive their broadcasts on a, you know, aluminum foil antenna for free, right? They're paying a bazillion dollars for a lot of stuff that they don't want in order to do this. And actually, I'm not trying to give advice here to the public affairs and lobbying people for Amazon and Prime, But like they have a very strong argument to make that they're actually the companies that are looking out for ordinary Americans, you know, who would much rather pay 20 bucks a month for a fully loaded Netflix package than whatever they're paying to access, you know, two, four, five and seven in addition to however else people are getting. That's just the broad facts there. But the NFL's real argument is, hey, we're going to – which is genuine, and they said the lawmakers, is, hey, we're going to be in the broadcast business as long as the broadcast business is around because it benefits us. But you guys can't and shouldn't tell us that we can't go into streaming as well. And that actually, Peter, that's a fair argument. And I think for the first time, however, we are seeing that the NFL is going to run the risk of getting stretched too thin probably here as they continue to sell these parcels of games away. But you know what? They'll be just fine. You mentioned football being made for TV, John. I was just thinking about this. I was texting my college friends. Some of us read the Chuck Klosterman book that just came out about football. And a central thesis of it is, despite the fact there's not a lot of actual gameplay doing a broadcast, I think the average of actual action of gameplay, not timeouts, not replays, is 11 to 18 minutes a game. Like, of the three hours you see on Fox or whatever. And there's just like, you know, but they find ways to fill the time and somehow make it compelling. And, of course, it is now the juggernaut. Anyway, that's a tangent. John makes the point about streaming in his piece. They went to the FCC. And as we know, Brendan Carr, the chairman there, has also weighed in on the NFL moving to streaming. He's usually more bark than bite and really has been. Eric Gardner and I talk about this all the time on this podcast, and it's in his writing, too. But they presented in their deck the fact that streaming services are also really widely distributed. Like, it is not as big as broadcast, obviously, but it is growing. and how many, you would know better than tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people are watching content on streaming. It's rivaling broadcasts in terms of video consumption. Oh, it's larger. Yeah, we crossed the 50% mark a little while ago. I mean, these numbers oscillate with Nielsen, but when you think about, you know, in America, cable went from 100 million homes to 60 million homes. You know, Netflix is in treble that, right? And as you're, sorry, I didn't mean to step in your line, Peter, but as you're saying this, the inescapable thought that like is just so real and maybe, you know, difficult to make the lawmakers, though it shouldn't, is that the distinction is truly silly now to discuss it, right? Like it's like talking about like print versus digital, you know, these are all of these media companies are accessible through apps, through smart TVs, through phones, They're available anywhere. And the only distinction really is that the ones that existed before 2000 and whatever also have these terrestrial networks that they were harvested on. If you wanted to watch a football game that was broadcast on CBS, a Jets-Patriots game, if you wanted to suffer through that, you could have innumerable options to do that that were all CBS channels, apps, CBS Sports. It's funny. John actually did a funny interview with Tony Kornheiser, who was a hero to you and I. It was on Tony's other show. But Tony was sort of complaining about how hard it is to watch stuff. and it actually was a useful proxy for what happens in Congress where a lot of people in their 70s who are just looking at their scientific Atlantic cable box saying, where the hell is this thing? And life has moved on. Yeah, this has been a hobby horse of mine. I've talked to you about it before. If you're in a hotel and you want to watch the commanders play, whoever, the giants, and it's on Amazon and you don't really know how to connect your TV, it's a real problem. I don't know. Like there's a lot of people out there who like don't get the tech and that's on top of like sports bars and stuff. I think there was an article last week about that too, like sports bars, like confronting the streaming thing. One more quick note before we go to break. John Orend did an interview with Hans Schroeder for this piece. And Schroeder was sort of bragging about the NFL's very sophisticated media strategy and kind of implying that it isn't just like monoculture broadcast anymore. and Schroeder says, to use Wyoming as an example, huge media market, Wyoming. To use Wyoming as an example, maybe those stations usually would get a lot of Broncos games. But now, because there's a lot of interest in Josh Allen, who went to the University of Wyoming, maybe they'll get more Bills games. That's a great example of the depth, thoughtfulness, and focus that we have at both the national broadcast network level and a local affiliate level. But, you know, if you're a Broncos fan in Wyoming and you get preempted for the, you know, Bills game, That might annoy you too. So it shows there's not really a win when you get that niche, I guess. This all makes me laugh. I flag that too. My mom, Peter, is funny. We're getting hive-minded as we get older here. If media is going to continue to function as a mega multi-billion dollar, trillion dollar industry, it has to be pro-consumer. And that really is the baseline of all of these conversations and disagreements. and at the end of the day the government has to be able to facilitate companies ability to get the programming however eyes ears words whatever it is to people where they are based less on dogmas and so I assume that this means the NFL is gonna get what it wants in the end and in this case it should Yeah I think so Look the FCC was started in the 1930s for radio and it was much more of a public interest thing Streaming would not have been a concept at all back then. And in many ways, you can argue it is in the consumer interest. It is in the public interest to give consumers more options. But we'll see what lawmakers say. John, let's take a quick break. speaking of less options let's talk about paramount skydance and warner brothers discovery after the break welcome back to the powers that be everybody it's media monday i'm talking to john kelly last week john wbd shareholders cleared the way for all of their brands to join paramount skydance later this year uh this was not a hurdle in the long list of hurdles i guess it was a mostly pro forma meeting one interesting thing uh that in belony noted this in his most recent dispatch is that they they kind of slapped the shareholders they kind of slapped david zaslov and other executives for their windfall pay packages they're going to get from this deal i just you know i feel like the maybe maybe not i could be wrong but the time of us here at puck talking about david zaslov a lot might be waning a little as this deal closes maybe maybe he'll still be a central character yeah he probably will but i wanted the john kelly take obviously it's not going to like come to anything but i hate to be pro zaslov here but wasn't wasn't he just hired to cut costs and sell the company and now the stock price is really high and everyone's kind of getting what they wanted from a shareholder perspective? Are they just whacking him because they think he's kind of a dick? Yeah, easy though. First of all, Peter, don't worry. Zazz is not going to exit our lives anytime soon. This deal is, Paramount's saying they're going to close it by September. I have a hard time believing. They're certainly motivated to do that with the ticker, but I think that's going to be challenging. And even so, if they pull that off, I'm sure that Zazz will will manifest himself in other ways. But yeah, this is one of those real sticky ones, you know, where at the end of the day, if you're a shareholder in this non-binding vote, like, are you going to be annoyed that this guy's making basically a billion bucks? That could be your money, right? Like, understandably, that is vexing. But on the other hand, Peter, I think that you have the correct point of view here, which is love it or hate it. And most people do hate it. This is the deal the guy got. The stock was trading in the sub $10 range in the fall. He recut his deal so that he'd be in the money at a lower strike price, and he pulled it off. I think one of the complications around Zaslav Komp, which is hard to wrap your head around. He was making more than Iger, making more than Moonves, who himself made a ton, making more than Philippe Domane. A lot of very overpaid people Iger deserved, but the other ones were sort of rapaciously greedy. Zaz was compensated in cash almost like a founder would be compensated in stock. We've made a version of that point before. And so he's really, The comp here really comes in the form of his sort of total discovery journey, you know, that he took this sort of, you know, fledgling cable systems business through these deals with, gosh, Scripps and other companies. And eventually they ate the, you know, the minnow ate the whale with Warners. And that's, you know, he pulled that off for his original shareholders. And so that's why he's being compensated this way. So nobody has to like it. nobody does like it but as you pointed out this actually unfortunately it proves the sort of edge case of why executives are are often compensated this way like the money helped him get this done you know um the guy may have been so motivated to to make this absolutely enormous windfall that he ran this like cutthroat process in which he got some of the smartest people in the entertainment industry at Netflix to bid against this, you know, boy king in Ellison. And Ellison just kept bidding up. So unfortunately, this is capitalism at its worst. One more quick note before I let you go, Eric Gardner and I did a pod last week about his reporting on Netflix, maybe, possibly, working it behind the scenes in Washington to try to scuttle this deal. They did get some $2 billion breakup fee from Warner Brothers backing out of their bid and going with Warner Brothers Discovery. But it sounds like there's hurt feelings over there, or at least a rivalry, and they want to maybe try to scuttle this deal. Netflix denies all of this, but Eric has heard from people in Washington that they're making whispered phone calls and hiring the right people to try to mess with the deal really quick you said september is when this is supposed to get done do you see any any way this doesn't happen i i think the deal is absolutely happening it's going to be unpopular eric story is great i recommend that everyone take a look at it it focuses on how these state ags which normally don't have anything um material to throw themselves in front of the train in these kinds of deals, but are riding some recent highs. And, of course, they're going to get involved here, as we discussed last week. So many people in the creative community hate this deal. I don't think Netflix is astroturfing this thing. But I wouldn't be surprised if they recognize that they're going to benefit from the fact that David Ellison, you know, 120 billion bucks in deals worth later finds that he's taken over from Zaz, right, as the face of the descent of the traditional entertainment industry. And this could be a sort of dead cat bounce for Ted Sarandos and Netflix, where all of a sudden they go from being the disruptors to maybe somehow being the good guys. We'll see. I think there's enough blame to go around to everyone, Peter. John, real quick before I go, in honor of my red-hot Cincinnati Reds in first place in the Central, look what I just pulled out of my desk drawer here. I want you to read this aloud for our listeners. Which baseball card is that? Who is that? Oh, it was fuzzy at first, Peter, but now I see that that is rocket-armed Rob Dibble, who... The Nasty Boys. Yeah, he was one corn-fed right-handed pitcher. I can still, that was, I guess, Peter, before mullets were chic. Now I feel like in the suburbs you see a lot of tween boys walking around with one. But Rob Dibble, that's not the guy that you want to face late in the game. I just realized this is a 1990 tops. This is the year they won the series. I'm looking at the back of the card. Also, you said corn-fed. It feels like most baseball players these days are like church boys from Nebraska or Texas. Rob Dibble's hometown, Bridgeport, Connecticut. I did not know that. Pizza fed. Not corn fed. Yeah, one of the true armpits of America. I'm trying to think in my mind if I can recount the starting lineups for both the Reds and the A's in that 1990 series. That was one of the true shockers in recent-ish modern baseball history. The A's were stacked in those years and didn't have an answer for Barry Larkin, though. Yeah, or Eric Davis. That was actually, I remember, the first time I cried, a tear of joy. I was a nine-year-old boy. Man. They swept them, too, right? That was a 4-0 sweep. Yeah, dude. Yeah, they definitely did. John, thanks so much, buddy. See you in the Slack. See you in the Slack, man. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of The Powers That Be. As a reminder, The Powers That Be is the official podcast of Puck. We'd like to thank Ben Landy, Liz Goff, and Alex Bigler for their editorial and production guidance. If you like what you hear, please share with a friend. It really helps us keep delivering the inside scoop that only Puck can offer. Follow us on Twitter at Puck News. I'm Ben Landy. See you tomorrow. This has been a presentation of Odyssey. Please listen, rate, review, and follow all episodes wherever you get your podcasts. The Powers That Be Daily is executive produced by John Kelly, co-founder of Puck, Bob Tabador, and Ben Landy, executive editor at Puck.
