Podcasting Chat Community

Rich Paul, CEO of Klutch Sports and active NBA agent, has drawn some ire this season for things he said on his new podcast called Game Over, which he cohosts with Max Kellerman. Anonymous members of the Lakers staff were reportedly mad at him for fake-trading Austin Reaves for Jaren Jackson Jr. Lakers fans are mad at him for causing the "disconnect" in the Lakers’ locker room. Stephen A. Smith was mad at him for not understanding that people see him as LeBron James’s mouthpiece. All of these reasons, I fear, are misguided. The only good reason to be mad at him is that he has leveraged the unlimited resources and power of Klutch Sports, CAA, Spotify, and The Ringer to make a daytime SportsCenter simulacrum without the catchphrases.

Paul and Kellerman’s FanDuel-sponsored podcast is bad. It's bad in the sort of banal way that most podcasts are bad: The hosts don’t say much of substance, they are stricken with red light syndrome, and their riffs are obtuse and unimaginative. Paul started a recent episode with the line, "Can’t put a watch on without the time being right." This reads like some kind of adage, but Paul was literally just talking about his watch. 

It's a strange thing to have a sports fandom that operates on something like the same life cycle as a cicada, but I do, and curling is that sport. Even by the standards of Olympic sports that I barely know how to watch, curling is both abstracted and wonderful to me—the opacity of it, the ASMR-adjacent audio experience, the strange and specific mastery required. I wanted to talk about curling before the Olympics go back into hibernation, and happily we were able to get John Cullen—author of the new book Curling Rocks!, host of the award-winning CBC curling podcast Broomgate, among other notable podcasts, and a former elite curler himself—on the pod to talk to us about it.

First we started with some other things, and anyone who wishes to skip past a long discussion of how I came to purchase Barstool-branded coffee at a deep discount, and why I now have it sitting in my home, should start the pod around the 15-minute mark. But those 15 minutes are densely packed, and include a long-awaited peek behind the curtain of my grocery shopping process, a deep reading of the (extensive) text on the package of Dan Katz's signature coffee product, the phrase "positive vibes" as a marker of the exact opposite of positive vibes, and John's experience recording too-spicy-for-TV jokes for a restaurant commercial.

NBA All-Star weekend has come and gone, and though the game itself was surprisingly spirited, the most intriguing development of the weekend was the strange story of some leaked DMs from a pair of anonymous Twitter accounts that people connected to those accounts say belong to Kevin Durant.

You will hopefully forgive the vagueness there, as we don't really know if Durant is behind the accounts. But also, including proper nouns doesn't make the story much easier to follow: A Twitter user named Pranav Sriraman made a post about how much he disliked the design of the Larry O'Brien trophy, which drew a counter-complaint about the posture of complaining itself from Durant, which Sriraman countered by asking Durant about his investment in Skydio, which sells drones to the IDF, which Durant dodged, only for user @basedfrog23 to make their only post detailing what they say are the DMs of "KDF." Other users eventually posted more DMs, in which the accounts talked all kinds of crazy shit.

My co-host Harry Krinsky spent the past 24 hours feverishly DMing as many people connected to the saga as possible, and though none of them agreed to come on Nothing But Respect with the protection of a voice distorter, he learned a lot. Additionally, we were able to wrangle Eamon Whalen to talk through all angles of the saga, most notably the way Durant's Skydio investment has mostly not been talked about, leaving it to disgruntled Twitter anons to do the work of calling him out.