A Series of "Parodies," If That's the Right Word, of Podcasts on the Ringer Podcast Network

Yeah this is really strange and will appeal to almost none of you. I wrote it for me and, like, the guys on r/billsimmons I guess. Consider it a bonus. Or a penalty, idk. This is all done in a loving fashion.

The Bill Simmons Podcast, with Host Bill Simmons and Guest Ryen Russillo

The walls are covered in sports memorabilia. The air is pregnant with quiet desperation.

Bill: [chews lip]

Ryen: Are we still doing this?

Bill: … we’re not not doing it.

Ryen: I don’t know, I just, what’s left to say in this parody space?

Bill: You’re not wrong.

Ryen: Just feels like, you know, Twitter got here first, and Reddit cleaned up on the glass, and now…

Bill: Well you know what they want to hear.

Ryen: I go to the gym! You love the Celtics! “Who says no?”

Bill: The exhausted comedic potential piece.

Ryen: Meta. Nice.

Bill: “It just is,” is another big one.

Ryen: What is.

Bill: It.

Ryen: Is what?

Bill: It just is.

Ryen: If this is a bit, I’m not getting it.

Bill: Like, we make a claim, then we say “It just is!”

Ryen: The argument by assertion piece.

Bill: Now we’re talking.

Ryen: Making a statement into a question?

Bill: Confidently agreeing, though I don’t appear to have been listening.

Ryen: Just seems, I don’t know, a little repetitive…. There’s only so many times you can say “Pearl Jam” and expect it to be funny.

Bill: Yeah…. I don’t know why I keep agreeing to do these.

Ryen: Well, you gotta promote the brand.

Bill: Promoting the brand is my reuben sandwich.

Ryen: [squinting at a list he’s holding] “…is having a moment.” Is having a moment?

Bill: Who is?

Ryen: It’s down here on the list. “… is having a moment.” But it doesn’t say who or what.

Bill: Oh, that’s one of our things!

Ryen: Our things?

Bill: [having turned a disturbing shade of red] Yeah, it’s like, one of the things we say. You and me. We say it.

Ryen: You mean a moment, like, in time?

Bill: Is there another kind of moment?

Ryen: But, I mean, like… our things?

Bill: Yeah. Us.

Ryen: Yours and my?

Bill: I’m not following.

Ryen: No, I get it, I just… do I get it?

Bill: Could we say that having a moment… is having a mo-

Ryen: [does that thing he does where he gets deeply disappointed in the world and all who are in it and expresses that disappointment with a weariness that makes you sad not only for him but for the world in which he sees so little to be inspired by] Don’t.

Bill: [mumbles] Sorry.

Ryen: No, it’s OK, it’s just like, what we are even doing here, you know?

Bill: [defeated]

Ryen: [deflated]

The seconds tick by. Rick Reilly staggers in, febrile, delirious.

Rick Reilly: [while dying] Sammy Sosa! What a smile!

Bill: [tries to cheer himself up with his favorite daydream, where he and God Shammgod beat Artis Gilmore and Adam Sandler in a pickup game]

Producer: So, uh…

Ryen: [rising to the occasion] You know, I’m like, I’m just a dude, you know?

Bill: [welling with new life] Right!

Ryen: [invisible trumpets swell] And sometimes, a dude is just a guy, you know?

Bill: [makes an excited fist, childlike enthusiasm rising] YES.

Ryen: And if a dude is just a guy and a guy is just a dude, then maybe there’s nothing more to this life than to live in the moment, right?

Bill: [mouth agape, looking amazed, like a kid in a Spielberg movie staring at a miracle]

Ryen: And in sports, it’s like - and I think this gets into the whole thing with the demise of the Big East and Tim Tebow on the Mets and the concept of stare decisis - sometimes, a guy is like a team. You know?

Bill: And sometimes a team… is like a guy.

Ryen: Right.

Bill: And before you know it I’ve got Wilt fucking Chamberlain on Tier Four of my All-Time NBA Four-Dimensional Hypercube, below Cuttino Mobley, and I’m actually proud of it.

Ryen: Well, your name’s on the building. Heh. Heh heh.

Bill: Do you want to talk politics?

Ryen: So this is a good transition into this because as somebody who, obviously, like I've argued for the SEC for years, I think it is the better conference. And then, I mean, it just became really, really political. And it's going to get even worse with the 12 teams.

I did not, even though I had it thrown at me a lot over the past week, I never argued Bama to be in after the Oklahoma loss because I don't know that there's anybody that's been more critical of Milroe. You know, other than, I'm talking like a guy who’s doing what I’m doing. Hell, I’m doing an NBA pod once a week too.

So, you know, I’m just not a fan. And the only way you lose to Michigan is in the way that Alabama lost to them. But when you look at the head-to-head stuff here with Ohio State, Tennessee, the South Carolina game was a lot more surprising to me than having Milroe just have some dud and then Michigan ends up getting into it.

Then you get USC, A&M. So, the head-to-head stuff here with the Big Ten and the SEC, you know, it’s been a nice bowl season here for the Big Ten. And who knows?

Bill: …

Ryen: …

Bill: [does that thing he does where he gets almost poignantly quiet on his massively popular bro podcast]

Ryen: [squinting at the paper again] What else is on the list?

Bill: I don’t need the list.

Ryen: Oh yeah? Want to throw some shit out, see if you can guess?

Bill: [in mock pain that betrays the true pain that lies beneath] Parent corner, Saved by the Bell, Ladainian Tomlinson must die, gamble gamble gamble, self-aware anti-Yankees homerism, not-self-aware anti-Bills homerism, sublimated but powerful disdain for Lebron, totally inscrutable metaphor between sports and pop culture, inexplicable resentment towards people who appear to have never harmed me, admirable tendency to break bread with people who badmouthed me, pretending I never said Mac Jones was a “sneaky” MVP candidate, Shakey’s Pizza, the Ewing Theory, overconfident prediction, Larry Bird, The Godfather.

Ryen: [mocking child’s voice] Drake Maye should have made the Pro Bowl!

Bill: [sounding just like your girlfriend] Don’t.

Ryen: Sorry.

Producer: [in the squawky voice of a 1970s airport intercom] Bill, Spotify says you haven’t hit the parody quota.

Bill: [sighs] MY FRIEND HOUSE LOVES TO EAT!

Producer: [holds two fingers up to indicate he needs a little more]

Bill: [with only child energy, morosely reaches over and hits the big red button]

Jack-O: Complex litigation, this is John.

The Watch, with Hosts Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald

Chris: Hello and welcome to the Watch! I am Chris Ryan, I am an editor at the Ringer.com, and joining me today, the man who puts the “upper” in upper-middlebrow, it’s ANDYYYYYY GREENWAAAAAALD!

Andy: [looking up from Wikipedia plot summary of Donnie Darko] One of your best.

Chris: I stretch these cords out only for you pal.

Andy: Let’s move forward.

Chris: We’ve got a great show today.

Andy: Are Mickey & Conrad on?

Chris: We’ve been over this.

Andy: But… Mickey & Conrad….

Chris: What else do you want to talk about today?

Andy: Conrad & Mickey?

Chris: [dabs away a stain on his 1997 Reebok The Answer DMX Mens]

Andy: I watch Bluey, which shows that I am no snob, no self-superior man of letters I!, rather I am a man of the people, a common brigand, like all other greying dads of my vintage who have a 114-day perfect streak on the New York Times word puzzle amusement called Connections.

Chris: [waves the jewel case of a CD by the rapper Freeway, hidden unseen inside is a burned CDR of the original Broadway cast recording of In the Heights]

Andy: Did I mention Mickey & Conrad?

Chris: You did, yes.

Andy: [vaguely gestures to real-world political controversy]

Chris: [nervously deflects with humor]

Andy: Do you remember when we were teenagers and I came to pick you up at your parent’s place and when I was coming upstairs I heard you singing along lustily to the song “Lightning Crashes” by Live in bed but when you heard my footsteps you quickly changed it to Gang of Four?

Chris: Kya, what’s on the docket for today?

Producer Kya: I get paid in Kohl’s Cash, Chris, you tell me.

Andy: I believe we have contractual obligations in the parody space.

Chris: [with the all the sadness one mic can handle] Yeah.

Andy: Kya, can you turn up Chris’s volume?

Producer Kya: He’s in the room with you, Andy.

Andy: [clutching collar in surprise] Oh!

Chris: You don’t understand, anything I play into here, I have to carry with me onto 37 other podcasts this week. You don’t know what it’s like.

Andy: I’m afraid it’s your burden to bear.

Chris: Alright… Zyn.

Andy: [clapping] Say the line, Bart!

Chris: [wounded] Is that my - is that my ‘thing’? Did that become my thing?

Andy: [with slightly condescending jocularity] No!

Chris: I don’t want that to be my thing.

Andy: We all got ‘em, brother.

Chris: I thought you said it wasn’t.

Andy: Well….

Chris: I don’t want Zyn on my tombstone.

Andy: Hey, you’re not alone here, buddy. Look at me! I’ve got my stuff. “Oh, look at me, girl dad girl dad girl dad!” “Oh, look at me, I’m a fretful Philadelphia sports fan!” “Oh, look at me, I am the very picture of the contemporary man’s tortured relationship to his own aesthetic soul, constantly haunted by my era’s overwrought fear of pretension and snobbery and yet unable to quell the insistence of my unchosen aesthetic conscience, driven to seek the sublime and the true in art but surrounded by a critical culture diseased by the incentives of late capitalism, which is to say pregnant with the baby of a false and grasping populism, so that I find a way to wedge listening to Taylor Swift in the car with my daughters into every episode, a scenario of eminent self-deception which enables me to represent myself as a man who listens to Taylor Swift, nay, as a man who enjoys listening to Taylor Swift!, and yet still I maintain the convenient construct of the unwitting figure encased in a musical environment he would not willingly choose, permitting me the illusion of wriggling out of my own endlessly warring nature, my obvious and in truth undeniable instincts towards the higher, the holy, the transcendent - undeniable even to me, wretch that I am! - competing against my fear of appearing to be that most scandalous of creatures, the old guy who looks down on the art of the Kids These Days, and so I endlessly tack back towards a self-defensive and utterly unconvincing ordinary-guy routine, but I am only as my God and culture made me, trapped in the hellish and unchosen bad faith of our age, there is no escape for any of us in the 21st century, and that’s why I deliver stammering 12-minute monologues about how I’m not the right one to judge the latest steaming pile of cynical corporate horseshit that’s just been released on Disney+!”

Chris: And I’m Zyn.

Andy: And you’re Zyn.

Chris: Do you want to talk about the television program?

Andy: Oh! The television program! How quaint.

Chris: It’s quite a program.

Andy: Did you enjoy the program?

Chris: Well, it was a program.

Andy: Oh, do I detect a little discontent here…?

Chris: You know, it was alright. I was entertained. It was worthy of my time. Wasn’t great. Wasn’t inspired. Filled the hours of our grinding existence. It has that spy stuff I like. I will say - I did like - something they were doing was - the sets were nice, right? Didn’t particularly fill me with glee. I’ll watch anything with Taylor Kitsch in it. Didn’t make me yearn for the sweet embrace of the forever nothingness we call death, you could say. You know. Standard 10/10, A+, gonna be number 7 on my year-end list stuff. Like a two-Bud Light Christmas. Like an LA bagel. Settling for a field goal try but getting a first down on a questionable penalty. Typical Monday morning feelings.

Producer Kya: It’s Thursday.

Chris: How did you feel about the television program?

Andy: What I want to say, and as you know I’m a man of the people, and I should include the standard legal disclaimer warning proviso that I am, myself, a showrunner, and as such I have a certain amount of industry mumbo jumbo bouncing around in my head, but the sentiment that I very much want to get across, which should not in any way be considered a judgment, much less a criticism, for who am I to play critic?, writing for The Fader two decades ago does not make one a critic!, I am no critic!, in truth it was Chris who gave Eminem’s Encore a mere three mics!, but the point I’m trying to make, as though language could ever contain such a thing as an EVALUATION of someone’s ART, expressed in feeble human WORDS, the point I’m arriving at here is that though I hated every last second of the time I spent watching this program, though it filled my house with the pungent scent of death, though I wished a thousand plagues on the sons and daughters of those that made the program, though every frame was the work of an inept dullard, like a syphilitic chimpanzee trying to recreate “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp” in crayon, though I now cannot see (for I have bleached my eyes to rid them of the stain of watching the program) I do not, in any sense, wish to convey the impression that I think the program is, in whatever way, some such thing that might be called “bad.”

Chris: I think I catch your drift.

Andy: Who am I to play magistrate to a merry-maker???

Chris: The girl’s pretty hot in it.

Andy: You’re telling me?

Chris: [searches “rental houses that look like castles” on Vrbo]

Andy: Aren’t you on another podcast later?

Chris: [eyes beginning to glow, sounding like Vigo from Ghostbusters 2] I am on all podcasts. Throughout the genre -

Andy: Well, medium.

Chris: Throughout the medium, I exert my influence. Where there is a microphone and shitty banter, I appear. I am omnipresent. I am written into the Blood of Podcasting itse -

Andy: Bit of a mixed metaphor there.

Chris: I am written into the BOOK of Podcasting itself.

Andy: [quietly fist pumps]

Chris: I have become the spirit of this new age, this bright shining future of audio supplemented by video (where available), this halcyon era of various tired riffs on the Howard Stern Show formula, I mean when Artie was a regular obviously. My heart beats to the cadences of Michael Barbaro’s voice; my pulse keeps the rhythm of Theo Von telling an obviously made-up story about his hardscrabble Southern childhood.

Andy: Wouldn’t the cadence of your heartbeat and the rhythm of your pulse be the same thi-

Chris: Right now, I’m burning sage in Joe Rogan’s studio, doing ADR to take out the mistakes in Call Her Daddy, and ironing one of Shannon Sharpe’s giant ties, yes, yes, but I am also the voice in the head of the man about to drop $400 on a Shure SM7B even though he’ll never actually upload an episode, I am the devil on the shoulder of your 19-year-old cousin, gently soothing him as his cracking voice stammers out the intro to the doomed fantasy baseball podcast he and his friends will doggedly try to get off the ground for a full 74 episodes and a total of 411 streams. I am all of them. Please call me by my true names.

Andy: Can I tell you something? …I love that for you.

Chris: Yeah dog.

The House of R, with Hosts Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson

Opium smoke hazes the studio, streaming from the comically long pipe of an ancient wizard slumped in the third mic’s chair. Joanna is effortlessly draining threes into a Nerf Mini Over-the-Door hoop. Mallory has recreated Rust Cohle’s aluminum can death orgy diorama from True Detective. They have been podcasting for seven hours.

Joanna: …and so, to put it simply, I just don’t think that it makes any sense to double a movie’s budget to try to account for marketing costs. Not anymore, anyway. It’s very 1994 box office analysis.

Mallory: Do you ever think about death?

Joanna: [laughs derisively] I mean, Disney didn’t spend $350 million promoting Indiana Jones & the Dial of Destiny.

Mallory: How did you just say an ampersand? Out loud?

Joanna: Whether we would call Netflix’s live action Avatar: The Last Airbender series an “artistic success” or not, it proved the ongoing viability of the intellectual property and the continuing attachment of its dedicated fanbase.

Mallory: [huffs one of the paints Henry Cavill uses to decorate Warhammer figurines that he left in the studio while promoting Argyle.]

Joanna: I’m not sure I love this for you.

Mallory: I wouldn’t ordinarily, but this is 100% pure Cavill juice.

Joanna: [Marge Simpson noises]

Mallory: My future… is Off Broadway.

Joanna: Off Broadway, specifically.

Mallory: [giggles nervously] Well the lights on the Great White Way, they’re too bright for a cornfed girl like me, of course!

Joanna: What’s, uh, what’s the material you’re looking to perform?

Mallory: [beaming] My one woman show… MAL! About a goodhearted young innocent, arriving in the big city with nothing but ESP, a trunkful of fent, and a dream!

Joanna: That I do love for you.

Mallory: Aww, Mom….

Joanna: [stares deep into the eyes of a limited edition 1994 “Captain Leonardo” TMNT-Star Trek Crossover action figure]

Mallory: We’ll be dark, on Tuesdays. A girl’s gotta have her me-time.

Joanna: The Funko Pop closet is the Criterion closet… of the people.

Mallory: [levitates above her chair with her legs crossed like Dhalsim from Street Fighter]

Joanna: The thing about playing Superman is, it’s not about muscles, it’s about presence. Does James Gunn get that, or is he just playing dolls with a $200 million dollar budget that Warner Bros. can’t afford to waste?

Mallory: [sing-speaking] THE POWER OF ONE… THE POWER OF TWOOOOO… THE POWER OF MAAAAAAAANYYYYYYY.

Joanna: So, you know, Feige could still get it.

Mallory: Mmm. Big dad-with-a-baseball-cap energy.

Joanna: Yeah. And not even a fitted cap.

Mallory: No way.

Joanna: I don’t think Kevin Feige knows that they make fitted caps.

Mallory: So it’s a snapback.

Joanna: But not, like, a cool, knowing, hype beast-style snapback.

Mallory: Noooooo. It’s like a my-dad-got-a-hat-for-working-as-a-race-official-at-the-local-Turkey-Trot-and-now-he-wears-it-every-day style cap.

Joanna: Things are looking grim for a potential Smallville reboot.

Mallory: [unsheathes Andúril]

The Big Picture with Hosts Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins and Guest Chris Ryan, in the Form of the Spirit of All Podcasts

Our hosts are sweltering in the heat of the flood lamps in the Big Picture studio. It smells like Kevin Smith in there. Fennessey alternates between looking despondent and delirious with happiness. He keeps forgetting about the camera for the YouTube feed and then suddenly, disquietingly remembering it’s there. Dobbins is eating one of those Mr. Beast Lunchable knockoffs, but ironically. Jesse Plemons sleeps soundly on a bean bag.

Amanda: So what are we thinkingk?

Sean: HaHAhaHahAhaHaHA.

Amanda: [scrolls Indeed.com on her phone]

Sean: Who won the weekend at the box office? Which up-and-coming young Hollywood lady climbed the highest on our exclusive power rankings? What IMAX theater did I nod off in this time?

Amanda: christ

Sean: [flipping up his Dwayne Wayne lenses] What’s that?

Amanda: Nothingk.

Sean: [muttering to himself] Like Tsurumaru standing on the precipice atop the castle ruins, such are the days of our lives.

Amanda: So Zach and I are fostering Takeshi 6ix9ine for awhile, just until he gets back on his feet.

Sean: {still muttering to himself, on a podcast] Such are the days of my life, anyway.

Chris: [taking an incorporeal form as the Spirit of All Podcasts, doing a ghost voice] Oooooo! Do one of your structured bits! People love those! Oooooo!

Sean: [pretending this was always the plan] That brings us to our next segment! I can’t believe we haven’t done this one yet - it’s time for our Draft of Movies Where a Guy Has to Wear a Mask But Doesn’t Want to Draft!

Producer: [pipes in applause]

Amanda: You said “draft” twice.

Sean: [grabbing the camera and pulling it close to his face with mounting panic] Wim Wenders… WIN WENDERS.

Amanda: Now, forgive me if this is an obvious question, but is The Mask eligible?

Sean: Why would The Mask be eligible? He wants to wear the mask in The Mask.

Amanda: Dooooooeeeeeees heeeeee?

A forty-minute debate ensues. Feelings are hurt.

Sean: Right, now that we’ve got that settled, let’s draft. I’m going first, then Amanda, then our guest drafter, Big Wos.

Producer: Big Wos is on vacation. He’s walking the Camino de Santiago.

Sean: That’s OK, I’m autodrafting for him.

Amanda: [once again opens up a prewritten HR complaint, her thumb hovering over the Send button]

Sean: [from a place of trauma] It’s the only fair way.

Amanda: Why don’t I get to do the “autodraftingk?”

Sean: HaHAhaHahAhaHaHA.

Producer: This studio charges by the hour.

Sean: With the first pick, I choose…

Amanda: Bum-bum-ba-bum!

Sean: [going obscenely quiet as he speaks, at the exact same time random mic static appears and Amanda stumbles into a timpani that’s in the studio for some reason and Jesse Plemons’s cellphone goes off and Chris rattles his Spirit of Podcasting chains and the producer interjects to give his five cents for some fucking reason] ₜₕₑ ₘₐₙ ᵢₙ ₜₕₑ ᵢᵣₒₙ ₘₐₛₖ

The Listener: What???

Amanda: Hoho!

Sean: Ahoho!

Chris: Oooooo! Good pick! Ooooooooo!

Producer: Dare I say, the pick?

The Listener: Wait, what???

Amanda: That pick is a pick!

Sean: It’s the pick of all picks, the only pick.

Amanda: That is a movie!

Sean: A movie indeed.

Amanda: Directed by a director.

Sean: And starring a star.

The Listener: [blearily hitting the fifteen second reverse button too many times and unwillingly falling back into the delirium of a SimpliSafe ad]

Amanda: You know, with a pick like that, there’s no way we could possibly speak in such a manner as to provide context clues for the harried listener who didn’t quite hear the baby-soft voices we use when announcing our picks.

Sean: Haha, no way! There’s just no way!

Chris: Oooooo! Eat shit, listeners! Oooooo!

Producer: It’s a shame that we’re prevented from ever repeating the names of our picks, by act of Congress.

Amanda: The law is a fickle creature.

Sean: [with the cadence of an actual joke] Did you learn about that… in college?

Chris: Ooooo! I don’t get what makes that funny! Ooooo!

Sean: Up next!

A series of vague noises play, some very quiet, some deafeningly loud. Identifiably human sounds emerge, but they have no shape or character, they are not interpretable, they rise and fall like skittering insects off of the windshield of a car. The listener leans in, adjusts volume, rewinds and fast forwards in a vain effort to keep track of the picks, again and again. But though the jokes are clearly heard and cut the ear like glass, the actual content of the draft exercise remains forever beyond the listener’s meager auditory powers, like the voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher.

Sean: And with V for Vendetta, we’ve completed all 30 picks in our draft! Another great competition, with me as the winner!

Amanda: Well.

Sean: [desperately] With ME as the winner!

Amanda: Well.

Chris: [makes vaguely dissatisfied ghost noises]

Sean: In any event, that’s it for the draft!

The Listener: What the fuck.

Sean: Now stick around for my four-hour interview with a guy who shot B-roll for the 1992 Charles Grodin vehicle Beethoven’s Second!

The Ringer Fantasy Football Show with Hosts Danny Heifetz, Danny Kelly, and Craig Horlbeck

We fade in and hold on three empty backdrops, caressing them with the camera the way Terrence Mallick lovingly shoots a wheat field. Gradually our hosts shuffle in. Heifetz looks like some sort of medieval giant in the frame of his Zoom, giving the impression that he might reach through your screen and steal your meats and cheeses. Craig carefully checks the arrangement of the Crate & Barrell backdrop that he has assembled with great consideration, the way a girl would. Danny Kelly ponders the ineffable; he is there and not there, present and far away, his mood grey, like the sea before a storm.

Heifetz: … DK?

DK: Uh, yes?

Craig: DK!

Heifetz: Alright alright alright! DK DK DK!

Craig: [to the tune of Gary Numan’s “Cars”] DK DK, DK DK, DK DK DK, DK DK,… Deee-KAAay.

Heifetz: [ripping his shirt apart] DEEEEEEEKAAAAAAY!

Craig: [staccato] DK. DK DK…. DK?

Heifetz: [to the rhythm of the Pink Panther theme] DK, DK. DK DK DK DK DKaaaaaaaay.

Craig: ♫ He’s the first member of, the DK crew! ♫

DK: [looking up from his copy of As I Lay Dying] Have we started?

Craig: [in the husky rasp of Patty & Selma] We’re live buddy.

Heifetz: Did you get enough sleep last night, DK?

DK: Well I -

Heifetz: [wounded] I was talking to Craig.

Craig: You’re not the only DK around here, DK.

DK: [pained]

Heifetz: We should probably talk positional value in a snake draft vs an auction, explore our deepest beliefs.

Craig: We have beliefs?

DK: OK. I was up late last night, looking at this thing from a few different angles. Do we want to address this directly? I feel like there’s three potential approa-

Heifetz: [like Bane from Batman right after he shoots himself up with that aggro juice] LET’S GET THIS SHOW ON THE ROOOOOOOAAAAAAD!

Craig: [smolders handsomely]

DK: [comes up with a valid proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, forgets it]

Heifetz: OK, time for categories. First up - which NFL team, coach, or player Stuck Their Dick in the Mashed Potatoes this weekend?

DK: Gotta be Patrick Ricard.

Heifetz: Oh, good call.

Craig: Yeah, I feel like that’s the only answer.

Heifetz: Maybe we should rename this the Patrick Ricard Stuck His Dick in the Mashed Potatoes category.

Craig: How could we not?

DK: Should we explain what the category is and why Ricard deserves it?

Craig: No.

Heifetz: When we go to my mom’s house she makes Jell-o with fruit in it.

DK: Like, with the canned peaches, that whole bit?

Benjamin Solak: [sticking his head into the Zoom from the quantum realm, sounding exactly like the Aflac duck]: SOLAK

Heifetz: [looking like a human Kool-Aid Man] This conversation… fails to amuse me.

Craig: [nurturing an old grudge] You only think DK is deep.

Heifetz: DK is deep.

DK: [beams like a girl who just got a flower from the star quarterback]

Craig: No, I mean, you think only DK is deep.

Heifetz: DK is deep.

DK: [smiles like Andy Dufresne when he emerges from that sewer tunnel]

Craig: But I am too! That’s my point.

DK: You know the thing with Geno Smith, he’s a competitor.

Heifetz: He’s got big “Troy from High School Musical” energy.

Craig: I’m deep. I carry darkness with me.

DK: Granted, QBR is a flawed metric.

Craig: I too am haunted by waters.

Heifetz: I know it, buddy. I know it.

Craig: What I’m trying to say here is… DK.

Heifetz: [karate chopping a cantaloupe on his desk] NEXT CATEGORY.

DK: It would be wrong to say that we know that humpback whale song is a form of language… but equally wrong to say that we know that it is not.

Heifetz: OK, Hoes or Tricks! DK, Bo Nix - Ho or Trick?

DK: It’s - I think it’s - I think it’s regional, like a ho or a trick? That’s like a regional - like, if we’re talking the Southern cultural context -

Heifetz: WRONG! CRAIG!

Craig: Oh, total ho. Obvious ho. Bo Nix has real open-pussy energy.

Heifetz: [expertly plays the theme to Skyrim on a slide whistle]

Sheil Kapadia: [feet up on a table, leaned way back, blissed out like a Boddhisatva surfer dude] whoa… heh… wow… far out…

DK: [quietly scribbles in a Moleskin, sketching out characters for the great novel he will someday write, the story of an African doctor who leads a spiritual movement to heal the scars of colonialism and unite the proud nations of “the dark continent” in a movement to foster peace and understanding across the globe. The book will sell ten million copies; the publisher however will insist on adorning the cover with a photo of a single acacia tree at sunset, attracting the ire of The Cut, and Kelly will be canceled for writing it, costing him his tenured position at Tulane]

Craig: Saquon not going for the record… what a bitch.

Heifetz: [headbutting his desk] SAY IT TO HIS FACE

DK: I actually have court in a bit.

Heifetz: What did we learn today?

Craig: [almost crying] I am haunted by waters.

Heifetz: Alright let’s talk off mic, you and me.

DK: We didn’t get through our other categories, “Pokémon or Digimon?” and “Gayest Offensive Lineman.”

Craig: Don’t constrain us with your conventionality, DK, we were born to fly free.

Heifetz: This podcast is for beautiful butterflies, DK. Beautiful carnivorous butterflies. Are you telling me that we as butterflies should be pinned to the wall, like in some sad university museum?

Craig: [dreams of a universal brotherhood of man]

DK: Uh, I didn’t - uh, no?

Heifetz: Alright, catch us in about twelve hours for our next show! Who’s gonna be the hot midweek waiver wire pickup that will win you your league???

Craig: It’s April.

Heifetz: Quitters never win, Craig.

Heifetz chugs an entire carton of Hood Golden Eggnog and then crushes his webcam in his hand like an egg. Craig gazes off into the distance like he’s shooting a cologne commercial and, with impeccable timing, logs off handsomely. DK is left alone, pondering the ghosts of his past, things said and unsaid, all those moments lost in time… like tears, in rain.

DK: Am I DK?….Am I DK?… Am I DK?… .

Through his window DK looks at the sky, the plateau, and, beyond, the invisible lands stretching all the way to the sea. In this vast landscape he has loved so much, he is alone.